These charts each compare, for the second year of the covid pandemic, a country with comparatively low mortality with another country with higher pandemic-related mortality. Each chart is to the same scale. And for each country, I will note its mask-mandate levels through the pandemic.
USA and France
Chart by Keith Rankin.
France has performed surprisingly well, with delta-covid affecting deaths in August and December 2021; compared to higher delta-related deaths in USA around August and January.
France has a close relationship between excess deaths and covid-recorded deaths. The USA on the other hand shows that two significant covid-related death waves began before the recorded death waves. For both countries it is still too soon to evaluate the omicron-covid wave, although USA shows signs of a mortality upturn this month.
Ourworldindata publishes face covering policies. (The country with the least mandated use of facemasks is in fact Japan – not shown in today’s charts – which also is among the very best performers on Covid19 mortality.) These mask-stringency numbers are like the former Aotearoa lockdown-levels, with scores from 0 (no policy) to 4 (masks required in all public spaces). Level 1 means facemasks are “recommended”, but not mandatory even on public transport.
For the USA, the average ‘mask-mandate-scores’ were: 2.68 for the first six months of the pandemic (from March 2020), 3.95 for the next six months, then 3.41, and 2.89. The current score is 3.
For France, the scores were: 2.11, 4.00, 3.41, and 2.43. The current level is 2. So, while both countries have been mask-stringent, France has been less so. All strains of Covid19 spread widely through both countries, despite their mask policies. We know that French people were highly-infected, because they took covid with them, tragically, to all their holiday colonies; including New Caledonia and French Polynesia. So the reason for France’s relatively low mortality is its high mix of natural and vaccination immunity.
Germany and Denmark
Chart by Keith Rankin.
In both countries, in the second half of 2021, actual pandemic mortality was substantially higher than recorded covid deaths. It is most likely that these extra deaths are mostly due to covid, during the delta wave. The omicron-covid wave shows up here, in 2022, with significant recorded deaths, and much lower excess deaths. Germany’s current lower level of excess deaths will be due to higher current anti-covid restrictions; thus Germany is likely to have postponed deaths in the coming summer months.
Re mask levels, Germany’s scores are: 1.71, 2.00, 2.00, 2.00. The current level is 2. Denmark’s scores are: 0.42, 2.00, 2.21, 1.70. The current level is 0.
Overall, in 2021/22, both countries’ mortality ‘performances’ are comparable. We may note that Denmark did better than Germany in 2020. Denmark has been more flexible than Germany in its masking policies. Its excess deaths are no longer being cushioned by policy restrictions.
Austria and Sweden
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Sweden has clearly performed much better than Austria in 2021/22. Sweden has performed better than Denmark during this period; and better than France, too. While both countries show evidence of undiagnosed Covid19, for Sweden this was only for a short period around December. For Austria, underdiagnosis has been more pervasive. And Austria’s low excess deaths in January 2022 are almost certainly due to its much stricter rules than Sweden’s.
Re mask levels, Austria’s scores are: 1.71, 2.96, 2.51, 2.00. The current level is 2. Sweden’s scores are: 0.00, 0.44, 1.15, 0.21. The current level is 0. Further, if comparing Sweden with Japan, Swedes were less likely to be wearing masks than Japanese, during their ‘recommend only’ mask levels.
Sweden, with its non-authoritarian style of social neoliberalism, became well known as the country most reliant on individual responsibility vis-à-vis government compulsion. Its performance in 2021/22 bears out the success of its approach; although early mistakes meant that, in 2020, too many older people died with Covid19.
Netherlands and Finland
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Both of these countries had substantial numbers of unrecorded covid-related mortality. This was true in 2020 as well, though with Netherlands having significantly more deaths from Covid19 than Finland. While Finland is showing more evidence than Netherlands of the omicron-covid wave in its recorded data, its most recent excess death data is looking as good as Netherlands, despite fewer restriction in January.
Re mask levels, Netherland’s scores are: 1.07, 2.00, 2.00, 2.53. The current level is 2. Finland’s scores are: 0.14, 1.00, 1.77, 1.00. Finland has resorted much less to facemasks than has Netherlands. Of the countries shown here, the only one which performed better in the 2021/22 mortality stakes was Sweden. And Sweden is the only one of these countries with lower facemasking requirements.
The country with the most severe facemasking requirement has been United States. And it’s the worst performed.
Conclusion
Wearing facemasks has not saved lives. Rather, most likely facemasks have contributed to a severely compromised level of personal immunity to a range of potentially fatal conditions. While, Aotearoa New Zealand seems to have bucked the trend so far, my best guess is that AoNZ will have higher excess death levels in 2022 than any of these charted countries. Not all of these deaths will be clinically due to Covid19; many will be due to compromised general levels of immunity. Wearing facemasks may have contributed to loss of life in Europe and elsewhere.
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.
The Conversation’s pre-budget survey of a panel of 46 leading economists selected by the Economic Society of Australia finds almost half want a budget deficit smaller than the A$99.2 billion expected for 2021-22 and the $98.9 billion forecast for 2022-23 in the December budget update.
Higher commodity prices and lower than expected unemployment – which is lifting tax revenue while also cutting spending on benefits – is set to produce a deficit tens of billions of dollars lower, perhaps as low as $65 billion, absent new spending.
But a substantial chunk of those surveyed (41%) want an unchanged or bigger deficit to boost spending in other areas, including an accelerated transition to net-zero carbon emissions and Australia’s defence.
The Conversation/Economic Society of Australia, CC BY-ND
Arguing for a deficit about as big as last year’s, former OECD official Adrian Blundell-Wignall said while spending on defence was important, so too was spending on supply lines to make Australia less dependent on other countries. Events in the Ukraine showed supply chains were as important as weapons.
Curtin University’s Margaret Nowak said the huge reconstruction needs following the floods in NSW and Queensland suggested there was no potential to reduce the deficit and good reasons why it might climb.
Arguing with the majority in favour of a lower deficit, independent economist Nicki Hutley said the government should bank rather than spend any improved psoition to reduce debt ahead of higher interest rates. It would need “reserves at the ready” to deal with economic and geopolitical uncertainty.
James Morley of the University of Sydney said with the economy on the road to recovery, more government handouts would be likely to be inflationary, making it harder for the Reserve Bank to keep inflation within its target band.
Asked to pick up to two spending or tax bonus measures from a list of twelve that would most deserve a place in the budget, more than 60% of those surveyed nominated spending on the transition to net zero carbon emissions.
University of Adelaide economist Sue Richardson said if she had the option, she would have picked “remove all subsidies to fossil fuels”. More than 90% of Australia’s energy now comes from fossil fuels. Reducing that – as the government has said it expects to do to get to net zero emissions by 2050 – will require a massive effort, “made much harder by starting so late”.
More than 32% of those surveyed backed increases subsidies for childcare, in part because it would allow more parents to do more paid work. More than 26% supported a temporary boost to JobSeeker and other payments; 13% supported increased defence spending; and 10.9% supported infrastructure spending and investment in domestic manufacturing.
Asked which of the measures should not be adopted, almost half (45%) picked a reduction in beer tax, and almost 35% nominated a reduction in fuel excise.
Saul Eslake said “gimmicks” such as cuts in beer or petrol excise failed to address the reality that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had serious economic consequences for Australia, including reducing national income. Governments can’t “pretend this hasn’t happened”.
Instead, what governments could do was ensure Australia’s lowest earners don’t bear the brunt of that economic pain.
The best ways to do this were temporary increases in social security payments, or a one-off special payment, and tax rebates for genuine low earners.
Eslake would fund them from the extra tax that will flow from the companies and shareholders who will benefit from the higher commodity prices following Russia’s invasion.
UNSW Sydney’s Nigel Stapledon was sceptical about higher social security payments. Given Australia’s experiencing a near five-decade low in unemployment, and unprecedentedly high number of job vacancies, he said it was hard to justify a higher rate of JobSeeker.
Also high on the list of measures panellists felt should not be adopted were further company tax cuts (21.7%) and bringing forward the Stage 3 tax cuts income tax cuts directed at high earners and due to start in July 2024 (21.9%).
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.
Yoorrook is a royal commission to establish an official public record of the systemic injustices of colonisation based on the experiences of the First Peoples of Victoria. This is reflected in its name: “Yoorrook” is a word in the Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba language for “truth”.
It is the first such body in Australia to have this function and the first in the world to be Indigenous-led. Four of Yoorrook’s five commissioners are Indigenous, three of them Victorian Traditional Owners.
The scope of this Indigenous-led pursuit of truth-telling reflects the role of the First Peoples Assembly of Victoria in calling for the establishment of Yoorrook in 2020. In addition, Yoorrook is independently connected with the Victorian treaty-making process.
Enforcing human rights law in Victoria
Under international human rights law, establishing the truth about gross or systematic human rights violations is a fundamental legal right to which the International Day draws attention. It forms part of a broader right to reparations and making sure such violations never happen again.
States are obliged to give effect to human rights law in their systems of justice, including through official fact-finding mechanisms like royal commissions and institutional reforms.
The Yoorrook Justice Commission was established within this justice framework. The Commission’s founding Letters Patent list the key international human rights instruments that support Indigenous peoples’ right to truth.
Among these documents are a set of principles agreed by the United Nations to protect human rights. These state that all peoples have the right to “know the truth” about past events involving heinous crimes and human rights violations.
Acknowledging human rights violations and the right to truth
Human rights violations can occur in different settings. One example is a conflict situation during a political transition from dictatorship to democracy, during which violations such as torture and disappearances have sadly been common tactics.
Another example is settler colonialism, as happened in Victoria. Violations such as massacres of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their territories can occur, which Yoorrook will examine and place on the public record.
In all such settings, the impacts of violations are commonly hidden by the perpetrators, which governments must actively prevent. If they fail to fulfil their obligation to investigate and bring perpetrators to justice, this can give rise to a harmful culture of impunity, both in the institutions of governnment and in broader society.
For the public not to know or deny the truth magnifies the suffering of victims, and their family and broader community. It creates circumstances in which trauma can be experienced individually and collectively, generation after generation, as many First Peoples in Victoria experience.
Examples of truth commissions abroad
There have been more than 40 truth commissions throughout the world since the second world war. Their main focus has been on conflict and like situations. Perhaps the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa is best known. But it was not tasked with examining and reporting on the colonial underpinnings of apartheid. It could only tell a partial truth.
More recent commissions have examined particular injustices caused by colonisation. For example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada examined First Nations residential schools, a mechanism for forced assimilation of Indigenous children. Some 150,000 children were removed and separated from their families and communities to attend these schools.
On the Commission’s recommendation, a compensation scheme (among many other things) was established. According to the report of the oversight committee, this amounted to more than C$3.2 billion in reparations in 2021. This commission told a fuller truth about a systemic injustice of colonisation and cultural genocide.
Truth and justice commissions in developed countries having colonial origins (like Australia) now commonly apply these concepts and methods. This is termed a “transitional justice” approach because it enables states to transition out of situations invovling human rights violations and systemic abuses with justice for victims. In a recent UN report, Yoorrook is discussed as a prime example of this approach.
The Uluru Statement from the Heart calls for Voice, Treaty and Truth. Substantive recognition of Indigenous people in Australia requires institutional reform across multiple inter-connected domains.
Yoorrook fits into this pattern. It is a truth and justice commission with a strong mandate to recommend institutional reform addressing systemic injustice. It is also connected with other processes that are underway. One is treaty-making in a way that supports self-determination for First Peoples. Another is recognising and compensating the Victorian Stolen Generations.
The Stolen Generations Reparations Steering Committee was also the product of Indigenous leadership. On its recommendation, the Victorian government has established a reparations scheme for individuals and families affected. Under the scheme, $155 million will be made available so that about 1,200 survivors can can access payments of $100,000.
As the International Day recognises, the right to the truth is a human right of great importance that forms part of a broader justice framework. Truth and justice commissions may apply this framework when examining historic and ongoing systemic injustices caused by colonisation in settler states like Australia. Yoorrook is doing so in the Victorian context. It will be delivering an interim report this June and its final report in July 2023.
Maggie Walter receives funding from the Australian Research Council and NHMRC
Senior Researcher and Claimant in the Yorta Yorta Struggle for land justice that culminated in the Yorta Yorta Native Title Case 1994-2002. President of the Koori Heritage Working Group that achieved major reforms of the Cultural Heritage Legislation in Victoria in the mid-1980s. Key advocate for the United Nations Decleration of Self Determination for First Nations Peoples.
Eleanor Bourke, Kevin Bell, and Sue-Anne Hunter 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.
Yoorrook is a royal commission to establish an official public record of the systemic injustices of colonisation based on the experiences of the First Peoples of Victoria. This is reflected in its name: “Yoorrook” is a word in the Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba language for “truth”.
It is the first such body in Australia to have this function and the first in the world to be Indigenous-led. Four of Yoorrook’s five commissioners are Indigenous, three of them Victorian Traditional Owners.
The scope of this Indigenous-led pursuit of truth-telling reflects the role of the First Peoples Assembly of Victoria in calling for the establishment of Yoorrook in 2020. In addition, Yoorrook is independently connected with the Victorian treaty-making process.
Enforcing human rights law in Victoria
Under international human rights law, establishing the truth about gross or systematic human rights violations is a fundamental legal right to which the International Day draws attention. It forms part of a broader right to reparations and making sure such violations never happen again.
States are obliged to give effect to human rights law in their systems of justice, including through official fact-finding mechanisms like royal commissions and institutional reforms.
The Yoorrook Justice Commission was established within this justice framework. The Commission’s founding Letters Patent list the key international human rights instruments that support Indigenous peoples’ right to truth.
Among these documents are a set of principles agreed by the United Nations to protect human rights. These state that all peoples have the right to “know the truth” about past events involving heinous crimes and human rights violations.
Acknowledging human rights violations and the right to truth
Human rights violations can occur in different settings. One example is a conflict situation during a political transition from dictatorship to democracy, during which violations such as torture and disappearances have sadly been common tactics.
Another example is settler colonialism, as happened in Victoria. Violations such as massacres of Indigenous peoples and dispossession of their territories can occur, which Yoorrook will examine and place on the public record.
In all such settings, the impacts of violations are commonly hidden by the perpetrators, which governments must actively prevent. If they fail to fulfil their obligation to investigate and bring perpetrators to justice, this can give rise to a harmful culture of impunity, both in the institutions of governnment and in broader society.
For the public not to know or deny the truth magnifies the suffering of victims, and their family and broader community. It creates circumstances in which trauma can be experienced individually and collectively, generation after generation, as many First Peoples in Victoria experience.
Examples of truth commissions abroad
There have been more than 40 truth commissions throughout the world since the second world war. Their main focus has been on conflict and like situations. Perhaps the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa is best known. But it was not tasked with examining and reporting on the colonial underpinnings of apartheid. It could only tell a partial truth.
More recent commissions have examined particular injustices caused by colonisation. For example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada examined First Nations residential schools, a mechanism for forced assimilation of Indigenous children. Some 150,000 children were removed and separated from their families and communities to attend these schools.
On the Commission’s recommendation, a compensation scheme (among many other things) was established. According to the report of the oversight committee, this amounted to more than C$3.2 billion in reparations in 2021. This commission told a fuller truth about a systemic injustice of colonisation and cultural genocide.
Truth and justice commissions in developed countries having colonial origins (like Australia) now commonly apply these concepts and methods. This is termed a “transitional justice” approach because it enables states to transition out of situations invovling human rights violations and systemic abuses with justice for victims. In a recent UN report, Yoorrook is discussed as a prime example of this approach.
The Uluru Statement from the Heart calls for Voice, Treaty and Truth. Substantive recognition of Indigenous people in Australia requires institutional reform across multiple inter-connected domains.
Yoorrook fits into this pattern. It is a truth and justice commission with a strong mandate to recommend institutional reform addressing systemic injustice. It is also connected with other processes that are underway. One is treaty-making in a way that supports self-determination for First Peoples. Another is recognising and compensating the Victorian Stolen Generations.
The Stolen Generations Reparations Steering Committee was also the product of Indigenous leadership. On its recommendation, the Victorian government has established a reparations scheme for individuals and families affected. Under the scheme, $155 million will be made available so that about 1,200 survivors can can access payments of $100,000.
As the International Day recognises, the right to the truth is a human right of great importance that forms part of a broader justice framework. Truth and justice commissions may apply this framework when examining historic and ongoing systemic injustices caused by colonisation in settler states like Australia. Yoorrook is doing so in the Victorian context. It will be delivering an interim report this June and its final report in July 2023.
Maggie Walter receives funding from the Australian Research Council and NHMRC
Senior Researcher and Claimant in the Yorta Yorta Struggle for land justice that culminated in the Yorta Yorta Native Title Case 1994-2002. President of the Koori Heritage Working Group that achieved major reforms of the Cultural Heritage Legislation in Victoria in the mid-1980s. Key advocate for the United Nations Decleration of Self Determination for First Nations Peoples.
Eleanor Bourke, Kevin Bell, and Sue-Anne Hunter 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.
You might be hearing more about kava over coming months, the psychoactive drink better known in the Pacific, but becoming more widely available in Australia.
How it’s imported and regulated has changed. So you might be able to buy it in the supermarket, health-food shop or go to a kava bar to drink it with your friends.
You might be curious to try it and not sure it’s safe. Here’s what you need to know about kava in Australia.
What is kava?
Kava is made from the root of the kava plant (Piper methysticum). This economically significant crop has been grown and consumed for more than 3,000 years across the Pacific.
Traditionally, the root is ground, then soaked in water to make a drink. It is mainly used by men in countries including Fiji, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu for ceremonial, recreational and medicinal purposes.
Traditional drinking practices, which usually involve drinking kava with others, moderate kava consumption. Although heavier recreational drinking occurs and can cause harm.
Kava is not commonly used in Australia. However, it is used by some Pacific communities, for instance, by some Fijian, Tongan and Samoan Australians.
Kava is also used in a small number of Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land, in the Northern Territory. Kava was introduced to these communities as an alternative to alcohol in the 1980s. Its use peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s.
In Australia, kava is usually available as a powder, which is then made into a drink.
What does it do? Is it safe?
Drinking kava can lead to effects including feeling sociable and at peace. People also report having reduced anxiety and an overall positive mood, while remaining clear-headed.
Increasing levels of intoxication can lead to feelings such as numbness, sedation, a sense of muscle weakness and fatigue.
The World Health Organization considers the risk of kava toxicity “very low”. However, kava use is not harmless.
High levels of kava use causes a scaly skin rash, weightloss, changes in liver enzymes and overall feelings of ill-health.
Traditionally, the root of the kava plant is ground and made into a drink, then shared. Shutterstock
Heavy kava use is also associated with a number of social harms. These harms are not specific to kava, but the harmful use of any drug.
This includes the impact of time spent accessing, using and recovering from kava use. This impacts someone’s capacity to fulfil family, cultural and workplace roles. There are also financial impacts from missed work, and buying kava.
When people in Arnhem Land used kava heavily, this led to significant community-wideharms. These included a decline in community and cultural activities, and less participation in employment.
What’s changed?
Kava has a complicated regulatory history in Australia, with many changes in recent years, including:
from December 2019 the federal government launched a two-stage “kava pilot”, aiming to boost trade with Pacific nations and making it easier for Pacific Australians to access kava for cultural reasons. Incoming passengers were allowed to bring in 4 kilograms per person 18 years or older (up from 2 kilograms per person).
from December 2021 the second stage of the pilot allowed kava to be commercially imported as a food product, with an import permit. Products need to carry labels saying “Use in moderation” and “May cause drowsiness”; these warnings must also be displayed where kava is sold. These changes bring Australia more in line with other nations with significant Pacific communities (such as the United States and New Zealand).
Despite these changes at the federal level, it remains illegal to bring kava food products into the Northern Territory.
The therapeutic use of kava extract – for anxiety, insomnia, and a range of other conditions – is not covered by the recent legislative changes.
What will these changes mean?
Under the latest changes, kava will be more widely available in Australia, from places including health-food shops, supermarkets, pharmacies, as well as online.
We don’t know if kava will have a broader appeal outside Pacific communities in Australia, and what the positive and negative implications of greater availability may be.
Not everyone’s happy
Previous regulatory changes related to kava did not involve consultation with affected communities, including Pacific communities in Australia, or adequate consultation with Aboriginal businesses, health organisations and communities.
For instance, the initial banning of kava imports to the Northern Territory did nothing to address the social determinants of health and underlying factors related to heavy kava use in some Arnhem Land communities.
Similarly, regulatory changes from 2019 did not occur with adequate Aboriginal community consultation. Community leaders have raised concerns of an increase in kava-related harms, including increased black-market activity in the Northern Territory.
What needs to happen next?
The federal government says the latest changes for Australia will be monitored and evaluated by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre working with the Indigenous owned organisation Ninti One.
This will look at the health, social, cultural and economic effects of increased kava availability. The final report is due in mid-2023 and we don’t know if the results will be publicly reported.
For the evaluation to be of value to all communities impacted by kava, we need genuine collaboration with these communities. This needs to consider the diversity of opinion in both Pacific communities in Australia and Aboriginal communities using kava.
Further research on the benefits and harms associated with kava, including identifying safe levels of consumption, is also needed.
Finally, we need surveillance of known risks. This includes driving under the influence of kava, and black-market activity related to kava entering the Northern Territory.
Julia Butt, at the National Drug Research Institute, has previously received funding from the Department of Health, Federal Government and Healthway.
Annalee Stearne receives funding from the NHMRC via the Centre for Research Excellence: Indigenous Health and Alcohol. Annalee is also a board member of Children’s Ground (https://childrensground.org.au/) and the National Centre for Clinical Research into Emerging Drugs (https://nccred.org.au/).
For weeks, Russia’s military assault on Ukraine has been complemented by full-fledged information warfare. The Kremlin has propagandised Russian state media, and is trying to control the narrative online too.
We’ve seen a bombardment of “imposter content” circulating – including fake news reports and deepfake videos – while Ukranians and the rest of the world have scrambled to find ways to tell the real story of the invasion.
