Fiji’s police chief Sitiveni Qiliho looks to have dug out an old playbook that was used over a couple of years ahead of Voreqe Bainimarama’s 2006 coup.
Qiliho is on a shorter game plan though, he’s got to sow uncertainty and fear in Fiji’s population quickly — before the June general elections.
If he doesn’t, then Bainimarama and his Sancho Panza, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, will lose the elections and the likely winner will be 1987 coup maestro Sitiveni Rabuka.
Today the Fiji Sun came out with this: “Police ready to prevent potential unrest.”
The one-sided slavish account of a ramble by Qiliho carried no details or names of those “elements” or what they might do. Other than to explicitly mention Rabuka.
Undoubtedly 1987 with its two coups — staged by Rabuka — was a disaster, but the unrest and uproar was not all his work. As we know now, Sayed-Khaiyum himself was one of the 1987 “elements”.
Arson investigative skills Qiliho himself had arson investigative skills in another coup or two.
But the Fiji Sun left that out.
“We’ve had past history where some people have utilised elements to create instability,” Qiliho is quoted in the Fiji Sun as actually saying. “Not in particular during election period, but there have been reports with our history from 1987 that people can be utilised for the wrong reasons.”
Qiliho and the intelligence boys are planning countermeasures.
The Fiji Sun today … another beat-up before the June elections. Image: Fiji Sun screenshot APR
“We are awake to that and our intelligence bureau and other stakeholders that we continue to discuss these issues with, we are well awake to that to see that there is no political influence on those types of activities,” he said.
“In terms of the security landscape it’s important for us to provide that security and stability so that elections can run smoothly and keep the criminal landscape stable as well.
“We don’t want to be used as a political football if we don’t provide that secure environment so that is important now.”
Qiliho has a short memory.
‘Dirty politics at its worst’ Ahead of the May 2006 elections, which saw Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase reelected, Bainimarama was one of those “elements” that Qiliho now talks of. Bainimarama referred to “Mr Qarase and his cronies” and said Fijian politics was “dirty politics at its worst…it is cannibalistic.”
Qarase responded that Bainimarama’s “stated intention of involving the military in the national election campaign is a threat to peace and stability, and the conduct of free and fair elections. It goes against the rule of law and good governance.”
It would appear Qiliho – a military officer rather than a constable — is keen on getting 4576 police into the political game. What roll the 10,000 strong Fiji Military Force — the traditional leader of coups – is not spelt out.
In 2006 Bainimarama was explicit about the May elections and said that if the result was not to his liking, then he would act.
Has Qiliho with his piece today stuck his toe into the tub?
As well as her interviews with politicians and experts, Politics with Michelle Grattan now includes “Word from The Hill”, where she discusses the news with members of The Conversation politics team.
In this podcast, Michelle and politics + society editor Amanda Dunn talk about Anthony Albanese’s handling of the bullying allegations mounted by friends of the late senator Kimberly Kitching, Labor’s sweeping victory in the South Australian election, and next week’s budget which will contain measures targeting the cost of living, which is escalating as an election issue.
Michelle Grattan 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.
Windmill Islands, near Casey Research Station, Antarctica Dana M Bergstrom, Author provided
Record-breaking heatwaves hit both Antarctica and the Arctic simultaneously this week, with temperatures reaching 47℃ and 30℃ higher than normal.
Heatwaves are bizarre at any time in Antarctica, but particularly now at the equinox as Antarctica is about to descend into winter darkness. Likewise, up north, the Arctic is just emerging from winter.
Are these two heatwaves linked? We don’t know yet, and it’s most likely a coincidence. But we do know weather systems in Antarctica and the Arctic are connected to regions nearest to them, and these connections sometimes reach all the way to the tropics.
And is climate change the cause? It might be. While it’s too soon to say for sure, we do know climate change is making polar heatwaves more common and severe, and the poles are warming faster than the global average.
So let’s take a closer look at what’s driving the extreme anomalies for each region, and the flow-on effects for polar wildlife like penguins and polar bears.
At this time of year, Adélie penguin chicks leave the nest to go hunting at sea on their own. Shutterstock
What happened in Antarctica?
Antarctica’s heatwave was driven by a slow, intense high pressure system located southeast of Australia, which carried vast amounts of warm air and moisture deep into Antarctica’s interior. It was coupled with a very intense low pressure system over the east Antarctic interior.
To make matters worse, cloud cover over the Antarctic ice plateau trapped heat radiating from the surface.
Recent storm clouds over East Antarctica. Barry Becker, Author provided
Since it’s autumn in Antarctica, temperatures in the continent’s interior weren’t high enough to melt glaciers and the ice cap. But that’s not to say large swings in temperature didn’t occur.
For example, Vostok in the middle of the ice plateau hit a provisional high of -17.7℃ (15℃ higher than previous record of -32.6℃). Concordia, the Italian-French research station also on the high plateau, experienced its highest ever temperature for any month, which was about 40℃ above the March average.
Air temperature anomalies across Antarctica at 2m above ground for the Mar 18. 2022. ClimateReanalyzer.org
The story is very different on the coast as rain fell, which isn’t really common for the continent.
The rain was driven primarily by an atmospheric river – a narrow band of moisture collected from warm oceans. Atmospheric rivers are found on the edge of low pressure systems and can move large amounts of water across vast distances, at scales greater than continents.
Despite their rarity, atmospheric rivers make an important contribution to the continent’s ice sheets, as they dump relatively large amounts of snow. When surface temperatures rise above freezing, rain rather than snow falls over Antarctica.
Last Monday (March 14) air temperatures at the Australian Casey Station reached a maximum of -1.9℃. Two days later, they were more like mid-summer temperatures, reaching a new March maximum of 5.6℃, which will melt ice.
This is the second heatwave at Casey Station in two years. In February 2020, Casey hit 9.2℃, followed by a shocking high of 18.3℃ on the Antarctic Peninsula.
Adélie penguins, which live across the entire Antarctic coastline, have recently finished their summer breeding. But thankfully, the Adélie penguin chicks had already left for sea to start hunting for food on their own, so the heatwave did not impact them.
The rain may have affected the local plant life, such as mosses, especially as they were in their annual phase of drying out for the winter. But we won’t know if there’s any damage to the plants until next summer when we can visit the moss beds again.
Snow on moss beds outside Casey research station 21 March 2022. Chris Gallagher
What about the Arctic?
A similar weather pattern occurred last week in the Arctic. An intense low pressure system began forming off the north-east coast of the United States. An atmospheric river formed at its junction with an adjacent high pressure system.
This weather pattern funnelled warm air into the Arctic circle. Svalbald, in Norway, recorded a new maximum temperature of 3.9℃.
US researchers called the low pressure system a “bomb cyclone” because it formed so rapidly, undergoing the delightfully termed “bombogenesis”.
Arctic air temperature anomalies at 2 metres above the ground for March 17, 2022. ClimateReanalyzer.org
Winter sea ice conditions this year were already very low, and on land there was recent record-breaking rain across Greenland.
If the warm conditions cause sea ice to break up earlier than normal, it could have dire impacts for many animals. For example, sea ice is a crucial habitat for polar bears, enabling them to hunt seals and travel long distances.
Early melting of Arctic ice sheets could have dire consequences for polar bears. Shutterstock
Many people live in the Arctic, including Arctic Indigenous people, and we know losing sea ice disrupts subsistence hunting and cultural practices.
What’s more, the bomb cyclone weather system brought chaotic weather to many populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere. In northern Norway, for instance, flowers have began blooming early due to three weeks of abnormally warm weather.
A harbinger for the future
Modelling suggests large-scale climate patterns are become more variable. This means this seemingly one-off heatwave may be a harbinger for the future under climate change.
In particular, the Arctic has been warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. This is because the melting sea ice reveals more ocean beneath, and the ocean absorbs more heat as it’s darker.
In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects Arctic sea ice to continue its current retreat, with ice-free summers possible by the 2050s.
Antarctica’s future looks similarly concerning. The IPCC finds global warming between 2℃ and 3℃ this century would see the West Antarctic Ice Sheet almost completely lost. Bringing global emissions down to net zero as fast as possible will help avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
Dana Bergstrom works for the Australian Antarctic Division and is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Wollongong. Her research and fieldwork in Antarctica was supported by the Australian Antarctic Division.
Sharon Robinson works for the University of Wollongong. She receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Antarctic Science Grants. She is a member of the United Nations Environment Programme Environmental Effects Assessment Panel.
Simon Alexander works for the Australian Antarctic Division and is part of the Australian Antarctic Program Partnership at the University of Tasmania. His Antarctic research was supported by the Australian Antarctic Division
New Zealand’s Omicron wave may be peaking, but we’ll continue to record thousands of new cases each day and most people who test positive or are hospitalised with COVID will have been vaccinated.
This is exactly what we should expect and it’s no reason to doubt vaccine effectiveness.
The principal reason why a lot of COVID cases are vaccinated is because most New Zealanders are now vaccinated. As of today, about 94% of people 12 years and older have had two or more vaccine doses, and even if their risk of catching COVID is significantly lower than for an unvaccinated person, they vastly outnumber those who aren’t.
In the week ending March 13, about 93% of the 118,000 confirmed cases 12 years and older were in people with two or more doses. But such crude proportions of cases aren’t all that good an indicator of vaccine effectiveness.
Last year, during the Delta outbreak, the proportions were misleading in the other direction. The rate of cases in people who were unvaccinated was about 20 times that in vaccinated people.
Unfortunately, some commentators talked about that ratio as if it was all a real benefit of vaccination. It wasn’t.
The outbreak in Auckland was nearly under control and was spreading among unvaccinated people partly because they had less resistance to infection, but also because they were more likely to come into contact with infected people. Social clustering leads to disease clustering.
What case numbers can tell us
For Delta, two doses of the vaccine produced very good immunity, especially in the short term. The vaccine is less effective for Omicron; two doses give only partial immunity even in the short term, and the effectiveness wears off over time.
About 60% of people 12 years and older have had a booster dose, and in the week ending March 13, only 42% of cases were in people who had been boosted. We can see that boosters help.
Counting cases remains important, because even a non-hospitalised case of COVID can be unpleasant, and because we don’t know how likely a mild case is to lead to long COVID and months or years of disability. We can’t draw strong conclusions from numbers of cases, though.
Many cases, probably most cases, are not being diagnosed at the moment. Unvaccinated people will be less likely to get tested, especially in mild cases of the disease, either because of poor access to the health system or because they don’t think COVID is important. We can’t really tell how much bias this introduces into the numbers.
Hospitalisations and deaths are much more reliably counted than cases. Results from clinical trials and careful population studies of COVID vaccines consistently show the vaccines to be more effective in preventing more serious disease, especially with the new variants. There are plausible biological explanations for this, based on different parts of our immune response.
Antibodies against the COVID virus seem to be affected more by differences between strains than T-cells are; antibodies are probably more important for preventing initial infection and less important for fighting serious disease.
More benefit in protecting from serious disease
When we look at hospitalisations and deaths, the difference between vaccinated and unvaccinated people is much more dramatic. In the week ending March 13, 65% of people over 12 hospitalised were vaccinated, compared to 94% in the population; 32% had a booster dose, compared to 60% in the population. The 5% of unvaccinated people over 12 contributed 20% of hospitalisations.
The number of deaths is, fortunately, too small for the Ministry of Health to publish detailed weekly breakdowns, but vaccinated people are a minority over the period since August.
The relatively small number of deaths in New Zealand’s Omicron wave also shows the effectiveness of the vaccine. Hong Kong had largely eliminated COVID until Omicron; they are now getting a large outbreak similar to New Zealand’s, but only in the number of cases. Over the past week, Hong Kong averaged 280 deaths per day, in a population less than twice that of New Zealand.
The vaccination rate in Hong Kong is much lower. About 71% are fully vaccinated and only 30% have had a booster. Among elderly people, who are at much greater risk from COVID, the vaccination rate is especially lower, with two-thirds of people over 80 and more than a third of those aged 70-80 having been unvaccinated when Omicron hit.
Towards fair comparisons
Comparing across whole populations this way gives some indication of the vaccine benefit, but it is very imprecise. We don’t choose randomly who gets the vaccine and who doesn’t.
In New Zealand, for example, essentially everyone over 75 has been vaccinated. Since people over 75 are much more likely to need hospital care than younger people, the higher vaccination rate in people over 75 makes the vaccine look less effective than it really is.
Statisticians call this “confounding by indication”. Auckland has always had more exposure to new outbreaks and had higher vaccination rates than the rest of the country; this again tends to make the vaccine look less effective that it really is.
More reliable comparisons require either random allocation of vaccine to people, as in the clinical trials performed before the vaccines were approved, or careful statistical matching of vaccinated and unvaccinated groups to get a fair comparison.
Omicron is too recent to have useful clinical trial data, but peer-reviewed statistical analyses of individual case data from the United Kingdom, the United States, and South Africa all agree the vaccines are beneficial.
There’s some evidence vaccination also reduces the risk and severity of long COVID, the most likely bad outcome for healthy people. But there obviously hasn’t been time to do this sort of comparison specifically for the Omicron variant.
Overall, the most reliable comparisons between vaccinated and unvaccinated people have consistently shown a benefit of vaccination. The effectiveness of the vaccines does wear off over time, and the effectiveness is lower against Omicron than it was against Delta or the original COVID strain, but it still improves your chances of avoiding infection, keeping out of hospital and making a full recovery.
Thomas Lumley 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.
You don’t have to look to far to find examples of poor quality residential aged care. Most recently, residents have too often been un-vaccinated, frightened, isolated, and have died alone in aged care facilities during the pandemic.
It’s tempting to see poor quality as simply the result of extreme circumstances or bad actors behaving incompetently or unscrupulously.
Unlike other sectors, such as disability and mental health, Australia doesn’t have a clearly defined, rights-based framework of outcomes for older people when they need care.
Instead, the emphasis has been on managing costs. This has been a particular problem for residential aged care. As a result, Australian residential care has become more privatised and marketised over the past 25 years.
So how has that affected the quality of care? And what can governments do to address this issue?
Snapshot of residential aged care in Australia
The Australian residential aged care system includes around 2,700 services. These are made up of:
private for-profit organisations, which operate 34% of services
not-for-profit providers, 57% of services
government providers, 9% of services.
Around 200,000 Australians live in residential care, at an average cost of around A$90,000 per year. Tax payers contributed around A$13.6 billion in 2019–20.
How do these facilities compare?
Governments want the aged care sector to provide high quality care as efficiently as possible.
In theory, the introduction of private operators promotes market competition. Competition should improve efficiency while maintaining quality.
State government services, which tend to be smaller, charge residents less and provide better quality care than for-profit and not-for-profit providers. This includes nursing hours worked per resident, the rate of assaults per resident, complaints per resident, the use of antipsychotic drugs, and avoidable early deaths.
In research classifying different types of aged care into three tiers of quality (best, middle or worst), just 4% of for-profit providers were in the highest quality tier.
Profits increase when costs are kept down. For-profit providers have to deliver returns for their share holders, which leaves less money to reinvest in services compared with not-for-profit and government services.
Pressure to increase efficiency reduces quality through cost-cutting. This includes reduced staffing levels, lower wages and reduced spending on food and other living items for residents. These pressures are there for all aged care providers, but they are greater when profits have to be maintained.
Providers reduce staffing costs through the management of staffing ratios and the use of less costly (unskilled) labour. This includes spreading activities such as showering and meals over longer periods, limiting the time scheduled for individual support, and increasing the size of resident groups supported by individual staff members.
The result has been residential care staff are poorly paid and it’s hard to attract and retain them. By international standards, more than half of aged care residents live in facilities with unacceptable levels of staffing. These pressures are greater among for-profit providers.
Staff ratios and staff skills and capabilities directly affect the quality of care. Yet one-third of the personal care staff in residential care facilities lack formal qualifications in aged care.
Under-staffing and inadequate training increases the risk of inappropriate and unsafe care and reduces the chance of residents receiving timely care and support. This results in neglect, loneliness and poor health outcomes.
Economies of scale
Private providers optimise profits by building larger institutions where they can more easily manage costs.
Large scale services with more than a hundred beds made up nearly half of the 220,000 residential places available in 2020. And they have increased rapidly, particularly in the private sector. Between 2010 and 2020, private for-profit places increased by one-third and the number of large-scale private places more than doubled.
Large scale institutions, meanwhile, lead to routinised and impersonal environments for both staff and residents. The larger the residential facility, the more likely you are to eat, sleep, shower and move about “on the clock” according to institutional routines.
There has been too much emphasis on cost and profit for providers and not enough on quality and outcomes for residents.
The federal government needs to restructure residential aged care to get a better balance between quality and cost. This will require an overhaul of regulation, funding and system management, to put much more emphasis on the quality of resident outcomes and experience.
In particular, residential care should be required to provide:
small scale, home-like environments
better integration with community services and facilities for residents
improved staffing ratios and staff qualifications.
The outcomes residents experience in residential services should be monitored much more regularly. And providers must be held accountable for the quality and performance of their services, with funding tied to quality and outcomes – with real consequences for providers who fail to meet these outcomes.
Aged care reform may become a key election issue in the coming months, so we’ll be watching next week’s federal budget closely for new announcements.
Hal Swerissen is a non Executive Director of the Murray PHN.
The biggest question relating to the management of the economy right now has nothing to do with next week’s budget. It has everything to do with the Reserve Bank and the board meetings that will follow it.
The question facing the board – the biggest there is when it comes to how the next few years are going to play out – is whether to hike interest rates just because prices are climbing.
On the face of it, it seems like no question at all. It is widely believed that that’s what the Reserve Bank does, mechanically. When inflation climbs above 3% (it’s currently 3.5%) the board hikes interest rates to bring it back down to somewhere within the bank’s target band of 2-3%.
It’s what it did the last time inflation headed beyond its target zone in 2010.
But the inflation we’ve got this time is different, and failing to recognise that misreads the bank’s rationale for pushing up rates, and what it is likely to do.
Inflation, but not as we’ve known it
The Reserve Bank does indeed target an inflation rate of 2-3%. The target is set down in a formal agreement with the treasurer, renewed each time a new treasurer or governor takes office.
Just about the only tool the bank has to achieve its inflation target is interest rates. If inflation is below the target, it can cut interest rates to make finance easier in the hope the extra money will encourage us to spend more and push up prices.
If inflation is above the target, it can push up rates so it becomes harder to borrow and interest payments become more onerous, taking money out of the economy and giving us less to push up prices with.
If the economy is growing very strongly, demand is very buoyant and that’s pushing up prices, we might need to raise interest rates to slow the economy, to get things back onto an even keel.
Note the qualifier: “if demand is very buoyant and that’s pushing up prices”.
Buoyant demand (spending) is most certainly not the main thing pushing up prices now. The main things are beyond the Reserve Bank’s power to control.
Petrol prices have skyrocketed because of an invasion half a world away. It’s also the reason the global prices of wheat, barley and sunflower oil are climbing.
And trucks and cars themselves are climbing in price because of a global shortage of computer chips.
And it might get worse. Last week China locked down the high tech hub of Shenzhen, said to be the source of 90% of the world’s electronic goods, among them televisions, air conditioning units and smartphones. It reopened the city this week after testing its 17.5 million residents for COVID.
It’s easy to see why prices have shot up, and easy to see why they might not come down for a while. What is harder to see is how pushing up interest rates to crimp demand, to force Australians to spend less, would do anything to stop it.
What’s missing is inflation psychology
It’s a view Reserve Bank Governor Philip Lowe seems to endorse. He said this month that what he is on the lookout for is “inflation psychology” – the view that price rises will lead to wage rises, which will lead to price rises in an upward spiral.
It used to be how things worked. Australians who are old enough will remember when, if they saw something at a price they liked, they rushed out to buy it before it climbed in price. Australians born more recently have learnt not to bother.
The old psychology could come back, but wages growth – which would have to be high if that sort of thing was to happen – has remained historically low at 2.3%, little more than it was before COVID.
When surveyed, trade union officials expect little more (2.4%) in the year ahead.
It is true that these days most Australians aren’t in trade unions. So the Reserve Bank seeks out the views of ordinary households. On average, those surveyed expect wage growth in the year ahead of just 0.8%, which is next to nothing. The psychology hasn’t taken hold.
Until it does, it is best to think about most of what has happened as a series of isolated externally-driven price rises that have dented our standard of living.
Pushing up interest rates to dent living standards further won’t stop them.
The Reserve Bank is right to be on the lookout for internally-driven, self-sustaining inflation. We will know it when we see it – but we’re not seeing it yet.
Asked on ABC’s 7.30 this week whether there was a role for higher interest rates in an oil crisis, a former Reserve Bank board member, Warwick McKibbon, said
the worst thing a central bank can do in a supply shock or an oil crisis is to target inflation, because by targeting inflation you push downward pressure on the real economy
He went on to say that if the bank did it without success and then kept doing it, it would bring on a recession. I am sure the bank doesn’t want to do that.
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.
Fearing Russia’s elite will evade economic sanctions by converting their wealth to cryptocurrency, high-profile US Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren has introduced a bill into US Congress to stymie Russian crypto transactions.
So no one can argue that Russia can evade all sanctions by moving all its assets into crypto. But for Putin’s oligarchs who are trying to hide, you know, a billion or two of their wealth, crypto looks like a pretty good option.
The bill does not seek to impose a blanket ban on all Russian cryptocurrency transactions. But it would give the US government the authority to ban US companies from processing cryptocurrency transactions connected to sanctioned Russian accounts, and to apply secondary sanctions to foreign cryptocurrency exchanges doing business with sanctioned Russian individuals, companies or government agencies.
But is it even necessary?
Even though the evidence shows that Russian cryptocurrency transactions have been increasing in both number and value in the past month, the scale suggests buyers are ordinary Russians seeking to hold on to their savings as the value of the ruble crashes.
The economic sanctions imposed on Russia for invading Ukraine are naturally hurting the entire Russian economy. Their intended target, though, is to hit Putin and the billionaire oligarchs who support his rule where it hurts most.
A cornerstone of this strategy is stopping these individuals from using or moving their wealth around by freezing the assets they hold overseas and blocking financial transactions.
But the continued operation of cryptocurrency exchanges in Russia, such as Binance, Yobit and Local Bitcoins, has been worrying US officials for some time. Even before Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine, the US Treasury Department warned cryptocurrencies could undermine the sanctions already imposed on Russia over its 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Ruble’s falling value
Our first graph below shows why ordinary Russians have good reason to buy cryptocurrency.
Since the February 24 invasion of Ukraine, the ruble’s value against the US dollar has fallen by as much as 40%, from $US1 being worth 76 rubles to 132 rubles. At the time of publication, $US1 was worth about 109 rubles.
The next graph shows the value of Bitcoin transactions by Russian accounts in rubles.
Bitcoin is not the only cryptocurrency Russians could buy, but it is by far the most traded and trusted of all cryptocurrency offerings, so is a useful proxy for the market. This data comes from Coin Dance, a leading Bitcoin statistics and services company.
Since the war began on February 24 until time of publication, spending on Bitcoin using rubles has increased by 260%.
Bitcoin trading volumes by Russian accounts in rubles (weekly)
This is an impressive rise, but less impressive when the devaluation of the ruble is factored in. The weekly value of rubles being converted into Bitcoin was about $US28 million last week, compared with about $US14 million in mid-February. That’s a 100% rise.
In global terms, this is still a tiny percentage of the money going into Bitcoin. According to cryptocurrency data provider Kaiko, each week between $US20 billion to US$40 billion is spent on Bitcoin. So the Bitcoin-ruble trade represents less than 0.14% of the total.
Small transaction size
It is also important to consider the number of accounts and size of average transactions.
According to Glassnode, another cryptocurrency data service, the number of Russian Bitcoin accounts has increased from 39.9 million to 40.7 million since the February invasion. (The Russian population is about 144 million.)
The daily average size of each Bitcoin-ruble transaction – based on data from the the largest exchange in Russia, Binance – has risen to $US580 by mid-February. This compares to the average value of American transactions being $US2,198 at the same time.
The capacity to put large amounts of rubles through crypto exchanges operating in Russia is also heavily constrained by the relatively low liquidity in Russian crypto trade.
Liquidity refers to the ease with which an asset or security – in this case Bitcoin – can be converted from or into cash without affecting its market price. When a market has more buyers and sellers, it becomes easier to complete a transaction, and the less impact there is on the exchange rate. With fewer buyers and sellers, it is harder.
A measure of the liquidity of the Russian Bitcoin exchanges is the value of orders submitted by buyers and sellers at any given time. This is about US$200,000, compared with $US22 million for US-based crypto exchanges – a volume 110 times larger.
These statistics suggest anyone wishing to trade large volumes of Bitcoin against the ruble will have difficulties.
Small-time investors
The evidence therefore points to most of the uptick in Russian cryptocurrency trading being dominated by small-time investors.
It is possible that Putin and his cronies could be using hundreds or thousands of accounts to perform many small-scale transactions to move their fortunes around.
But it’s more likely their wealth is mostly invested through shell companies in assets in places like Monaco, the British Virgin Islands, Ireland or even the US district of Delaware.
There is little argument against the strategy of using economic sanctions to combat recalcitrant regimes. Other than direct military intervention, there are few other meaningful weapons available. But a detailed analysis of any proposed sanction beforehand is needed so as to not overestimate its likely effectiveness.
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 Ronli Sifris, Senior lecturer in law, Deputy Director of the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law, Monash University
Shutterstock
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a nightmare for prospective parents engaged in surrogacy arrangements in the country.
Ukraine has become a popular destination for surrogacy. While exact numbers are difficult to obtain, it’s estimated between 2,000 and 2,500 babies are born each year via surrogacy in Ukraine.
BioTexCom, one of the largest fertility clinics in Ukraine, is expecting 200 babies to be born via surrogacy by the end of May.
But it’s currently extremely challenging for such parents to cross the border into Ukraine to meet their babies. This is a disaster for the babies, the surrogates and the intended parents.
The babies are left in limbo, born into a war zone without their parents to look after them. The surrogates have to give birth in a war zone and then aren’t able to hand the babies over to the intended parents.
As for the intended parents, one can hardly imagine how distressing it must be to know your baby has been born, or is about to be born, but not know how or when you can reach them.
The situation highlights why Australia must change its surrogacy laws.
Why are Australians travelling to Ukraine for surrogacy?
Ukraine is a popular surrogacy destination for several reasons.
One is financial. Surrogacy in Ukraine is more affordable than in the United States, for example. Surrogacy in Ukraine is estimated to cost approximately USD $40,000 (A$54,000), whereas surrogacy in the United States can cost as much as USD $150,000 (A$202,000).
Another is legal. Under Ukrainian law, unlike in Australia for example, the intended parents are recognised as the legal parents of a child born through surrogacy at birth.
Although it’s worth noting only heterosexual married couples are able to access surrogacy in the country.
For the vast majority of people, surrogacy isn’t their preferred way to have a child, but an option of last resort.
For example, for one Australian couple, the topic of a recent Sydney Morning Herald article, surrogacy was their only option. They’d lost three pregnancies, and their use of surrogacy in Ukraine was the culmination of an excruciating six-year journey.
Australian laws encouraging cross-border surrogacy
The stress involved in cross-border surrogacy highlights this further. The vast majority of Australians who travel overseas to access surrogacy arrangements would prefer to do so back home, but Australian law presents a significant obstacle.
In Australia, only “altruistic surrogacy” is permitted, where the surrogate mother doesn’t benefit financially from the arrangement.
But “compensated” or “commercial” surrogacy, where the surrogate does receive a financial benefit, is prohibited.
The prohibition of compensation is problematic for a number of reasons. From the perspective of the surrogate, it’s inherently exploitative to refuse to allow a woman to be paid for her reproductive labour. And the obsession with “altruism” amplifies problematic stereotypes and expectations of the “self-sacrificing woman”.
From the perspective of intended parents, the prohibition of compensation has led to a predictable dearth of Australian women willing to become surrogates.
This has fuelled the popularity of cross-border compensated surrogacy, which is illegal for residents of New South Wales, Queensland and the ACT but widely undertaken.
For some, surrogacy is their only option. Shutterstock
What’s the solution?
All Australian states and territories should amend their laws to allow for compensated surrogacy.
Regulating behaviour that is already occurring, and to which law enforcement is turning a blind eye, has three key benefits:
regulation ensures the rights of all parties are protected properly. Regulation in Australia can prevent exploitation abroad
in a country like Australia, which has a social safety net in place to protect those who are most vulnerable, the question of compensation can be separated from exploitation
compensation is a matter of justice. It’s unjust to allow many of the people involved in providing surrogacy – clinics, lawyers, counsellors and others – to be compensated for their time and services, but not the person doing the most labour and assuming the greatest risk.
The anxiety around legalising and regulating compensated surrogacy in Australia does not make sense.
Australia’s legal system has the capability to do this, and in doing so, would minimise the risk of exploitation.
This would also likely reduce the number of Australians going overseas for compensated surrogacy, with the risks and stressors that comes with that.
The most sensible solution, and the solution that best protects the rights of all involved, is for Australia to properly regulate (rather than prohibit) compensated surrogacy arrangements so desperate intended parents aren’t forced overseas.
Ronli Sifris does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University
Shutterstock
While most expectant mothers are excited, many are also anxious about giving birth, especially first-time mothers. Perineal trauma is something many expectant mums are fearful about.
It is hard to comprehend being able to give birth to an entire human, but a woman’s vagina is pretty amazing, and nature has designed it to accommodate the baby. Hormones, increased blood supply and a clever, stretchy design all play a role in making this happen. No muscles in the female body are able to stretch without rupturing as much as those of the pelvic floor.
The perineum is the soft tissue between a woman’s vagina and anus, and it has the capacity to stretch significantly during birth. However, it can tear, or may be surgically cut if medically indicated and consented to by the woman (called an episiotomy).
When women have their first baby, they are more likely to have some perineal tearing. Most tears heal well and are never thought about again, but for some women there is ongoing pain and psychological trauma.
There are different degrees of perineal trauma (1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th). First-degree (involves skin but not muscle) and second-degree tears (involves perineal muscles) are the most common. Third- and fourth-degree tears, known collectively as “severe perineal trauma” are more serious, as they also involve the anal area and can lead to long term consequences, such as pain and incontinence for women.
Many women are anxious about child birth. Shutterstock
In Australia, the latest statistics show more than one in four women have no perineal tearing during the birth (more likely when not the first baby), 21% have a 1st degree tear, 30% have a 2nd degree tear and less than 3% have a 3rd or 4th degree tear (more common with the first baby).
Around 24% have an episiotomy, which is worrying as this has doubled in the past ten years (12% in 2009), and there is evidence the recovery is more painful than if the perineum tears naturally.
There is little doubt the rates of perineal trauma have increased over the past 100 years, with early midwife records indicating most women had no tearing.
An increase in the use of birthing interventions such as vacuum, forceps and episiotomy (which can cause further tearing), women giving birth at an older age to fewer babies, and greater vigilance by midwives and doctors when examining the perineum after birth have all played a role in the increased perineal trauma rates we see today.
Rates of perineal trauma vary across the country, with one report finding a 12-fold difference between hospitals, ranging from six per 1,000 births in some hospitals to 71 per 1,000 births in others.
This difference could come from varying hospital practices such as more frequent use of forceps and vacuum, or from the demographics of the women in a given area (more women having their first baby, or even the country of birth of the women).
There are ways to reduce the risk of perineal tearing. Jimmy Conover/Unsplash
How to reduce perineal tearing
There are recommendations on how to reduce the chance of perineal tearing and trauma, based in part on our research.
During pregnancy:
1) perineal self-massage (or with help from your partner) after 34 weeks of pregnancy can help protect your perineum and reduce the risk of third- and fourth-degree perineal tears
2) pelvic floor muscle training may help prepare you for labour and birth and reduce the possibility of a third- or fourth-degree perineal tear.
Warm compresses and pre-birth exercises have been shown to reduce perineal tearing. Shutterstock
During a vaginal birth:
3) applying warm compresses to the perineum during the second stage of labour (when pushing and giving birth) can significantly reduce the risk of a third or fourth degree perineal tear
4) slowing the rate at which the baby’s head and shoulders emerge, with the help of your birth attendants, may help prevent perineal injuries
5) perineal massage performed by your health-care professional during the second stage of labour may reduce the risk of third- and fourth-degree perineal tears. However, some women may not feel comfortable with this option, and it is not recommended for everyone
6) listening carefully to your midwife’s voice and following their instructions can help the baby emerge from your vagina gently and slowly. For example, your midwife will tell you to breathe and not push just before your baby is born
7) perineal trauma is less common when women give birth in home-like environments such as at home or in a birth centre, where they have less medical intervention, can use water for pain relief and give birth in upright birth positions.
In a new paper we have also found having two midwives in the room in the late stage of birth, instead of one, can reduce perineal trauma by up to 31%. Our study found having a second midwife in the room meant one of them was focused on the woman at all times, and was not distracted by other things that needed to be done. It also meant they could give suggestions and reinforce the first midwife’s words to the mother during the birth.
Following the birth, your midwife or doctor will stitch any perineal trauma that needs to be repaired in the birthing room, and these stitches dissolve over the coming weeks. Some tears are minor and do not require stitches.
Most perineal wounds heal well by resting, applying ice for the first day or two if swollen, changing sanitary pads and keeping the perineum clean, gentle pelvic floor exercises after a couple of days to help healing, and adequate pain relief.
After birth, if you have problems with your perineum, don’t just put up with it. Contact your midwife or doctor to get further advice.
Hannah Dahlen receives funding from NHMRC and ARC.
Christine Rubertsson receives funding from Lund university, Regional South Funds (SUS), Government ALF research grants from Lund university and Lund university Hospital, Jan Hains Foundation.
Malin Edqvist receives funding from The Swedish Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare.
Readers are advised that the following article contains mentions of sexual assault.
The Teach Us Consent movement – founded by Chanel Contos in 2021 – has gained bipartisan political support to mandate consent education in Australian schools from 2023. The movement was rapidly successful after collecting over 6,600 stories of people who had experienced sexual assault by someone when they were at school.
This was followed quickly by the federal government committing $189 million over five years to strengthen prevention and early intervention efforts in family, domestic and sexual violence.
Consent isn’t just about sex. Consent needs to be taught in the context of our rights to say no to anything we’re not comfortable with. That education needs to start early, hence why the proposed curriculum is from school years K-12.
Teach Us Consent has advocated for comprehensive consent education that moves beyond simply teaching the law or explaining that “no means no”. Consent in a sexual context includes – but is not limited to – respect, healthy relationships, gender stereotypes, ethics, communication and empathy.
As strong and emotive reactions to recent speeches by Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins show, issues of sexual violence and consent are gaining momentum at a national level. Yet, within these important discussions, the voices, experiences and needs of First Nations people are not widely represented or heard.
Drawing on the current momentum and interest in consent education, there is an opportunity to fund place-based, culturally appropriate and co-designed consent education with First Nations young people.
The response to sexual violence must move beyond simply adding “dot paintings” to mainstream curricula to address the conditions that make sexual violence an issue for many.
To have a real impact on young people and our communities, we need to be telling the whole story of women, gender and sexual violence in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s lives against the backdrop of colonisation.
Before colonisation, our diverse cultures were grounded in collective rights and responsibilities for people and Country.
Women were keepers of knowledge and Lore, and were responsible for passing knowledges down through our kinship lines. This involved educating and nurturing young girls as they transitioned into adulthood.
There were laws that regulated behaviours – sexual and otherwise – and women were revered in their roles as Elders, mothers and healers.
However, when Australia was colonised, Aboriginal women’s roles as teachers and matriarchs were rendered invisible by the colonisers’ gaze, guns and violence.
When children were taken and family members murdered, this led to families and communities being displaced, and their cultural roles disrupted. Australia’s assimilation policies laid the foundation for the entrenched racism and displacement we experience today.
This has contributed to First Nations people’s ongoing experience with inequalities in social and health indicators – including sexual and other violence.
The ongoing impact of colonisation, racism and cultural loss are key drivers of violence in First Nations communities. This needs to be understood and addressed if our experiences are to be genuinely included in the national narrative around sexual consent and violence.
Growing relationships with First Nations people, communities and organisations based on genuine respect and cultural strength is fundamental to developing culturally safe education around consent.