The instant messaging app Telegram has surfaced as one of the most important channels through which to do so. But what is it about Telegram that has millions flocking to it amid the chaos?
Telegram is one of the most popular social apps in Ukraine and Russia, and has been since before the invasion began. It’s a free cloud-based app that allows users to send and receive messages, calls, photos, videos, audio and other files.
The platform was first created in 2013 by Russian-born tech entrepreneur Pavel Durov – a figure who has butted heads with the increasingly authoritarian Russian state on numerous occasions.
Now Telegram is providing some clarity in a foggy environment of (mostly Russian) disinformation. It has even been a go-to point of contact for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
How does it work?
Telegram has several key features that make it an appealing option for communications relating to the war.
It facilitates public and private groups of up to 200,000 users (where individuals can send messages and interact), and channels (which allow one-way broadcasting to channel subscribers).
Through these groups and channels, organisations can reach hundreds of thousands of people with messages and audio/video live streaming – all of which is encrypted and stored on the Telegram “cloud”.
However, while both public and private communications on Telegram are encrypted, the default encryption setting is not end-to-end encryption, and instead happens on a client/server basis.
The data is stored (albeit in an encrypted form) on the cloud, and distributed across multiple data centres throughout the world. These centres are controlled by legal entities in various jurisdictions, and subject to the laws of those jurisdictions. This data could be decrypted, although doing so would be difficult.
But Telegram does offer another layer of security through its “secret chat” feature. When this is enabled, the communication between two users becomes end-to-end encrypted.
This data isn’t stored anywhere apart from the sender’s and receiver’s device. Not even Telegram can access it. Users can also set a “self-destruct” timer on secret chats. Once the timer ends, the communication disappears forever.
Telegram claims to be even more secure than similar apps such as WhatsApp and Line.
One feature that differentiates it from WhatsApp is anonymous forwarding. When this is enabled, any message forwarded by a user is no longer traceable back to them. The message includes their display name in plain, unlinked text, but this display name can easily be changed or deleted.
Also, while users do need a phone number to create a Telegram account, the number doesn’t have to remain linked to the account (whereas a phone number will always remains linked to a WhatsApp account).
Telegram meets politics (once again)
Telegram has a history of being leveraged as a protest tool in times of conflict and oppression.
In 2020, people in Belarus opposing the Russian-supported authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko used the platform to organise a mass protest of around 100,000 people.
It’s likely similar actions have taken place in the context of the war on Ukraine. President Zelenskyy has openly used Telegram to urge men to take up arms and resist the invasion.
Many Russians have also turned to the app for independent information, following the Kremlin’s clamp down on free media. Russian journalist Ilya Varlamov used Telegram to live stream the invasion, and has acquired 1.3 million subscribers since the war began.
According to Time, there has been a 48% increase in the number of Russian subscribers on Telegram since February 24 when Russia’s invasion began. Presumably the bulk of these people are looking for independent news. Western outlets including The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have also joined.
Telegram is also valuable for Ukraine’s military, as it can help circumvent Russian surveillance and conduct intelligence operations. Russia’s penetration of Ukraine’s telecommunication networks has been pervasive during the invasion.
The double-edged sword
As is the case with any powerful technology, the privacy afforded by Telegram is also a problem in the wrong hands.
The Russian government is running Telegram channels for state-affiliated media, including Sputnik and RT news, and has encouraged users to turn to the app for pro-Kremlin content.
Meanwhile, Russian bot accounts are spreading disinformation, often by posing as fake “war correspondents” supporting the Kremlin’s narrative.
Historically, Telegram has been profiled for all the wrong reasons. End-to-end encryption has enabled illegal activity on the app (including by extremist groups such as the Islamic State).
One study found the number of Telegram groups or channels shared in darkweb cybercrime and hacking forums increased from 172,035 in 2020, to more than one million in 2021.
Telegram provides criminals and hackers the same opportunities as the Darknet, VPNs and proxy servers: all of these tools make it difficult to trace the location of a cybercriminal, and therefore hinder efforts to gather intelligence.
For example, the private Telegram channel “combolist” – on which hackers sold and circulated large amounts of stolen data – had more than 47,000 users before it was taken down.
And last year, a US non-profit group sued Apple and demanded it remove Telegram from its app store (just as it removed Parler) for failing to prevent violent content spreading after the January 6 2021 Capitol attack. Telegram remains available on both the Apple and Google app stores.
Pressure is mounting
Telegram has a record of refusing calls to moderate content (perhaps due to Durov’s libertarian view of how such technologies should be governed).
Moreover, the way the platform is built means there is a limit to how much it can be moderated. In many cases, Telegram won’t be aware of illegal activity until it is notified.
And with end-to-end encryption, it’s difficult to know just how much harmful content is making the rounds. Telegram can only intervene in a limited number of cases, and with narrow capacity.
Still, it seems mounting threats and legal concerns have started to chip away at Durov’s resolve.
A ban on Telegram was enacted by Brazil’s Supreme Court on Friday, in a bid to stop fake news spreading ahead of Brazil’s October elections.
The ban was lifted two days later, after Durov took actions to comply with the court’s requirements. He deleted posts by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, removed one supporter account and promised the monitoring of others.
Similarly, Germany threatened to shut down Telegram in February to prevent “hate and incitement” from far-right groups and COVID conspiracists. It’s reported more than 60 channels were removed in response.
It seems Telegram finds itself between a rock and a hard place. It’s limited, by design, in how much it can filter content. Yet despite the social and enforcement challenges, it continues to be a lifeline for those resisting the Russian invasion.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In a major turnaround, the Morrison government has accepted New Zealand’s long-standing offer to resettle annually 150 refugees who came by boat.
The Coalition government previously refused to take up the offer, which goes back to 2013, on the ground that it could provide an incentive for people to get on boats to try to come to Australia. The government said sending refugees to New Zealand would provide a “pull factor”.
The agreement appears part of removing political “barnacles” before the May election. Shadow minister for home affairs, Kristina Keneally, said it “is just another pre-election promise to protect inner-city Liberal seats”.
The decision was announced in a joint statement by the federal Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews and New Zealand’s Immigration Minister Kris Faafoi.
Under the agreement, up to 150 refugees will be settled annually for each of three years. They will be from Australia’s regional processing cohort.
The ministers said resettlement will initially be considered for refugees who
are on Nauru or temporarily in Australia under the regional processing arrangements
meet New Zealand’s program’s requirements
are referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
are not engaged in other third country resettlement pathways (such as the resettlement program Australia has with the United States).
Andrews was anxious to stress the government’s tough border policy had not changed. No one who came illegally by boat would ever be allowed to settle here, she said.
“This arrangement does not apply to anyone who attempts an illegal maritime journey to Australia in the future,” she said.
“Anyone who attempts to breach our borders will be turned back or sent to Nauru.”
The government previously gave as a reason for not accepting New Zealand’s offer that the refugees once in New Zealand would be able to enter Australia by the back door.
Asked about this, sources said on Thursday that while the refugees, when they became New Zealand citizens, would be able to visit Australia, they would never be allowed to settle here.
Keneally said: “This is a humiliating backflip for Scott Morrison who claimed as recently as 2018 that New Zealand’s generous offer to resettle refugees would see people smugglers restart their evil trade”. She said the Liberals might never actually implement the deal.
The Refugee Council of Australia welcomed the agreement, saying “New Zealand’s generosity […] will make a life-changing difference to 450 of the refugees who have so far endured nine excruciating years suffering in Australia’s offshore arrangements, much of that time in locked detention”.
But several hundred people would still be left with nowhere to go, the council said.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Orthopaedic surgery (surgery for problems related to bones, joints, tendons and ligaments) is the third most common reason Australians go under the knife.
Last year, more than 100,000 orthopaedic surgeries were performed in Australian public hospitals. As most orthopaedic surgeries are performed in private hospitals, the real number is much higher (and unfortunately unknown).
But what most people don’t know is that many common orthopaedic surgeries are not better for reducing pain than non-surgical alternatives that are both cheaper and safer, such as exercise programs. Some surgeries provide the same result as a placebo surgery, where the surgeon only conducts a joint examination, rather than performing the real surgery.
And contrary to popular opinions, placebos are not actually very powerful, so real surgery that isn’t better than a placebo should not be recommended.
In this article we discuss the evidence behind three commonly performed orthopaedic surgeries for back, knee and shoulder pain that might be doing patients (and their pockets) more harm than good.
Spinal fusion is the riskiest type of surgery for back pain and the most expensive orthopaedic procedure performed in Australia. Depending on your health insurance arrangements, the total cost of the surgery can be around A$58,000 and out-of-pocket costs might be close to A$10,000.
It involves permanently fusing two or more vertebrae together to stop them moving on each other, typically using metal implants and bone from other areas of the body.
It was originally conceived to treat broken spinal bones and some spine deformities, such as severe scoliosis (abnormal curvature of the spine). Surgeons’ justification for using this surgery has expanded over time and it is now the most common surgery to treat everyday back pain that isn’t caused by a serious issue like a fracture or infection.
This is despite evidence that spinal fusion is not more effective than non-surgical treatments (such as an exercise program) and often results in complications. About one in six patients experience a serious complication, such as an infection, blood clot, nerve injury, or heart failure. In New South Wales, only one in five workers who have spinal fusion return to work after two years and one in five have another spine surgery within two years.
Spinal fusion is not more effective than non-surgical treatments like exercise programs, and often results in complications. Shutterstock
Arthroscopy is a type of keyhole surgery commonly used to treat knee osteoarthritis and shoulder pain. The surgery is used to remove or repair damaged pieces of bone or cartilage that are thought to cause pain.
Thousands of knee arthroscopies are performed every year. In 2013, more than 33,000 knee arthroscopies were performed in Australian hospitals. Since then, this number has reduced by around 40%.
Australian data shows the number of shoulder arthroscopies increased nearly 50% from 2000 to 2009. Since then, numbers have remained stable, at about 6,500 surgeries per year from 2009 until 2021.
The cost of these surgeries is substantial. Typical out-of-pocket costs for patients with private health insurance is A$400 and A$500 for knee and shoulder arthroscopy, respectively. Sometimes, out-of-pocket costs can be as high as A$1,900 to A$2,400, respectively.
Even though these surgeries are minimally invasive, they still result in substantial inconveniences. For example, it may take up to six weeks after shoulder arthroscopy for patients to perform simple daily activities like reaching above the head or driving, and up to three months to return to heavy work or sport.
Knee and shoulder arthroscopies for common complaints have been found to be no more effective than placebo – which is to say – not very effective. Shutterstock
Knowing what treatment options are available to you, and their benefits, harms, and costs is important to ensure you make the best choice for yourself. Luckily, there are tools available to help you. We’ve developed decision aids to help people with shoulder pain decide whether to have surgery or not (the tool is available here).
Our research has shown that people with back pain who seek a second opinion can avoid unnecessary spine surgery, including spinal fusion.
And avoid Dr Google. Information on the internet usually oversells the benefits and downplays the harms of common surgeries such as spinal fusion, shoulder arthroscopy, and surgery for a torn ACL (ligament in the knee). You will find misleading information even on websites from trustworthy sources such as government and university websites.
Before making a decision, make sure you ask your doctor the following questions:
am I more likely to get better with surgery than without it?
what happens if I choose not to have surgery?
what are the risks of having this surgery? Both during surgery (for example, anaesthesia) and after surgery (for example, complications)
have I received enough information about the benefits and harms of having surgery compared to other treatments (including doing nothing)?
Sometimes surgery is recommended because non-surgical treatment has not worked. Unfortunately, the failure of non-surgical treatment does not make the ineffective surgery any more effective. It still doesn’t work any more than not operating.
The available evidence tells us that the risks and inconveniences of the three surgeries discussed here do not outweigh the potential benefits.
Giovanni Ferreira receives funding from a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Emerging Leadership Level 1 Investigator Grant.
Joshua Zadro receives funding from a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Emerging Leadership Level 1 Investigator Grant.
Mary O’Keeffe receives funding from a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Centre for Research Excellence (CRE) Grant.
Mary O’Keeffe has previously received funding from a European Commission Marie Sklodowska Curie Grant.
Ian Harris 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 global petrol prices skyrocket and governments step in to reduce the cost, is there a point when car owners will say enough is enough and opt for a different kind of transport? If history is anything to go by, probably not.
Over the past few weeks, New Zealand drivers received a nasty shock as the price of fuel rose to over NZ$3 a litre, before dropping back to around $2.60 after the government temporarily cut fuel taxes by 25 cents a litre and the market eased. In Australia, the government has promised to implement some form of cost cutting measures in the upcoming budget.
Despite these temporary actions, greater price volatility has been predicted. And there is no doubt fuel prices are on the community’s radar. But will rising fuel prices change behaviour? Unfortunately, the available data doesn’t tell us much.
Pain at the pump doesn’t change behaviour
Fuel prices change on a weekly or daily basis and are reported over the same time frame, while robust fuel consumption statistics are only publicly available for longer time periods.
This makes consumer reaction to sudden price hikes hard to study, unless the price hike is a long-term trend rather than a short-term spike. It’s not yet clear which of these two scenarios is confronting motorists today.
Therefore, in order to study consumer reaction to a long-term rise in fuel prices, one has to go back to the oil crisis of 1973 when oil prices abruptly quadrupled and stayed that way for more than a year.
So, what do motorists do when they are confronted with a massive and sustained increase in petrol prices? As seen during the 1973 crisis and beyond, the consistent answer to this question is “not much”.
In the decades after the oil crisis, the number of cars in New Zealand continued to rise and the country is now ranked fourth in the OECD for car ownership.
While some reduction occurs over the longer term, petrol consumption appears to be “inelastic” to price changes. In economic parlance, an inelastic good is one where price does not significantly affect demand because there are either few good alternatives, as with petrol and tobacco, or the product is necessary, such as medicines.
The decision to use public transport in New Zealand is influenced by multiple factors, including convenience and speed. Lynn Grieveson/Getty Images
A complex market driven by petrol
That said, the general trends in fuel consumption disguise numerous complexities within the market.
Petrol consumers range from millionaire Porsche drivers getting away to their holiday home, to contract cleaners proceeding to their next gig in a rusty Nissan Micra on its last legs.
A US study in 2019 divided this range of households into two groups to study their behaviour separately: “hand to mouth” and “non-hand to mouth” consumers.
Hand-to-mouth households do not reduce fuel consumption because they are simply not able to do so. Their petrol consumption is already reduced to non-discretionary use only, which is usually related to work, and this expenditure cannot be reduced without also reducing income.
Often the “gig” work that such households rely on is inflexible and not public transport friendly. Buying an electric vehicle (EV) in such circumstances is a fiscal impossibility.
Non-hand-to-mouth households do not reduce their expenditure on fuel because it supports activities and benefits that are usually of far higher value than the additional cost imposed by a rise in fuel prices.
Cheap public transport is not a perfect solution
For example, I commute 15km to work each day. This might use about three litres of fuel (I’m not really sure, which is a comment in itself). A rise from $2 to $3 increases my fuel cost from $6 to $9 a day. The cost of public transport for this return trip has gone down from $6 to $3.
I could therefore use public transport, which will save me $6 a day. However, a round trip in a car takes 40 minutes, while a public transport round trip takes over three hours. How much does one value two hours and twenty minutes a day?
Even at the minimum wage, it’s worth around $50 to me, which means fuel might well have to rise to more than $15 a litre to get me out of the car.
This analysis and logic can be applied in varying forms to almost any non-hand-to-mouth household. A 2007 government-funded study found public transport usage in New Zealand was influenced less by price than other factors.
Given this, it’s a fairly safe bet that increasing fuel costs will not significantly reduce consumption and oil companies are unlikely to face significant consumer backlash.
Instead, household resources will be redirected away from elastic costs, such as food, to pay for the increased cost of fuel. Upmarket cafes that serve the non-hand-to-mouth households may feel a slight chill as a red line is reluctantly drawn through the daily afternoon latte.
However, the food banks that already support hand-to-mouth households are likely to see a far more drastic effect as they are called on to bridge the increasingly unbridgeable gap between non-discretionary expenditure and minimum income within these stressed communities.
It’s a crisis, whatever the prime minister might say.
Robert Hamlin 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.
Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has upended all kinds of certainties, created new possibilities and closed off old ones. This is certainly true for the world’s use of nuclear power.
Late last month, Russia seized the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine. The move rekindled fears about nuclear safety, decades after the plant’s catastrophic meltdown in in 1986.
And the war has prompted a scramble for new energy supplies in Europe – including potentially extending the life of existing nuclear plants.
All this points to the folly of nations exiting nuclear power while continuing to use coal, gas and oil – fuels that are more polluting, more expensive and often sourced from brutal dictatorships.
Danger at Chernobyl
The Chernobyl nuclear plant no longer produces nuclear power. But Russian-Ukraine combat damaged a high-voltage power line to the plant, temporarily cutting off electricity needed to cool spent nuclear fuel and run other safety systems.
Radiation around the plant spiked after the occupation – probably due to dust disturbed by Russian tanks.
This week, radiation monitoring systems in the Chernobyl exclusion zone were not working and yesterday, forest fires broke out around the plant.
And Chernobyl staff were reportedly close to collapse recently after working for weeks at Russian gunpoint.
Elsewhere, Russian forces this month seized Ukraine’s large Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, in an attack which started a dangerous fire near one of its reactors. This underscores the risk to Ukraine’s four operating nuclear power plants and their 15 reactors.
These events will raise concerns about nuclear plants operating anywhere in potential conflict zones. They are also likely to trigger more stringent safety requirements at plants, further increasing the cost of nuclear power.
What’s more, Russia – and its state-owned company Rosatom – will no longer be a welcome partner anywhere in the democratic world.
Within weeks of Russia’s invasion, the Finnish government announced it would not grant a permit to a long-planned power station in that country. The project included a Russian owner and Russian nuclear reactor, and Rosatom’s design.
The break with Russia is also likely to make governments even more skittish about dealing with unpredictable regimes.
As tensions worsen between the West and both China and Russia, nations will want to avoid risky deals which may see them lose control of crucial infrastructure.
For example, the UK government is reportedly seeking to remove China’s state-owned nuclear energy company from all future power projects in that country.
But it’s struggling to attract other private investors.
With China and Russia out of the picture, the design options for new nuclear plants will shrink drastically.
Contenders from the West have run into financialproblems in recent years, and a Korean design has had no international orders for over a decade.
The great remaining hope for new construction of nuclear plant design rests on “small modular reactors”. The most advanced proposal, put forward by United States-based company Nuscale, involves modules produced in factories then shipped to sites to be installed as needed.
This technology has been hyped for many years, but has not progressed past the prototype stage. Its arrival is likely still years away, if it ever happens.
So-called ‘small nuclear reactors’ appear far from commercial viability. NuScale
Postponing nuclear retirement
By contrast, there is good news for the world’s existing nuclear reactors.
The European Union relies heavily on Russian fossil fuels, but the threat posed by Moscow means it must wean itself off this source.
Every other energy source must be considered. It’s too late to start building new nuclear plants, but the life of existing plants could be extended.
Belgium has already deferred its planned closure of a nuclear plant, possibly until 2035.
Germany shut down half its nuclear plants in January, as part of a plan to phase out atomic power. This misguided decision was taken even as Putin’s armies were massing on the Ukrainian border, and before Germany had eliminated its reliance on gas and coal.
Germany’s remaining nuclear plants are due to close at the end of the year. The country is now under pressure to revisit this plan – but that will not be easy.
Germany has long been working towards the nuclear exit, including ending orders for new fuel. Reversing the process now would require special legislation and urgent intervention to secure new fuel supplies.
For the moment, the German government rejects both an extension of nuclear power and an embargo on Russian gas. But the second position may prove untenable.
The US has banned imports of Russian coal and gas, and Europe will come under growing international pressure to follow. Alternatively, Russia could make good on its threat to cut off gas supplies to Europe.
In that case, Germany is likely to find ways to overcome the legal and technical obstacles to extending nuclear power.
Looking ahead
Russia’s war on Ukraine won’t produce the resurgence in new nuclear plants predicted 20 years ago.
But it accentuates the urgent need for nations to free themselves from dependence on coal, oil and gas. Until then, our best option is to keep nuclear plants running as long as possible.
John Quiggin is a former Member of the Climate Change Authority
PODCAST: Buchanan + Manning: What can bring the Russian war against Ukraine to a close?
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A View from Afar – In this podcast, political scientist Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning raise the question:If escalation of the Russian war against Ukraine will occur should NATO or European Union nations intervene to protect Ukraine, who or what can assist in bringing this war to a close?
For many of us around the world, Russia’s war against Ukraine raises a philosophical dilemma. Is defence of the vulnerable the correct pathway toward reestablishing peace?
And specifically, Defence… what should it look like?
Do we, as members of an international community, stand by and allow innocent people to be murdered in the name of a geopolitical doctrine or ambition? Or, do we truly have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable?
In last week’s episode we explored how Russia had advanced ahead of NATO and Europe in matters of deterrence. We also canvassed the Responsibility to Protect principles.
Today, we deep dive into how concerned nations may be able to come to Ukraine’s aid, and under what circumstances could this be possible, and how will such resolutions be defined.
You can comment on this debate by clicking on one of these social media channels and interacting in the social media’s comment area. Here are the links:
Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
In just three weeks, the war in Ukraine has seen what could be the largest refugee movement since the second world war.
There are currently more than 3 million Ukrainian refugees, with a further 6.5 million people displaced inside Ukraine. Meanwhile, Russian attacks on Ukrainian cities and civilians continue.
Various organisations including the Law Council of Australia have called for Australia to “open its doors” to Ukrainian refugees, and Ukrainian community organisation in Australia are also working to assist refugees to resettle here.
But Ukrainian organisations have also pointed out that refugees are only part of the issue. Ukrainian national sovereignty is also key. As a historian of post-second world war displaced persons, it is important to understand how this history informs the current moment.
Ukraine between the wars
Between the two world wars, what we now know as “Ukraine” was split. It became the Soviet Ukraine in the east, with the west ruled by Poland.