Our Watch – a national leader in the primary prevention of violence against women and children in Australia – has worked closely with First Nations people to develop Changing the Picture. This is a resource to support the prevention of violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and children.
A co-design process would complement and build on the good work of Our Watch and those programs highlighted through this resource. It would draw on the professional and lived experiences of staff and communities working in this space.
Ways to approach consent education will vary depending on cultural, historical and local differences. Our communities need a curriculum that is flexible and adaptable enough to honour these diverse local and cultural needs.
To achieve this, collaboration must occur at all levels and stages of the design, rollout and evaluation of the new consent curriculum.
There has been further commitment to fund responses beyond the national curriculum development, but there must be targeted funding for First Nations to ensure the responses are culturally appropriate.
Making decisions “with” people instead of “for” people
Co-design with First Nations communities and organisations is about all stakeholders – government, experts on sexual violence, community, advocacy bodies, young people and researchers – working together.
A key principle of co-design is that lived experience participants – in this case Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – are valued and respected and their knowledge is privileged.
A good example of culturally secure co-design is the Looking Forward project at Curtin University, in which methods were developed in a collaboration between Elders and young people.
The project includes two key truth-telling activities that build relationships and trust, ensuring the space is culturally secure: Storying and On Country.
Storying is the process of sitting as equals and sharing the story of who you are as a person outside your professional role or qualifications. Equally as important is the deep listening and connecting with others in the room through our shared experiences.
Storying is followed by an On Country event. Activities are led, held and weaved together by Elders who share stories and knowledge about Country. This helps to better understand the central role culture has in people’s social and emotional well-being and how to include this in work practices.
Due to the complex legacies of colonisation, the relationships that begin to form through Storying and On Country events are integral in building trust with First Nations people. This enables non-Indigenous people to develop an understanding of culture, kinship and spirit. These activities are part of addressing the racialised power differences and developing a genuine commitment from non-Indigenous people.
This approach forms the foundation for robust discussions that need to occur in the development of any consent education around sexual violence.
These programs may not use the words “consent education”, but they do address the legacy of colonisation that is a driver of sexual violence. Importantly, these examples create culturally safe spaces for all members of the community to engage in conversations about violence against women.
Growing relationships with First Nations people is fundamental to developing culturally safe education. shutterstock
The federal government’s move to mandate consent education is a step in the right direction. If funded and resourced appropriately, it provides a unique opportunity to address sexual violence at a national level.
Moving forward, the voices, experiences and expertise of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples must be listened to. Historical and current colonial violence, as well as the strengths of culture, must be understood and incorporated.
Engaging with First Nations people working in and for the community is where we need to start.
Amanda Sibosado works for the Looking Forward Research Team, on Our Journey Our Story at Curtin University. Our Journey, Our Story is funded by the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Million Minds Mission.
Michelle Webb works for the Looking Forward Research Team, on Our Journey Our Story at Curtin University. Our Journey, Our Story is funded by the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Million Minds Mission
The Green Party says New Zealand has put its relationship with the NATO security alliance ahead of saving lives in Ukraine.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern yesterday announced $5 million would go to a NATO fund for the purchase of “non-lethal military assistance” such as fuel, rations and first aid equipment.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, or NATO, is a security alliance including the United States, Canada and 28 European nations.
Green Party Foreign Affairs spokesperson Golriz Ghahraman told RNZ the funding appeared to be a “diplomatic nod” and could have been put to better use.
“It looks like we’re trying to be part of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ — so to speak — when that’s not actually our best contribution,” Ghahraman said.
“That $5m could have gone to aid where it would immediately be saving lives … versus us ticking-the-box of being in the NATO circle while giving very little by way of actually helping people in this conflict.”
Ghahraman said Ukrainian refugees were desperately in need of food, blankets, medicine and shelter.
‘Contending with covid’ “They are contending with covid at the same time they’re living through a European winter — millions upon millions, displaced in refugee camps or in need of resettlement.”
To date, New Zealand has contributed $6m in humanitarian aid, mostly through the Red Cross. The government has also created a special visa to assist Ukrainians to join their relatives in New Zealand.
Speaking at a media conference on Monday, Ardern said the “extraordinary measures” to help Ukrainian forces were in direct response to requests from Ukraine.
Asked to explain the pivot from humanitarian aid to military assistance, Ardern described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “a massive disruption to the international rules-based order”.
The Defence Force will also donate surplus stock of 1066 body armour plates, 571 camouflage vests and 473 helmets to Ukrainian forces.
ACT leader David Seymour said New Zealand’s contribution was “pathetic” and should include direct weapon support.
“How long do we want to be the weakest link in the West? We have to answer the call and provide what we have to help these people defend their homes.”
Send missile launchers Seymour said New Zealand should immediately send Ukraine its supply of Javelin medium-range missile launchers.
“They’re not doing much here — I haven’t seen any Russian tanks in New Zealand lately — but they could do a lot over there,” Seymour said.
Ardern said directly providing weapons would be a “fundamental change” in the country’s approach to the conflict, but the option remained on the table.
She noted New Zealand did not have a large supply of such equipment.
National Party Foreign Affairs spokesperson Gerry Brownlee told RNZ the government’s response, so far, was appropriate.
“The circumstances here are very different than anything we’ve had to deal with before,” Brownlee said. “We should be doing our bit.”
Providing firepower Brownlee said the option of providing firepower could potentially be considered “further down the track”.
“Our contribution would be so small compared to that from the United States or Great Britain,” Brownlee said.
“Whatever we do, clearly we’re going to have to operate through NATO and their connections into Ukraine to make sure that whatever assistance is given does get to the right place.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
It is doubtful Vladimir Putin has visited the memorials along the Alley of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes in central Kyiv.
If he had, he might not have underestimated the will of ordinary Ukrainian people to fight – and die – for their country’s independence and their right to determine its future.
Many countries revere soldiers who have given their lives for their country. What is special about Ukraine’s memorialising is the depth of respect for individual citizens who died defending Ukraine’s liberation and continued independence.
Kyiv’s street memorial to the Heavenly Hundred Heroes features images of ordinary people killed during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity which overthrew the government of pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych.
Those who died range in age from 16 to 83. They came from different age groups, genders, educational backgrounds and nationalities. They were entrepreneurs, pensioners, scientists, artists, students and activists.
The memorial to the Heavenly Hundred Heroes features images of ordinary people killed during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. spoilt.exile/flickr, CC BY-SA
After three months of peaceful demonstrations, they were attacked by government forces. They protected themselves with rudimentary, low-impact weapons including a catapult.
The Order of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes was established to recognise civil courage, patriotism, upholding the principles of democracy, human rights and freedoms.
Remembering the individuals
There are many ways Ukrainians remember the courage of ordinary individuals.
In 2015, the Soviet-era Defenders of the Fatherland Day was replaced by the Day of the Defenders. This holiday was created to honour veterans and fallen members of the armed forces. Its slogan is “strength of the unbowed”.
March of the Defenders of Ukraine, Kyiv, Independence Day, 24 September 2020. from Kyiv. spoilt.exile/flickr, CC BY-SA
At marches on the Day of the Defenders and on Independence Day, people hold photographs of family members who have died supporting Ukraine’s independence.
Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, Ukrainians have increasingly sought to erase Soviet ideological influence on their lands. Some Soviet-era monuments have been dismantled or reworked to emphasise Ukrainian identity.
This monument to the Soviet Army in Sofia was reworked as Glory to Ukraine in 2014. Luchesar V. ILIEV/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Ukrainian memorials built over the last decade have been designed to bring attention to suppressed national memories, and to strengthen Ukrainian identity. Many of these were built out of grassroots initiatives, commemorating those who fell in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
A recent study by one of us (Anna Grew) looked at the intensely personal quality of these memorials. Funded by family members, colleagues or local authorities, these monuments do not depict Ukrainians as victims. They show the dead not as an abstract group, but as complex and full people with hobbies, hopes and dreams, and a readiness to fight for their country.
Left: A commemorative stand in a small town of Opishnia (Poltava oblast), showing pictures of the local fallen soldiers asking the audience to remember they sacrificed their lives for Ukraine’s independence. Right: Monument to the soldiers in Poltava, where a digital screen loops photographs and biographical details of local fallen soldiers. Anna Grew, Author provided
Writing today’s history
Russia has been using heritage as a tool in this conflict, placing Ukraine’s cultural heritage at risk.
Across the country, Ukrainians are working to protect heritage objects and places. Historic statues are wrapped. Museum objects are being relocated to basements and other more secure locations. Disaster plans are being enacted.
Important sites and collections have already been destroyed, and others are under threat.
In early March, Babyn Yar – a site where thousands of Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and which today is the site of a Holocaust memorial – was bombed. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said this act aimed to “erase the true history of Babyn Yar.”
In the village of Ivankiv, north of Kyiv, a local history museum burned down. It held works by the famous Ukrainian folk artist Maria Pryimachenko. There is widespread concern Russia has a strategy to diminish Ukraine’s identity as a separate nation by destroying its authentic culture and history.
The National Museum of the Holodomor-Genocide is ensuring the experiences of individuals are not forgotten. On March 15 the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy established a new platform My War, where people can describe their experiences of the war.
As 29-year-old Vladimir Strashko writes:
we are strong, confident and united. We are together. We are Ukrainians.
‘People who do care’
Zelenskyy has prepared Ukraine for a Russian invasion from the day he was elected. He has nurtured Ukrainian unity, recognising it is critical to the outcome of any war.
In a statement from December, he encouraged Ukrainians to sign up as volunteers in the army:
because it is impossible to defeat an army whose number is unknown. An army, the ranks of which in one moment is reinforced by tens, hundreds of thousands, millions of people who do care.
On March 3, Zelenskyy posted on his Facebook page:
They wanted to destroy us so many times. They failed. We’ve been through so much! And if someone thinks that, having overcome all this, Ukrainians will be frightened, broken or surrender, he knows nothing about Ukraine. And he has nothing to do in Ukraine.
Zelenskyy’s message throughout the war has been about the ability and willingness of Ukrainians to defend their country. When we look at symbols like the Alley of the Heavenly Hundred Heroes, we understand the valour of ordinary citizens is at the heart of Ukrainian national character.
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.
Students from West Papua have been facing a stressful time in New Zealand since the beginning of the year after Indonesia said it would no longer fund their autonomous Papuan scholarships and wanted them repatriated home.
One student from the Central Highlands in West Papua that RNZ Pacific has spoken to says he has had his dreams of a brighter future shattered by the Indonesian government.
Laurens Ikinia is a Master of Communications student at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), who has been ordered home just when he was due to complete his studies this month.
“The government has terminated the scholarships of 42 students here in Aotearoa who are the recipients of Papua provincial government scholarships and I am one of the students who was terminated, and this is worrying me,” Ikinia said.
West Papua’s struggles began in 1962 when the former Dutch colony was controversially and forcibly annexed by the Indonesian military through the New York agreement signed by the Netherlands and Indonesia.
In 1969, Western countries oversaw the takeover from the Netherlands to Indonesia and the right of self-determination was stripped from West Papuans.
“We are just surviving and do some part-time jobs as long as we can but, unfortunately, some students cannot work because of their visa conditions. I don’t know how long it’s going to take us but that’s what we are doing just to survive,” Ikinia said.
Of the 42 students impacted on by the new policy, 27 were on course to finish their studies.
‘Lame’ reason for policy change The reason given by Indonesian authorities that the students were being recalled because they were failing in their studies was “lame”, Ikenia said.
“We don’t see that there will be a good future when the concerned students will go home. Most of the students come from low-income families. Even some parents cannot afford to send their children to pursue education up to tertiary level.
“I have not finished my thesis yet because my team and I have been busy with advocacy. However, I am determined to finish my study within this month,” he said.
“We have tried our best through various channels to communicate and negotiate with the Indonesian government in Jakarta, and the Papuan provincial government. However, as of today, there is no positive response.
“The provincial government stated in the letter that they would no longer support the students on the list. We have provided the complete data of the concerned students to clarify the data that the provincial government has, but they still stick to their decision to repatriate the concerned students.
“We are so heartbroken by this decision,” Ikinia said.
The students have approached the Green Party to lobby the New Zealand government on their behalf to try to resolve the issue.
Some of the West Papuan students in Aotearoa New Zealand pictured with Papua Provincial Governor Lukas Enembe (front centre) during his visit in 2019. Image: APR
Green MPs meet students Green Party MPs Ricardo Menendez March and Teanau Tuiono met with West Papuan students last week.
The Greens have asked the government for a scholarship fund to support those West Papuan students impacted by this funding decision.
They are also seeking a residency pathway for West Papuan students whose welfare is impacted on as a result of their scholarship fund being cut.
Additionally, they have asked the government to ensure students from West Papua remain safely housed in affordable accommodation because many students are on the verge of termination by their landlords.
The Greens were awaiting a response from the government.
All the West Papuan students, the recipients of the Papua provincial foreign scholarship in New Zealand, have not received their allowance and living costs since January.
“We have been receiving a lot of pressure from landlords and property owners. Some students have received a final warning from the owners,” Ikinia said.
“I still don’t know what is going to happen if we don’t pay the rent. For instance, I received the final warning email today.”
He thanked AUT for understanding his plight.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Samoa’s total number of active covid-19 cases has increased to 196 with the government confirming 192 cases in Upolu and 4 cases in Savai’i.
The Government Press Secretariat’s community transmission update, which was distributed to the local media today, advised that health authorities had identified 85 new community cases by 2pm Sunday.
The new community cases, when added to the 15 imported active cases, pushes Samoa’s total active cases to 196.
The Ministry of Health confirmed that a total of 2207 tests were carried out since 18 March 2022 in six designated covid-19 screening sites, in addition to tests conducted at health facilities.
Out of the 181 active community cases reported, 62 positive cases were confirmed from the six screening sites with 119 cases confirmed in health facilities.
The Red Cross Headquarters at Tuanaimato screening site has so far recorded the highest percentage of positive cases at 47 percent of total covid-19 positive cases confirmed, according to the Press Secretariat.
The ministry has also identified 428 close contacts who are currently under investigation.
Summary of cases A summary of the statistics provided by the Press Secretariat is that there are 192 active cases in Upolu and 4 in Savai’i with both Manono-Tai and Apolima-Tai still recording zero cases since the first community case was recorded last Thursday.
Current active imported cases stand at 15 (including 3 frontline workers); active community cases total 181; while those currently in the isolation ward at the Tupua Tamasese Meaole National Hospital at Moto’otua total 11.
According to the Press Secretariat update, there are currently no covid-19 positive cases in the national hospital’s intensive care unit.
The number of community cases are expected to increase following the detection of the country’s first community case last Thursday.
The authorities are yet to ascertain where the individual picked up the infection, as she has been a resident in Apia and did not travel abroad after her arrival in Samoa.
On Saturday, the ministry uploaded an instructional video onto its official Facebook page to show families how they could safely manage home isolation for a family member who tested positive for covid-19 in their own homes.
Impact being felt The publishing of this instructional video confirmed Samoa’s health apparatus was beginning to feel the impact of the rise in covid-19 cases and now sees home isolation as an alternative to managed isolation in hospitals.
Lalomanu District Hospital’s first community case, which was recorded on Saturday when a man went in and got tested to return positive results, is now in isolation at home with his family which include children.
Staff at the district hospital told the Samoa Observer that he got sick and began to show symptoms of covid-19 after his return to the village from Apia the previous weekend.
Alexander Rheeney is an editor (development) with the Samoa Observer. Republished with permission.
He told RNZ Morning Report that looking around the world other countries did not go straight up and down with their peaks and New Zealand would be at risk of “yo-yoing around” if vaccine passes and other public health interventions were removed too soon.
Vaccine passes should be retained until it was clear that the omicron outbreak was just about over, he said.
‘We’re at the top’ “We’re at the top at the moment. It makes absolutely no sense to remove any effective public health measures when we’re still at the top.
“It’s crazy. I think it’s political nonsense to be pushing to take them away now.”
Professor Jackson said more than 1 million New Zealanders still needed to get their booster. As well, the unvaccinated were twice as likely to catch covid-19, three times as likely to transmit it than fully boosted people and five times more likely to be in hospital.
“We’re not over it yet … those relatively small numbers of people, when you do all of those multiplications, they are sufficient to overwhelm our health system.”
He referred to what was happening in the UK and parts of Australia where there were rising case numbers.
“I know there’s huge pressure to take away the vaccine passes but I think it’s a mistake.”
Professor Jackson said it was business which forced the government to introduce vaccine mandates and he did not believe they were hugely in favour of taking them away now.
“I think this is politicking.”
Makes no sense It did not make sense to change the traffic light setting in the next few days either.
“We’ve got more people in hospital today than we’ve ever had. We’ve got more deaths than we’ve ever had.
“It just doesn’t make any sense to be relaxing public health measures that have proven to be incredibly effective at the peak of an outbreak.”
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told Morning Report that the traffic light system must be “no more restrictive” than needed and mandates would not be as necessary after the first omicron wave.
The changes will mark the biggest domestic shake up to covid-19 restrictions since omicron arrived on Aotearoa’s shores.
“We know that in the future we’re likely to have have additional waves of omicron… We’re already seeing that in other countries,” Ardern said.
“So let’s make sure we get the covid protection framework, that traffic light system, right for the future.
“We want it to be no more restrictive than it needs to be, so if there are areas we can pare it back, we will.”
She said that with a highly vaccinated population the government believed mandates and vaccine passes would no longer be as necessary once the omicron outbreak had peaked.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
It seems not a day goes by without learning someone in our inner circle of family, friends and colleagues has covid. When we ask how unwell our acquaintance is, the responses vary from “they’re really crook” to “you wouldn’t even know they had it”.
Given the ubiquitous presence of this highly infectious coronavirus in our community and the high rate of asymptomatic illness, those who have not been diagnosed with covid might wonder, “how would I know if I had been infected?”
And, “does it matter if I have?”.
How covid is diagnosed Most people know they’ve had covid because they had a fever or upper respiratory tract symptoms and/or were exposed to an infected person AND had a swab test (PCR or rapid antigen) that detected the covid virus (SARS-CoV-2) in the upper airway.
At the beginning of 2022, many people with consistent symptoms or high-risk exposures were not able to access PCRs or RATs to confirm their diagnosis, but instead presumed themselves positive and quarantined.
It is possible to diagnose past infection in those who never tested positive. A blood test can look for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (also known as immunoglobulins). When we are infected with SARS-CoV-2, our immune system launches a precision counter strike by producing antibodies against viral targets, specifically the Spike (S) and Nucleocapsid (N) proteins.
Covid vaccination induces a similar immune response against the S protein only. The S antibody “neutralises” the invader by preventing the virus from attaching to human cells.
These antibodies can be detected within one to three weeks after infection and persist for at least six months — potentially much longer. A blood test that shows antibodies to S and N proteins indicates someone has been previously infected. Detection of antibodies to the S protein only indicates vaccination (but not infection).
The problem with antibody tests Before you rush off to get a covid antibody test, there are a few notes of caution. There is still much to learn about the characteristics of the immune response to covid infection.
Not everyone mounts a detectable antibody response following infection and levels can decline to undetectable levels after several months in some people.
Because there are other circulating seasonal coronaviruses (such as those that cause the common cold), tests may also pick up antibodies to non-SARS-CoV-2 strains, leading to “false positive” results.
Commercial and public hospital pathology labs can perform SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing, but the interpretation of results should be undertaken carefully.
So, antibody testing should really only be done when there’s a good reason to: say, when confirming past infection or effectiveness of vaccination is important for the current care of an individual.
Diagnosing a post-infectious complication or eligibility for a specific treatment, for example. It could also be useful for contact tracing or for assessing the background population rate of infection.
Antibody testing a population “Seroprevalence studies” test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in repositories of stored blood that are representative of the general population, such as from a blood bank. This data helps to understand the true extent of covid infection and vaccination status in the community (and informs our assessment of population susceptibility to future infection and reinfection). It’s more useful than daily reported case numbers, which are skewed towards symptomatic individuals and those with access to swab testing.
New research from the World Health Organisation, which is yet to be reviewed by other scientists, reported the results of a meta-analysis of over 800 seroprevalence studies performed around the world since 2020. They estimated that by July 2021, 45.2 percent of the global population had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies due to past infection or vaccination, eight times the estimate (5.5 percent) from a year earlier.
There are plans to conduct fresh seroprevalence studies in Australia in the coming year, which will update local data and help us understand to what extent the omicron wave has washed through the population.
Even after ‘mild’ cases, a new study by this @CurtinUni expert finds “long COVID” symptoms may persist. This includes “brain fog”, fatigue, and problems with concentration and memory. https://t.co/4lckYrks0Y
Does it matter if I have had covid and didn’t know? For most people, knowing your covid infection status is unlikely to be more than a topic of dinnertime conversation.
While some studies have pointed to a less robust and durable antibody response following mild or asymptomatic infection compared with severe illness, it is not known how this influences protection from reinfection. Certainly, the knowledge we have antibodies from past infection should not deter us from being fully up-to-date with covid vaccination, which remains the best protection against severe illness.
There are reports of people with mild or asymptomatic covid infection developing ‘long covid’ — persistent or relapsing symptoms that last several months after initial infection. Symptoms can include shortness of breath, physical and mental fatigue, exercise intolerance, headaches, and muscle and joint pain.
However, the likelihood of developing this condition appears higher in those who suffer a heavier initial bout of covid illness. This might be linked with higher viral load at that time.
Bottom line As we enter the third year of the covid pandemic and given that up to one in three infections may be asymptomatic, it is likely many of us have been infected without knowing it.
If you are experiencing lingering fatigue, brain fog or other symptoms that could be long covid, you should talk to your GP. Otherwise, knowing our covid infection status is unlikely to be of much practical benefit. Antibody testing should be reserved for specific medical or public health indications.
Being up-to-date with covid vaccination is still our best defence against severe illness moving forward.
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: Is it time for Labour to introduce public dental care?
Dental care is out of the financial reach of a large proportion of our population. At the moment about half of the public put off trips to the dentist due to the burden of paying in a private system.
With the Labour Government currently struggling to enact a programme of transformation, risking the loss of its traditional working class constituency, perhaps it’s time for it to introduce their promised free dental care for adults. Health Minister Andrew Little could fold dental services into the public health system, fixing the historic anomaly in which dentistry has been treated as separate from the rest of the health system.
Such a merger would cost Grant Robertson’s Budget a hefty amount, but making dental care universally available would be of immense benefit to poor and ordinary New Zealanders. This could be seen as something of a reward for the hard work in carrying the country through the Covid crisis, and as some sort of partial justice to balance the explosion of inequality that has resulted from Covid policies. It is estimated that about $1 trillion has been transferred to the wealthy in the last two years.
Such a transformative policy would be a true legacy for this Government, which must be looking especially attractive now, as the likelihood of Ardern’s administration being a two-term government increases. Covid aside, Labour and Jacinda Ardern have nothing much else for the history books.
In fact, making adult dental visits free is Labour Party policy – it was adopted by the party in 2018. Since then, the various ministers of health and the Prime Minister have dragged their feet, seemingly embarrassed by the lack of progress in implementing the policy. At the last election, Ardern said that it would be too expensive, saying “We need to prioritise” blaming the cost of the pandemic.
At the same time the Government fought to keep the estimated cost of better public dental care secret. There was an attempt to bury a Ministry of Health report which showed that full universal dental care would cost $648 million a year. The report also indicated that if the Government simply extended free dental care for children until the age of 28, the cost would be only $96 million.
Instead, Labour promised that, if it was re-elected, emergency dental grants for beneficiaries would be increased from $300 to $1000. Even this has not been implemented.
The health portfolio has shifted from David Clark to Chris Hipkins to Andrew Little, and each new health minister has to make excuses for not fixing a historic anomaly that is causing serious damage to New Zealanders’ health.
And the crisis is getting worse. There are continued reports of skyrocketing emergency admissions to hospital of people who can’t afford to see the dentist for minor problems that turn into major ones. Last year, more than 6000 people went to hospital emergency departments for problems that should have been fixed earlier by a dentist.
A New Zealand Medical Journal study released last week showed that nearly one per cent of emergency department patients turn up because they can’t access dental care, and that this is putting a strain on ED resources.
The notion of public dental health has also just received a push with the publication this week of a cover story in the April edition of North & South titled “The Shocking State of Dental Care“, by Helen Glenny. You can read an 800-word preview of this online.
This must-read article explains that when New Zealand’s public health system was established, lobbyists for the private dental sector successfully pushed the Government to exclude dentistry from the system, so that they could carry on without competition. The compromise was to only fund public dental care for those under the age of 18.
The article argues that “Dental care in New Zealand is the gaping abyss in our health system.” It interviews dental health scholars who say free dental care for children has had a remarkable impact on lowering dental inequality. Prof Jonathan Broadbent at Otago University is quoted saying: “By the age of 26, a few short years after a publicly funded system finishes, [the inequalities] open up, and they open up really wide.”
Researchers say there are large returns to be made from government investment in public dental care. For example, the New Zealand Dental Association says “the government could expect $1.60 returned on every dollar spent. This would come from savings to DHBs by reducing oral health issues that have to be treated in hospitals – as well as the tax revenue from increased productivity, given the impact of dental problems on employment.”
Meanwhile, a 2018 recent study shows “dental inequality” in New Zealand is worse than in comparable countries such as Australia, Canada and the United States.
So is it time to get rid of the user-pays system, and bring it under the public hospital system? It would certainly be popular. A recent Colmar Brunton survey showed that 64 per cent of the public backs free dental care.
The public are very happy to pay taxes for other parts of the welfare system to be universal – especially other elements of primary health care – and they would surely welcome transformation in this area when Andrew Little carries out his health reforms. Further reading on dental health care
Barry Soper (Herald): Why can’t this Government make a decision and announce it at once?
Looking at the Government’s announcement on the future of Covid mandates and passes, Newstalk ZB’s Barry Soper bemoans: “yet again there will be an upcoming announcement of an announcement on Wednesday, from the announcement of the announcement made after Cabinet today.”
Jason Walls (Newstalk ZB): Cost of living to dethrone Covid as the most important issue to Kiwis
Back in October surveys showed that 32% of the public thought Covid was the most important issue facing New Zealand, and only 1% thought it was cost of living. Now both are on about 7%, and the “economy” is on 16%.
Chris Trotter (Daily Blog): Democracy’s a drag
The public’s view of democracy has been steadily tarnished over recent decades, and Chris Trotter reviews why this has occurred and where it might take us.
Emile Donovan (RNZ): Teaching Aotearoa’s history
Explaining the rollout of the new history teaching curriculum, and the contentious issues of explaining colonisation.
Simon Wilson (Herald): 7 big things I’d like to see in Grant Robertson’s budget (paywalled)
Here’s what the Herald’s Simon Wilson would do in the upcoming Government Budget: Take the GST off vegetables and fruit; Supersize the prefab housing sector; Health system reform; Pour money into poor schools; Vastly extend the public transport subsidy; Free e-bikes; Tax relief where it’s needed
Phil Pennington (RNZ): ‘No transparency’ on DHBs’ contractor spending
About half a billion dollars is spent on contractors in the public health system, but research shows that there are some “big holes and major discrepancies” in how this spending is reported.
Jane Patterson (RNZ): Where are the promised inquiries into the Parliament protest?
RNZ’s political editor reports on the different views on who should be reviewing the recent unprecedented protest outside Parliament and how it was handled by authorities.
Glen Scanlon (Stuff): Racist and cultural insults offend us most
The chief executive of the Broadcasting Standards Authority reports on survey evidence showing a significant decrease in public tolerance for racial and cultural insults.
Chris Trotter (Interest): Holding National together
How can National deal with its very different factions of social liberals and conservatives?
Danyl McLauchlan (Spinoff): On Too Much Money, a book about what divides us
There’s been a shift back to concerns about class and inequality. Danyl McLauchlan reviews Max Rashbroke’s latest publication on wealth: “Too Much Money”.
In 2019, my colleagues and I discovered spooky glowing rings in the sky using CSIRO’s ASKAP radio telescope in Western Australia. The rings were unlike anything seen before, and we had no idea what they were.
We dubbed them odd radio circles, or ORCs. They continue to puzzle us, but new data from South Africa’s MeerKAT telescope are helping us solve the mystery.
We can now see each ORC is centred on a galaxy too faint to be detected earlier. The circles are most likely enormous explosions of hot gas, about a million light years across, emanating from the central galaxy.
Our paper showing these results has been peer-reviewed and accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
A closer look
We now have beautiful images of one of these rings taken with South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope, which shows the ORC in stunning detail.
The MeerKAT (green/grey) image of the odd radio circle ORC1 superimposed on an optical image from the Dark Energy Survey. Created by Jayanne English using data from MeerKAT and the Dark Energy Survey.
For example, MeerKAT sees a small blob of radio emission in the centre of the ring, which is coincident with a distant galaxy. We are now fairly certain this galaxy generated the ORC.
We see these central galaxies in other ORCs too, all at vast distances from Earth. We now think that these rings surround distant galaxies about a billion light years away, which means the rings are enormous – around a million light years across.
From modelling the faint cloudy radio emission that MeerKAT detects within the rings, it seems the rings are the edges of a spherical shell surrounding the galaxy, like a blast wave from a giant explosion in the galaxy. They look like rings instead of orbs only because the sphere appears brighter at the edges where there is more material along the line of sight, much like a soap
bubble.
Artist’s impression of odd radio circles exploding from a central galaxy. It is thought to take the rings 1 billion years to reach the size we see them today. The rings are so big (millions of light years across), they’ve expanded past other galaxies. Sam Moorfield/CSIRO
Energetic electrons
MeerKAT has also mapped the polarisation of the radio waves, which tells us about the magnetic field in the ring. Our polarisation image shows a magnetic field running along the edge of the sphere.
This suggests that an explosion in the central galaxy caused a hot blast to collide with the tenuous gas outside the galaxy. The resulting shock wave then energised electrons in the gas, making them spiral around the magnetic field, generating radio waves.
Lines around the edge of the ORC show the direction of the magnetic field. A circular magnetic field like this indicates it has been compressed by a shock wave from the central galaxy. Created by Larry Rudnick from MeerKAT data.
One big surprise from the MeerKAT result is that within the ring we see several curved filaments of radio emission. We still don’t know what these are.
But we do know that the sphere is so huge that it has swallowed up other galaxies as it blasted out from the central galaxy. Perhaps the filaments are trails of gas ripped off the galaxies by the passing shock wave?
Colliding black holes or the birth of millions of stars?
The big question, of course, is what caused the explosion. We are exploring two possibilities.
One is that they were caused by the merging of two supermassive black holes. Such a “merger event” releases an enormous amount of energy, enough to generate the ORC.
Another possibility is that the central galaxy went through a “starburst” event, in which millions of stars were suddenly born from the gas in the galaxy. Such a starburst causes hot gas to blast out from the galaxy, causing a spherical shock wave.
Both black hole mergers and starburst events are rare, which accounts for why ORCs are so rare (only five have so far been reported).
The puzzle of ORCs is not solved yet, and we still have much to learn about these mysterious rings in the sky. So far, we have only detected them with radio telescopes – we see nothing from the rings at optical, infrared, or X-ray wavelengths.
Getting a better view
To find out more, we need a tool even more sensitive than MeerKAT and ASKAP. Fortunately, the global astronomical community is building just such an observatory – the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), an international effort with telescopes in South Africa and Australia.
ASKAP and MeerKAT were built to test the sites and technology for the SKA. Quite apart from their role as precursors for the SKA, both telescopes have been hugely successful in their own right, making major discoveries in their first years of operation.
Their success in discovering and studying ORCs therefore bodes well for the SKA.
The two telescopes are also beautifully complementary – ASKAP is superb at surveying large areas of sky and finding new objects, while MeerKAT is unrivalled for zooming in on those objects and studying them with higher sensitivity and resolution.
The SKA promises to surpass both. No doubt the SKA will find many more ORCs, and will also be able to probe them to find out what they are telling us about the lifecycle of galaxies.
Many commentators have already debunked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s absurd claim to be waging war to “de-nazify” Ukraine.
Some have pointed out the far right received only 2% of the vote in Ukraine’s 2019 parliamentary elections, far less than in most of Europe. Others have drawn attention to Ukraine’s Jewish president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and the efforts of the Ukrainian state to protect minorities like Crimean Tatars and LGBTQ+ people, who are subject to brutal persecution in Russia.
What has received less coverage is the Putin regime’s own record of collaboration with far-right extremists. Even as Russian diplomats condemned “fascists” in the Baltic states and Kremlin propagandists railed against imaginary “Ukronazis” in power in Kyiv, the Russian state was cultivating its own homegrown Nazis.
The origins of this relationship date to the late 1990s, when Russia was shaken by a wave of racist violence committed by neo-Nazi skinhead gangs. After Putin’s accession to the presidency in 2000, his regime exploited this development in two ways.
First, it used the neo-Nazi threat to justify the adoption of anti-extremism legislation, a longstanding demand of some Russian liberals. Ultimately, this legislation would be used to prosecute Russian democrats.
Second, the Kremlin launched “managed nationalism”, an attempt to co-opt and mobilise radical nationalist militants, including neo-Nazis, as a counterweight to an emerging anti-Putin coalition of democrats and leftist radicals.
This cooperation expanded in the aftermath of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004. To insulate Russia against the contagion of pro-democracy protest, the Kremlin transformed Moving Together into a more ambitious project called “Nashi”, or “Ours”.
As part of its preparations to confront a potential democratic uprising in Russia, Nashi enlisted football gang members, whose subculture overlapped with the neo-Nazi underground.
During 2005, Nashi’s thugs staged a series of raids on anti-Putin youth groups. The most violent attack, which left four left-wing activists in hospital, led to the arrest of the assailants. They were released after a visit to the police station from Nikita Ivanov, the Kremlin functionary who supervised the regime’s loyalist youth organisations.
The resulting scandal provoked a reconfiguration of “managed nationalism”. While Nashi distanced itself from football gangs, its radical militants migrated to two rival Kremlin proxies, the nationalist “Young Russia” group and the anti-immigration “Locals” group. These organisations became bridges between the neo-Nazi subculture and the Kremlin.
Members of the pro-Kremlin Nashi movement celebrate the victory of Putin’s party in parliamentary election in 2007. MISHA JAPARIDZE/AP
Neo-Nazi leaders implicated in killings
As I demonstrated in a recent study of the Kremlin’s relationship with Russian fascists, these linkages made possible a bold experiment to create a pro-Putin neo-Nazi movement.
In 2008-09, the Kremlin was threatened by Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny’s efforts to build an anti-Putin coalition of democrats and radical nationalists in Russia. In response, the Kremlin began to work with Russkii Obraz (“Russian Image”, or “RO” for short), a hardcore neo-Nazi group best known for its slick journal and its band, Hook from the Right.
With the assistance of Kremlin supervisors, RO attacked nationalists who were abandoning the skinhead subculture for Navalny’s anti-Putin coalition. In return, RO was granted privileged access to public space and the media.
The problem for the Kremlin was that RO’s leader, Ilya Goryachev, was a fervent supporter of the neo-Nazi underground, the skinheads who committed hundreds of racist murders in the second half of the 2000s. The authorities turned a blind eye to RO’s production of a two-hour internet “documentary” titled Russian Resistance, which celebrated these killers as patriotic heroes and called for armed struggle against the regime.
But they could not ignore the arrest on murder charges of Nikita Tikhonov, an ex-skinhead and cofounder of RO. Tikhonov was the leader of BORN (“Fighting Organisation of Russian Nationalists”), a terrorist group that committed a string of murders of public figures and antifa militants.
The police investigation revealed that Goryachev regarded BORN and RO as the armed and political platforms of a neo-Nazi insurgency, on the model of the IRA and Sinn Féin in Ireland and Northern Ireland.
The adverse publicity wrecked the careers of some of the Kremlin’s Nazi promoters, but veterans of RO flourished in the propaganda institutions of Putin’s increasingly autocratic regime.
One of them is Anna Trigga, who worked for the Internet Research Agency, the trolling factory that interfered in the 2016 US presidential election and tried to foment anti-Muslim hatred in Australia. Another is Andrei Gulyutin, editor of the website Ridus, an important platform of pro-Putin Russian nationalism.