Soviet Ukraine endured a bloody civil war, forced collectivisation and the Holodomor (literally “hunger-extermination”) – the Soviet-made famine in 1932-33.
Members of the Ukrainian community sing the national anthem at the National Press Club in Canberra. Mick Tsikas/AAP
After the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, it deported 315,000 people, including Ukrainians, into gulags.
During the war, the Ukrainian radical-right in Poland collaborated with the subsequent German occupiers against Poles, Jews and the Red Army. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) was highly nationalist and then declared an independent Ukrainian state, with its leaders imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Germany.
Ukraine after 1945
By 1945, Stalin had taken control of most of eastern Europe, including all of Ukraine. But the OUN was extraordinarily successful in advocating for an independent Ukrainian state in the post-war displaced persons camps in Europe.
“Ukrainian” was not originally a nationality categorisation used by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Ethnic Ukrainians were technically either from the Soviet Union or Poland. It was only after Ukrainians protested it was agreed to create a separate category: “Ukrainian”, and separate camps.
Displaced persons camps also became training grounds for the Ukrainian-dominated Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, which claimed to represent 32 nationalities “imprisoned” by the Soviet Union. These included the Balts (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Hungarians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Serbs, Belorussians and Cossacks.
The bloc argued for a separatist “new order” based on independent and ethnically homogeneous states. Their slogan was “Freedom for nations! Freedom for individuals!” In the Cold War, such initiatives received support from the west, particularly the United States.
Ukrainians in Australia
In Australia, Ukrainian community organisations were founded by the 14,000 Ukrainians who arrived in the country between 1947 and 1952. They included former forced labourers under Nazi occupation and former prisoners-of-war who found themselves in Germany and Austria in May 1945.
Ukrainian supporters have been gathering all around the world, including in Sydney. Bianca De Marchi/AAP
All were anti-Soviet and refused to return to lands under the control of the Soviet Union. Many were anti-Communist but, above all, they were nationalists and against what they saw as Russian imperialism.
So, while Ukrainian displaced persons who resettled in Australia became “new Australians”, many also saw themselves as Cold War warriors, advocating for Ukrainian nationalism. They felt vindicated decades later when the Soviet Union fell.
Ukrainian nationalism
For more than a century, Ukrainian nationalism has proved that it has not – and will not – disappear.
This means that as well as refugee support the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations is also calling for concrete political assistance from Australia. This includes support for Ukrainian membership in the European Union, a #NoFlyZone over Ukraine and for business leaders to divest from Russia.
At the end of the day, who is going to help Ukraine defend its territory?
War is complex and traumatic. Our first response is naturally to think of people who are injured and displaced. But we should not forget, Ukrainians want their country as well as temporary relief.
Dr Jayne Persian receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
AAP/Mick Tsikas
Telereach conducted nine polls in federal seats from March 17-19 for the News Ltd tabloids. All seats had a sample of about 800 according to Kos Samaras. The seats polled were Coalition-held Bass (Tas), Boothby (SA), Chisholm (Vic), Flynn (Qld), Reid (NSW), Swan (WA) and Longman (Qld), and Labor-held Dunkley (Vic) and Gilmore (NSW).
Only primary votes are displayed on the poll graphic. In the discussion below, I am using my judgment as to which parties would win seats based on the primary votes; the verdicts in the graphic have too many “too close to call” seats.
In Bass, the Liberals held a 45-33 lead over Labor with 7% for the Greens and 10% One Nation, and would easily retain. In Boothby, the Liberals led by 38-36 with 12% for the Greens and 4% UAP; Labor would gain from Greens preferences.
In Chisholm, the Liberals led Labor by 45-33 with 7% Greens, 5% One Nation and 4% UAP, and would easily retain. In Dunkley, Labor led by 47-29 with 9% One Nation and 7% Greens, and would easily retain. In Flynn, the LNP led by 42-27 with 10% One Nation and 8% UAP, and would easily retain.
In Gilmore, Labor led by 38-36 with 10% Greens, 8% One Nation and 4% UAP, and would retain. In Reid, Labor led by 39-33 with 13% One Nation, 10% Greens and 4% UAP, and would gain. In Swan, Labor led by 37-31 with 12% Greens, 11% One Nation and 8% UAP, and would gain. In Longman, the LNP led by 37-29 with 13% One Nation, 9% UAP and 6% Greens, and would retain.
The poll graphics also show satisfaction ratings in each seat for Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese, preferred PM and good/poor ratings for government performance over the last three years.
These polls were conducted by robopolling, and the high votes for One Nation and UAP in some seats may be inflated by this method. Australia’s current national regular polls are all conducted using online methods, not robopolling.
At the 2021 Canadian election, the right-wing populist People’s Party (PPC) won 4.9% of the national vote, compared with 7.0% in the CBC Poll Tracker. Robopolls (IVR in the linked poll table) were most prone to overstate the PPC – the three final robopolls gave the PPC one estimate of 9% and two of 10%.
If these polls are correct, Labor would gain three of the seven Coalition seats polled and hold its own two seats. The disappointing results for Labor in Bass and the two Queensland seats may be due to the education divide that I covered last May.
The most surprising result was the strong Liberal vote in the inner Melbourne seat of Chisholm. In past elections, seat polls have been unreliable.
National Morgan poll: 58-42 to Labor
A Morgan poll, conducted March 14-20 from a sample of 1,419, gave Labor a 58-42 lead, a two-point gain for Labor since the March 3-13 poll. Primary votes were 37.5% Labor (up 0.5), 31% Coalition (down 2.5), 12% Greens (up 0.5), 3% One Nation (steady), 1% UAP (steady), 10.5% independents (steady) and 5% others (up 1.5).
Essential “2PP+”: Labor holds 48-44 lead
An Essential poll, conducted March 16-20 from a sample of 1,091, gave Labor a 48-44 lead on Essential’s “2PP+” measure that includes undecided (49-44 last fortnight). Primary votes were 37% Coalition (up one), 37% Labor (up two), 9% Greens (down one), 3% One Nation (steady), 2% UAP (down one), 4% all Others (steady) and 7% undecided (steady).
Essential has been far better for the Coalition than either Newspoll or Morgan. They are also far lower on the all Others vote than other regular polls, who are at 15.5% in Morgan and 10% in last week’s Newspoll.
48% disapproved of Morrison’s performance (down one since February), and 45% approved (up one), for a net approval of -3. Albanese’s net approval improved four points to +7. Morrison led Albanese as better PM by 39-36 (40-35 in February).
51% thought the federal government’s response to the recent Queensland and NSW floods was poor while 26% thought it good.
Unemployment rate fell to 4.0% in February
The ABS reported on March 17 that Australia’s February unemployment rate dropped 0.2% from January to 4.0%. The underemployment rate was also down 0.1% to 6.6%. The employment population ratio – the percentage of eligible Australians employed – increased 0.3% to 63.8%, and is at its peak for at least the last ten years.
The ABC said the last time the unemployment rate was this low was in August 2008, shortly before the global financial crisis began. It has not been lower since 1978.
While the jobs situation is good for the federal government heading into an election, other economic indicators like inflation are poor. I previously reported that inflation-adjusted wages fell 1.2% in the full year 2021.
SA late counting: Labor likely to win fifth upper house seat
With 64% of the upper house vote counted for last Saturday’s South Australian election, Labor has 4.52 quotas (up from 4.45 after election night). The Liberals have 4.11, the Greens 1.11, One Nation 0.48, the Liberal Democrats 0.39, Family First 0.37, Legalise Cannabis 0.24 and Animal Justice 0.17.
The concern for Labor after election night was that their vote could fall in late counting, and they would have to rely on preferences from other left-wing parties to pass the Lib Dems or Family First. But Labor is now likely to win five of the 11 seats up at this election, with four Liberals, one Green and one One Nation.
Labor (nine) and the Greens (two) are thus likely to hold a combined 11 of the 22 total upper house seats, with eight Liberals, two SA-Best and one One Nation.
In the lower house, the ABC has called 26 of the 47 seats for Labor, 13 Liberals and four independents with four seats in doubt. Of the doubtful seats, Labor is likely to win Waite and the Liberals Dunstan and Morialto. Finniss could be won by an independent, but the independent must pass Labor first to overtake the Liberals.
Adrian Beaumont 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.
A View from Afar – In this podcast, political scientist Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning raise the question:
If escalation of the Russian war against Ukraine will occur should NATO or European Union nations intervene to protect Ukraine, who or what can assist in bringing this war to a close?
For many of us around the world, Russia’s war against Ukraine raises a philosophical dilemma. Is defence of the vulnerable the correct pathway toward reestablishing peace?
And specifically, Defence… what should it look like?
Do we, as members of an international community, stand by and allow innocent people to be murdered in the name of a geopolitical doctrine or ambition? Or, do we truly have a responsibility to protect the vulnerable?
In last week’s episode we explored how Russia had advanced ahead of NATO and Europe in matters of deterrence.
We also canvassed the Responsibility to Protect principles.
Today, we deep dive into how concerned nations may be able to come to Ukraine’s aid, and under what circumstances could this be possible, and how will such resolutions be defined.
Join Paul and Selwyn for this LIVE recording of this podcast while they consider these big issues, and remember any comments you make while live can be included in this programme.
You can comment on this debate by clicking on one of these social media channels and interacting in the social media’s comment area. Here are the links:
Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
Petrol prices are hitting eye-watering highs. As global affairs put pressure on the availability of commodities, we’re likely to continue seeing volatile petrol prices in the future.
So there’s never been a better time to embrace alternative modes of transport such as e-bikes and e-scooters (also called “micromobility” devices).
In Australia’s major cities, the average car trip is around 10km (a distance many people would consider to be within cycling range).
As both researchers and users of micromobility vehicles, we’re here to help answer some common questions that arise when people consider becoming an e-bike or e-scooter rider.
1. What are the benefits of e-scooters and e-bikes?
E-bikes have been around for some time. Most are “pedal-assisted”, which means the electric motor kicks in when the rider starts pedalling. They’re a good option for longer trips (5-15km), covering hilly terrain, or riding in warm weather.
They can also carry loads on attached baskets or pannier bags. Some cargo e-bikes can be used for shopping runs, or even for operating small mobile businesses.
More recently, e-scooters have grown in popularity. They’re usually ridden standing (although seats can be added as an accessory).
E-scooters are easier to park and take up less space. They can also replace those short car trips that are just too far to walk. As of recently, passengers have been allowed to take e-scooters and bikes on South East Queensland trains, allowing for first- and last-mile connections.
If you’re unsure whether either vehicle is right for you, most major cities offer hire schemes (such as Beam, Lime or Neuron) that let you try before you buy.
These are generally dockless sharing schemes that allow users to park anywhere near their destination, as long as they park responsibly on a footpath and avoid cluttering.
Our past research has shown students are receptive to having shared e-bikes offered at university campuses, and that tourists find shared e-scooters handy when visiting new places.
In Australia, e-bikes that comply to certain European standards (regarding what actually constitutes an electric bike) are allowed on public roads and governed in a similar way to bicycles.
However, the legality of riding e-scooters (or similar devices) in public differs by state and territory.
Australian e-scooter laws, restrictions, and shared services available by State/Territories, as of March 2022. Compiled from various State and Territory transport agencies by the authors
Victoria, South Australia and the Northern Territory only allow shared e-scooters at selected trial sites, but in general don’t allow privately owned e-scooters to be ridden in public.
Public areas in New South Wales remain a no-go for e-scooters (although trials have been announced to start this year).
Users should check their own state or territory’s road rules and regulations before using or purchasing an e-bike or e-scooter.
3. How much fuel and money can I save?
The cost of buying a micromobility vehicle will vary greatly depending on the vehicle type, battery and add-ons (such as a rack, lights or remote tracking).
We recently surveyed privately owned e-scooter users in South East Queensland, and found most popular models are priced between A$500 and A$1,500. Higher-end models can cost more than A$2,000 (which is still much less than a car, and especially an electric car).
E-bikes are slightly pricier, with most models costing between A$1,000 and A$3,000, and only a few options under A$800.
The operating costs for micromobility vehicles are mostly for electricity and maintenance. The good news is these costs are also low, as the vehicles are much lighter than cars and use efficient electric motors. It’s estimated that with one kilowatt hour of energy an e-scooter can travel 100 times the distance a petrol car can, and 17 times the distance of an electric car.
In Australia, the average passenger vehicle travels 11,100km per year and requires 1,232 litres of fuel. At current prices, this equates to more than A$2,700 spent on just fuel, let alone other costs such as lease or loan payments, insurance, registration and repairs.
And if the upfront costs of purchasing an e-bike or e-scooter seem too high, some companies are starting to offer these vehicles for rent by means of a monthly subscription fee.
4. Is it safe?
Safety is a key concern for all road users. As micromobility remains a novelty, the safety record for these vehicles is just being established. That said, a 2020 International Transport Forum report suggests the risk of e-scooters is comparable to cycling.
The available figures for shared e-scooter risk range between 78 and 100 fatalities per billion trips, whereas cycling risk across cities ranges between 21 and 257 fatalities per billion trips. In comparison, motorcycles or mopeds have a risk range between 132 and 1,164 fatalities per billion trips.
While there’s little data on e-scooter safety, cycling statistics suggest there is a “safety in numbers” effect. This means there are less fatalities in countries where cycling is more common.
Current e-bike standards are more mature compared to e-scooters. E-scooters available on the private market are not as well regulated, and may exceed local speed or power restrictions (which are usually 25km/h).
Pedestrian and disability interest groups have expressed concerns dockless shared e-devices can create trip hazards or block footpaths. Such concerns are valid, and addressing them will require careful management by scheme operators and local authorities.
We believe there is too much attention placed on creating incentives for the electrification of full-sized electric vehicles. For instance, the Queensland government’s recently announced
electric vehicle subsidy doesn’t include e-bikes or e-scooters.
Research shows three in four people are interested in cycling, yet the lack of safe routes raises concern for bicycle, e-bike and e-scooter users. Appropriate cycling infrastructure, including protected bike lanes and off-road paths, are essential to encourage the uptake of both cycling and personal mobility devices.
Advances in micromobility vehicle design and technology may also help improve users’ safety and experience. Built-in sensors could help detect hazards and alert users and pedestrians, as well as enable effective parking management.
It’s likely such advanced micromobility vehicles will first appear in shared schemes, but government-issued mandates may eventually require all micromobility vehicles to have these features.
This article was coauthored by Timo Eccarius, Assistant Professor of Sustainability Science and Engineering at Tunghai University, Taiwan.
Abraham Leung’s research at Griffith Cities Research Institute is funded by the Transport Academic Partnership (Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR), The Motor Accident and Insurance Commission) and Transport Innovation and Research Hub (Brisbane City Council, BCC). His forthcoming Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowship is funded and/or partnered with TMR, BCC, Townsville City Council, and micromobility operators (Neuron and Beam).
Madison Bland is affiliated with the Griffith Cities Research Institute where he is completing his PhD research in partnership with the City of Gold Coast. He is also an active member of PIA and PedBikeTrans industry groups.
Australia established a Defence Space Command in January this year, “to achieve our strategic space ambitions and lead the effort to assure Australia’s access to space”. The government also plans to spend around A$7 billion on space defence over the next decade.
Many areas within defence are already engaged in space activities, but Defence Space Command will bring them together. It will aim to build space capability not only in defence but also the rest of government, industry, and the research and education sectors.
I’m director of UNSW Canberra Space – the space mission, research and education program at the Australian Defence Force Academy, which develops and flies satellite missions for Defence Space Command. I have seen first-hand how defence, universities and industry can work together to develop Australian space technology and skills.
Preparing for (and preventing) conflict
Why do we need to put so much effort into space and space defence? One reason is Australia (like the rest of the world) depends on space-based technologies to provide communications, navigation and timing, and Earth-observing services.
However, space is increasingly “congested, contested and competitive”, according to the United Nations committee responsible for disarmament and international security in space.
The risk of collisions is increasing, as is the potential for conflict. Many nations now regard space as a “warfighting domain”, and the challenges are not just technological but political and ethical.
Defence Space Command will prepare for such space conflict, and deter it as much as possible.
Another reason for Australia to step more boldly into space is increasing commercialisation. Space is no longer solely the domain of government space agencies. A rapidly growing array of private companies are now leading the way.
The Australian Space Agency, established in 2018, is tasked with growing the country’s space industry to take a share of the global space economy. Along the way, this industry will support Defence Space Command and defence more broadly.
Australian players are new to the game, and the history of competitive markets shows disruptive innovation – the kind that creates new markets or sources of value – is the only way new entrants can compete and win against incumbents. Australia must be prepared to take risks in space, flying often, learning from failure, and commercialising innovative technologies from research-driven space missions.
Australia (defence included) must embrace disruptive innovation in the space domain, or we will become technically capable but not necessarily commercially or militarily competitive.
Skills for space
To rise to these challenges, Defence Space Command will need a highly skilled space workforce.
There are currently few personnel in defence who understand the complexities and harsh realities of operating in space through hands-on experience. Knowing which missions to do and how to do them right can’t be learnt from textbooks.
Analysis from various quarters also emphasises the workforce of the future will have a growing need for technological skills, particularly in the areas of automation and artificial intelligence; social and emotional skills, for leadership and teamwork in complex situations; and higher cognitive skills, including critical thinking and complex information processing.
All these are crucial for defence. The complexities of the space domain, the cross-disciplinary skills required, and the relevance of space to all aspects of society, mean training a future space workforce can inspire and educate, not just technologists and war fighters, but the critical thinkers and leaders of the future.
How universities fit in
This is where universities come in. Many of Australia’s universities are rapidly building space expertise, including Curtin University and the University of Melbourne. Take, for example, our work.
We help meet three critical needs: attracting and training a highly skilled workforce; pursuing and commercialising disruptive innovation; and performing early analysis and feasibility studies of potential space missions.
Defence and UNSW Canberra have jointly invested more than A$30 million since 2015 in this program. In that time, we have has developed four missions with five satellites. We have also performed extensive research and development for artificial intelligence-enabled space systems. We have also tracked and predicted the behaviour of satellites and their interactions with the space environment (known as “space domain awareness”).
Our most recent mission, M2, was launched in March 2021. It consists of two advanced satellites demonstrating technologies for Earth observation, satellite monitoring, communications and in-orbit artificial intelligence.
The M2 mission demonstrated cutting-edge technologies. UNSW Canberra, Author provided
Our missions have grown defence’s capacity and capability for developing and operating space technologies to meet national needs. The technical and operational lessons we learn feed directly into our space education program and also our plans for the future.
Just as importantly, the team has spawned three Canberra-based spin-off companies (Skykraft, Infinity Avionics and Nominal Systems) and established a domestic supply chain of approximately 30 organisations to support the missions. We have also contributed more than 20 highly skilled space professionals to other parts of the Australian space sector.
UNSW Canberra Space, along with our colleagues across the university sector, agencies such as Defence Science and Technology Group, the Australian Space Agency, CSIRO and Geoscience Australia, and in industry, has ambitious plans for new Australian space missions in the coming years.
The innovations that flow will be many, and the growth in skills across the country will be extensive. With coordination, these outcomes will make an important and enduring contribution to the success of Defence Space Command.
This might be a familiar scene. You pop into your local pharmacy to fill a script and you’re told your regular medicine is out of stock. When will it be in? Sorry, we don’t have a date. But I’ll ring up your GP to see if she can authorise an alternative.
This is a common conversation more than two years into the pandemic. So why, when our borders are open and planes are arriving from overseas with medicines on board, do we still have medicine shortages?
This may be surprising, but medicine shortages have been an ongoing issue in Australia. The pandemic only made it more visible.
For my PhD research, I looked at Australia’s pharmaceutical supply chain – the process of how medicines get from manufacturers to wholesalers and then to pharmacies.
I interviewed 20 supply-chain experts from 15 Australian and multinational companies. Here’s what I found, and what we could be doing better.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration database lists shortages of 263 medicines, with a critical shortage of 27 of them. Shortages of 65 more medicines are expected. The list is updated daily.
However, the pandemic is not the root cause of medicine shortages. So
border openings will not solve the problem.
Even before the pandemic, we were regularly seeing medicine shortages at similar levels.
The pharmaceutical industry is fundamentally different from other industries. Developing medicines is an extremely lengthy process, with no guarantee of success. Some 90% of candidate drugs don’t complete clinical trials. Of those that do, not all make it to market.
Some drugs are also “personalised” so they are better targeted to an individual patient’s needs. This means small quantities of tailored drugs may be needed.
So organisations, such as drug manufacturers, wholesalers and hospitals, mainly rely on historical data to plan the production and distribution of medicines.
Until now, it’s been hard to predict which medicines need to be made and distributed to meet demand. Shutterstock
However, Australia’s pharmaceutical supply chain is highly fragmented. There’s little coordination or data sharing among manufacturers, wholesalers and pharmacies. This leads to poor communication and incomplete or inaccurate information.
For instance, manufacturers may have little or no access to pharmacy data and stock levels. So, they cannot adequately plan for medicine production, which can take from several months to a year.
Australia also accounts for only 2% of the world’s drug market, a small one for
multinational pharmaceutical manufacturers. So their domestic suppliers generally keep a low stock due to short expiry dates and profit margins.
The slightest disruption, such as disease outbreaks or natural disasters, can easily spike demands and cause a shortage. Pandemic-related supply chain disruptions only make the existing challenges worse.
If a medicine is in short supply, there may be an alternative option a doctor can prescribe. But substituting medicines can lead to side effects, longer recovery times, longer stays in hospitals, and increased health-care costs.
Some pharmacies and wholesalers overstock their warehouses if they anticipate a shortage. But that is costly and medicines might expire before they are used. These are only short-term solutions.
So we need a system-wide and nationally coordinated approach among supply chain partners and the government to reduce the risk of medicine shortages.
Looking at vast amounts of data, from many sources, in real time is the key. Shutterstock
We could do this using artificial intelligence technologies such as “big data analytics” and sharing data across the pharmaceutical supply chain.