Promoting neo-Nazis overseas
No less important is the role of neo-Nazis and other right-wing figures in Russia’s onslaught against Ukraine.
Today, RO’s Dmitrii Steshin, a celebrated war correspondent for a mass circulation tabloid, disseminates lies blaming Ukrainian false-flag operations for atrocities committed by Russian forces.
The Kremlin’s cultivation of domestic neo-Nazis is matched by its promotion of neo-Nazis in the West. Some have amplified anti-Western conspiracy theories as “experts” on RT, the Kremlin’s cable TV propaganda channel.
Others have served the Kremlin as “monitors” who applaud the conduct of fraudulent elections. Meanwhile, Rinaldo Nazzaro, an American, has been quietly running The Base, the international neo-Nazi terrorist organisation, from an apartment in St Petersburg.
Putin’s weaponisation of neo-Nazis was always a risky strategy, but it was not irrational. Unlike mainstream nationalists, who tend to support the idea of free elections, neo-Nazis reject democratic institutions and the very idea of human equality. For a dictator dismantling democracy and constructing an authoritarian regime, they were ideal accomplices.
If you’ve had a skin cancer check lately, you might have been told to consider adding a daily vitamin B3 pill to your skin safety regime (hopefully, you already use sunscreen, wear sun-smart clothes and avoid sun exposure in the middle of the day).
So, what is this vitamin and why is it sometimes recommended as a way reduce skin cancer risk?
Australia is the skin cancer capital of the world, where two-thirds of people can expect to develop some form of skin cancer by retirement age. It is the most common type of cancer and also exerts the costliest burden on the health-care system. Anything that can help minimise the burden of skin cancer is worth considering.
Anything that can help minimise the burden of skin cancer is worth considering. Shutterstock
Supplementing your diet with with vitamin B3 may benefit the skin
The key chemical you need to know about is called nicotinamide (also known as niacinamide).
Nicotinamide or niacinamide is a variant of vitamin B3. It’s found in dietary sources such as meat, fish, nuts, grains and mushrooms. It is the precursor of nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD+), essential for many physiological reactions that help cells obtain energy.
If you don’t get enough vitamin B3, you can get the disease pellagra. Pellagra affects organs with high cellular energy requirements such as the brain, skin and gut, manifesting with what medical professionals sometimes call the “4 Ds” – dermatitis, diarrhoea, dementia and death.
Recently, emerging evidence suggests supplementing your diet with with vitamin B3 may have a range of benefits, particularly for the skin.
Nicotinamide has been shown to replenish cellular energy, enhance DNA repair, act as an anti-inflammatory and modulate some of the local immunosuppression caused by ultraviolet radiation.
Much of the work in this field has been led by Professor Diona Damian, Head of Dermatology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney. Building on from her pioneering laboratory work in the field, she went on to lead the landmark ONTRAC trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2015.
In this phase 3, double-blind, randomised controlled study, 386 patients at high risk of skin cancer took either nicotinamide 500mg twice daily or a placebo for 12 months. The results were striking: the rate of new non-melanoma skin cancer was 23% lower in the nicotinamide group than in the placebo group.
Similar improvements have been observed in a small studies of renal transplant patients – a group well known to be at increased risk of developing skin cancer.
Nicotinamide is also becoming increasingly employed in cosmetics and skincare products. Several small clinical studies have demonstrated niacinamide may help improve wrinkles, excess pigmentation, redness, sallowness and elasticity of the skin.
Aged skin has less nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide in it. The theory is supplementing with nicotinamide may help replenish these levels, which then helps repair cellular dysfunction.
Taking niacinamide supplements
Nicotinamide is a well-tolerated supplement. It is easily available from most pharmacies or supermarkets, costing less than 10c per capsule.
You should be aware different formulations of vitamin B3 exist over the counter, such as niacin (which can cause profound flushing upon consumption). It is better to seek out the niacinamide formulation.
The optimum long-term niacinamide dose is not known, but given the ONTRAC study used a regime of 500mg twice daily, this is generally what is recommended.
Its role in children is less clear. It appears to be safe, but the therapeutic benefit offered by niacinamide in paediatric patients is yet to be determined.
Based on the scientific literature to date, it is reasonable to recommend niacinamide for people at high risk of skin cancer.
It is, however, is only one of the pillars of sun safety. Using sunscreen and sun-smart clothing, avoiding sun exposure during the middle of the day and being aware of new or changing spots on the skin all remain crucial.
To our horror, another mass coral bleaching event may be striking the Great Barrier Reef, with water temperatures reaching up to 3℃ higher than average in some places. This would be the sixth such event since the late 1990s, and the fourth since 2016.
It comes as a monitoring mission from the United Nations arrives in Queensland today to inspect the reef and consider listing the World Heritage site as “in danger”.
As coral reef scientists, we’ve seen firsthand how the Great Barrier Reef is nearing its tipping point, beyond which the reef will lose its function as a viable ecosystem. This is not only due to climate change exacerbating marine heatwaves, but also higher ocean acidity, loss of oxygen, pollution, and more.
Scientists are at our own tipping points, too. The reef is suffering environmental conditions so extreme, we’re struggling to simulate these scenarios in our laboratories. Even though Australia has world-class facilities, we are proverbially beating our heads against the wall each year as conditions worsen.
It’s getting harder for scientists to predict how these conditions will affect individual species, let alone the health and biodiversity of reef ecosystems. But let’s explore what we do know.
Coral bleaching seen due to the current marine heatwave. Grumpy Turtle Films, Author provided
What is coral bleaching and why does it happen?
Corals are animals that live in a mutually beneficial partnership with tiny single-celled algae called “zooxanthellae” (but scientists call them zooks).
Zooks benefit corals by giving them energy and colour, and in return the coral gives them a home in the coral tissue. Under stress, such as in too-hot water, the algae produce toxins instead of nutrition, and the coral ejects them.
Without the algae, the corals begin to starve. They lose their vibrant colours, revealing the bright white limestone skeleton through the coral tissue.
If stress conditions abate, the algae can return and coral can recover over months. But if stress persists, the corals can die – the skeletons begin to crumble, removing vital habitat for other species.
Water temperatures reaching up to 3℃ higher than average in some places. Grumpy Turtle Films, Author provided
We had hoped for a reprieve
Scientists and managers had hoped for a reprieve this year. Much of the Great Barrier Reef was in the early stages of recovery following the 2016, 2017, and 2020 bleaching events.
In the tropical paradise of northern Queensland, we’ve been wishing for cloudy days and cooler temperatures, hoping for rain and even storms (but not big ones). These conditions typically come with La Niña – a natural climate phenomenon associated with cooler, wetter weather, which has now happened two years in a row.
But despite these effects of La Niña, climate change meant 2021 was one of the hottest years on record. Now, at the tail end of Australia’s summer, the reef is experiencing another marine heatwave and is tipping over the bleaching threshold.
There’s not enough time for coral to recover between events. Even the most robust corals require nearly a decade to recover. There is also no clear evidence corals are adapting to the new conditions.
To make matters worse, climate change is supercharging the atmosphere and making even the natural variations of La Niña and its counterpart El Niño more variable and less predictable. This means Australia will not only endure more intense heatwaves, but also flooding, droughts and storms.
At least 1,625 species of fishes live in the Great Barrier Reef. Grumpy Turtle Films, Author provided
How will this hurt marine life?
A healthy Great Barrier Reef is home to at least 1,625 species of fishes, 3,000 species of molluscs, 630 species of echinoderms (such as sea stars and urchins), and the list goes on.
Marine life in coral reefs have three options in warming waters: adapt, move, or die.
Most shark species can’t adapt to warmer waters fast enough to survive. Grumpy Turtle Films, Author provided
1. Can they adapt?
Over generations, species can make changes at the molecular level – their DNA – so they’re more suited to or can adapt to new environmental conditions. This evolution may be possible for species with fast generation times, such as damselfishes.
But reef species with slower generation times can’t keep pace with the rate we’re changing their habitat conditions. This includes the iconic potato cod and most sharks, which take a around a decade or longer to reach sexual maturity.
2. Can they move?
Some species of reef fishes may start moving to cooler waters before the harmful effects of warming take hold.
But this option isn’t available to all species, such as those that depend on a particular habitat, certain resources, or protection. This includes coral, as well as coral-dwelling gobies and several damselfishes.
The third option is one we don’t like to talk about, but is becoming more of a threat.
If marine life can’t adapt or move , we’ll see extinctions at a local scale, total extinction of some species, and dramatic declines in fish populations.
UNESCO representatives are visiting the reef to assess its World Heritage status. Grumpy Turtle Films, Author provided
Listing the reef as ‘in danger’
While the reef is bleaching, UNESCO delegates have arrived in Queensland to monitor its health, as the World Heritage site is once again being considered for an “in danger” listing.
The visit will likely include seeing the bleaching currently occurring, the damage to the reef still apparent from past events, and they’ll hear firsthand from scientists and managers who’ve witnessed these impacts.
Listing the Great Barrier Reef as “in danger” would raise the alert level for the international community and hopefully inspire climate action.
Reducing the major source of stress the reef faces – climate change – will require ongoing collaborations between Australian and international governments, with work on local management issues also involving business owners, reef managers, Traditional Owners, scientists, civil society groups, and other stakeholders.
We’ve known for a long time the most important step to save the reef: cutting emissions to stop global warming. Indeed, future projections of coral bleaching from the 1990s suggested that frequent and severe events would begin from the late-2010s – and they’ve been alarmingly prescient.
The Great Barrier Reef’s continuing demise is one of the most visible examples of how our inaction as humans has profound and perhaps irreversible consequences. We are rapidly accelerating toward the tipping point.
Jodie L. Rummer receives funding from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.
Scott Heron receives funding from Australian Research Council and NASA ROSES Ecological Forecasting.
The sad passing of Kimberley Kitching and Shane Warne (both 52) from suspected cardiac conditions has put a spotlight on the causes of heart disease.
In recent days, attention has turned to the issue of psychological stress in the context of allegations of workplace bullying as a potential contributor to Ms Kitching’s physical health before her death. Ms Kitching’s ALP colleagues have strongly denied bullying claims.
But we are learning more and more about how mental stress can endanger our hearts.
Heart disease is more common in those who experience extreme stress
Psychological factors are under-recognised risk factors for heart attack when compared to more established ones like high cholesterol or blood pressure. Yet centuries of evidence show the intricate link between the heart and mind.
Historical accounts dating back to the 17th century show heart conditions were more prevalent in people exposed to extreme stress and trauma, like those serving in the military compared to the civil population.
Much of this excess burden was thought to be due to rheumatic fever or heavy labour. But studies of contemporary, community-based veterans show stress plays a key role. Veterans with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have a greater risk of developing heart conditions like heart failure when compared to those without PTSD.
Further evidence comes from people experiencing acute distress following natural disasters or the loss of a loved one. The latter can lead to Takotsubo syndrome (an acute heart failure syndrome) also known as “broken heart syndrome” which is especially common in women.
What our research shows
Our recent paper, presenting research led by Deakin University’s Food and Mood Centre’s Meghan Hockey, found it is not just exposure to extreme stress that can increase one’s risk of having a heart event.
The study followed 195,531 American adults over 5.9 years. We found people reporting mild, moderate and severe levels of psychological stress died prematurely from cardiovascular disease (usually stroke or heart attack).
What was striking was that the association worked in a dose-response manner – the risk of someone dying from a heart condition increased with the severity of psychological stress (22% for mild stress, 44% for moderate and 79% for severe levels, respectively). This association remained even after we considered other factors like age, gender, ethnicity, education, income, body mass index, physical activity, smoking and alcohol intake.
Job stress increases your chance of having a heart attack
Workplace conditions – how much control you have at work, long working hours, shift work, discrimination, bullying and sedentary activity – can shape your cardiovascular and emotional responses over the course of a working day. This, in turn, affects your risk of heart disease.
Chronic exposure to these forms of stress can influence your “fight or flight response” causing a release of cortisol and an inflammatory response that can accelerate the thickening or hardening of the arteries that lead to heart attacks, called the “atherosclerotic process”.
While there is evidence some of the association between stress and heart disease may be explained by behavioural factors like poor diet, smoking or drinking that might be used as stress coping mechanisms, research shows an independent relationship exists between both acute and chronic psychosocial stressors and cardiac disease.
Often, the assumption is that the responsibility for preventing heart disease rests solely with an individual. But given the sources of stress and trauma may be beyond an individual’s control, it is important we consider the environment in which we work, age and play when we think about our heart health.
Scientists have calculated 5% of new cardiovascular events (first hospitalisation from heart attack or stroke) could potentially be prevented if workplace bullying was eliminated. Given there are approximately 161 cases of heart attack or unstable angina in Australia each day, this is not insignificant.
In 2015, the American Heart Association launched a Worksite Health Achievement Index by which employers can benchmark their practices related to heart disease prevention.
Such a tool goes beyond assessing individual employees’ health based on conventional risk factors to consider policy, programs and environmental factors that can improve the heart health of their employees. The benefit to employers is likely to be happier, healthier, more productive employees. Of course, rigorous research is needed to confirm this.
Addressing workplace bullying could save lives. Shutterstock
Seeking professional support via your GP, psychologist, publicly available services like beyond blue or employee assistance programs to help manage stress is critical.
Promisingly, there is evidence people who receive comprehensive mental health care over one year (antidepressants, therapy) halve their risk of having a cardiac event over the next eight years compared to those who do not.
We are currently developing clinical guidelines on behalf of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry that aim to provide clinicians with evidence-based recommendations for treating patients with depression that include considerations around employment, environmental, social and lifestyle targets (due for publication mid 2022).
This type of approach is likely to have both mental health and cardiovascular benefits which in turn benefit individuals, families, businesses and society.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Adrienne O’Neil receives funding from the National Health & Medical Research Council
On the last day of his 11 years as chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), Rod Sims announced the commission is bringing a “world-first” claim against Meta (owner of Facebook) in the Federal Court for false or misleading conduct.
The ACCC alleges Meta failed to take sufficient steps to stop displaying scam cryptocurrency ads on Facebook in 2019, even after receiving complaints. Sims said the ads led to more than A$650,000 in losses for one consumer.
“Those visits to landing pages from ads generate substantial revenue for Facebook,” Sims said.
Almost a decade ago, the ACCC failed in an arguably similar misleading conduct claim against Google. This time, however, the commission has some new arguments that focus on Facebook’s business of targeting ads at particular consumers.
If the ACCC succeeds, digital platforms would need to rethink their hands-off approach to the ad content they host. Especially when they help advertisers target individuals based on detailed profiling by both the platform and advertiser.
The relevant ads for cryptocurrencies and other investment schemes were published on Facebook in 2019. They contained links to fake media articles on other websites that made it look like well-known Australians were endorsing the promotions.
Some ads featured images of mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, businessman Dick Smith, television presenter David Koch and former New South Wales premier Mike Baird – but these individuals had no prior knowledge of or connection to the ads. Other celebrities from overseas have also found themselves associated with such schemes.
The ACCC says Meta failed to take sufficient steps to stop the ads, even after celebrities complained about the misleading conduct.
In February, Forrest launched criminal proceedings against Facebook in Australia for its part in the misleading ads. He has also brought civil proceedings against Facebook in California (where Meta’s headquarters are located). Both cases are yet to be heard.
Meta will likely argue it did not engage in any misleading conduct itself, because it was only passing on a communication from the advertiser to the consumer and did not endorse the representation. Essentially, the argument would be that Meta is much like your postie delivering mail, or a newspaper printing an ad – a “mere conduit” for the message.
Google succeeded with a similar argument in the High Court of Australia in 2013, after the ACCC brought a misleading conduct claim against it. In that case, advertisers bought ads on Google which misled consumers searching for a rival business.
For example, when consumers searched for a supplier via Google search (such as “Harvey World Travel”) the results page published “sponsored link” ads with a similar title (such as “Harvey Travel”), but which linked to the website of a rival advertiser instead (in this case, STA Travel).
The court found Google did not make the relevant representation itself, or endorse or adopt the advertisers’ representation. The advertisers set the sponsored link to run in response to the entry of certain search terms. Google was found to be a mere publisher, like a newspaper or radio broadcaster.
Why Meta’s targeted ad model makes this different
The problem for Meta is that Facebook is not comparable to your postie delivering the mail. Not unless your postie profiles you by checking out the car in your garage, the clothing brands on your washing line and the gas company billing you – and then makes money if you respond to the advertising material he helped to target you with based on this information.
In its marketing, Facebook boasts of its “targeting capabilities” and claims it can connect advertisers with Facebook audiences based on information including users’ online purchases and behaviour:
Facebook will automatically show your ads to people who are most likely to find your ads relevant.
It seems likely the ACCC will argue Meta’s conduct in displaying the ads could lead people into error, even if it did not make the representations itself. The ACCC’s claims focus on Meta’s control of the ad technology and its targeted ad business – similar to the arguments raised by Andrew Forrest in his cases.
The ACCC says Meta is involved with targeting ads at the consumers most likely to click on the ad, and that Meta makes revenue as a result of consumers responding to the ads. (Google engages in similar “behavioural advertising” in some of its ad businesses).
Saved by the fine print?
Meta will likely argue there is a contractual exclusion clause in Facebook’s Terms of Service which rules out its liability to consumers in these cases. One term in the fine print states:
We do not control or direct what people and others do or say, and we are not responsible for their actions or conduct […] or any content that they share (including […] unlawful and other objectionable content).
But this won’t necessarily save Meta from a claim under the Australian Consumer Law. In these cases, the court must assess the conduct as a whole, in light of all the relevant circumstances.
It could decide an exclusion clause obscured in the fine print is not prominent enough to offset the appearance that the ads were validated by Meta’s approval process.
The ACCC alleges Meta did, in fact, lead users to believe it would detect and prevent scams and promote safety on its platform. If it can prove certain false representations under the Australian Consumer Law, Meta could be fined either up to A$10 million, three times the value of the benefit Meta received, or 10% of its turnover in the 12 months prior (whichever is largest).
Katharine Kemp receives funding from The Allens Hub for Technology, Law and Innovation. She is a Member of the Advisory Board of the Future of Finance Initiative in India, and the Australian Privacy Foundation.
The Australian Greens have lobbed a large rock into the placid pool of economic policy by announcing a proposal for a “Liveable Income Guarantee”.
The policy would increase all income support payments – for those looking for work, studying full-time or unable to work because of age, disability or caring responsibilities – to A$88 a day (about $32,000 a year) from July 2023.
This payment level is based on the poverty line calculated by the Melbourne Institute. Increases to all payments would be indexed to changes to the poverty line. The policy would also scrap mutual obligation programs such as “work for the dole” and relax eligibility restrictions.
Currently welfare payments vary widely, with the age pension for a single person being about $70 a day, while JobSeeker is about $44 a day.
This is the first significant economic policy in the undeclared campaign for the next federal election campaign. Up to to this point it looked like there wouldn’t be much to talk about.
Apart from some sweeteners carefully targeted at marginal seats and voting blocs, and small-scale initiatives like Labor’s social housing program, the only significant new policy from either major party likely to follow the election is the “Stage 3” tax cuts legislated under the Turnbull government.
These cuts are supported by both the government and the opposition. Both major parties have also committed to “budget repair”, a euphemism for expenditure cuts, but are unlikely to provide any details until after the election.
COVID-19 changed the landscape
The Greens’ plan shares its name, and many of its design features, with a proposal put forward in July 2020 by Tim Dunlop, Elise Klein and myself.
We proposed this after the massive expansion of the JobSeeker program to deal with COVID-19 demonstrated Australia did have the resources to eliminate most sources of poverty when it was considered necessary to do so. We argued a liveable income guarantee would be an ideal way to make the achievements of JobSeeker permanent.
The Greens’ policy differs from our 2020 proposal in two main respects.
First, it is more generous, raising all benefits. The Parliamentary Budget Office has calculated this will cost about $43.7 billion in the first year, and $44.9 billion in the second.
On the other hand, we proposed expanding payment eligibility to people engaged in volunteering, community projects and artistic and creative activity. The Greens’ proposal maintains the existing set of benefit categories.
How to pay for liveable welfare payments
As debt and deficits have faded as a political point-scoring issue, the idea that all new spending programs need to be matched with other cuts or extra revenue has become less compelling.
But resources used for one public program can’t be used for other programs, or for private expenditure. So it’s important to ask what kinds of measures could offset the call on public resources proposed in the liveable income guarantee.
The option with the biggest impact would be to cancel or defer the Stage 3 tax cuts, which will cost an estimated $18-20 billion a year. That would offset nearly half the money spent on the liveable income guarantee.
The Greens have also pointed to tax measures they have previously proposed, including a billionaires tax and a corporate super-profits tax.
It has always hard to estimate how much revenue such measures would collect, given the capacity of wealthy individuals and corporations to rearrange their tax affairs. On the other hand, with improved global cooperation on tax, thanks mainly to initiatives from the OECD, there is more capacity to make billionaires and large corporations pay a fairer share of the costs of the society that supports them.
Another source of offsets could arise from what used to be called “tax expenditures” and are now referred to more obscurely as tax benchmark variations. These are tax concessions or exemptions applying to particular activities or classes of taxpayer.
These total about $150 billion a year according to the latest Treasury estimates. The biggest elements are concessions on capital gains tax and superannuation.
The Greens proposal would greatly improve the position of millions of Australians on low incomes at the expense of reducing the disposable incomes and wealth of the well-off, with a particular impact on the very rich.
Barring a complete revolution in Australian politics, there’s no chance the next election will lead to such a result, or even a serious move in that direction.
It is a striking commentary that the Greens’ Liveable Income Guarantee will be rejected by a government led by Scott Morrison, a self-declared conservative, and also by Anthony Albanese, a leader from the Labor Party faction still sometimes called the “socialist left”.
Based on current polls, the most that millions of Australins living in poverty can hope for is a Labor government in need of Green support raising benefits a little, and softening some of the most oppressive features of the current system.
But the point of an election is to debate and decide on the future direction of the country. By putting forward this bold initiative, the Greens are providing us the chance to have such a debate.
Other Greens proposals, like phasing out the use of coal, once seen as outside the realm of possibility, are now widely accepted. Similarly, the liveable income guarantee may make its way on to the policy agenda for the future.
John Quiggin has undertaken research on the design of a Liveable Income Guarantee, but has not received external funding for this work. He is not a member of any political party.
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: Labour needs to rediscover its political soul
In the last few days the Labour Government has come in for criticism for its panicked pandering to opinion polls. Last week it announced petrol tax cuts and reduced public transport fares. This was in response to pressure from opponents and the public who alleged the Government was out of touch on the cost of living crisis, and following a poll showing Labour behind National.
Likewise, the Government has decided to fast-forward the dismantling of the Covid protections framework – expect to see Covid passes and mandates being phased out. This all has the appearance of Labour choosing pragmatism over principle.
TVNZ’s Jack Tame has been scathing, telling his Newstalk ZB audience on Saturday that the recent petrol tax cuts were a kneejerk reaction: “The truth is, petrol taxes would never have been cut if Labour had been well ahead in last week’s poll. They saw the poll numbers. They freaked out. They dropped almost $400m to try and win back some popularity.” Tame argued that there are more targeted ways to relieve the cost of living crisis.
He calls the government’s actions “cowardly”, “cynical and reactionary”, concluding: “Once again, Jacinda Ardern’s Government has shown it’s more interested in doing what is popular than what is right.”
Tame’s point is that the petrol tax cuts went against the bigger and longer-term goal of shifting people off reliance on fossil fuels through higher prices. He argues that other crises such as housing see the Government only ever thinking about the short-term.
In terms of the transport package, there’s evidence Tame is right. On Friday the Government admitted that the decision had been rushed into implementation bypassing the usual scrutiny of officials. Finance Minister Grant Robertson admitted that Cabinet decided to sidestep putting the tax cuts through a Regulatory Impact Analysis in which the proposal’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as alternatives, are considered by relevant government agencies. Instead, Cabinet agreed to a “post-implementation assessment”.
The website Interest.co.nz asked economists for their view on the reforms: “The policy didn’t meet the sniff test of the economists interest.co.nz spoke to, who characterised it as political, reactionary, poorly targeted, short-termist and interventionist.”
Of course, the counter argument is that the Government was listening to the public and being nimble in their response. Focus groups and market research would have given the Government a good steer on exactly what pressures were afflicting the public and how to address them.
It seems that the Government has to resort to a reactive approach instead of being proactive because it lacks any real underpinning vision about where it wants to take the country. To have direction, political leaders need to have policy, values, and be embedded in a milieu of critical thinking and innovation.
This is traditionally what a political party is. It’s a big think tank of on-the-ground policy development based on a vision of a particular sort of world that it wants to create. The problem for Ardern and her colleague is that this is entirely lacking for them. There is no mass membership party feeding ideas and policies up from its base. In fact, the last Labour Party annual conference showed that the party barely has any debate at all, and certainly no real decision making powers like it used to.
Without a useful anchor in society, the Labour Government is now just floating around, lost at sea, only reacting to events as they arise. It means the party and government have little chance of taking the country anywhere, and voters will eventually tire of its managerial approach. To sell itself based on its competence during the Covid crisis is not going to work again at the next election – especially since much of that competence has been more questionable since 2020.
Leftwing blogger Steven Cowan wrote in the weekend that Labour’s values now seem to be “defending the status quo” and “staying in power”, which is hardly very inspirational. Labour used to stand for more than that.
And for Cowan the problem is that voters don’t have much choice of parties: “Elections have been captured by big money, lobbyists and the media while the policy convergence between the present parliamentary parties has crushed real choice. It has produced disenfranchisement and disillusionment”.
Columnist Andrea Vance is even more scathing of where Labour values have gone, writing yesterday: “In their second term, Labour has become adept at downplaying their mistakes, discrediting those who criticise, encouraging misinformation and diverting attention from bad news, while wrapping themselves in meaningless cultural signals.”
The Government can jettison the more unpopular parts of its reform programme – especially things like its hate speech law reforms, and perhaps Three Waters – but what will these be replaced with? When a party lacks connection to its voter base, and has no strong ideological underpinnings, it is forced to make up policies as it goes, reacting to opinion polls. It means that badly formulated policies like KiwiBuild are quickly dreamt up, and just as quickly discarded when they become embarrassing. Cycling bridges are announced and then un-announced, again all in reaction to polls.
The even bigger problem is that Labour has forgotten its own traditional voter base. This is observable in the fact that they have overseen a massive transfer of wealth to the rich, while the poor have simply got poorer. Bernard Hickey says this transfer has been more than $1 trillion. Hence Duncan Garner writes today in the NBR, “Labour has served the wealthiest Kiwis to a high standard indeed during this pandemic. And they won’t be thanked, they’ll be shown the door. More than $20b was spent on wage subsidies alone, paid to bosses to help pay wages. Then there was the Reserve Bank’s aggressive loosening of monetary policy, which saw some homeowners gain billions of dollars in wealth as housing prices soared while the poor were still in a motel waiting for a phone call from Kāinga Ora.”
This is why transformation is not possible under Labour at the moment, and why the party has become conservative. It’s been cut adrift from its original principles and support bases. This makes it more likely to lose power at the next election. Ultimately Labour needs to find a way to reconnect with some of its original working class constituents and ideologies. That’s the political soul of the Labour Party, and something that seems sorely missing at the moment.
There was a brief moment of euphoria last week, when it seemed that COVID-19 vaccines, medicines and supplies might be liberated from the World Trade Organization’s intellectual property rights straitjacket and a patent waiver would make them available and affordable to the unvaccinated in the global south.
But on closer scrutiny, Big Pharma and their parent states have won again.
The leaked “solution” agreed by the informal “quad” (US, EU, India and South Africa) is insufficient, problematic and unworkable. There are too many limitations to make any significant difference and it is a far cry from the original proposal from India and South Africa that would have effectively addressed the barriers.
While the WTO makes decisions by consensus, it is unclear how far this deeply flawed text can, or will, be reopened when members debate it next week. Given its fraught history, it is unlikely they will agree to remedy its defects.
Let us recall some stark and distressing facts. Into the third year of this pandemic, only 14% of people in low-income countries have been vaccinated even once. Wealthy countries like New Zealand are 90% vaccinated and on our third shots. Indeed, by the end of last year, more boosters had been given in high-income countries than total doses in low-income ones.
A second stark and disturbing fact: in November last year the People’s Vaccine Alliance reported that Pfizer, BioNTech and Moderna, the companies behind two of the most successful COVID-19 vaccines, were together making US$65,000 (NZ$92,000) every minute.
They had received more than US$8 billion in public funding to develop the lucrative COVID-19 vaccines. Pfizer and BioNTech had delivered less than 1% of their total vaccine supplies to low-income countries, while Moderna has delivered just 0.2%.
Pharma’s profits and property rights before right to life
An important guarantor of pharmaceutical companies’ profits is a little-known trade agreement, the Agreement on Trade-related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
During negotiations to form the WTO during the early 1990s, the US had demanded strong protections for its corporations’ intellectual property rights as the price for agreeing to discuss genuine trade issues such as subsidised agriculture. The WTO’s members, aside from the least developed countries, have to implement these rules in their domestic laws.
The significance of the TRIPS was exposed in the late 1990s when pharmaceutical giants threatened legal action against South Africa and Brazil for producing generic versions of patented HIV-AIDS anti-retroviral medicines.
A global name-and-shame campaign led them to back down and saw a Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health adopted at the WTO ministerial conference in 2001. That compromise was a forerunner of the COVID-19 scenario.
To date, only one country, Rwanda (which belongs to the group of least developed countries), has been able to jump the hurdles and import pharmaceuticals under the amendment to TRIPS.
Tentative deal limited to vaccines only
Two decades later, in October 2020, South Africa and India led moves for a TRIPS waiver for COVID-19 vaccines, medicines, test kits and other supplies. Despite another global campaign, which included New Zealand public health advocates, unions, churches and development agencies, the European Union, Switzerland and UK blocked the waiver every step of the way.
The Biden administration shifted its position in May 2021 to support negotiations for a waiver, but limited it to vaccines. That announcement brought a fence-sitting New Zealand on board.
The proposal remained stuck for 18 months. Some richer countries demanded completely unrelated trade-offs to advance their commercial objectives, while the hard core refused to budge. Last December, the talks moved to a new phase where the “quad” of key WTO members tried to broker a deal.
When that tentative deal was announced last week and the text was leaked, the euphoria quickly subsided.
The text applies only to patents on vaccines, and only for COVID-19, which means a similarly fraught process would be required for future pandemics. WTO members will decide in six months whether to extend it to medicines, diagnostics and therapeutics, as South Africa and India had proposed. Realistically, that won’t happen.
Odds continue to be stacked against poorer countries
Beyond these limitations, there is no guarantee that governments can access the “recipe” for all currently patented vaccines, let alone second-generation vaccines still applying for patents, or the technology needed to produce them.
There are many legal uncertainties. A WTO member state can authorise “use of patented subject matter” that is otherwise protected under TRIPS Article 28.1 “to the extent necessary to address the COVID-19 pandemic”.
When does COVID-19 cease being a pandemic, who decides, and what happens when COVID-19 is just endemic? Which uses of patented subject matter will be considered “necessary” (a restrictive concept in trade law) and which go too far? The text still allows those matters to be taken to a dispute.
The odds are stacked further against poorer countries. Eligibility is limited to WTO developing countries that exported less than 10% of the world’s vaccines in 2021. That means China and non-WTO countries are excluded, as are countries like Brazil that recently surrendered their developing country status.
Coverage of least developed countries is unclear. And the complex and burdensome notification and compliance requirements are likely to be as unworkable as the previous TRIPS waiver.
Four things remain to be seen. First, will the deal actually be gavelled through without debate and amendment in another travesty of the WTO’s consensus process?
Second, what trade-offs will richer countries demand in return for their support?
Third, will this be the end of moves to set aside TRIPS rules, even temporarily, to secure genuine access to life-saving COVID medicines, vaccines and medical supplies for the majority of the world’s people in the developing world once the immediate COVID-19 crisis has subsided?
And will the New Zealand and Australian governments be complicit in this happening?
Jane Kelsey 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 devastating floods in Queensland and New South Wales have taken everyone by surprise.
People have been left to fend for themselves while bickering governments scrambled to provide a coordinated and adequate disaster response.
The intensity of the rainfall may not have been possible to predict, but having a clear roles for governments, emergency services, the military, the charity sector, volunteers and individuals is possible – and absolutely necessary.
Our research
In upcoming research, we look at disaster risk reduction policies at the international, federal, state, regional and local government levels. We found all these policies refer to the principle of “shared responsibility” – yet none adequately defines what this means.
A local resident, walking through their flood affected belongings in Ipswich. Darren England/AAP
The research involved a detailed analysis across 12 disaster polices and pieces of legislation to identify how vulnerable populations were protected.
We found these documents repeat terms such as “resilience” and “shared responsibility” without clearly defining the meaning or process for implementation. And they fail to specify who is responsible for increasing “resilience”.
A move towards individual responsibility
During the 1990s, there was a growing sense the public had become too reliant upon emergency services and needed to develop their own disaster management capacity.
A 2004 Council of Australian Governments report on bushfire management emphasised the idea of “shared responsiblity”. From 2011, the principle of shared responsibly was embedded across federal and state disaster policies to signal individuals and households were expected to develop their own disaster resilience.
Academics understand “shared responsibility” to be about distributing obligations among different groups or sectors. But what sounds reasonable in theory becomes messy and unworkable in the midst of a crisis.
Studies have shown shared responsibility actually means “diffused responsibility,” making it more difficult to determine responsibility – and accountability.
Indeed, our research was unable to determine who was actually responsible for helping vulnerable flood communities prepare for and respond to disasters. There seemed to be an assumption that volunteers and the charity sector would mobilise as needed.
These guidelines explain the roles of federal, state and local governments and households. But the largest portion of responsibility lies with individuals. For example,
It is the role and responsibility of families and individuals to attain the highest degree of physical and financial self-reliance – before, during and after an emergency.
These arrangements suggest government and the volunteer/charity sector do not have the ability or the responsibility to fully offset the economic, social, cultural and human losses incurred during a disaster.
They also assume the individuals are responsible for adequate property and personal insurance. This of course is highly problematic as insurance premiums escalate and become unaffordable and some regions become uninsurable.
Volunteers, charities and resources
All the legislation we examined says managing and coordinating volunteers is a local government job.
But this assumes volunteers and charities will have adequate resourcing, skills and capacity to handle disaster recovery. The recent floods have shown much volunteer activities is are largely unregulated, with people having to take matters into their own hands.
Flood victims are facing many months of of cleanup. Jono Searle/AAP
This is becoming more common as structured programs like those run through charities and state emergency services struggle to retain volunteers.
Some of these unregulated volunteers have literally saved lives. But some were in need of help themselves or took advantage of the situation to loot resources from flood victims.
Blame games
Shared responsibility is also highly susceptible to politicisation. We have seen this play out since the flood disaster hit, with continued arguments between state and federal governments.
Following criticism over the speed and scale of federal assistance, Prime Minister Scott Morrison argued
States obviously respond to emergencies. They run the SES [State Emergency Service], they run the police, they run the hospitals.
Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar also claimed the federal government had to wait for state premiers to declare an emergency and request federal help before it could send the military.
This is despite legislation which gives the federal government power to declare an emergency unilaterally. (Incidentally, this law was introduced following a recommendation from the bush fire royal commission, following confusion over responsibility for emergency declarations).
At the local level, disagreements have also erupted between opposing members of local government as to the adequacy of drainage infrastructure, emergency alerts and volunteer coordination.
These politically driven disagreements are enabled by the ambiguity of shared responsibility, and ultimately undermine the effectiveness of disaster response.
What needs to happen instead
Clearly we need a better understanding of what “shared responsibility” actually means. Questions we need to answer include:
Who makes the decision over the allocation of tasks at each stage of the disaster?
Have all relevant groups and people been included in agreeing upon this allocation?
Have duties been communicated and understood?
Have allowances been made for unexpected situations?
Until we have these answers, the trauma of natural disasters will be compounded by confusion, inaction, political blame games and a lack of resources. And it will be individuals and vulnerable communities left to pick up the pieces.
Rowena Maguire receives funding from the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR) and the Cotton Research Development Corporation (CRDC).
Amanda Kennedy receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is affiliated with the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law.