Big data analytics can store and analyse a large array of data in different formats, from different sources, in real time. This would create an integrated database for all pharmaceutical supply-chain partners to have access to. This would allow all partners to monitor and predict demand in real time.
For example, a pharmacist would be able to access a centralised database on their computer and check the current stock level and availability of a medicine in other pharmacies, or even manufacturers and distributors. This could even help predict medicine shortages way before they occur.
For this to work, Australian pharmaceutical organisations need both robust IT and a skilled workforce that knows how to analyse and use the data. While this might be practical and affordable for pharmaceutical companies, this might not be the case for hospital or community pharmacies.
So governments would need to support pharmacies and other smaller players – technically, financially, and with appropriate policies and regulations – to make sure they could access and use the data.
We need to plan for the next crisis
The current pandemic may be adding additional stresses to an already stretched supply chain. But future pandemics and natural disasters, such as floods and bushfires, will also worsen medicine shortages.
So we need to start planning now to create a resilient pharmaceutical supply chain that predicts medicine shortages and responds quickly.
Maryam Ziaee 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.
Warning: this article contains graphic descriptions of human disfigurement.
In 1878, the body of Sergeant Michael Kennedy lay in the bush in Victoria’s Wombat Ranges. He’d been shot by the notorious Ned Kelly gang – but the bush would add its own gruesome ending.
According to the man who later stumbled across his body, “one ear was gone. I imagined it had been gnawed away by native cats (quolls). The body was very much decomposed”.
This report is not isolated. My recent research has found 111 accounts between 1831 and 1916 where the scavenging of a corpse was attributed partly or entirely to quolls.
These grisly reports reveal a fascinating picture – not just of quolls, but of life in Australia in the 1800s.
Two men stand near the body of Michael Kennedy, after it was purportedly disfigured by quolls. Victoria Police Museum
A captivating carnivore
Quolls, historically known as native cats, are carnivorous marsupials. Four species are native to Australia: the spotted-tailed quoll, and the western, eastern and northern quoll.
Quoll populations in Australia have been declining for more than a century. Tasmania’s remaining eastern quoll population, for example, fell more than half in the decade to 2009 and numbers have not recovered since.
Quolls are known to scavenge. But I wanted to know more about their scavenging of human corpses. I hoped this would yield further insights into the animal’s diet and feeding behaviour.
The research sought to learn more about quoll diets. UTS
Delving into a gruesome history
Of the 111 historical accounts I found of quolls scavenging on a human corpse, six involved definitive evidence – either eyewitness accounts of the behaviour, or tracks and scats at the scene.
In 1862, a police officer saw seven quolls scavenging a corpse near Sale in Victoria. Upon being disturbed they ran into a dead tree. The policeman “burnt them and the tree to the ground” – revealing the widespread antipathy towards quolls at the time.
Tragically, in two cases quolls were seen feeding on infant corpses: at Araluen in New South Wales in 1895, and Sydney’s Middle Harbour in 1897.
And a sorry account tells of a man lost in the forest at Winchelsea in Victoria. Found near death, he said quolls and other animals “had eaten his fingers and his toes. They had bitten his face and torn his nose away”. He died soon after.
In 105 accounts I identified, quolls were not caught in the act of disfigurement, but were assumed to be the culprits.
In 1831, for example, Captain Bartholomew Thomas died in the Tasmanian bush after an Aboriginal spear attack during the Black War. When his body was found it was missing half the throat. A member of the search party speculated it had been eaten by crows or “native cats”.
The author found 111 historical accounts of quolls eating human bodies. Sutterstock
In a modern context, it may seem a huge leap to attribute so many corpse disfigurements to quolls. And of course, correlation does not equal causation.
But during the period, quolls were a major problem. They were recorded invading homes and other buildings, and in one account from South Australia, someone’s bed.
In 1856 at Glencoe in South Australia, 550 quolls were killed in one day after the animals reportedly gnawed on boots and stock whips.
And quolls were, and remain, abundant in a few parts of Tasmania, threatening rabbits, chickens, poultry and captive birds.
So in this context, assuming a quoll was responsible for scavenging a human corpse was only natural.
What we can learn
In the 1800s and early 1900s, quolls were found across Australia. But the accounts I uncovered were limited to Tasmania, and a wide coastal-inland band from the Queensland/NSW border to just east of the South Australia/Victoria border.
Those areas had significant human populations – and newspapers to report their observations – which may explain the pattern. But at the time, the eastern quoll reportedly reached plague proportions in some places, and may have been desperate for food.
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The victims spanned all reaches of society: a former convict, swagmen, farm workers and labourers, Chinese settlers and Aboriginal people. They died from a range of causes including murder, suicide, old age and misadventure.
Some 85% of the reported human victims of quoll scavenging were male. This is consistent with social attitudes during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when the outdoors was an overwhelmingly male domain.
Quolls are most abundant in late spring and summer. However, 41% of human scavenging accounts were reported in winter, and only 16% in both spring and summer.
This likely demonstrates quolls are hungriest in winter, as you might expect. But it also reflects the challenge of human survival at the time. There were minimal social supports, and human frailty or misadventure could easily lead to death from exposure.
Most accounts reported facial damage – to the eyes, ears, nose or tongue. Fingers and toes were reported in just three accounts.
Clothing worn by the person at their death, such as gloves, may help explain this. It may also reflect a bias on examining the face when identifying a corpse.
But it could also suggest quolls preferred some human body parts over others. In Tasmania, for example, quolls typically start on soft animal parts where they are able to tear open the skin.
Bringing back the quolls
I uncovered few corpse disfigurement accounts after 1900. This is consistent with a massive decline in quoll numbers by this time, reportedly after constant persecution by humans, and disease.
Australia’s four quoll species are now struggling to survive. They’re variously listed as endangered or vulnerable, due to perils such as habitat loss, introduced cats and foxes, poisonous cane toads, climate change and car strikes.
Australia’s four quoll species are now struggling to survive. shutterstock
Quolls are beautiful and special animals. I want to spread their story far and wide in the hope efforts to protect them will be expanded.
In some cases, fox and cat control has allowed quolls to return to places they’ve been absent from for many years. But more conservation measures are needed.
Let’s hope quolls never again chew on a human corpse. But, restored to healthy numbers, perhaps they can resume their role in the bush as tough and wily predators.
David Eric Peacock 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.
With yet another coral bleaching event underway on the Great Barrier Reef, we’re reminded of the tragic consequences of climate change.
Even if we manage to stop the planet warming beyond 1.5℃ this century, scientists predict up to 90% of tropical coral reefs will be severely damaged.
But we believe there’s a chance the Great Barrier Reef can still survive. What’s needed is ongoing, active management through scientific interventions, alongside rapid, enormous cuts to global greenhouse gas emissions.
In 2020, the federal government announced the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program, which aims to help coral reefs adapt to the effects of warming oceans. It included research and development funding into 35 cutting-edge technologies that could be deployed at large scale, from cloud brightening to seeding reefs with heat-tolerant corals.
Now, two years into the effort, we’re seeing a number of breakthroughs that bring us renewed hope for the reef’s future.
Coral aquaculture research at the National Sea Simulator. Roslyn Budd/Budd Photography, Author provided
Bleaching on the reef
Aerial surveys of the entire reef are currently underway to determine the extent and severity of current bleaching. These should be complete before the end of March.
Meanwhile, United Nations’ reef monitoring delegates are visiting the Great Barrier Reef this week to determine whether its World Heritage status should be downgraded.
Early indications suggest bleaching is most severe in areas of greatest accumulated heat stress, particularly in the area around Townsville. In some places, water temperatures have reached 3℃ higher than normal.
It seems bleaching is most severe in the area around Townsville. AIMS, Author provided This is the fourth bleaching event in the reef since 2016. LTMP, Author provided
Researchers involved in the Reef Restoration and Adaptation Program are examining a wide range of interventions to repair coral reefs. Unlike current reef restoration efforts, which are done by hand on a few square metres of reef, these interventions are designed to be applied at tremendous scales – across thousands of square kilometres.
Major scientific, technological, process, communication and management breakthroughs are required to see this become successful. We’re pleased to report that we’re already seeing the first successes, with others becoming more likely as research and development continues.
Early success stories
One key family of possible interventions involves culturing and deploying millions of heat-tolerant corals onto selected reefs.
Over the last two years, the research team has accelerated the natural adaptation of several coral species to warmer temperatures, allowing them to survive up to an additional four weeks of 1℃ excess heat stress. We believe a total of eight weeks of 1℃ excess heat stress can be achieved.
This level of additional heat tolerance can make a real difference for reef survival if we can limit greenhouse gas emissions driving climate change.
Reef interventions are designed to be applied across thousands of square kilometres. Marie Roman, Author provided
We’ve also developed novel seeding devices, which allow mass delivery of juvenile corals to reefs in a way that enhances their survival, paving the way for larger field trials.
Seeding heat-tolerant corals onto the reef will require significant improvements in coral aquaculture – the process of raising healthy coral in an aquarium before transporting them to the Great Barrier Reef. While current methods are limited to producing and deploying a few thousand corals per year, new advanced methods are designed to produce tens of millions per year – faster and cheaper than ever before.
Advances in reef interventions must be paired with cuts to emissions. Roslyn Budd/Budd Photography, Author provided
Another breakthrough relates to the ongoing development of new models and the data to calibrate them.
These are set to vastly improve our ability to predict where interventions are best deployed, and how well they’ll function. Early modelling results suggest even at a modest scale, well-targeted interventions could be enough to shift the state of individual reefs from terminal decline to survival over several decades.
4 conditions for lasting benefit
For these early breakthroughs to bring lasting benefit at such tremendous scales, four key conditions must be met:
interventions will have to be readily scalable and affordable. That means methods and technologies now being trialled in labs and on small patches of reef will have to be automated, mass-produced, up-sized and delivered in ways not previously considered feasible. All of this will take significant investment
interventions must be safe and acceptable to regulators and the public
a range of people, especially Traditional Owners of reef sea-country, must be involved in the effort. This includes through consultation, in decision-making and design
most importantly, global emissions must be brought rapidly under control, ideally to keep warming to under 1.5℃ this century.
Much of the Great Barrier Reef was in the early stages of recovery following prior bleaching events. LTMP, Author provided A healthy Great Barrier Reef is home to at least 1,625 species of fish. LTMP, Author provided
Over the coming months, the program will be conducting more trials on the reef. Alongside recent advances by other programs, such as approaches to control coral-eating crown of thorns starfish, there’s now real promise that a combined intervention at scale can be successful.
Saving the reef
Imagine a world where coral reefs have largely disappeared from the world. The few remaining reefs are a shadow of what they once were: grey, broken, covered in weeds and devoid of colourful fish.
Millions of people who’ve depended on reefs must turn to other livelihoods, which may contribute to climate-related migration. Imagine, too, how we’d feel knowing it could have been prevented.
The program will be conducting more on-reef trials in coming months. Marie Roman, Author provided
We are hopeful for an alternative vision for the future of the world’s reefs. It’s one in which the amazing beauty and diversity, and the huge global economic benefits, are intact and thriving well into the next century.
The difference between these two possible futures depends on choices we make right now. To save our reefs, we must simultaneously mitigate global warming and adapt to impacts already locked in. Neither alone will be enough.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ang Li, Research Fellow, NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Healthy Housing, Centre for Health Policy, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne
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That renters have poorer mental health than home owners is well-documented. But how much of this is due to being in rental accommodation itself, rather than other factors such as lower incomes?
Our research quantifies this, showing housing insecurity has a clear impost on renters’ mental health. The good news is our results show the gap between renters and home owners can be closed through longer rental tenure.
Controlling for other factors, once renters have lived in the same property for six years, their mental health is, on average, the same as homeowners.
This shows the importance of a sense of stability and continuity to personal well-being. Policies to promote stable housing are therefore an essential part of efforts to tackle our mental health crisis.
How we did our research
Age, relationship status, income and preexisting health conditions all help to explain the significant difference in mental health between owner-occupiers, private renters and those in social housing.
This is shown in the following graph, tracking the average mental health outcomes for owner occupiers, private rental tenants and social housing tenants in Australia over the past two decades.
This data comes from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey, a nationally representative sample of about 18,000 Australians every year. It is a longitudinal study, meaning it surveys the same people each year on things including income, employment, housing, health and well-being. This enables researchers to use it to understand influences that change people’s lives over time.
HILDA enables mental health outcomes to be quantified and compared using two well-established scales.
We used both scales to measure the effects of tenure stability – being stably housed without frequent forced moves – to ensure the validity of our results.
Our analysis focused on working aged people (25-65 years of age) living in low to middle income households, using a final sample of 7,060 people.
We then created comparable groups of owners and renters by matching people by their health and sociodemographic (income, education, employment, age, household characteristics, etc). This allowed us to control for other factors affecting mental health and isolate the effect of tenure stability.
What we found
Our results show the mental health gap between private renters and home owners is greatest in the first year and declines the longer someone lives in the same home.
The next graph shows the results from the SF-36 mental health scale. The shaded bars indicates the range of values that we can be 95% confident will contain the true value. The dotted lines show average predicted values of mental health outcomes.
By the sixth year the difference between home owners and renters is slight and statistically insignificant.
It’s important to not interpret this as suggesting that renters will have better mental health after ten years. We don’t know that. There is less data available to make confident predictions after a decade.
The next graph shows our results using the Kessler scale of psychological well-being. These results are slightly different but broadly consistent with the previous chart.
These results suggest home ownership itself is not essential to mental health of well-being. The more important factor is security and stability.
Studies overseas have found similar results. A 2019 study covering 25 European countries, for example, found that while homeowners tend to have better health and well-being outcomes than renters, the smaller the difference in outcome the smaller the tenure gap.
This is likely why our research shows stability is particularly beneficial for private renters in the 35-44 age bracket – the cohort most likely to have young children. Their improvement with stability is larger than renters in other age groups and they become similar to homeowners in the level of well-being faster, reaching parity at three to four years.
With the high costs of housing in Australia meaning an increasing proportion of the population are being shut out of home ownership, our results point to the importance of stronger tenant rights and improved minimum standards for rental housing conditions.
Most renters have little security, with lease length in Australia typically lasting one year, sometimes just six months.
One reform to give renters more security is to end no-grounds eviction – by which landlords can evict tenants on a fixed-term lease if they wish. The Victorian government did so in 2021. Queensland will do so in October. The other states and territories should follow suit.
Ending the merry-go-round of short, unstable leases means people can live better, healthier lives. That’s good not just for renters but society.
Ang Li receives funding from the University of Melbourne Early Career Researcher Grant Scheme and funding support from the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Emma Baker receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), and The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). She is currently board member of Habitat for Humanity (SA).
Rebecca Bentley receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council and the Australian Research Council.
Hans Zimmer on stage in Cologne, Germany, March 2022.GettyImages
As important to films as acting, writing, and design, music can instantly create a realistic or fantastic world, guide emotions and enhance storytelling. Yet the annual Academy Award nominations for best original score are one of the few times film music gets a look in with the general public.
And because they are chosen by Academy members who work professionally in the world of film music, the nominations also serve as a bellwether for current trends in film scoring. The five nominated scores are the ones film musicians themselves have found the most compelling, and are therefore worth the attention of moviegoers.
The 94th Academy Awards will be held in Hollywood on March 27. And so, the nominees for best original score are…
Dune – Hans Zimmer
Hans Zimmer is the most influential composer working in Hollywood today, having scored more than 200 films over his 30-plus years in the industry, including Gladiator, Thelma and Louise, Blade Runner 2049 and the Dark Knight trilogy.
As well as his own nominated score for Dune, his influence can be heard in most of this year’s other nominated work.
Where John Williams, the most influential film composer in the 1980s and 1990s, used thematic melodies and rapidly shifting harmonies to “musicalise” the events and emotions on screen, Zimmer uses varied instrumental or electronic textures and slowly shifting chords to sit beneath action and dialogue.
Dune is a textbook example of his style. Music is as prominent in the mix as the sound effects, and pervades the film in long, slow-burning passages (which film composers call “cues”).
Oscillating semitones and meandering scale figures, often made with an Armenian instrument called the duduk (popularised in film scoring by Zimmer himself in his score for Gladiator in 2000), are played over chugga-chugga rhythms provided by acoustic and electronic drums.
This can all be heard in the cue “Ripples in the Sand”. There is little subtlety in the music, but director Denis Villeneuve and his collaborators compensate with nuanced production design and acting. The film’s best moments produce an interesting contrast with the bluntly expressive music.
Don’t Look Up – Nicholas Britell
What we might call the softer side of Zimmer’s influence is evident in Nicholas Britell’s score for Don’t Look Up, the climate change satire that has divided viewers and critics.
Britell’s cues use the repeating harmonic modules of Zimmer, adding a jazz influence in the timbre (a large brass section and prominent mallet percussion) to cannily suit the satirical tone of the film.
The music cues are mostly short, punctuating major events in the story and covering transitions. Britell is skilful in his ability to convey a scene’s meaning in musical microcosm. For example, the cue “My Boyfriend Broke Up With Me” takes only 30 seconds to set the film’s mood.
Encanto – Germaine Franco
The Zimmer style is also heard in Germaine Franco’s score for Encanto. Franco takes Zimmer’s typical aesthetic markers and adapts them to the animated family film genre.
In fact, the music often sounds a lot like Zimmer’s Lion King score, albeit with South American musical features rather than African ones.
Listen to “Antonio’s Voice”, for instance, which incorporates Colombian chanting in its textured motives. It is an effective score for a charming film, but very much a long shot to win the Oscar, which nearly always goes to dramas or epics.
Parallel Mothers – Alberto Iglesias
Alberto Iglesias is not as well known in the English-speaking world as some of the other nominated composers, and most of his work has been in his native Spain.
That may change, with his nomination being the first in many years for a non-English language film. Scored for his frequent collaborator, director Pedro Almodóvar, Iglesias’s music helps make Parallel Mothers a must-see melodrama about motherhood and Spanish national trauma.
Like Zimmer, Iglesias is largely influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite composer, Bernard Herrmann. And like Herrmann, he uses repeating but subtly shifting musical modules, usually favouring strings.
The film’s trailer (which uses the actual music from the film, surprisingly unusual in trailers) demonstrates how well the score fits the mood Almodóvar creates with his images.
The Power of the Dog – Jonny Greenwood
The one major exception to the Zimmer influence among this year’s nominees is Jonny Greenwood’s score for The Power of the Dog. And for me, it’s the standout because of its different approach to matching music with onscreen action.
Greenwood makes careful use of melody, harmony and texture, not just to serve as wall-to-wall aural carpeting, but rather to actually interpret the dramatic setting and what is happening between the characters.
His music doesn’t merely reinforce what we can already see, but adds a layer of meaning, effectively amplifying Jane Campion’s languid yet intense storytelling.
Greenwood’s favourite composer, Olivier Messiaen, is very much in evidence, but he finds his own version of Messiaen’s innovations in melody and harmony. Greenwood also incorporates certain stylistic features from maverick 20th century American composers Charles Ives and Conlon Nancarrow, matching the film’s 1920s western setting. The cue “Best Friends” illustrates this well.
The envelope please…
The front runners seem to be Dune and The Power of the Dog, both of which have done well in other awards this year. But with the final decision voted on by the full Academy membership, rather than just the music branch, the Oscar is somewhat more of a popularity contest.
Setting my own tastes aside, however, all five are worthy nominees and undoubtedly represent the foremost current trends in film composing.
Gregory Camp 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.
In the very marginal Sydney eastern suburbs seat of Wentworth, where the Liberals are being challenged by a high profile “teal” candidate, Scott Morrison is unpopular, Anthony Albanese is preferred PM, and climate change tops issues people say will influence their vote.
Facing an election within two months, Liberal incumbent Dave Sharma at this point is only a nose ahead – 51-49% – of independent Allegra Spender on a two-candidate vote, according to polling done for the University of Canberra’s Centre for Change Governance and The Conversation’s Wentworth Project.
Notably, Wentworth electors are evenly split on which side Spender, if she won, should support to form government if the May election resulted in a hung parliament.
The Wentworth Project will chart the campaign for this seat in coming weeks. Automated polling of 1036 voters done by KJC Research from Saturday to Monday is reported here. Focus groups will be run during the formal election campaign. The research is not predictive, but will give an insight into one of the election’s closely-watched contests.
Encompassing some of the country’s most exclusive real estate, Wentworth covers many of Sydney’s most affluent suburbs. The second smallest electorate (38 square kilometres), it includes well known areas such as Darling Point, Double Bay, Vaucluse, Paddington, and Bondi Beach.
Wentworth.
Based on 2016 census data (the latest available), Wentworth has a gender split of 48% male and 52% female, and a medium age of 37 years old. Of its families, 42% are couple families with children, 45% couple families without children, and 11% one parent families – 19% of single parents are male. This is a well-educated electorate: 47% of the population hold a bachelor’s degree level or above, and 9% an advanced diploma or equivalent.
The most common occupations, on the census data, include professionals (41%), managers (21%), clerical and administrative workers (11%,), community and personal service workers (8%), and sales workers (8%).
The most frequent response on religion is “no religion” at 33% and Catholic at 20%. The seat includes a large Jewish community with 12.5% nominating Judaism. The most common ancestries are English (23%), Australian (16%), Irish (10%), Scottish (6%), and Italian (3%); 32% of people had both parents born in Australia and 43.5% of people had both parents born overseas.
The seat includes a large LGBTQ+ community.
A historically conservative seat that dates back to federation, Wentworth has been political home to four ministers and a prime minister since World War 2. Malcolm Turnbull held it from 2004 and 2018. After Turnbull lost the prime ministership in 2018, a by-election saw independent Kerryn Phelps wrest the seat briefly from the Liberals.
Sharma won it at the 2019 election with 48.5% of the primary vote; Phelps secured 32.4%. While Phelps recorded 51.3% of the two-candidate preferred vote on election day, a strong Liberal performance with pre-poll and postal votes ultimately handed Sharma victory. The 2019 election saw a Liberal majority recorded in only 11 of the 40 polling places.
Phelps’ strong 2019 performance meant the Liberals were extremely relieved when she did not run this election .