Melissa Bull receives funding from Australian Research Council.
Annastasia Bousgas and Bridget Lewis do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Review: Manifesto, choreographed by Stephanie Lake, Adelaide Festival
Nine drummers, nine dancers, what’s not to love? So ran my imaginary opening line for this review.
But Manifesto, choreographed by Melbourne-based Stephanie Lake is much more complex and satisfying than the mere pairing of dancers with drummers might suggest.
As the show opens, drummers are seated and equipped with a standard drum kit: bass, snare and tom drums and cymbals.
Charles Davis’s classy set is reminiscent of a 1930s Busby Berkeley movie. Drummers occupy raised positions along the back of the stage. Lush, red hanging curtains fill the visual field, with a niche for each drummer.
The work starts with simple beats. Beats don’t necessarily create rhythm. Beats can simply be sounds that seem to come from nowhere and suddenly stop, as they do early in the work.
On the silent beat, dancers freeze in a dramatic tableau, enhanced by Bosco Shaw’s beautifully focused lighting. Single beats turn into a succession. Dancers seem to magically appear from nowhere. Freezing, they create unexpected focal points.
Just when you think a pattern is being established, the work shifts. Roy Vandervegt/Adelaide Festival
Gesture and composition direct the eye, often to an individual dancer. But just when you think a pattern is being established, a new sequence of beats and images sears into the retina.
Sounds become increasingly complex, with drum rolls, shallow beats and rolling trills on the snare drum. The clang of the cymbals suggests a storm moving in. Later, drummers make seemingly impossible sounds reminiscent of industrial noise.
Continuously morphing
Like the choreography of Twyla Tharp, the movements of Lake’s dancers are often recognisable from daily life, though enhanced and embellished. Each successive movement is utterly unpredictable, executed in a delightfully relaxed and fluid manner, with seemingly effortless falls, leaps and catches.
Movement is at times silly, as in a butt wiggle that makes the kids in the audience squeal with delight, but also sexy, with hips and asses drawing attention to the beauty of human form in motion.
When the dancers come together, we don’t see formations being set up as they’re unfolding so fluidly and rapidly. Everything shifts constantly, continuously morphing: a series of collective shapes and forms that can’t be predicted.
The dancers are sometimes silly, sometimes sexy. Roy Vandervegt/Adelaide Festival
Beats turn into longer rhythmic sequences as bodies are held aloft, on the floor, flying across and off the stage, constantly shifting. Moments of high drama increasingly come fast and furiously.
At times dancers appear to be fighting to regain control of bodies, as if the body has a mind of its own.
As the drumming builds and the energy heats up, the men doff their shirts. It’s as if a series of perpetual motion machines have been activated.
In another sequence, choreography focuses on the hands and arms manipulating the body in uncomfortable and disturbing ways. It is reminiscent of the choreography of Pina Bausch, but unlike Bausch’s work, Lake’s dancers are not being acted upon by others, but touch their own body as if it is not their own.
Anything can happen
As dancers roll, fly, and bounce off the floors individually and in pairs and small groups, it is clear how Lake’s choreography highlights the individual strengths of her cast. Similarly, composer Robin Fox has successfully marshalled a clearly differentiated set of drummers with diverse skill sets and sounds.
Racing toward the final coda, dancing becomes increasingly hyperkinetic. With jumping kicks, the work takes on an almost gladiatorial, confrontational quality.
Just as quickly, the movement switches into a kind of whirling dervish mode, enhanced by the swaying light fabric of Paula Levis’ costumes. These costumes drape, move, flow, and enhance movement, drawing attention to the diverse body styles of the dancers and turning dancers into characters we can track.
Lake’s choreography highlights the strengths of her dancers. Roy Vandervegt/Adelaide Festival
In the work’s penultimate moment, a heart beat brings all the dancers together, then apart, then together.
A rhythmic sequence is introduced and repeated, a kind of military tattoo the audience can discern and unconsciously anticipate. The dancing takes on an increasingly ecstatic quality and we’re with them on the beat.
There is a purposeful contrast between the precision and repetition of the martial, parade-like beat, and the free and playful – even sexy – spirit of the dancers, increasingly moving into a state of wild abandon.
Dancers move down to the lip of stage as total mayhem results. One streaks naked across the stage. The work ends at an absolute fever pitch. When I saw it, the audience leapt to their feet, compelled to rise and shout.
Manifesto is a beautifully and carefully crafted work, one that continually keeps the audience in a state of not knowing what will happen next.
Anything can happen in this tightly crafted, remarkably innovative and thrilling work. And it does.
Adelaide season closed. Manifesto will play at Rising: Melbourne in June.
William Peterson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jay Marlowe, Associate Professor, Co-Director Centre for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies, University of Auckland
GettyImages
An estimated three million people have fled Ukraine in the last three weeks, triggering an extraordinary response from governments around the world, including New Zealand. But the question begs to be asked – why have Ukrainians been welcomed when others fleeing violence have not?
The New Zealand government’s announcement to grant temporary protection to 4,000 Ukrainians who are family members of people already living here is welcome. It will provide a sense of relief knowing that there is a short-term solution to provide safety and security in a situation that has quickly spiralled out of control.
Of course, Ukrainians need to get somewhere safe, and we know there needs to be an international response to ensure neighbouring countries keep their borders open. Let’s face it, they’re not countries that usually welcome refugees and asylum seekers.
A Eurocentric approach
But there’s something very Eurocentric in this response, starting within the borders of Ukraine itself. In the early stages of the Russian invasion there were numerous reports of people from African, Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean nations being refused passage through the checkpoints leading up to the border to Poland and then being refused admission when they finally reached the crossings.
Since the start of Russian military operations in Ukraine on February 24th, more than 2.6 million civilians have been displaced into neighbouring countries. Narciso Contreras/Getty Images
We can see similar dynamics playing out across Europe and other Western nations. The outpouring of support and even opening of people’s homes is being witnessed at a scope and scale not seen during the height of the so called ‘European refugee crisis’ in 2015 as hundreds of thousands of equally desperate people made their way across land borders and the Mediterranean to escape persecution following the Syrian civil war.
There were notable exceptions at the time, but the Ukrainian situation has very different political overtones and public receptivity.
This concerning trend is not just about protecting those “like us” but also about keeping the “other” out. Thus, the label of Eurocentrism is not strong enough. This trend highlights how racism often operates in implicit and, at times, explicit ways.
A quick response is possible
The New Zealand government’s announcement regarding the Ukrainians fleeing their homes shows that we can act relatively quickly to humanitarian crises. However, the current response is disproportionate to recent conflicts in other parts of the world.
According to the 2018 Census, 1,281 Ukrainians are living in New Zealand. There are also 1,635 Ethiopians residing here. Why wasn’t such a scheme developed when the conflict in Tigray escalated into war in late 2020? An estimated half a million people have died in the region from protracted conflict, famine and lack of health care, and two million have been forcibly displaced.
As the Taliban stormed into Kabul with breathtaking speed, I watched Afghan friends and colleagues despair as they saw very limited options to support those who were directly targeted.
The New Zealand Government did finally respond by introducing Critical Purpose Visa. According to the Immigration New Zealand website, 1,168 Afghans have arrived under several visa schemes since August 2021.
However, these visas were designated for those who worked for or supported New Zealand government initiatives, military, and human rights defenders, especially women. They were not primarily intended for family reunification.
The Rohingya people from Myanmar continue to struggle to support their families in the world’s largest refugee camp in Bangladesh, with little prospect of being able to safely return home. Approximately 745,000 people (an estimated 400,000 of them children) remain stuck in Cox’s Bazar following state sanctioned violence and persecution in 2017.
Similar stories can be told of South Sudan, Yemen, Iraq – the list continues, asking tough questions of who is deserving of protection and who is less so.
Meeting our commitments
So, what more can be done in the New Zealand situation?
The New Zealand government doubled its annual historic refugee quota of up to 750 people to 1500 in 2020. Due to the Covid pandemic, however, these numbers have never been realised, with the 2020-2021 intake only accommodating 260 people.
The current intake year is expected to take fewer than 1,000. Similarly, planned and budgeted increases to family reunification have fallen well short.
Last year, just one person was reunited through this visa category and only 54 people of the 600 allocated spaces have arrived this year. At the very least, New Zealand could commit to taking these places retrospectively, ensuring we meet obligations we have already signed up to.
New Zealand’s government doubled the refugee quota in 2020 but the Covid-19 pandemic has meant that spots have not been filled. Phil Walter/Getty Images
There are other areas where we could bolster our commitment to the universal rights to refugee protection, regardless of race, religion or other factors leading to persecution.
For example, asylum seekers whose claims for refugee status have already been approved face delays of several years before their permanent residence is granted, meaning they cannot apply for reunification of family members who often remain in precarious situations.
Our recent report, entitled Safe Start, Fair Future highlights how these delays have more than tripled over the last decade. In 2011, 90% of applications were completed in 309 days; it now takes nearly 1,000. Fast-tracking these applications would make a real and tangible difference to people creating a new life in New Zealand.
While the specific policy details are still coming to light, New Zealand has an important role to play in protecting Ukrainians and other populations forcibly displaced in humanitarian crises. The Ukrainian response is welcome. Now let’s lift this standard to other groups equally deserving of support and protection.
Jay Marlowe receives funding from the Royal Society Te Apārangi under a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris James, ARC DECRA Fellow, Centre for Hypersonics, School of Mechanical and Mining Engineering, The University of Queensland
Hypersonic vehicles, which can fly much faster than passenger jets, would allow passengers to go from Sydney to Los Angeles, for instance, in just a couple of hours.
They could also offer more flexible options for launching payloads into space than conventional rockets and their speed and manoeuvrability mean they have a range of potential tactical military uses too.
Russia and China already claim to have operating hypersonic missiles, but hypersonic passenger aviation is still a dream rather than reality.
Nevertheless, several types of hypersonic vehicles already exist, including rockets, planetary entry vehicles such as SpaceX’s Dragon capsule and intercontinental ballistic missiles.
What is hypersonic flight?
Hypersonic flight is faster than supersonic flight – the latter term, by definition, means faster than the speed of sound.
To break the sound barrier – and surpass “Mach 1” – you need to travel faster than about 1,235km per hour, or a kilometre in just under 3 seconds. Mach 2 is twice as fast, and so on.
There is no clearly defined Mach number that marks the boundary between supersonic and hypersonic flight. But Mach 5 is generally taken by aerospace engineers to be where hypersonic speed begins.
Hypersonic travel presents a few extra problems that aren’t encountered at more pedestrian speeds. Chief among these is the fact that the air flow over the vehicle causes so much friction the outside of the craft can exceed 1,000℃.
Hypersonic engines, called scramjets (supersonic combustion ramjets), need to burn fuel in a supersonic air flow, which is very complicated.
Artist’s impression of the Boeing X-51A Waverider, a scramjet powered hypersonic test vehicle. U.S. Air Force
Another persistent issue is that hypersonic flight is difficult to model accurately, because of the interplay of various different physical effects that come into play at extreme speeds.
So if you want to understand everything together, you have to do real flight tests such as today’s launch. But these are expensive and technically demanding.
One of the trickiest hypersonic problems is predicting something called the “boundary layer transition location”.
When an aircraft flies through the air, a thin layer of air forms around its surface and is dragged along with the vehicle.
This “boundary layer” is very important, as most of the heating happens here, along with a significant portion of the drag forces that try to slow down the vehicle.
As this boundary layer grows along the vehicle’s length, it will eventually “transition” from the calm “laminar” flow near the leading edge of the vehicle, to violent “turbulent” flow further downstream.
Gas flow transitioning from laminar, transitional (in between) and then turbulent on a flat plate. David L. Chandler, MIT News Office
While we understand what leads to this “boundary layer transition”, we can’t perfectly predict it, especially at hypersonic speeds.
The problem is that predicting the boundary layer transition location accurately is very important for designing hypersonic vehicles. In most cases, turbulent flow is bad. It greatly increases both heating and drag.
Uncertainty in where the flow will be turbulent is a major issue, as large
heating and drag uncertainties make some vehicle designs inefficient or completely unfeasible.
BOLT II: a new transition flight experiment
BOLT (short for Boundary Layer Transition) was a US$6 million hypersonic flight test that launched in June 2021 from Esrange Space Center in northern Sweden to study boundary layer transition.
But it failed to reach hypersonic speeds, after problems with its rocket launch mechanism.
A separate experiment is run on each side of the vehicle, with one “smooth” side and one “rough” side. The flow running length along the vehicle is 1 metre, slightly larger than the original BOLT vehicle.
The original BOLT flight vehicle before testing. Air Force Office of Scientific Research/Johns Hopkins APL
Where to from here?
To develop the hypersonic vehicles of the future, we need to properly understand how to predict boundary layer transition on realistic vehicle shapes and what the minute effects of turbulent flow on hypersonic vehicles are. Data from the BOLT II flight experiment will help do just that.
The launch will be livestreamed on the NASA Wallops Youtube channel, so we’ll know straight away if the flight is a success or not. Assuming it is, in the coming years we will see many scientific papers published on the breakthroughs from this significant experiment.
The ability to accurately predict hypersonic boundary layer transmission will bring us much closer to hypersonic passenger flight one day. NASA’s planned NASP hypersonic space-plane was cancelled in the 1990s, partly due to the inability to accurately predict its transition location. Hopefully, soon we can move past that.
However, many issues will still remain. Air-breathing hypersonic engines are still in their infancy; the materials used to shield hypersonic vehicles are very expensive; and the design of hypersonic vehicles is still very complicated. Companies like Australia’s own Hypersonix, which aims to use an air-breathing hypersonic vehicle to launch small payloads into orbit, will hopefully bring us closer to making the hypersonic flight dream a reality.
Chris James receives funding from the University of Queensland, the Australian Research Council, and the U.S. Office of Naval Research..
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s barbaric and cack-handed invasion of Ukraine perversely makes him look like a great re-unifier. Russia is now the most sanctioned country in the world, thanks largely to a broad transatlantic coalition that looked anything but cohesive just prior to Russian troops crossing the border into Ukraine.
The European Union has stopped dithering about Putin and is finally acting cohesively and firmly against the Kremlin’s self-appointed role as the wrecking ball of the European security order. And NATO has been reinvigorated to such an extent that Sweden and Finland are considering putting up their hands to join.
But as tempting as it is to see Putin as the reason for this newfound sense of European and transatlantic unity, the reality is more complex and less comforting. In fact, the real trigger for the West’s momentum has been the resistance of Ukraine’s people, its armed forces and its president.
A scruffy populist with global appeal
To begin with, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has skilfully personified Ukraine’s image overseas as a peaceful and democratic underdog beset by a fanatical neighbourhood bully. His messaging has been near-flawless: thanking leaders and nations for every ounce of help he gets, gleefully trolling Putin and humbly begging for more assistance.
His heartfelt speech to the US Congress – combined with a video of airstrikes and destruction that bluntly revealed the human cost of Russia’s invasion – unsurprisingly earned him a standing ovation.
In a sense, Zelenskyy has also become a lightning rod for Western values and democracy. Intuitively, this is an odd claim given the widespread problems with corruption that have been well-documented in Ukrainian politics for decades.
But Zelenskyy appeals to Western audiences in ways that compare favourably to the many disappointments they perceive in their own leaders. He is refreshingly honest rather than shiftily mouthing slogans. He is scruffy and casually dressed rather than polished and manicured. He is a populist without being crudely bombastic.
Ukraine’s spirited resistance and Zelenskyy’s adroit messaging, therefore, put pressure on Western governments to act – and, more importantly, to be seen to be acting.
This is happening in two ways. First, Zelenskyy’s appeals play to a sense of regret at the top levels of Western governments that more was not done to prevent Putin from invading. In fact, it was just the opposite: NATO members sent a clear message to Putin they would not fight for Ukraine under any circumstances.
Second, the vivid images of destroyed Ukrainian towns, bombed-out maternity hospitals and wounded civilians have resonated deeply with Western audiences. They want to do more to assist Kyiv, and their leaders are acutely mindful of this.
It may not have been the no-fly zone he has been calling for – this is a bridge too far for NATO leaders anxious not to goad Putin into a wider war. But it will go a long way towards keeping Ukraine’s armed forces supplied with what is tactically the next best thing: portable anti-tank and air defence systems, which have proven highly effective against Russian forces.
The large US commitment also guarantees that European nations will follow suit. And the longer Ukraine’s forces can hold out, the louder the calls will become for some form of limited no-fly zone in the form of protected humanitarian corridors.
Beyond merely resupplying Zelenskyy’s forces, though, the West owes Ukraine a great deal more for its newfound sense of unity and purpose.
Putin calculated that the West would not have done much more than impose a tokenistic round of sanctions if he invaded. And this would almost undoubtedly have been proven correct had Russian forces managed to take Kyiv and force Ukraine’s surrender in a few days.
Yet, the West is now presenting an entirely different face to the cautious and fragmented one it displayed on the eve of Russia’s invasion: it is firm and committed. The West is also sending a clear warning to other authoritarian regimes about the consequences of territorial aggrandisement.
But it is not Putin, nor his actions, that are primarily responsible for this. His expansionist intentions have been known at least since his infamous speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, where he essentially claimed the former Soviet republics were rightfully Russian proxies.
Critically, the West has kicked the can of managing Putin down the road for decades, fearful of provoking gas supply wars in Europe, and in the process enriched Putin both personally and politically. This helped him centralise his power base and rearm his military.
That means the West bears its share of the blame for the suffering of Ukrainians today. The very least it can do is to rebuild Ukraine once the conflict ends with a comprehensive reconstruction plan, provide it with a pathway to joining the European Union, and deliver a de facto guarantee of its security against future Russian adventurism.
Triumphalist noises being made in the West about Ukraine being a war NATO had to have to provide it with a clear existential threat are also disingenuous. NATO is not fighting this war at all – it is watching as Ukrainians fight it.
If Ukraine’s suffering is to be the West’s wake-up call, then this is the last time NATO and the EU can seek strategic outcomes without risk, and only limited economic discomfort. To do so would be nothing short of betrayal, implying it is content to let Ukrainians fight and die for the hope of joining a West that is unprepared to make the same sacrifices.