Sharma is one of the Liberal moderates; he was among those who crossed the floor during the all-night debate on the religious discrimination bill. Challenged over his “teal”- coloured campaign material (that didn’t mention Liberal) he retorted, “No one owns a colour”.
Allegra Spender is often dubbed as being of Liberal “royalty”: her father and grandfather served in federal parliament. Her mother, the late Carla Zampatti, was an icon of Australia’s fashion industry. Spender, who has an economics degree from Cambridge University, is a businesswoman. She is among a slew of independents, mostly women, challenging Liberals in “leafy” seats, including Mackellar and North Sydney, and Goldstein in Victoria.
Our polling asked Wentworth electors about their attitudes to Sharma and Spender, their voting intentions, issues they say will most influence their votes, and their views of Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese and of the government’s performance.
The Liberals’ primary vote in the polling is on 42%, with Spender – who needs to come in second to have a chance of winning the seat – on 27%. Labor is polling 14%, the Greens 9%, with the rest going to small parties and others.
When voters were asked to choose between Sharma and Spender, Sharma polled 49% and Spender 46%, with 5% “don’t knows”. Eliminating the “don’t knows’ gives a two candidate vote of 51-49% in Sharma’s favour. Three quarters of voters (74%) said they were already certain how they’d vote.
Sharma is more popular than Spender, but also more unpopular, with the polling showing she has yet to become as known and defined in the voters’ minds as he is.
Some 44% had a “favourable” view of Sharma, compared to 34% for Spender. More than a quarter (27%) had an unfavourable opinion of Sharma, while Spender’s unfavourable rating was 17%. So the net favourability for each is the same – plus 17. But Sharma is much better known, with just 5% who were unaware of him, compared to a hefty 18% who were unaware of Spender.
One quarter of voters (24%) were neutral towards Sharma, compared to 31% who were neutral towards Spender.
Climate change is a major campaigning issue for most of the teal independents in Liberal seats, many of whom (including Spender) are receiving financial backing from Climate 200, founded by Simon Holmes à Court.
Asked which, out of a list of six issues, would have most influence on their vote, climate change was well ahead.
The results were: climate change and the environment (28%), jobs and economic management (20%), integrity in politics (14%), national security and defence (14%), cost of living pressures (12%), health and COVID management (4%).
The ranking reflects the inner-city nature of the electorate – for instance, cost of living would likely rate higher in outer suburbia.
Wentworth voters are clearer in their views about Scott Morrison than about Albanese. Asked whether their opinion of each leader was favourable, neutral or unfavourable, 55% were negative towards Morrison. Three in ten (30%) had a favourable view and 13% were neutral.
Albanese had an unfavourable rating of 37%, while 30% were favourably disposed towards him and 30% neutral.
On the question of preferred prime minister, Albanese led Morrison 43-39%.
The Morrison government gets a bad rap from the Wentworth voters. Only 33% rate its performance as good or very good (14% very good, 19% good), compared to 46% who said it was poor (15% poor, 31% very poor). Nearly one in five (19%) rated its performance as average.
If Spender won, 39% say she should support the Coalition to form government (if the parliament were hung), the same proportion say Labor, and 12% say she should support neither.
With the budget looming and the election date to be announced soon after, the polling highlights the challenges for the two main contenders in a close and potentially fluid contest.
Dave Sharma is handicapped by an unpopular prime minister and a government of which many voters are critical. Allegra Spender has the strong concern over climate change running in her favour but the task ahead of becoming better known.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Rowe, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
Ash Barty has always done things her own way.
The shock retirement of the world number one women’s tennis player at the age of 25 was pure Barty in action.
The razzmatazz of a major media conference with jostling journalists and clicking camera shutters was not for her. When basketball superstar LeBron James switched teams in 2010, a live television special entitled The Decision ran for 75 minutes and extracted as much publicity as possible beforehand.
In contrast, Barty called time on her tennis career in a six-minute Instagram video post via a one-on-one conversation with her close friend and former doubles partner Casey Dellacqua. The inevitable big media conference was scheduled for the following day, but Barty made sure she set the agenda and, at least initially, controlled the narrative.
A multi-talented athlete and restless spirit
Her idiosyncratic history in sport has always involved keeping those outside her tight inner circle off balance. In 2014, Barty took a break from the game and played cricket with some success before returning to tennis two years later.
The unexpected news of her permanent retirement is consistent with the restless spirit of a multi-talented athlete (she is also a very accomplished golfer) who has always looked far beyond the tennis court’s baseline.
It’s not even been two months since I wrote about Barty riding the crest of a wave after victory in the Australian Open women’s singles final.
The other main subject of the article was Nick Kyrgios, who with Thanasi Kokkinakis had won the men’s doubles title.
Both Barty and Kyrgios are far from being cookie-cutter pro tennis players, but they’re vastly different in style. Kyrgios, like Barty, has proclaimed that tennis isn’t his life. But his way of dealing with the world is not to train too hard and to stage a show many people will watch because of his brash unpredictability.
Barty, on the other hand, projects her ordinariness. She drew attention to her play and her team, not her personal image. Barty reached the pinnacle of the sport, including winning three singles Grand Slam titles. Kyrgios, though, who has often foreshadowed his own retirement, has to a degree squandered his extravagant talent.
In public esteem ranking, Kyrgios is a polarising figure, whereas Barty is astonishingly well regarded. Her combination of success and humility means her departure from tennis has made many fans genuinely sad.
Typically, she has suggested a new, though as yet undeclared, game plan that will keep her in the public eye.
What next for the Barty party?
In her social media retirement discussion with Dellacqua, Barty said she had given all she could as an elite tennis player, and was “spent”.
But this seemed to be more than simple exhaustion. Having climbed to the summit of the sport at Wimbledon last year, she experienced the familiar feeling of the ultra-successful – that it was somehow not enough. We could almost hear the strains of the famous lament in the 1960s Peggy Lee hit (covered by PJ Harvey and many others), Is That All There Is?
The home win at Melbourne Park seemed to convince Barty she didn’t want just to “keep dancing”, as the song goes. Instead of getting on the plane to the US for Indian Wells and going into intense preparation for the French Open and following tournaments, it was time to enter a new phase of life.
Tennis has given Barty wealth, influence and a global profile beyond the imagination of most late millennials. She has multiple options that will no doubt soon be exercised. As a Ngaragu woman who is the national Indigenous tennis ambassador for Tennis Australia, it’s probable she will remain deeply committed to First Nations causes.
There might be the familiar move into media commentary. No doubt many organisations, large and small, will beat a path to her door. Having the face of Barty in the service of a company or campaign would be a highly valuable asset.
But this very singular woman wants to spend more time at home in southeast Queensland, and her recent engagement indicates that at some point there will be a wedding to organise.
Barty’s self-effacing, open manner gives many a sense they somehow know her personally, and they can “read” her intentions and mind.
This is an attractive illusion. Right to the end of her tennis career, she kept the world at bay with a disarming smile and an engaging disposition.
Will there be another tennis comeback for Barty? Perhaps. There have been few sporting champions as adept at keeping the curious guessing. But we can be sure that any choice will be strictly on her terms.
David Rowe has received funding from the Australian Research Council for the Discovery Projects ‘A Nation of “Good Sports”? Cultural Citizenship and Sport in Contemporary Australia’ (DP130104502) and ‘Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics’ (DP140101970).
On 1 December 2021 the CCCFA (Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act) entered Aotearoa New Zealand with more stealth than the Omicron BA2 variant. It resulted in unintended consequences that were (and are) entirely predictable.
There are two sets of ‘unintended but predictable consequences’: those consequences that make anxious and desperate people more anxious, more desperate, and more detached from mainstream law-abiding living; and those consequences which aggravate the systemic problems of our system of primitive capitalism.
Anxious People
A starting point for this topic might be the Swedish novel Anxious People (now condensed into a Netflix series, that should appeal to the same people who enjoyed The Detectorists). Set in a small city not-too-far from Stockholm, the story starts with a man committing suicide. The trigger for his suicide turned out to be the rejection of an application for a bank loan. Then, the main antihero of the story also found herself in an incredibly difficult situation, in part because of the Family Court and social assistance bureaucracies, and in part because of petty ‘rules-based’ rejection by the bank, following her attempt to gain a small personal loan. The story was bittersweet, neither tragedy nor comedy; uplifting because of the way that the community of ‘ordinary people’ (people each with their own issues) resolved their personal issue through what might be called ‘genuine community kindness’.
In New Zealand we have many anxious people, brought to critical states of anxiety for a number of different reasons. (In this RNZ story, The Science behind a Broken Heart 21 Mar 2022, the interviewee states that “scientists are figuring out that when we feel lonely, when we feel abandoned, our immune systems change”. This is an important undisproved hypothesis – that escalating anxiety itself may be the equivalent of a pandemic, in terms of physical health – that needs much more discussion and scientific investigation. We remind ourselves that ‘scientific’ truths are not ‘facts’; rather they are undisproved hypotheses, with some of these truths having been subject to more scrutiny than others.)
One of the most important reasons relates to housing: both getting home loans, and negotiating the rental market. Too many twenty-somethings are too anxious, and/or too poor, to leave the parental home. Many people in Aotearoa need to borrow money in order to forestall immediate problems in their lives. The last thing that they need is to have to confront an intrusive lender bureaucracy; a form of officialdom that can be as stressful to face as the government ‘we are here to help’ bureaucracy.
Banks lend to people who can jump certain hurdles. The government’s ‘here to help’ agencies target people who cannot jump similar hurdles. One day an anxious person may visit a government agency, dressing downbeat, and spinning their answers to emphasise their incapacity. On another day, such an anxious person may go to the bank, dress upbeat; and must re-spin their answers to essentially the same questions, to emphasise their capacity. Always there are lengthy forms to complete, so that the assessors can tick – or not tick – their formulaic boxes. The banks tended to be the lesser evil; that is, until 1 December 2021.
Capitalism works well when the income distribution system is working well. Government-targeted welfare is a part of the income distribution system; albeit a charity band-aid to a market system that fails. Primitive capitalism fails because it emphasises private property rights – including labour rights – while rejecting public property rights. And we note that the word ‘targeted’ is a euphemism for ‘allocation by means of intrusive bureaucracy’.
Lending and borrowing – credit and debt – is capitalism’s number one backstop for when the income distribution system fails to maintain its necessary equity and circulation objectives. Borrowing, while indeed a backstop, is actually much more than a backstop. It’s an integral component of any form of capitalism, primitive or developed.
People with less income than they need to meet their reasonable aspirations have just a few options; options which may help them get by in the present (eg as renters instead of home purchasers), or may give them sufficient means to escape from an income trap. These options are: borrowing, gambling, private charity, disreputable self-employment, and overt crime. If we take away the better of these options, that pushes people towards the worse of these.
Despite (or because of) the failings of the income distribution system, the lending/borrowing system in New Zealand was working surprisingly well. It was getting much money into the bank accounts of those who needed it to meet their aspirations, and the aspirations of the many resilient but stressed businesses who sold goods and services to people spending borrowed as well as earned funds.
The CCCFA was an attempt to fix a problem, which, except at the margins, did not exist. Once again from the government, a solution in search of a problem. And where, at the margins, a problem of exploitation did exist, there were better solutions available than deterrence through bureaucracy.
What happens if we make our financial markets under-accessible to ordinary households and small businesses? It means a circulation problem; see below. And it means that ordinary New Zealanders must increasingly look to these: the bank of mum and dad, gambling, private charity, disreputable self-employment, and overt crime.
Gambling gives people a chance of meeting an aspiration; it makes rational sense when they would otherwise have no chance of meeting that aspiration. Private charity includes various forms of individual and community ‘giving’: foodbanks is an obvious one, as is giving money to street beggars. Less obviously, it includes the many and varied forms of charity that parents may provide to their adult children. Related to this last form of charity is the bank of mum and dad, where loans – usually soft-loans – are made between parents and adult children. The bank of mum and dad tends to reinforce existing privileges in the income distribution landscape.
Overt crime here is theft, which includes running businesses that sell illegal goods or services. Disreputable self-employment is either selling marginally legal services – such as prostitution – or working as a ‘contract employee’ for an illegal or a marginally legal business. These activities represent the ‘black’ and ‘grey’ economies.
The key point here is that, as people’s lives become more precarious, and as relatively good options (such as borrowing money) diminish or close, then people get pushed into the much worse options to either maintain a basic living standard, or to meet aspirations of success.
We note that even bankruptcy represents an important part of the better options. Life for the economically insecure does involve hopeful borrowing that in some cases leads to bankruptcy. In practice, undertaking debt with a risk of bankruptcy is a far better option – for individuals, businesses, and society in general – than is resort to the criminal underworld. One doesn’t have to read or watch too many Dickensian stories to appreciate the need for an alternative to crime and criminalised debt. Indeed, the modern concept of bankruptcy – the decriminalisation of debt default – was one of the most important and socially progressive developments of the Victorian era.
Policies which make personal debt harder to access represent a reversal of post-Dickensian social progress.
Circulation of Money and Wage Goods
The other, and in some ways even more important problem with the bureaucratisation of household and small business finance, is that of impaired circulation of income and spending. Income and spending together make up ‘the circulatory economy’; or, for short, ‘the economy’.
An important concept here is that of ‘wage goods’; a term used a lot by economists in the period from circa 1850 to 1950, but not a lot these days. Wage goods are the goods and services that ordinary people buy; they include ‘necessities’ but go well beyond being necessary goods. They include basic aspirational goods and services. Thus, they represent mass markets. The key to the success of industrial capitalism – an extension of primitive capitalism which arose from the industrial revolution – is the ability of ordinary people to buy goods manufactured at scale, through the ‘factory system’.
During the twentieth century, cars and houses became wage goods. In the more-populated early twenty-first century, we might say an apartment rather than a detached or semi-detached house. The larger wage goods – which include household devices – always have and always will require recourse to borrowed money. This recourse is called ‘personal finance’; and involves a lifecycle mix of borrowing and saving. Further, large wage goods can be either rented or purchased; ideally with the lessors being people and businesses embedded in the circulatory economy.
To these wage goods we can add ‘social wage goods’. Think of education, healthcare, defence, and environmental and public health subsidies. In normal times, these will be funded from public revenue; taxation for the most part. But, and especially when public revenue systems are under strain, it is essential that they be funded by other means, rather than being unprovided or underprovided.
An efficient monetary circulation system has two requirements. The first of those is an income distribution system that maintains a stable (and not excessive) degree of inequality. By ‘stable’, we mean that the distribution of income inequality should be essentially the same in 2022 as it was in 1972; and (assuming that 1972 was a good year) in all years in-between, and all years in the future.
The second requirement is that there is a stabilising financial system (including an international system, which is beyond the scope of this essay). Such a system has three components: personal finance, business finance, and government finance.
Personal finance has already been alluded too. Business finance represents the core of capitalism; in particular, the financing of businesses which supply (create and sell) goods and services. Businesses invest in capital goods, and in inventories. Government finance – the third leg of the financial stool – is a critically important for investment in capital infrastructure, to maintain the income distribution system through what would otherwise be ‘hard times’, and to maintain the supply of social wage goods. As the third leg of the stool, government finance stabilises the stool – the system – compensating for the collective vagaries associated with personal spending and business investment. Of particular importance is the privileged (and necessary) ability of central governments to maintain a ‘balance sheet’ that enables them to be ‘borrowers of last resort’ while undertaking their core roles even in – no, especially in – hard times.
What I have outlined above is what we call ‘the economy’. When functioning well, with due recognition of public as well as private rights, the economy has transitioned from primitive to democratic capitalism.
What happens if we have legislation that hobbles the efficient cycling of money into the production of wage goods (including social wage goods), and capital goods (private and public)? Where does the money go when it doesn’t go where it should go? The short answer is that it flows to a relatively small number of asset-rich people. Part is this is cycled back into the economy through their purchases of luxury goods (those private goods and services which are not wage goods). Part of it just sits in banks and other repositories; it does not circulate at all. And the third part circulates in another place; a place that may be called ‘the casino’.
The casino is a whole suite of secondary markets – real estate, company shares, bonds, financial derivatives, foreign bank deposits, crypto-currencies, gold, artefacts, artworks, football teams, non-fungible-tokens; once upon a time there was even a speculative secondary market in tulip bulbs. Capitalism always has its casino, inhabited in the main by oligarchs and plutocrats. The circulation system is inefficient – and unstable – when ‘the casino’ is too big relative to ‘the economy’; and particularly when the casino grows faster than the economy.
In this last ‘uneven growth’ case, the flow of unspent money into the casino from the economy exceeds the flow of spent money from the casino back to the economy. It is in these times – a net flow of money from the economy to the casino – when most asset prices rise; this may be facilitated by monetary policies which inject new money into the casino rather than into the economy.
The easiest way by far for injecting new money into the national economy is via the government’s balance sheet. The big problem here is when debt-averse governments resist this process, thereby forcing money that should be going into the economy, into the casino instead. When this happens, the casino grows faster than the economy; asset prices increase, creating an illusion of wealth creation, but really only pumping up the prices of tradable assets. Rather than a bottomless money pit, the casino is a gravityless monetary sky.
New Zealand’s present regime of ‘Authoritarian Social Neoliberalism’
Finally, I will present this label that I think fits. Neoliberalism, by the way, means – more than anything else – the centrality of both private property rights (as a basis for the distribution of income) and restrictive public finance (aka government debt-aversion).
The government takes an authoritarian ‘top down’ approach to execute both a social policy agenda and its responses to exogenous events. The alternative is a democratic approach where informed – through discussion, not narrative – populations find their own solutions, and are supported by governments to do so. And the government pursues its debt-averse interpretation of neoliberalism, both with respect to its own balance sheet, and in its supposition that households and businesses also should behave as debt-minimisers.
The result is that both personal savings and new money flow, substantially and excessively, into ‘the casino’; the financial stratosphere inhabited by those with large portfolios of ‘financial wealth’, meaning the tradable assets mentioned above. When subject to this kind of casino-enriching policymaking – albeit policy making that is not understood by the policymakers in this way, due to regime wilful blindness – there are necessarily large net flows of money entering the world of asset trading. That is the consequence of public policy developed in the spirit that underpinned the CCCFA.
If we don’t allow money to flow towards where it can be usefully spent within the economy, then we push people towards more desperate options, such as crime. And we prioritise the casinoisation of the economy, which includes the designation (and resigned acceptance) of land as an appreciating asset, rather than as places to live and grow food. Authoritarian social neoliberal governments don’t understand that this is what they are doing; nevertheless, that’s what they do, though they would rather not know it.
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.
You pick up a piece of plastic litter from the beach, and get a small buzz. You’ve done something for the environment. But then you look around, and see plastic everywhere. It’s much more than you could pick up.
Earlier this month, the United Nations endorsed a new resolution on ending plastic pollution.
While that sounds positive, focusing on pollution is missing the elephant in the room: production. Why is more and more plastic being produced, with some ending up in forests, rivers and oceans near you?
Our research has shown that to actually make a difference to the ever-growing amount of plastics in our oceans, our soils and our bodies, we must focus on why our societies use and throw away ever more single use plastics.
The answer lies in our systems. If you’re a time-poor parent, stressed by juggling kids, work and the mortgage, it can be much easier and faster to reach for heavily packaged ready-made meals, or get dinner delivered in many layers of plastic.
When we’re time poor, we’re more likely to choose plastic-heavy food options. Shutterstock
It’s time to stop focusing just on plastic waste
Plastic pollution is out of control, with almost 80% of the 8.3 billion tonnes we have produced thrown away into landfill or the environment.
Why, then, is the UN focused only on the problem of waste, rather than production? We are producing more plastics than ever. Plastics are created from oil, and will account for one-fifth of all oil consumption by 2050. Not only this, but 40% of all the plastics we produce is used for packaging. Just over a third of these plastics are for food packaging.
Our research has shown mainstream approaches such as the UN resolution are ineffective and even counterproductive.
If we want to make a dent in the major problem of plastic pollution, we have to make systemic changes.
Why? Consider recycling and the notion of the circular economy, often held up as an answer to plastic waste. The issue here is that plastic degrades every time it is cycled through. Not only that, but recycling itself is often highly energy-intensive with its own set of environmental impacts.
Plastics degrade during recycling. Shutterstock
Recycling only delays the final disposal of plastics. Similarly, the concept of a circular economy is only put into practice when profitable.
Could we switch en masse to alternative disposable materials, like bio-based packaging?
Both recycling and switching to bio-based packaging are drawn from the technocraticgreenwashing playbook, in which we look to technology to let us keep living in an unsustainable way.
Why do we use and throw away so much plastic?
What we actually need is to consider how we can reduce how much plastic we make and consume, so we have a better chance of living within the planet’s ecological boundaries.
Our current capitalist system gives producers the incentive to make as much plastic as they can sell, and to create new market niches for their products. It’s no surprise the result is an avalanche of plastic.
Take food packaging. The use of plastics to cover food has increased dramatically since the 1960s, alongside the expansion of the globalised food market.
There is a link. As food production has gone global, it has displaced some local food production, manufacturing and consumption. Major corporations have profited from this shift, which requires longer and more complex supply chains. And longer supply chains means more packaging to keep food saleable.
To us, this suggests that the problem of plastic runs much deeper than how we prevent the waste entering our rivers and oceans. We believe the central issue stems from the growth-at-all-costs capitalist system.
Consider: packaged food is sold as “convenient”. Why do we need convenient ready-to-eat meals or those with minimal preparation, like frozen dinners, instant noodles and fast food? Because we are time-poor.
Why are we time-poor? Because in our fast-paced capitalist economies, people need to fit food preparation around their inflexible paid labour, which may often require long hours or fitting into a casualised system.
As a result, many of us get to the end of the day with little time and energy to shop in local stores, cook our meals from scratch using fresh ingredients, or grow our food.
It’s well established that time deprivation has increased how much processed packaged food we eat.
Manufacturers have financial incentives to produce ever-more plastic. Shutterstock
Waste is just a symptom
We do not hold out great hopes for the new UN agreement on plastics, based not only on the failure to address the root causes but also the poor implementation of previous climate commitments and other international environmental agreements such as e-waste management.
Proposals to reduce plastic pollution which skim over the root causes will do very little to reduce our overall use of plastics and alleviate the significant damage they do to our societies and the environment.
If we are serious about reducing the damage, we must look at deeper solutions, One might be transitioning towards a degrowth society, which would help us re-localise food systems.
In a degrowth society, we would gradually shift back to local food production, which would reduce the globalisation of food and shorten supply chains. That, in turn, would slash the need for packaging.
Degrowth would also help us address time poverty by, for example, reducing working hours or introducing a work-sharing mechanism.
There would be more free time in a degrowth society, and local food systems would provide healthy, fresh, seasonal produce requiring minimum packaging.
Locally grown food can reduce dependence on plastic packaging. Shutterstock
Supporting local farmers or pursuing more free time for all might well be a more effective solution to the issue of plastic pollution rather than simply pushing for improved recycling schemes.
Is this just blue sky thinking? No. Consider how our society was able to react to the COVID pandemic and get organised differently.
The pandemic showed us we are capable of large-scale change if a problem is taken seriously. If we begin to prioritise our social and ecological well-being over company profits, we will see change.
Sabrina Chakori receives funding from Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
Martin Calisto Friant receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 765198.
Ammar Abdul Aziz and Russell Richards 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.
For as little as A$1 a tin, canned tuna is an excellent, affordable source of protein, polyunsaturated fats and other nutrients. A tin of tuna is significantly cheaper than many types of fresh meat or fish.
Sounds good, but how much can you eat before you need to worry about mercury?
It is safe for everyone (including pregnant women) to consume canned tuna as part of their fish intake.
Canned tuna generally has lower levels of mercury than tuna fillets because smaller tuna species are used and the tuna are generally younger when caught.
But how many tins a week?
Lab tests we did for the ABC TV science program Catalyst in 2015 suggest – depending on your body weight and the exact brand of tuna you buy – you could eat anywhere between 25 and 35 small tins (95g each) of tuna a week before you hit maximum mercury limits.
That’s a level even the most keen tuna-lover would be hard pressed to consume.
Mercury is naturally present in our environment but can biomagnify to relatively high concentrations in fish – particularly predatory fish.
In other words, it builds up as smaller fish get eaten by middle-sized fish, which get eaten by large fish, which get eaten by us. So the bigger the fish, the higher the likely mercury content.
Most forms of mercury are potentially very toxic to humans. But to make matters worse, a substantial proportion of mercury in fish is present as methylmercury – a potent neurotoxin formed by bacteria in waters and sediments.
Although mercury pollution has increased since industrialisation, accumulation of methylmercury in animals is a completely natural phenomenon.
Even fish caught from the middle of the ocean, far from any polluting sources, will contain methylmercury.
Tinned tuna is cheap, tasty and nutritious. Shutterstock
Tuna in Australian cupboards is likely smaller species
Over the years, some scientists have raised concerns about high concentrations of mercury in canned tuna.
Mercury concentrations are higher in predatory fish such as tuna and generally increase with age and size. So this concern has largely been associated with the use of tuna species such as albacore and larger tuna specimens.
Skipjack and yellowfin are the main tuna species listed as ingredients in canned tuna in brands sold at Australian supermarkets.
Skipjack are the smallest of the major tuna species, while yellowfin are larger.
So, the fact the canned tuna in Australian cupboards is likely to contain smaller species is already a bonus when it comes to reducing mercury risk.
Two separate maximum levels are imposed for fish ― a level of 1.0 mg mercury/kg for the fish that are known to contain high levels of mercury (such as swordfish, southern bluefin tuna, barramundi, ling, orange roughy, rays and shark) and a level of 0.5 mg/kg for all other species of fish.
However, whether mercury is harmful or not also depends on the amount of fish you eat and how often. After all, it is the dose that makes the poison.
Based on international guidelines, Food Standards Australia New Zealand also provides recommended safe limits for dietary intake. In other words, how much mercury you can safely have from all food sources (not just fish).
This limit is known as the “provisional tolerable weekly intake” or PTWI.
The maximum dose of mercury set for the general population is 3.3 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per week. 1,000 micrograms (µg) is 1 milligram (mg).(The guidelines assume all mercury in fish is present as the more harmful methylmercury as a worst case scenario).
Pregnant women are advised to limit their fish intake because of placental transfer of mercury to the unborn foetus and the effect of mercury on neural development.
Whether mercury is harmful or not also depends on the amount of fish you eat and how often. Shutterstock
Testing three tins
Our laboratory is well equipped to measure mercury concentrations in fish. As part of the Catalyst program in 2015, we analysed mercury concentrations in Australian fish including three tins of canned tuna purchased from the supermarket.
Given the very low sample numbers, our data is just a snapshot of mercury concentrations. More research is clearly needed.
We found none of the canned tuna brands exceeded the safe consumption levels for mercury of 0.5 milligrams of mercury a kilogram. All three tins had slightly different levels of mercury but even the “worst” one wasn’t that bad.
You would have to eat around 25 tins (at 95g a tin) of it a week before you hit the maximum tolerable intake of mercury. For pregnant people (or people trying to get pregnant), the limit would be around 12 tins (at 95g a tin) a week.
It is unlikely many consumers will reach these limits.
But watch out for other species of fish
Some Australian fresh fish can contain higher mercury concentrations than canned tuna.
Food Standards Australia New Zealand recommends that, for orange roughy (also known as deep sea perch) or catfish, people should limit themselves to one 150 gram serving a week with no other fish that week. For shark (flake) or swordfish/broadbill and marlin, the limit is one serving a fortnight.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The Samoa government has extended its alert level three lockdown for another two weeks, due to the rapid spread of the covid-19 in the community.
There are 467 confirmed covid-19 cases, 15 of which are imported cases of passengers on the repatriation flight from New Zealand in early March.
As case numbers climb there is real concern frontline workers will be most at risk of contracting the virus.
Prime Minister Fiame Naomi Mata’afa said the surge in the community cases was expected and would continue to increase due to the transmissibility of the virus.
“However it is clinically proven, that promoting the practices of simple protective behaviours that can reduce risk to ourselves, our friends and families; such as staying home, to reduce contact, and adhering to the preventative health measures will help reduce new infections, and subsequently contain community transmission,” she said.
Fiame added that these were crucial components of Samoa’s national response to covid-19 which would support the Ministry of Health to undertake all necessary health measures to contain the spread of the virus and respond to cases requiring hospital care.
She said enhancing surveillance and maintaining high surveillance rates needed the rollout of the paediatric Pfizer vaccine for children 5-11 years old, expected to start in Savai’i this week.
Vaccination rollout “And the continuation of the vaccination rollout for everyone including booster does once the bulk supplies arrive over next week.”
The Prime Minister said their message at the outset of the covid-19 national response is that vaccines are highly effective in protecting against severe disease.
Unfortunately, the tests conducted this week, showed that some had not even started their vaccination or completed their second vaccine.
“This is a concern,” said the Prime Minister.
Fiame said every phase of Samoa’s journey would present new difficulties but they must remain resilient and unified and accept that everyone contributed to maintaining the well-being and health of the nation.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New Zealand’s Director-General of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield, says covid-19 case numbers have passed their peak in Auckland, the country’s largest city, but that people should remain vigilant.
He said the latest analysis showed covid-19 case numbers had passed their peak in Auckland, and were tracking down in all three district health boards.
Dr Bloomfield said that analysis also showed case numbers nationally — not including Auckland — were also slowing. They increased just 1 percent in the seven days to March 20, compared to a 44 percent increase in the week ending March 13.
The pattern did differ by DHB, with cases still increasing in the South Island, although there were encouraging signs they were peaking in the Midland region and in the Wellington region.
He said case numbers appeared to be largely now following the modelling for a high-transmission scenario. Case numbers were higher than the modelling suggested, and Dr Bloomfield said this may be because most cases in New Zealand were the BA.2 subvariant.
Hospitalisations in the northern region were also levelling off.
“We’re watching carefully and the expectation is that they will start to drop as the week progresses,” Dr Bloomfield said.
“The average length of stay for people on wards in the Auckland hospitals who have been discharged is now 3.2 days compared to just over two days last month, and the average stay in intensive care is five days.
“This increase in average length of stay reflects that we’re now seeing that people who are needing longer care, they may even be over their covid infection but they have symptoms that need to be managed, often from underlying conditions.”
Watch the update
Video: RNZ News
Dr Bloomfield said that even though cases in hospital in Auckland were staying high, the number of new admissions each day was dropping quickly. But because those being admitted now were sicker and required longer care in hospital, the total number of people in hospital remained fairly steady.
Emergency department admissions testing positive remain highest at Middlemore, but they had fallen from 40 percent last month to 28 percent now. Auckland Hospital was down from 30 percent to 22 percent, while Waitematā was steady about 18 percent.
Whangārei’s ED positivity rate was still increasing, he said.
“Admissions in the rest of the country are growing and we will continue to see them grow.”
Dr Bloomfield said hospitalisation rates during the delta outbreak was about 8 percent, whereas the omicron outbreak had been about 0.9 percent.
“That hospitalisation rate will appear to increase over coming weeks, because as the cases drop yet people remain in hospital we’ll see the denominator decline much quicker … hospitalisations will decline but more slowly,” he said.
“The number of deaths each day is also likely to increase and will take longer to decline.”
He said staffing shortages were a major pressure on the health system, and there was real pressure in hospitals as well as care in the community, including rest homes.
‘Covid isn’t done with the world just yet’ Dr Bloomfield said New Zealand could expect ongoing waves of covid, and looking across the Tasman was instructive.
“The number of people hospitalised with covid in New South Wales never dropped below 950 after their first omicron wave … it’s now back over 1000 as cases started to increase again.
“In contrast, in Victoria the number of hospitalisations declined down to around 200 and remained steady there … so two quite different pictures.”
He said this showed New Zealand should expect to see a residual number of cases and people in hospital.
The UK had seen increased case numbers with the BA.2 subvariant, with Scotland hit hardest.
“Case numbers there are just below their previous peak, and hospitalisation figures the highest they have been since 2020. Globally it’s likely there will continue to be further waves of omicron and likewise there will be new variants of concern.”
He said New Zealand would face these just as other countries would.
Ahead of the announcement, Dr Bloomfield said New Zealand was still in the middle of a global pandemic which had thrown curveballs before and would continue to.
“We need to be prepared to redeploy the measures that we already have in place or have used in the past.”
He said there was a balance between protecting the population — particularly vulnerable groups — and only using restrictions for the extent they were needed.
At the moment, total ICU and HDU beds were about 60 percent occupied, he said. Each day hospitals were looking at the number of beds available and staffing those accordingly.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Many Australian women rely on and trust maternity services to see them through pregnancy, labour and the early stages of new parenting.
But for First Nations women, these same services can be confronting and can result in poor outcomes. Many women must travel far from family and community to birth. And if they don’t, they often feel misunderstood and judged by mainstream health services.
There is another way. Birthing on Country means First Nations women give birth on their ancestral country. It acknowledges First Nation peoples’ continued ownership of land and unique birthing practices.
What can Birthing on Country services do?
Birthing on Country services centre First Nations values, and are designed to meet First Nations people’s social, emotional, cultural and health needs. The services are embedded within larger health service networks.
Our team works in partnership with First Nations communities to deliver Birthing on Country maternity services that address health inequities.
Our partners in one urban setting saw a profound reduction in preterm birth and increased antenatal attendance and breastfeeding.
This was achieved through integrating within a wraparound system of care, designed as a one-stop-shop in an Aboriginal community controlled setting.
It also involved redesigning the service using a successful blueprint that prioritises investing in the workforce, strengthening families’ capabilities, and embedding First Nations governance and control in all aspects of maternity service planning and delivery.
However, Birthing on Country services are yet to be trialled in regional and remote Australia. So there is much work to do to ensure all First Nations women can access these services.
be self-determining and participate in the design of health services
include and revitalise cultural practices, languages, and medicines.
Birthing on Country services are one example of how this can be achieved.
Commitment to uphold the UN declaration requires resourcing and monitoring to support and celebrate the world’s oldest midwifery practices and cultures.
2. Acknowledge how health systems fail First Nations people
Racial bias has been identified as a contributing factor in First Nations maternal deaths. This includes health services dismissing women’s concerns and turning them away from hospital when seeking care – even when they have life-threatening symptoms.
This can make First Nations families feel unsafe and uncomfortable accessing maternity health services.
Large organisations make Western ways of “knowing and doing” dominant in every work practice. This often results in institutionalised racism and dismisses other forms of knowledge suggesting we should or could be doing things differently.
Australia’s health system was designed to serve those who designed it.
First Nations people have been explicitly excluded from decision-making about the services provided to them.
First Nations people want and need to be at the decision-making table, and ensure “nothing about us” is decided “without us”.
First Nations people need to be involved in designing health services. Shutterstock
Participatory action research is one evidence-based way to work collaboratively with stakeholders to respond to needs identified by the community.
First Nations people value the process as it aligns with principles of self-determination and equity. And it privileges the voices of those often marginalised in research.
Engaging community in design, implementation and evaluation of maternity services brings local knowledge, community activation and investment that leads to lasting change.
4. Recognise how First Nations peoples can improve health care for everyone
Our colleagues in Aotearoa (New Zealand) found maternity systems that privilege whiteness cannot provide equitable health care for all.
All people can benefit from ethical knowledge systems that have safely guided childbirth and the flourishing of First Nations people for millennia.
Relationality – being connected with all human and non-human beings – is at the centre of First Nations values, ways of knowing, doing and being. It ensures our responsibility to be in good relations with each other, whether with community, Country or our research partners.
The current system does not embed relationality in its design; rather encourages capitalism and competition for scarce resources over genuine partnership and equitable care.
Our task is to re-centre good relations in our everyday work to make health and wellness gains. We do this by:
ensuring our work is community-driven
using methodologies that represent First Nations views
presenting and defending findings at community forums
ensuring our research leads to action at the local, state and national level.
5. Share findings in accessible ways
The Caring for Mum on Country project is a community-driven action research project piloting doula (birthing companion) training and exploring reproductive health literacy.
It has shown the power of grassroots community activation in finding Yolŋu solutions to local needs.
Charles Darwin University researchers Sarah Ireland (a co-author of this article) and Ḻäwurrpa Maypilama (in partnership with the Australian Doula College and Yalu Aboriginal Corporation) used community action research to pilot First Nations doula training, locally known as djäkamirr–caretakers of pregnancy and birth.
Film is an impactful way to discuss research. Finding creative and accessible ways to share research findings is imperative to bringing learnings to people who can benefit from and enact change.
Health inequities in childbirth will persist until health systems relinquish control and acknowledge the value of First Nations knowledge systems centred on relationality and wellness.
We must work in partnership with First Nations communities to redesign health services and work differently with communities in their journeys to implementing Birthing on Country maternity services.
Sarah Ireland receives funding from NHMRC Partnership Grant 2021: “To Be Born Upon a Pandanus Mat” APP2010289.
Yvette Roe receives funding from NHMRC .
CI A Prof Yvette Roe, NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence: 2020 Redesigning maternal, newborn and child health services for the best start in life for First Nations families. APP1197110
CI A Prof Yvette Roe, NHMRC Partnership Grant 2021: “To Be Born Upon a Pandanus Mat”. APP 2010289
Sophie Hickey 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.
One in three university students (30.6%) have experienced sexual assault at least once in their lifetime. This is one finding from the 2021 National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) report, released today.
The survey responses from 43,819 students enrolled in 38 Australian universities, as well as written responses from 1,835 current and former students, demonstrate the extent and impacts of sexual violence in and beyond the higher education sector.
The survey also found one in 20 (4.5%) had been sexually assaulted in a university context since starting their studies. In the 12 months preceding the survey, 1.4% of women and 0.6% of men reported experiencing sexual assault in a university context.
Chart: The Conversation. Data: Author provided, CC BY
Rates of sexual harassment were much higher. One in two students (48.0%) had experienced it at least once. One in six (16.1%) had been sexually harassed in a university context since starting their studies, and one in 12 (8.1%) in the preceding 12 months.
Sexual violence reflects patterns of inequality
Universities Australia funded the survey under the Respect Now Always initiative. It builds on a legacy of previous work, including the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2016 national survey of university students on sexual assault and sexual harassment. That led to its 2017 report, Change the Course.
The 2021 survey also explored student attitudes and knowledge about sexual violence and reporting processes, establishing a benchmark against which universities can measure their progress into the future.
The past two years however have been a time of COVID lockdowns – and it’s likely this impacted on the 12 month results of sexual harassment and assault in university contexts. Only a third of students (33.6%) in the 2021 survey said they had been able to take part in some or all of their classes on campus. It is also worth noting improvements to the survey methodology mean the 2021 prevalence results are not directly comparable with the 2016 results.
Nonetheless the 2021 data still suggest about two students in a tutorial class of 25 would have been sexually harassed or assaulted in a university context at least once in the preceding 12 months.
And it is not an evenly spread problem either. Much like the 2016 survey, rates were highest for students who were women, non-binary gender or transgender, sexuality diverse, disclosed a disability or were younger (18 to 21 years).
It happens on and off campus, and is rarely reported
For sexual violence on campus, we can expect universities to be responsible for ensuring a just and timely response, and to take action to prevent these harms. Many of the instances of sexual harassment and sexual assault that impacted people most, as reported in the 2021 survey, did happen in settings such as lectures and classes, libraries, clubs and events, and student accommodation.
But, of course, not all such experiences were on campus. As is the case in society more generally, sexual assault in particular often happened in private homes or residences.
Whether on or off campus, though, a majority of perpetrators were known to the victim through their university. This has significant implications for victim-survivors’ safety and well-being in their ongoing studies.
It is also telling that one in two students who responded to the survey said they knew little or nothing about their university’s reporting or complaint processes.
Overall, few students, about one in 20, formally reported the experience that impacted them most to their university. Many thought it would be too hard to prove, or that they wouldn’t be taken seriously.
Our universities have a crucial role to play in responding to sexual violence. Whether it happens on campus or elsewhere, universities can help ensure victim-survivors are supported to feel safe in continuing their studies – rather than bearing the impacts of sexual violence alone.
Yet universities also have a role in preventing sexual violence through addressing the inequality and discrimination that fosters these harms.
Some efforts, such as the Educating for Equality initiative, have begun to be implemented. But clearly, more needs to be done.
University students themselves have a clear vision of the role of universities to address and prevent sexual violence.
Through the 2021 research they called for more transparent reporting processes, as well as awareness campaigns so students know what sexual violence is and how to report it or seek help. They wanted visible and proportionate disciplinary action for perpetrators to show universities take such reports seriously. And they wanted properly resourced supports for victim-survivors.
Beyond this, students called for universities to work collaboratively with victim-survivor advocates, and take a more active role in promoting equality and respect on their campuses and beyond.
The 2021 NSSS research tells us sexual violence remains a problem and students are demanding action.
What remains is for universities to demonstrate they are fully implementing and funding the necessary actions – and in doing so, to ensure no institution is left behind.
The author acknowledges the contributions of the Social Research Centre as the lead organisation on the 2021 NSSS reports. In particular, acknowledgement is made to Dr Paul Myers and Dr Wendy Heywood.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732. In immediate danger, call 000.
Anastasia Powell receives funding from the Criminology Research Council and Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS). Anastasia is also a director of Our Watch (Australia’s national organisation for the prevention of violence against women), and a member of the National Women’s Safety Alliance (NWSA). She was a commissioned researcher on the National Student Safety Survey reports.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kyle J.D. Mulrooney, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Co-director of the Centre for Rural Criminology, University of New England
Shutterstock
While drink driving fatalities and injuries have declined in recent decades, it still remains a major problem on Australian roads.
Blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limits have helped since they were put in place over 25 years ago, but new technology may now be able to stop drink driving altogether.
In the US, the massive infrastructure bill passed by Congress last year mandated car manufacturers equip vehicles with advanced drink-driving prevention technology. These systems can either monitor a driver’s performance to detect if they are impaired, or test a driver’s BAC to determine if it’s above the legal limit.
The US Department of Transportation has been given latitude to choose the type of system that manufacturers use, with a requirement for it to be installed in new cars by 2027.
These systems monitor things such as steering, braking and driving trajectory, enabling the car to “infer” the driver’s alertness and activate warnings or even corrective action, such as autonomous emergency braking, where necessary.
More recent advancements in DMAS have focused on the driver specifically, using real-time video to track things such as head position, eyelid closure and eye gaze direction to detect driver impairment.
In an emergency situation, these systems can also work together to prevent a crash. The cameras can establish a driver’s impairment, for example, while the automated driving technology steers the vehicle to safety.
Such technologies have been been integrated into vehicles since the early 2000s, primarily to monitor fatigue and distraction. Today, most new vehicles come with such systems and they’ve become increasingly sophisticated.
New technologies to target drink driving specifically
Other technologies are being developed to target drink driving more specifically through detection systems that use alcohol sensors.
One is a breath-based system that can determine a driver’s blood alcohol content from normal breathing in the car. Another is a touch-based system that uses sensors in the ignition button or gear shift to determine a driver’s blood alcohol content below the skin surface.
If either system determines the driver is impaired or over the legal limit, it will take action. This could mean not allowing the car to start or move, giving the driver a warning or actively pulling the driver off the road.
This new technology will be available for open licensing in commercial vehicles later this year.
Others have decried the loss of freedom and inconvenience that might result from system failures.
How our current drink-driving approach is failing
Yet, this new technology may be a vast improvement on our current system for policing drink driving, which is expensive, unreliable and hasn’t been effective in stamping out the problem.
Australia and other countries rely largely on impairment tests following random or “probable cause” police stops or from systematic police roadblocks. The very randomness of these interventions limits their effectiveness, especially in non-urban environments. Punitive measures such as prison time also do not appear to have an impact, particularly with repeat offenders.
Additionally, the breath analysis tests used by police may be flawed and are subject to human error.
There are many issues with our current system for catching drink drivers. Shutterstock
Our current enforcement methods can also infringe on people’s rights and contribute to discriminatory practices through the over-policing of specific areas or minority groups.
For example, while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are less likely to drink alcohol than other Australians, those who do are more likely to drink at dangerous levels, have significantly higher drink-driving conviction rates and be over-represented in alcohol-related road crashes.
Research has suggested a range of contributing factors for these higher rates, many of which are grounded in the long history of colonial violence, mistreatment and dispossession of First Nations peoples.
While a passive driver impairment detection system will not directly address such causal factors, these technologies will at least reduce the likelihood of people’s interactions with the criminal justice system and subsequent legal repercussions, which can have lifelong consequences.
A reduced focus on reactive and punitive responses should create more opportunity for attention to social, cultural and health-based interventions. This is particularly relevant when we consider the role of alcohol dependence in drink driving, and the fact many drink drivers face a range of social, economic and health problems, especially repeat offenders.
Technological design innovations have been used successfully to prevent car thefts. So, if the privacy concerns can be addressed and managed, these systems may be a way to curb drink driving at a reduced financial cost to communities, while also minimising the harms caused by our current legal framework.
Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.
New Zealanders are about to enjoy cautiously relaxed COVID restrictions under the country’s COVID-19 Protection Framework, starting from this weekend.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern announced the relaxations today, signalling the end “for now” of vaccine passes, QR codes and vaccine mandates in the education, police and defence sectors from April 4.
Mandates will still apply for health, aged-care, corrections and border control workers, pending more official advice. Settings within the traffic light system have also been revised, but the country remains at the red level and indoor mask use is still required.
New Zealand’s vaccine pass system was designed when we were in the middle of the vaccine rollout, only about one in 400 New Zealanders had had COVID-19, and nobody had even heard of Omicron.
At that time, unvaccinated people had a much higher risk of catching the virus and spreading it to others.
For this reason, vaccine passes were an important part of safely relaxing the Auckland lockdown. They helped us enjoy a summer with very low case numbers and minimal restrictions. Crucially, this meant we avoided the dual Delta-Omicron epidemic that significantly added to the health burden in places such as New South Wales.
The situation we face today is very different. Vaccines remain highly effective at preventing severe illness but aren’t as good at stopping people catching Omicron. And the protection they do provide against infection wanes fairly quickly.
At the same time, increasing numbers of people have some temporary immunity as a result of having had the virus. This means vaccine passes are far less effective as a public health intervention now than they were a few months ago.
But as vaccine passes are phased out, it is important to consider what measures we can use to reduce transmission.
Vaccines still work
Vaccines are still highly effective at preventing severe illness and death from COVID-19. Like New Zealand, Hong Kong is now experiencing a major Omicron wave after initially following an elimination strategy. But in the last two months, Hong Kong has had close to 4,000 deaths per five million people compared to New Zealand’s 130.
But it’s clear vaccines are less effective at preventing infection with Omicron. The UK Health Security Agency estimates the effectiveness of two doses of the Pfizer vaccine against symptomatic COVID-19 drops to just 10% after about 25 weeks following the second dose. This jumps to 65% after a booster but also wanes quite quickly to around 40% 15 weeks later.
The proportion of unvaccinated people testing positive is not that different from fully vaccinated people. So if you go to a cafe, a hairdressers or a bar, whether or not there are unvaccinated people there makes little difference to your risk of catching the virus.
Other risk factors are more important: are people wearing masks, is it crowded, is the venue well ventilated or outdoors, are people staying away if they have symptoms?
We still need public health measures to mitigate COVID
The limitations the vaccine pass system has placed on people’s freedoms are much harder to justify now. But that doesn’t mean we can end all vaccination requirements or remove all public health measures.
COVID-19 is an airborne disease but a comparison with diseases spread through contaminated water is useful. The spread of cholera from contaminated water is one of the earliest examples of an effective public health response to an infectious disease.
The first response was a “boil water” notice, the equivalent of mask wearing to prevent the spread of infections. Longer-term measures involve systemic changes, such as infrastructure for clean water or, in the case of COVID, infrastructure for clean air through ventilation and filtration.
The time to remove boil-water notices is not when case numbers are peaking, or even when they are back at half of their peak level. It is when there are sufficient systemic changes in place to keep people safe.
Similarly, isolation periods are intended to stop people from infecting others. For Omicron, studies suggest half of all cases were still infectious on day five and the infectious period may be as long as ten days. Given wider availability of rapid antigen tests, we could introduce a test-to-return policy to require a negative test before people leave isolation.
Some vaccine mandates remain
People working in specific high-risk situations, like healthcare and aged residential care, will still be required to be up to date with their vaccinations to protect the vulnerable people they work with.
We are currently in the middle of a major Omicron wave, with hospitalisations and deaths at record levels. At least as many people will get infected on the way down from the peak as on the way up.
And even when this wave subsides, COVID-19 isn’t going to go away. It’s likely we will continue to see daily case numbers in the thousands for some time. Added to other respiratory illnesses like influenza and RSV, this could cause significant strain on healthcare over the winter months.
Altogether, this means we still need a set of sustainable mitigations to reduce transmission and the health impacts of the virus. This includes strategies to address vaccine inequity and increase booster uptake, mask use when cases are high, better ventilation and adequate financial support for people to take time off work when they are sick.
COVID vaccine passes have outlived their usefulness at least for now. But COVID-19 is going to be with us for the forseeable future.
Michael Plank is affiliated with the University of Canterbury and is funded by the New Zealand Government for mathematical modelling of Covid-19.
Dion O’Neale receives funding from the NZ Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet for providing modelling and analysis related to COVID-19 and from the NZ Health Research Council for research on modeling and equity impacts of COVID-19 in Aotearoa. He is affiliated with COVID Modelling Aotearoa, The University of Auckland, and Te Pūnaha Matatini.
Emily Harvey receives funding from the NZ Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet for providing modelling and analysis related to COVID-19 and from the NZ Health Research Council for research on modeling and equity impacts of COVID-19 in Aotearoa. She is affiliated with COVID-19 Modelling Aotearoa, ME Research, Te Pūnaha Matatini, and the University of Auckland.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is Dr Bryce Edwards’ New Zealand Political Roundup – which analyses one prominent topic being debated in New Zealand and links to media coverage. You can sign up to NZ Political Roundup for free here.
Political Roundup: Bouquets and brickbats for the Government’s move against corruption
The Government has announced that it will legislate to force greater transparency around the ownership and control of private companies in New Zealand. This is a positive move that will help the fight against domestic corruption, money laundering, tax evasion, and the general use of New Zealand as a haven to hide the money of foreign oligarchs.
Commerce Minister David Clark announced yesterday that Cabinet has agreed to introduce legislation to establish a public register of the “beneficial ownership of companies”. This will require the accurate listing of who really owns and controls businesses here. And it will involve some strong compliance measures.
This is a real blow to wealthy vested interests attempting to keep any riches and ill-gotten gains secret from the public. Corporate New Zealand is being made to tidy up its act.
The fact that the current system has existed for so long should be a huge concern for those New Zealanders wanting to create a fairer society that is less influenced by the pernicious impact of oligarchs and the corrupt. For although New Zealand is often seen as the least corrupt and most transparent country in the world – and we regularly top the annual Transparency International Corruption Perception Index to reinforce this – current laws make it very easy for wealth and its owners to hide here.
The existing companies register simply isn’t much use, something the recent passage of the Russia Sanctions Act 2022 exposed to public view. In reality neither the government nor the public can easily locate the companies in which the oligarchs hide their riches here.
Some call this “legitimised secrecy”. According to the NGO Tax Justice Aotearoa, a “convoluted structure of companies and trusts” are established “so that minimal tax is paid and no-one knows who owns what or where.” Corruption and money laundering are naturally allowed to flourish in such secrecy.
Those against greater transparency cite the need for New Zealand to retain its world-leading “ease of doing business” here. They say compliance costs will also be too great on the corporates. The Government says it has come up with a scheme that balances the privacy and costs of business versus the right of the public to know and be protected from corruption. The complaints of vested business interests about this new law should give some certainty to the public that the right thing is being done. NZ Venture Capital Association protesting the new law is probably something the Labour Government will celebrate.
Reform has been a long time coming
The Government will introduce legislation later this year, but it’s already been a very long time coming. New Zealand has been signed up to the inter-governmental global money laundering alliance, the Financial Action Task Force, for decades, and increasing pressure has been applied on this country by that body for nearly a decade. Judith Collins first made some noises about implementing such a law in 2016 when she was Minister of Commerce. Then, with the change of government, Kris Faafoi got the ball rolling, but it seemed to get lost in consultation for years.
This week the Financial Action Task Force put public pressure back on countries like New Zealand, which may have led to the announcement yesterday. Oddly, David Clark says that Cabinet actually made the decision back in December but has kept it secret until now.
Loopholes in the new rules
Along with a bouquet, the Labour Government also needs to take a brickbat for giving an exemption to trusts. Although this long-contentious sector was recommended to be included, the Government suggests it would be too much hard work to extend the rules to trusts.
The International Financial Action Task Force will be disappointed, as they strongly advocated for trusts to be included. Similarly, Tax Justice Aotearoa (TJA) and Transparency International will have their excitement about the new initiative heavily tempered. One TJA spokesperson, Louise Delaney, commented that “trusts are cleverer than companies at hiding assets.”
Today’s editorial in Stuff newspapers also condemns this omission, pointing out that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment “didn’t recommend that move, acknowledging that privacy and confidentiality have historically been recognised as an essential virtue of trusts. Many a rogue would concur.”
So why were trusts left out of the new legislation? Obviously, law firms have lobbied hard for the exemption. The compliance costs for them would be considerable, concerns about privacy for trust owners have been highlighted, and threats of lengthy legal challenges would have made the Government think twice about venturing into a fight with the legal firms.
However, there is some impact on trusts. David Clark has explained that the proposed changes would still capture cases where shares in companies are owned by trusts.
There is good cause to be sceptical about how much change this really represents, given the track record of previous efforts. The Herald’s Matt Nippert – a long-time investigator into this area – says: “Herald reporting last October on the Pandora Papers showed, despite past reforms, New Zealand trust and company structures were still being misused by wildly controversial figures – including Russian billionaires convicted of fraud, and a Moldovan oligarch facing sanctions in the United States.”
The public will soon get a chance to have its say on the proposed legislation. As often with such complex legislation there might well be fishhooks and unintended consequences from this type of regulation.
The consultation period will be a time for those interested in tax fairness, corruption, and transparency to support the reforms, but also to push the Government to strengthen them. Hopefully, there will be a particularly strong focus on the elephant in the room – the exemption being given to the hundreds of thousands of trusts. If such secretive vehicles are allowed to continue to be shielded from the sunlight of public inquiry, then confidence in the new system will be more than just a little dented.
Victor Billot (Newsroom): Protest, 2022: a great variety of morbid symptoms
As the fallout from the Parliamentary Grounds protest rolls on, a “lifelong socialist” recounts his years of robust protest involvement, and gives a very thoughtful discussion on how we have ended up in such a politically unhealthy environment. He comments: “The self-defined left have dissolved into competing tribes of lunatics shouting at each other on Twitter, irrelevant to the majority.”
Matthew Hooton (Patreon): Thought experiment on how not to be a d*ck at 11am (paywalled)
The Prime Minister’s “Beyond Omicron” speech is this morning, and Matthew Hooton ponders what the reaction to today’s Covid announcements would be if Christopher Luxon was revealing identical decisions. He suggests that partisan tribalists would be wise to think about how they would react if National was implementing the exact same liberalisation of Covid rules that Ardern is going to do.
Peter Dunne: $1.9 billion spend on mental health produces no results
Former Minister responsible for mental health Peter Dunne argues that for better “care in the community” delivery, the Government needs to move away from using “centralised agency like the Ministry of Health, or even district health boards”.
Jenée Tibshraeny (Interest): Treasury puts $5 billion price tag on Reserve Bank’s QE programme
When the Reserve Bank first started printing more money during the Covid crisis, it Treasury expected it to be cost-neutral. Now they say it “estimates the net direct fiscal cost will come in at $5.1 billion.”
Ian Llewellyn (BusinessDesk): Councillors’ conflicts face sunlight soon (paywalled)
A select committee has reported back on a proposed law bringing in a pecuniary interests register for local government politicians, and so it now looks like it will be brought into law next year, and will apply to those elected at the upcoming elections.
In the past few years, Australia has formed its own space agency and launched a defence “space command”. Billions of dollars for defence, and hundreds of millions for civilian space, have been allocated from the public purse to develop capability in this growing sector.
This level of investment is unquestionably a good thing. But the great majority of it supports applied research and engineering, and commercialisation of outcomes. None of the new funding goes to basic research.
In the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, India, South Korea, China, Russia, and United Arab Emirates – to name a few – basic research in space and planetary science, and science missions, are key elements in strategies to grow their sectors. In Australia, this kind of fundamental work only gets around A$2 million a year. It hasn’t budged in a decade.
Why basic research is important
Applied research and engineering aims to provide practical solutions to well-defined problems by applying existing knowledge.
Basic research aims to expand knowledge. It’s the most successful mechanism humans have ever invented for generating new knowledge.
Every other major spacefaring nation funds basic research in space and planetary science from the public purse. They do it for a good reason, and it’s not to make planetary scientists like me happy.
It’s because in space science, an unusually short thread connects basic research, applied research and engineering, commercial outcomes, and a trained workforce.
Basic research isn’t an optional extra: it’s a crucial catalyst for everything else.
How it works
In other nations, scientists like me come up with an idea or hypothesis. Something big and exciting about how we think our Solar System works.
To test that hypothesis, we develop a space mission with engineers from both industry and academia. Because the universe defines the problem, not a human, that team is continually presented with unique challenges, requiring completely new technical solutions.
As a happy byproduct, this process creates an environment that is almost perfectly optimised for technology breakthroughs. I learned this lesson on the very first mission I was on: the UK’s Beagle 2 Mars lander.
The mission didn’t succeed. We didn’t get to sniff for trace methane on Mars. But the technology turned out to be a great way to detect early-onset tuberculosis.
Exploring the solar system is the kind of inspiring project that draws people to space science. NASA
And exploring the Solar System to make fundamental new discoveries is a great way to inspire young engineers and scientists. So you inspire your public, you get students interested in STEM careers, and in the long term you get your highly trained workforce of the future.
I see this all the time. It’s one of the joys of my job.
Our space program at Curtin University is called Binar, from the Nyungar word for “fireball”.
At any one time, around 60 undergraduate engineers are involved in Binar. Last week, dozens of high school students visited us. WA government is supporting a program that will see them flying experiments on Binar spacecraft from next year. That’s what inspiration looks like.
And yes, a collateral benefit is that you make planetary scientists happy. But their discoveries win you credibility and visibility on the world stage, so that’s not a bad thing either.
In Australia, basic research is formally excluded from the new funding schemes (for example, the Moon-to-Mars Demonstrator Mission scheme states “STEM, scientific or research projects without a clear commercialisation pathway” are ineligible activities). So no science missions.
That exclusion, and the lack of funding, means that planetary science is no longer seen as a strategic area by universities. As a result it has been one of the first areas to be cut as belts have been tightened because of COVID.
Colleagues at the Australian National University and Macquarie University have lost their jobs. In fact, our team at Curtin University is the only substantial group left in Australia.
Not a zero-sum game
The Australian model is consistent with a belief that each dollar you spend on science is a dollar less for industry. Is this the case?
NASA doesn’t think so. Its model is built around basic research and science missions.
A recent NASA-commissioned study found this model was extremely successful at generating benefits for the wider economy. Over a single year, every dollar spent on the agency generated around US$3 in total US economic output. Over longer timescales the return is even higher.
Other agencies, large and small, can demonstrate a similar return on investment with science-based models. Each ₤1 the UK Space Agency invests in space science and innovation yields ₤3-4 in direct value to the space industry and additional spillover impacts of ₤6-12.
No other major spacefaring nation has implemented a strategy that formally excludes basic research. It follows that Australia is engaged in a unique experiment to see whether growth of our space sector is optimised by minimising our ability to generate new knowledge.
With hundreds of millions in new funding for civilian space, and billions for defence, our space sector can’t help but grow. The question is whether that investment is efficiently generating growth. Will our taxpayers see the same return on their investment as taxpayers in those other nations if we delete science?
Overseas space agencies can point to an economic return of three to 12 times the original investment. Can our space agency do better with a model that formally excludes basic research and science missions?
I don’t know the answer. Unfortunately, no one does, because there are no examples or studies to draw on.
My hunch is that this novel strategy is not optimal. Hedging our bets – learning from the strategies of other nations – wouldn’t cost much.
It would mean looking again at that A$2 million of annual funding for basic research. Engaging scientists in how research programs are defined. Possibly even the odd science mission. Doesn’t seem like a lot if it buys you peace of mind.
Phil Bland receives funding from the Australian Research Council, and the Australian Space Agency under its Demonstrator Mission Feasibility scheme.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter J. Dean, Chair of Defence Studies and Director, UWA Defence and Security Institute, The University of Western Australia
Unless you have been under a political rock for the past few weeks, you could not have missed the emergence of a “khaki election”.
Obviously thinking it is a vote-winner and a Coalition strength, the Morrison government is hell-bent on putting national security and defence front and centre in the lead-up to the May election.
It becomes glaringly obvious if you look at Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s schedule in March. From a major foreign policy speech to the Lowy Institute on March 7 through to his visit to Perth on March 16-17, Morrison has announced seven major initiatives on national security and defence in a ten-day period. In this time, he took every opportunity to talk about his credentials on defence and attack the opposition’s record on defence spending.
This is occurring with the government well behind in the polls and the PM struggling with his popularity. But the Coalition clearly sees national security as safe political ground and a weak spot for Labor. As journalist Philip Coorey noted:
As the election nears, the Coalition is tidying up its pitch, tying together economics and national security, to a population ready to point the finger over the massive east coast floods and cost of living.
Is the electorate buying?
The early signs for the government’s strategy are not promising. National security does not seem to have the same cut through that it has had in previous elections. Polling suggests voters trust Labor more than the Coalition to manage the relationship with China, while they are neck and neck as the preferred political party to handle the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The prime minister’s attack on Labor also risks collateral damage by dividing the community and some voters (especially those of Chinese heritage), while laying open the government’s patchy record on defence issues to scrutiny.
Over the past nine years of government, the Coalition has thrown record spending at defence. But this spending has not necessarily translated into actual capability for the ADF. This is especially important as the government ended, in 2020, defence’s long-standing ten-year warning time for major conflict in our region.
But the PM is known for taking political risks. He seems to be banking on a national security election strategy on the basis that while it will not necessarily help Labor to win the election, it may well cost them enough votes to lose one.
Both major parties make missteps
Morrison’s first major tactical approach was to accelerate attacks on the Labor opposition over China. In the last sitting week of parliament, Morrison accused Deputy Labor Leader Richard Marles of being a “Manchurian candidate” for the Chinese Communist Party.
It was a week of relentless attacks, but Labor easily batted these away, using support from former ASIO head Dennis Richardson and current ASIO head Mike Burgess, who warned such divisions could undermine national unity and security.
Labor then weakened its position somewhat when Anthony Albanese also used parliament to accuse the prime minister of being the real “Manchurian candidate”. It was an unedifying week in national politics from the Government – but, most significantly, it did not seem to move the opinion polls at all.
In the second week of March, both leaders made their way to the Lowy Institute for major foreign policy speeches. Here we were able to assess the different world views and different policy approaches to national security of both sides.
So, how do they compare on national security?
While many of the themes and pledges were similar, especially on defence spending and China, the focus of the two leaders diverged on key issues. While Morrison focused on an “arc of autocracy” – drawing immediate comparisons to George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” – and a commitment to a new submarine base for the east coast, the Labor leader emphasised climate change, sovereign supply chains, national resilience and unity, as well as the need to accelerate the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF) strike capabilities.
Albanese knows national security is not perceived as safe political ground for Labor, so his main strategy is to try to neutralise Morrison’s lines of attack. Tactically, the opposition has dealt with this through bipartisanship, effectively drawing closer to the government in key areas.
Bipartisanship has become the byword on national security for Labor in opposition since the last election. However, it can be a doubled-edge sword. Too much of it and Labor looks, as Paul Kelly has argued, like a cardboard cut-out of the government. It also narrows Labor’s room to attack the Coalition’s vulnerabilities.
An image from the week spoke volumes: While the government was under fire for being too slow in deploying the military to support flood victims Morrison and Defence Minister Peter Dutton announced the biggest expansion of the ADF since the Vietnam War in Brisbane, while half the city was underwater.
Labor has no such qualms on climate. This issue has also allowed Labor to reposition itself in contrast to the government on the ANZUS Alliance, because US President Joe Biden has directly linked climate and security, and made it a policy priority.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese has had no problems tying together national security and climate change. Jason O’Brien/AAP
Labor’s counter-attack is built around the government’s poor performance on defence spending. This includes problems with major projects such as helicopters and new frigates for the navy. But the biggest hole that currently exists is in submarine capability.
We can expect Labor to be relentless on this issue. But submarines are the “third rail” of Australian defence policy – for both sides of politics. Generally, when you touch it, you get burned, badly.
Since 2013, the Coalition has overseen what is the biggest procurement disaster in defence history – and we currently have no submarine contract. However, Labor, as former Secretary of Defence Dennis Richardson noted this week, has its own history with submarine capability.
Meanwhile, the Coalition is keen to focus on money and leadership. Morrison and Dutton have been relentless in attacking Labor’s past performance on defence spending. They have revived, ad nauseam, Tony Abbott’s line from 2013 that Labor in government had driven defence spending down to its lowest level since 1938. Labor has attempted to counter this by committing to reaching the mythical 2% GDP on defence spending, or above.
In fact, using the percentage of GDP to measure defence spending is a poor practical measurement. But it has become the main political measure that counts on defence funding, and there seems little chance of that changing.
Focusing on funding is not the certain the win the government thinks it is. A quick look at other measures of defence spending shows the Morrison government does not compare so well. As a percentage of actual government outlays in the budget, Labor spent 6.65% and 6.52% in its last two years in office. The Morrison government spent 5.1% and 5.8% in 2021 and 2022.
No matter what measures are used, expect defence spending to be shouted at voters until election day.
On to election day
The budget later this month will be a key marker post, and I suspect it will have a heavy national security and defence focus. It seems the government has set the political playing field by using announcements of big-ticket items far off into the budget forward estimates (such as nuclear-powered submarines, submarines bases, increases to the size of the ADF) to lay the groundwork.
The Coalition’s next tactic is to pour on the announcements that will have a more immediate impact on jobs and security. Examples include the WA dry dock and the army’s LAND 400 infantry fighting vehicle project.
Labor will attack the Coalition over its record in office, and will link defence spending to the government’s (mis)handling of the pandemic and the rising cost of living. Morrison will use the benefits of incumbency to relentlessly attack Albanese and his lack of experience in national society portfolios.
But the overarching question is: does this matter to the electorate and will it change votes?
Long-term polling on this issue shows the ADF is one of the most trusted institutions in Australia. But, as Danielle Chubb and Ian McAllister have shown, being supportive of the defence force does not translate into supporting greater funding for defence.
Irrespective of this evidence, the international security landscape in the Indo-Pacific has shifted radically in recent years. We are in uncharted geo-strategic waters, and with a problematic domestic political record the government thinks national security is a vote winner.
Peter J. Dean receives funding from The Australian Research Council, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, The Department of Defence and the US State Department.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Hellewell, Research Fellow, Faculty of Health Sciences, Curtin University, and The Perron Institute for Neurological and Translational Science, Curtin University
Far from the respiratory disease it seemed at first, COVID can impact almost all parts of the body, including the brain. For a small number of people, COVID infection may be accompanied by an episode of post-COVID psychosis, a break from reality which can be frightening for the patient and their loved ones.
Psychosis is a condition characterised by confused thoughts, delusions and hallucinations. People with psychosis can struggle to tell what’s real from what isn’t. Psychosis occurs in “episodes” which may last for days or weeks. Since the start of the COVID pandemic, reports of post-COVID psychosis have come from all over the world.
Post-COVID psychosis is different to psychosis seen in other brain illnesses and diseases. So-called “first episode psychosis” is usually seen in teens or young adults in the development of schizophrenia, or alongside dementia in elderly people.
But people experiencing post-COVID psychosis are typically in their 30s, 40s and 50s, and are experiencing psychosis for the first time. They usually do not have any family history of psychosis. People with post-COVID psychosis also frequently have insight into the way they are feeling. They can recognise this is not normal for them, and something has changed in the way they are thinking.
Based on the small number of reports so far, the start of psychosis has been days, weeks or even months after COVID diagnosis. While the symptoms of post-COVID psychosis can be varied, there are some commonalities: people usually have problems sleeping, followed by paranoid delusions and hallucinations. Some people feel compelled to hurt themselves or others.
The scientific evidence of post-COVID psychosis comes mostly from “case reports”, which are research papers describing symptoms and recovery of individual patients.
In the first and most widely reported case, a 36-year-old American woman developed psychosis approximately four days after she started having mild COVID symptoms. She became delusional, thinking that her partner was trying to kidnap her children. She was convinced she was being tracked through her mobile phone.
After trying to pass her children through a fast-food restaurant drive-through serving counter to protect them, she was taken to hospital for care. After one week of in-patient care to treat her psychosis, she was discharged. Her delusions did not return.
In another case, a 43-year-old Bulgarian man
began experiencing psychois two days after he was discharged from hospital for severe COVID.
He believed the doctors had faked the results saying his COVID illness had resolved. He also had delusions that he had already died and his organs were rotten. He became a danger to his family, believing he should kill them to “spare them the same slow suffering”. After two weeks of treatment in hospital, his psychotic symptoms resolved and did not return.
There is new evidence that brain areas undergoing change in mild COVID infection may also be areas that change in people who are at risk of, or who are experiencing, first-episode psychosis (that is, not after COVID infection). These areas are the orbitofrontal cortex
at the front of the brain, and the parahippocampal gyrus – a key memory region deep in the brain. These regions may shrink in both mild COVID and psychosis.
However, more research is needed to understand this link.
COVID is not the first virus to be linked to psychosis. During the “Spanish flu” influenza pandemic of 1918 there were reports of post-viral psychosis.
Psychosis has been reported after infections with the other human coronaviruses, like those that cause Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). Links between coronaviruses, immune system activation and psychosis have also been found, suggesting COVID may not be the only coronavirus capable of causing psychosis.
Just how common is post-COVID psychosis? The evidence to date suggests it is rare, occurring in about 0.25% of COVID cases who are not hospitalised (and likely have a mild infection), and 0.89% of people who are hospitalised for COVID.
Because there have been so many cases of COVID worldwide, isolated reports of post-COVID psychosis may stand out more. The frightening nature of what people might experience means we might hear more and more about them on social media and in the news.
Although the risk of post-COVID psychosis is low, people who have had COVID and their families should look out for any sudden changes in personality, paranoia or delusions in the days, weeks and months following infection.
If these signs are noticed, seeking medical help is vital. Most cases of post-COVID psychosis resolve quickly with proper psychiatric care and treatment with medication.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Sarah Hellewell 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.
A photo of Lake Pedder before it floodedStefan Karpiniec/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA
Fifty years ago this week, the world’s first “green” political party was born in Tasmania after the state government purposefully flooded the magnificent Lake Pedder.
The flooding made way for a hydro-electricity scheme, transforming the nearly 10-square-kilometre lake into a reservoir spanning almost 250 square kilometres today. This damaged the surrounding wilderness – now recognised as part of Tasmania’s World Heritage Area – and greatly tarnished its natural beauty.
The controversial move sparked nationwide outcry. In an effort to save the lake, the United Tasmania Group was formed on March 23, 1972 by fielding candidates in the state election that year. The party was the forerunner to the Australian Greens and saw other green-oriented political parties soon follow worldwide, including New Zealand’s Values Party and Switzerland’s Popular Movement for the Environment.
Now, half a century later, environmentalists are upping their campaign to restore the lake to its former glory. It symbolises the broader contest between unsustainable industrialisation and a greener economy that addresses challenges such as climate change.
The combination of Lake Gordon and Lake Pedder is the largest water storage in Australia. Shutterstock
The lake was once beautiful
Before 1972, Pedder was a remnant glacial lake flanked by a spectacular, pink-quartzite beach and mossy rivulets.
Nestled amid a primeval mountain range 300 metres above sea level, the alpine lake had geomorphological significance as it was formed in the outwash of a glacier an estimated 1 million years ago, when ice sheets covered much of the planet.
And it was spectacularly wild. Prior to the flooding, Lake Pedder was difficult to access, known best to serious bushwalkers and tourists chartering light aircraft. These tourists and hikers brought the lake’s beauty and geological significance to a broader public when threats of flooding began to materialise.
The flooding saw heavy ecological losses. The massive hydropower dam drowned about 250 square kilometres of surrounding wilderness. This included a mosaic of diverse ecosystems including wetlands, temperate rainforest and buttongrass moorlands, along with several rare plant species.
The Lake Pedder galaxias (Galaxias pedderensis), a fish once endemic to the lake, is now considered extinct in its natural habitat after 350,000 trout, a predator, were put in.
Four other species of invertebrate fauna, also endemic to the original Lake Pedder, have disappeared or dramatically declined due to the altered habitat.
An aerial view of Lake Pedder, nestled in primeval Tasmanian mountains. Elspeth Vaughan, Author provided
The birth of Green politics
The loss of Pedder helped trigger the formation of the United Tasmania Group (UTG), which is generally credited as the world’s first political party with a foundation in environmental values.
While the UTG didn’t win seats in that or subsequent elections it contested during the 1970s, it was the forerunner to the Tasmanian Greens and, nationally, the Australian Greens.
But the UTG didn’t spring purely from the Lake Pedder controversy. As historian and journalist Paddy Manning identifies in his book on the history of the Greens, the UTG was part of broader global shift to greater environmental awareness in the 1970s. For example, the first Earth Day was held in 1970, and saw 20 million people in the United States demonstrate against the impacts of industrial development.
The name “Green” for environmentally minded political parties, however, came later. Indeed, it was derived from another Australian-first: the “Green Ban” movement in Sydney in the 1970s that united building workers and community groups to save cultural and natural heritage from destruction.
Footage in 2020 confirming Lake Pedder’s iconic pink quartzite beach remains intact.
Restoring the lake today
The former Australian Greens leader Christine Milne is presently leading the campaign to restore Lake Pedder. This campaign actually began in the immediate aftermath of the damming for the hydropower scheme, when the Whitlam government appointed an inquiry in 1973 to advise on the area’s future, including possible restoration.
In 1994, the Pedder 2000 initiative was launched, which sought federal assistance to reinstate the lake by the start of the new century. A year later, a federal parliamentary inquiry confirmed the scientific feasibility of restoring the lake.
However, the inquiry concluded that the most compelling reasons to restore the lake were aesthetic rather than for nature conservation. It said the economic costs and opposition by Tasmania’s major political parties meant restoration had “no real prospect of proceeding in the foreseeable future”.
Now, over two decades later, the campaign is once again gaining traction. The United Nations declared 2021-2030 the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, calling for projects to replant forests, remove dams, rehabilitate wetlands and more. The 2021 Glasgow Climate Conference reinforced this message by affirming the importance of ecological restoration in mitigating and adapting to climate change.
Restoring Lake Pedder would entail more than pulling the plug on the dams, and it would likely take several decades for the original ecosystems to flourish again. Yet, the major geomorphological features such as the lake’s iconic beach would quickly return as the waters retreated.
The fight to restore the once-beautiful lake has recently begun to gain momentum. Rob Blakers, Author provided
The arguments against Pedder’s restoration today primarily rest on its contribution to Tasmania’s electricity generation and its desire to be Australia’s “battery of the nation”.
But the economic advantages from Lake Pedder’s restoration may outweigh its value for electricity production, as new renewable energy projects step in to meet demand, coupled with the benefit of foregoing the growing cost of maintaining the ageing dams.
What’s more, once it is restored, the lake could become a major international tourist attraction. It truly was a scenic wonder on par with Uluru and the Great Barrier Reef, one we should fight to bring back.
Benjamin J. Richardson is affiliated with the Restore Lake Pedder campaign and a member of the Tasmanian Greens
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Zylstra, Adjunct Associate Professor at Curtin University, Research Associate at University of New South Wales, Curtin University
WA Department of Fire and Emergency Services
As coal-fired climate change makes bushfires in Australia worse, governments are ramping up hazard-reduction burning. But our new research shows the practice can actually make forests more flammable.
We found over time, some forests “thin” themselves and become less likely to burn – and hazard-reduction burning disrupts this process.
What does that mean as Australians face a more fiery future? Is there a smarter and more sensitive way to manage the bushfire risk?
To find out, we looked at the forests of south-western Australia, where hazard-reduction burns are very frequent.
A jarrah forest in Western Australia after a prescribed burn. Another prescribed burn nine years earlier had triggered dense understory growth, making the next burn very intense. Roger D’Souza
Lessons from Black Summer
Hazard reduction burning, also known as prescribed or controlled burning, is the practice of deliberately burning off flammable material in a forest, such as leaf litter, grasses and shrubs. It aims to slow the spread of any subsequent bushfires by reducing the amount of fuel available.
In the summer of 2019-20, the Black Summer bushfires ravaged Australia’s south-east. In the decade before the fires, the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service doubled the area of prescribed burns compared to the previous decade.
In fact, the area of national park burned that decade was the largest in the state’s history. But as we now know, it had little effect.
Where prescribed burns had very recently been carried out, the bushfires were marginally less severe, about half of the time. But the bushfires ultimately burned ten times more forest than any other Australian forest fires on record.
The Black Summer bushfires ravaged Australia’s south-east. Sean Davey/AAP
Forests control their own flammability
We wanted to measure how past fires – planned and unplanned – affected the bushfire risk in the forests of Australia’s south-west.
This 530,000 hectares of forest spans the dry jarrah and tuart near Perth, down to Margaret River and east, through tall wet karri and tingle forest, to Denmark and Albany.
We examined official records showing where fires had burned over 65 years in national parks. The results were stark.
Forests were unlikely to burn for five to seven years after a prescribed burn. This finding supported earlier work in the same region.
But there’s more to the story.
Other studies have shown fires cause a massive flush of understorey growth in WA’s karri and jarrah forests.
During bushfires, the understorey is the main driver of large flames which cause destructive crown fires.
Left: a section of burnt jarrah forest, with dense understorey growth. Right: adjacent old growth jarrah with much less understorey brush. Author provided
Our research corroborated these earlier findings. We found as the understorey grew back, becoming taller and denser, fire risk greatly increased for the next 37 to 49 years.
The trend did not change as the climate warmed from the 1980s onward, although the burned area grew larger.
What about older forests?
Ecologists have long known shrub layers often “self-thin” as a forest grows.
Past studies in WA have shown 25 years after fire, there were 13 times fewer shrub stems in karri forests. In jarrah forests, only a quarter of the previous understorey fuel remained 50 years after fire.
Since the 1800s in Australia, there have been concerns that fire, including prescribed burning, converts self-thinned understoreys into dense thickets.
But we didn’t know how self-thinning affected the flammability of older forests in Australia’s southwest. Our research set out to find the answer.
As the below graph shows, 43 to 56 years after a fire, the forests had thinned their shrub layers. We found this meant they were, on average, seven times less likely to carry a bushfire than forests burned more recently.
In other words, burning made forests on average seven times more flammable for 43 to 56 years.
Graph showing the mass of fine shrubs in a forest in the years following fire, taken from figure 5-7 at https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/10037. Philip Zylstra
In the hottest and driest climate conditions, old, self-thinned forests even out-competed recent prescribed burns – those up to seven years old. Bushfires were three times less likely in old forests than they were in recent prescribed burns.
Our previous work in the Australian Alps found similar trends; mature forests there are dramatically less likely to burn.
Cooperating with country
Early Australian colonists recorded many Australian forests as park-like with open understoreys.
This reflected First Nations’ care for country. In southwest Australia, as in many parts of the continent, Indigenous fire use was precise and focused. Unlike prescribed burns, Indigenous practitioners did not attempt to burn vast areas at once.
Grant Stewart, a ranger from Kanyirninpa Jukurrpa. Unlike prescribed burns, Indigenous fire management does not burn vast areas. Louie Davis
Instead, they cooperated with natural processes such as self-thinning, so country was allowed to age.
Australia’s forests have controlled their own fire risk since they were part of the Gondwana super-continent. We should respect, rather than disrupt, these ancient natural processes.
Cooperating with country today means moving away from prescribed burning across large areas. Frequent burns may be useful only close to homes, or in other locations where we know with confidence they can achieve an ecological goal or help firefighters stop a burning edge.
Elsewhere, we should work with forest landscapes and allow them to become open again. We can support this process by refocusing fire management to quickly suppress fire when it does break out.
Philip Zylstra received funding for this study from the San Diego Zoo and Botanical Garden via the Australian Network for Plant Conservation.
David Lindenmayer receives funding from The Australian Government, the Victorian Government and the Australian Research Council
Don Bradshaw 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 short-video platform is again behind the creation of a hit song. TikTok is changing the music industry, how hits are made and how the platform opens a new way to discover new artists and new music.
At the heart of the phenomenon are viral challenges or trends, in which creators use short clips from a song that are re-used by thousands or millions of other users in their videos.
But how do trends, challenges, and memes make hits? The answer lies in how music has become creative material for social storytelling on TikTok, and how storytelling works when videos are only a few seconds short.
Social storytelling with music
Tom van Laer, associate professor of narratology at The University of Sydney Business School, explains what makes for good storytelling:
For a good story, you need three things. A story has a plot and a character… That’s the minimum for a story. For a good story you need a third thing, which is a dramatic curve.
And this is where the music comes into play. When a challenge or trend emerges on TikTok, it always features the same clip from a particular song, which serves as a common story element across all those videos. As van Laer explains:
What you then get is a certain cultural capital or cultural knowledge that is already there. So then every new iteration is just added to that. And if you’re on the inside, if you in the know, then that is still something you could easily follow because you see the one video of 15 seconds only as another event in the bigger story.
Because the clip is instantly recognisable by the audience it ties together all the videos that make up a TikTok challenge or trend. It acts as the meta-narrative that allows each creator to contribute their own interpretation of the story.
This can take the form of imitations, such as in the “Jamie Big” trend, based on a original video that has been viewed more than 200 million times. It shows a man dancing to Nelly Furtado’s Say It Right in front of his bathroom mirror.
Thousands of videos have since imitated the original, whereby a creator always films themselves in front of their bathroom mirror, switching to the original video on the beat change of the song.
Other trends work by offering different interpretations of the same story line. A good example is the “Things that just make sense…” trend, set to Che la luna, a version of a classic Sicilian folk song. In this video contributors film themselves showcasing the features of a particular location, each doing the same characteristic hand gestures.
An example is Australian Olympian Scott James filming his room at the Olympic village in Beijing.
Because the audience always recognises the characteristic song, they are instantly familiar with the story’s plot; they know what to expect and can thus simply enjoy each interpretation of the theme. The music provides the glue that holds together a social story, collectively told across many videos.
A challenge or trend is thus a form of social storytelling, with the music acting like shorthand to provide the context for all the videos.
We Don’t Talk About Bruno has provided material for a number of different trends, each driving its popularity. And besides the many Encanto fan edits featuring parts of the song, there is a particular clip with a catchy hook that underpins a story-line in which creators try to do a task in the first take of the video and after the beat change reveal why the task is so difficult. This features dance moves from the Encanto movie.
Music as creative material
To understand what makes TikTok such a powerful platform for the music industry, we must “unlearn” music as something we just listen to. On digital platforms like TikTok music is rapidly becoming a material for creating, for self-expression, for storytelling.
Virality is then a by-product of the use of music as creative material for collective storytelling – one that provides the canvas, or meta-narrative, for each creator’s interpretation of the emerging story-line.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New Zealand is no stranger to protest, or protest violence. But what happened in the grounds of parliament over 23 days in February and March was unique – and, in the end, extreme.
A country that grinds its teeth at unruly freedom camping by tourists ended up with an unapproved campsite in one of the least appropriate places imaginable. And it ended violently.
How the government and parliament responds to what happened is important for both the future of legitimate protests and for the security of parliament itself.
A review of security arrangements for parliament has already been signalled, but the nature and funding of the protest itself also demands scrutiny. Overall, it may be that a law change, specific to the parliamentary precinct, is needed.
Keeping the grounds open
There is no specific legal right to protest. Rather, it is a manifestation of the wider rights to freedom of movement, association and peaceful assembly. Internationally, these are protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its related framework of human rights treaties, and domestically by the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.
In practice, the right to protest is evident in the country’s history. Events that shaped generations and made New Zealand one of the freest and most liberal democracies occurred outside on the parliamentary grounds as much as within the legislative chamber.
From women’s rights and redress for injustices done to Māori, to workers’ rights and foreign policy reform, parliament grounds have been a forum for dissent. Indeed, if there was room for another sculpture in the grounds, it should be of ordinary people delivering a petition to lawmakers.
Keeping the grounds as open and unfenced as possible is therefore critical. A new, bespoke law for the parliamentary precinct – including clear pathways for lawful and orderly protest – should be created.
Parliament grounds are undergoing repairs after damage caused during the 23-day occupation by anti-government protesters. GettyImages
Rules with consequences
It’s important to remember that the right to protest is not absolute. There is no right to violent or unlawful protest. But while existing laws for prosecuting lawbreakers are adequate, there are clear gaps.
Firstly, New Zealand has more laws about respecting the flag than about protecting the epicentre of its democracy. Even at a symbolic level, this needs to change.
A starting point would be to place parliament alongside Te Pitowhenua, the Waitangi Treaty Grounds, as a national historic landmark. Citizens should be encouraged to look at the capital of the nation’s political and legal history with the same respect.
Currently, parliament grounds are vested in the Queen under the effective control of the Speaker of the House, whose job it is to allow and moderate protests. The rules prohibit a variety of actions, including:
damaging lawns and flower beds
interfering with traffic flows and driving onto the grounds
mounting the main steps of parliament or interfering with the use of parliament buildings
excessive amplified sound and erecting structures such as tents
general breaches of the peace and protests lasting more than eight hours or into the night.
To enforce the rules, the speaker can issue a notice under the Trespass Act. But the ineffectual nature of these powers was laid bare during the occupation, with protesters largely indifferent to the weak penalties.
Any new law specific to the parliamentary precinct should uphold the existing right and ability to lawfully and peacefully protest, but increase the penalties for non-compliance.
Riot police move in to end the occupation of parliament’s grounds and surrounding streets. GettyImages
Funding and foreign interference
Beyond the behaviour of protesters, their ideological origins and funding need to be better understood. Similar “anti-mandate” protests elsewhere are suspected of having received foreign funding. Did this happen in New Zealand?
It’s an important and difficult question. The flow of charitable support across borders for lawful purposes is a good thing. But charitable or other financial support may not always be benign.
There are already laws to protect New Zealand elections from foreign interference by banning foreign donations to political parties and candidates. That concern needs to extend to foreign interests trying to foster lawless or extremist behaviour within New Zealand protest movements.
None of this is simple. And in the past, New Zealand has sometimes responded to protest or dissent heavy-handedly – for example after the hunger marches in 1932 and the waterfront lockout of 1951.
At other times, wiser counsel prevailed when it came to mending the fabric of society. An example of this was the creation of Independent Police Conduct Authority in the decade after the 1981 Springbok tour protests.
The challenge for lawmakers this time is to reach for deeper solutions t*hat address the importance of protest, but also fix the problem of how poorly the epicentre of our democracy was respected and defended. At the same time, understanding how this protest was different will be important.*
Clamping down on future protests is not the answer. Equally, preventing another episode such as the country has just witnessed is urgent.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