It would also reinforce the perception the West will only countenance limited police actions in weak or failing states, and not meet hard power in kind. In the messy and much more adversarial world that is now emerging, this will prove to be little to no deterrent at all.
Matthew Sussex has received funding from the ARC, International Studies Association, the EU and various Australian government agencies for research not related to this piece.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shannon Brincat, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, University of the Sunshine Coast
Darko Vojinovic/AP/AAP
Republican senator Lindsey Graham has been among those calling for the assassination of Russian president Vladimir Putin in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The Biden administration immediately denied any such plans. But despite the White House’s best attempts to deny targeting Putin, it begs the question, when is it acceptable to assassinate a tyrant?
In Libya, a US drone was involved in the airstrike that lead to the death of former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. In 2003, the invasion of Iraq began with “decapitation” strikes directly aimed at killing Saddam Hussein.
No wonder Putin is reported to be “extremely paranoid” about being assassinated.
International law and assassination
Since the second world war and the Nuremberg trials, the international culture has been to prosecute tyrants rather than kill them. The assassination of heads of state is also prohibited under the 1973 New York Convention, which covers “internationally protected persons”, and is outlawed under the laws of war, first established in the 19th century.
A woman who was rescued from a burning building, hit by artillery shells in Kyiv. Felipe Dana/AP/AAP
The US itself has specifically prohibited assassination under its rules of war since 1863, and each president since 1976 has reaffirmed executive orders against assassinating foreign leaders.
It also remains a rare event. Only ten leaders have been assassinated by a foreign state between 1875 and 2004.
Legal philosophy
There is a huge grey area around the issue of tyrannicide – the killing of a ruler who rules illegitimately, oppressively, and/or acts aggressively at home or abroad. Putin appears to meet this definition.
Towering figures of classical jurisprudence (or legal philosophy) like Hugo Grotius and Emer de Vattel claimed tyrants were “common enemies of humankind” who should be targeted like pirates.
But the issue of whether such tyrants can be targeted under international law is somewhat confused, with arguments both for and against.
We also know assassination has substantial effects on political stability at both national and international levels.
Political philosophy
There have been at least three different historical approaches to tyrannicide in political thought.
In Ancient Greece and Rome, if the ruler was harmful, they could be legitimately and violently deposed. For example, in The Republic, Plato condemned tyranny as the most degenerate political crime. In De Officiis, Cicero claimed tyranny was a pestilence on the body politic which, because it injures the rest of the body, should be severed.
During the medieval period, some philosophers justified complete submission to the god-given order, including tyranny. However, theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and protestant reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin generally argued private individuals had a tacit mandate of tyrannicide when no other means of ridding the community of the tyrant were available.
A destroyed building after shelling in downtown Kharkiv, Ukraine. Vasily Zhlobsky/ EPA/AAP
In the modern period, especially with the advent of liberalism around the 17th century, there was a push to institutionalise a protective right of the people against tyranny. For example, in 1689, John Locke argued the people retained the ability of saving themselves from tyranny through the existence of a “supreme power” or “implied reserve”.
These principles can be traced to the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, widely believed to include a right to “alter or abolish” and bear arms against tyranny. This has recently led to confused attempts at subverting democratic processes also, as we saw at Capitol Hill in January 2021.
The US approach
Yet we know the US has used assassination in its foreign and military affairs. For example, a 1953 CIA training manual bluntly called “Study of Assassination” is easily found online.
Since 2001, the US has also killed over 4,000 targets in drone strikes and retains “kill lists” of terrorist suspects. The 2011 assassination of Osama Bin Laden has been popularised in a film partly written by the CIA.
So clearly, the US does assassinate people, and quite often – but can it ever be justified against a leader of a foreign state?
Ukrainian refugees leaving Lviv, bound for Poland. Mykola Tys/EPA/AAP
In 1975, a US Senate committee concluded the US had supported a number of plots to kill foreign leaders, though there was no evidence of direct involvement.
Interestingly, the very conundrum posed by Russia’s invasion was anticipated by the committee. In these circumstances, assassination may be compatible with American values, it said:
This country was created by violent revolt against a regime believed to be tyrannous, and our founding fathers (the local dissidents of that era) received aid from foreign countries […] we should not today rule out support for dissident groups seeking to overthrow tyrants.
Human rights vs chaos
Today, the justifications for tyrannicide revolve around self-defence and protecting human rights. Arguably, these justifications could be made in the defence of a state like Ukraine and the human rights of its citizens. However, these exact arguments could also be said of the illegal American-led war in Iraq.
Still, the answer is unclear.
One of the main problems is the outcome is unpredictable. In the case of Iraq, it created a hotbed for terrorism in the form of ISIS and in Libya it allowed slavery to return.
Another fear is tyrannicide will spawn an even worse leader. Or result in an escalation of hostilities and retaliation. What leader would be safe in such a world?
Ultimately, the problem of tyrannicide is not only ethically vexing but legally complex and politically doubtful. More than 2,000 years after Plato, we still don’t have a definitive answer.
Shannon Brincat 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.
It seems not a day goes by without learning someone in our inner circle of family, friends and colleagues has COVID. When we ask how unwell our acquaintance is, the responses vary from “they’re really crook” to “you wouldn’t even know they had it”.
Given the ubiquitous presence of this highly infectious coronavirus in our community and the high rate of asymptomatic illness, those who have not been diagnosed with COVID might wonder, “how would I know if I had been infected?” And, “does it matter if I have?”.
Most people know they’ve had COVID because they had a fever or upper respiratory tract symptoms and/or were exposed to an infected person AND had a swab test (PCR or rapid antigen) that detected the COVID virus (SARS-CoV-2) in the upper airway.
At the beginning of 2022, many people with consistent symptoms or high-risk exposures were not able to access PCRs or RATs to confirm their diagnosis, but instead presumed themselves positive and quarantined.
It is possible to diagnose past infection in those who never tested positive. A blood test can look for SARS-CoV-2 antibodies (also known as immunoglobulins). When we are infected with SARS-CoV-2, our immune system launches a precision counter strike by producing antibodies against viral targets, specifically the Spike (S) and Nucleocapsid (N) proteins. COVID vaccination induces a similar immune response against the S protein only. The S antibody “neutralises” the invader by preventing the virus from attaching to human cells.
These antibodies can be detected within one to three weeks after infection and persist for at least six months – potentially much longer. A blood test that shows antibodies to S and N proteins indicates someone has been previously infected. Detection of antibodies to the S protein only indicates vaccination (but not infection).
Before you rush off to get a COVID antibody test, there are a few notes of caution. There is still much to learn about the characteristics of the immune response to COVID infection. Not everyone mounts a detectable antibody response following infection and levels can decline to undetectable levels after several months in some people.
Because there are other circulating seasonal coronaviruses (such as those that cause the common cold), tests may also pick up antibodies to non-SARS-CoV-2 strains, leading to “false positive” results.
Commercial and public hospital pathology labs can perform SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing, but the interpretation of results should be undertaken carefully.
So, antibody testing should really only be done when there’s a good reason to: say, when confirming past infection or effectiveness of vaccination is important for the current care of an individual. Diagnosing a post-infectious complication or eligibility for a specific treatment, for example. It could also be useful for contact tracing or for assessing the background population rate of infection.
Antibody testing a population
“Seroprevalence studies” test for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in repositories of stored blood that are representative of the general population, such as from a blood bank. This data helps to understand the true extent of COVID infection and vaccination status in the community (and informs our assessment of population susceptibility to future infection and reinfection). It’s more useful than daily reported case numbers, which are skewed towards symptomatic individuals and those with access to swab testing.
New research from the World Health Organization, which is yet to be reviewed by other scientists, reported the results of a meta-analysis of over 800 seroprevalence studies performed around the world since 2020. They estimated that by July 2021, 45.2% of the global population had SARS-CoV-2 antibodies due to past infection or vaccination, eight times the estimate (5.5%) from a year earlier.
There are plans to conduct fresh seroprevalence studies in Australia in the coming year, which will update local data and help us understand to what extent the Omicron wave has washed through the population.
Does it matter if I have had COVID and didn’t know?
For most people, knowing your COVID infection status is unlikely to be more than a topic of dinnertime conversation.
While some studies have pointed to a less robust and durable antibody response following mild or asymptomatic infection compared with severe illness, it is not known how this influences protection from reinfection. Certainly, the knowledge we have antibodies from past infection should not deter us from being fully up-to-date with COVID vaccination, which remains the best protection against severe illness.
There are reports of people with mild or asymptomatic COVID infection developing long COVID – persistent or relapsing symptoms that last several months after initial infection. Symptoms can include shortness of breath, physical and mental fatigue, exercise intolerance, headaches, and muscle and joint pain.
However, the likelihood of developing this condition appears higher in those who suffer a heavier initial bout of COVID illness. This might be linked with higher viral load at that time.
As we enter the third year of the COVID pandemic and given that up to one in three infections may be asymptomatic, it is likely many of us have been infected without knowing it.
If you are experiencing lingering fatigue, brain fog or other symptoms that could be long COVID, you should talk to your GP. Otherwise, knowing our COVID infection status is unlikely to be of much practical benefit. Antibody testing should be reserved for specific medical or public health indications.
Being up-to-date with COVID vaccination is still our best defence against severe illness moving forward.
Ashwin Swaminathan has previously received funding for medical research from the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is happening half a planet away from Australia.
But the ripple effects are plain to see at every petrol station and, potentially soon, your electricity bill.
As a result of the invasion and Western sanctions on Russian exports, energy prices have skyrocketed.
If that makes you think nations should have taken steps to secure alternatives to fossil fuels years ago, you’re not alone. As it is, the much higher energy prices are likely to accelerate the exit of coal – and gas – from our energy grids.
This should be a wake-up call. It doesn’t matter that Australia is far from the battlefield. Everyone in the world will be affected in some way.
What’s the link between the invasion and Australian energy prices?
You might think Australia’s domestic supply of coal and gas means we’d be immune to price rises. Not so.
Due to formal sanctions and informal shunning of Russian exports, oil, coal and gas are now extremely expensive on a global scale. Thermal coal prices have increased five-fold to an unprecedented ~$A500 per tonne. Oil is ~$140 a barrel and up 60% year on year. Natural gas in Europe is around 50% higher than last October, but since the invasion, prices have spiked as high as ~200% higher than 2021 levels.
Coal buyers are locking in supply, concerned that Russian sanctions will continue. Russia is the third largest exporter of coal and its existing customers are now under pressure to find alternative supplies.
Russia’s aggression is not just resulting in a major humanitarian and political crisis. It is also causing pain at the bowser for Australian consumers due to the surge in oil pricing and may soon result in higher electricity bills.
Australia’s east-coast electricity market is still heavily reliant upon coal. While many coal-fired power stations have existing supply contracts, the much higher global coal price may increase the cost of any extra coal purchases by existing power stations.
Not only that, but our gas-fired power stations are facing potential increases in operating costs due to much higher global gas prices.
Unfortunately, we may see the result in rising power bills. The price of future contracts for wholesale electricity next year in NSW are now twice what they were a year ago. Assuming this flows through to end-users, prices for residential customers could increase by as much as 10–15%.
So what should Australia do?
While it’s too late to dodge this bullet, we can prepare for future shocks by doubling down on firmed renewables. The faster we move, the less we’ll be hit by the price and reliability risks of coal.
Already under pressure from cheaper renewable technologies, coal power station operators now find themselves potentially facing much higher costs in the short-term. There’s no relief for coal in the long term either, with the rapid rise of renewables and other zero-carbon technologies.
Not only that, but most of our coal power stations are near the end of their lives, and industry doesn’t want to build new ones. That means coal will become more and more expensive, as the plants become increasingly unreliable.
Wind and solar technologies are now much cheaper per unit of energy generated and can be integrated with energy storage to provide dispatchable “firmed” energy. The faster we transition to renewables firmed by storage, the better.
Renewables firmed by storage now offer a cheaper, more reliable alternative. Shutterstock
If we do this, our new grid will also be more reliable. Continuing to rely upon coal is like relying upon a 1970s car to travel from Sydney to Melbourne on the hottest day of the year.
State governments around the nation are already embracing this approach, with the New South Wales government moving ahead with plans for 12 gigawatts (GW) of new renewables and storage and the Victorian government announcing plans for 9GW of offshore windfarms.
Governments must carefully design policies to avoid guaranteeing profits for private sector players while socialising any losses across taxpayers and energy consumers. In NSW, alternatives are being considered.
As European and many other nations scramble to reduce their dependency on Russian coal, oil and gas, Australia now has a once in a generation opportunity to become a leading exporter of new clean energy.
We have truly enormous clean energy resources in the form of free sunlight and wind. To export it, we can either run underseas cables to neighbouring countries, or convert cheap renewable power into green hydrogen and ship this to the world just as we currently do with LNG.
Renewables draw energy from sources unaffected by war. Shutterstock
What else can we expect to see?
Surging fossil fuel prices has supercharged the existing disruption to an already rapidly changing domestic energy industry. In the past month, Origin announced it would abandon coal more rapidly, with the closure of its NSW coal-fired power station, Eraring, in 2025.
Meanwhile, AGL has been pursuing a “demerger” with a view to splitting off its coal assets and pursuing new energy technologies. This comes as Australian tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and Canadian asset fund Brookfield offered to buy AGL for $8.25 a share, though they were not successful. Their plan was to accelerate the closure of AGL’s coal assets, which would move AGL from the highest carbon emitter in Australia to a clean energy company. The age of coal power is ending, and much faster than most of us realise.
This crisis should spur us to build a future-proofed fleet of “firmed” and well-distributed renewables with a known cost structure.
By doing this, we will protect ourselves from the pain of geopolitically driven fossil fuel prices. And we will have a platform ready if we want to provide clean energy to the world in the form of green hydrogen.
We have had decades to make full use of our wealth of renewable energy resources. We haven’t embraced this as fully as we should have.
It turns out localised clean energy production is not just necessary to tackle climate change. It will prove a vital resource as we navigate the highly turbulent decade we have found ourselves in.
Tim Nelson is an Associate Professor at Griffith University and the EGM, Energy Markets at Iberdrola Australia, that develops renewable projects and batteries.
Joel Gilmore is an Associate Professor at Griffith University and the GM, Energy Policy & Planning at Iberdrola Australia, that develops renewable projects and firming assets.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Naomi Barnes, Senior Lecturer, School of Teacher Education & Leadership, Queensland University of Technology
The political attention education issues are getting in the lead-up to the federal election may be an opportunity to demand politicians focus on issues that matter to schools and their communities.
Local school experiences, teachers’ expertise and the educational research that should inform Australian schooling will tell you these issues are all framed too simply. Some have called on the media to be more responsible in reporting education issues.
The LNP’s issues of choice are typically conservative. They offer voters a romanticised view of school before rapid change swept the world.
The issue chosen by the ALP is typically progressive. It presents education as a process of catching up to overcome an uncertain future. But the ALP is also trying to play a romantic game by linking outdated, non-inclusive understandings of internet safety to outdated, non-inclusive “pen licences”.
Understanding why politicians frame education in the ways they do can help teachers and parents make sense of the issues raised by the major parties. And if they understand what is happening, voters can apply localised pressure to the parties in the election campaign.
Why moral panics?
Politicians are no longer connected to localised issues. The diversity and complexity of these issues, coupled with the ubiquity of information on the internet, present a problem for politicians trying to understand the “typical Australian”. So much information is available that it is difficult to know what policy promises to make.
To solve this problem, governments and political parties have drawn on a new class of knowledge brokers to decipher the information and make recommendations. Federal politicians use their partisan knowledge brokers, often employed at think tanks, to look for issues that appeal to their interpretation of the average Australian. These think tanks work as a buffer between politics and the public.
We are researching the effects that buffer organisations, like think tanks, have on education policy development and the politics that goes along with education reform.
We have concentrated our research at this stage on the partisan organisations. But even if they claim to be non-partisan, their work often reveals gaps in their knowledge about education issues.
For example, a recent analysis of teachers’ workloads recommended creating materials for teachers to use, so they could concentrate on how to teach, rather than what to teach.
The election presents an opportunity for the public to demand courageous education policy. With more and more independent candidates standing in their local electorates, voters don’t need to engage with moral panic. Independents present an opportunity for schools and their communities to pitch the local education issues of most concern to them.
Ultimately, local candidates represent local issues, but party candidates will always have to balance local concerns with the party platform. Truly independent candidates can be more receptive to issues locals regard as important. Local issues raised with these candidates are more likely to be reflected in their platforms.
The major parties are increasingly fearful of being outflanked by independent candidates. As a result, these parties could feel the need to adopt aspects of the independents’ policies, or pay more attention to the concerns they raise.
What sort of issues are we talking about?
At a symposium in June 2020, Keith Heggart and Steven Kolber asked teachers, principals, politicians, journalists, education researchers, parents, public intellectuals and community members to discuss democratic issues faced by Australian schools. The two authors have compiled a soon-to-be-published edited collection based on the symposium. They summarise key issues as:
teachers’ rapidly increasing workload
lack of trust in teachers and their professional judgment
lack of scrutiny of the expensive adoption of new technology
the quality of research used for so-called evidence-based policy.
Suggested approaches for tackling these issues include:
more effective and personalised professional learning for teachers
more parental and community involvement in schools
more targeted support for early-career teachers by linking them to professional networks and teaching communities
a revitalisation of teacher unions, including a return to grassroots work with members, but also through expanding connections with the broader education community, including parents, professional associations and think tanks.
Underpinning all of these issues was a central theme: teachers must have the flexibility, trust and quality of research essential for education that serves local needs.
Thank you to Cameron Malcher and Tom Mahoney for their assistance.
Keith Heggart receives funding from the Independent Education Union of Australia.
Naomi Barnes and Steven Kolber do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Thirteen years ago, during the global financial crisis, Australia announced what became a A$16 billion program called Building the Education Revolution.
Designed to provide building work in almost every suburb and town in Australia, it funded projects in more than 8,000 primary schools, most of them school halls.
There’s an argument now for something that would make a greater, even more important, mark: safe air.
Thanks to tight controls and an awareness of what unsafe water can do, nearly all the water we drink is clean. Nearly all the air we breathe is not.
The discovery in the 1800s that water contaminated with sewage caused diseases including typhoid and cholera was a catalyst for huge investments in sewerage and water treatment in Western Europe during the late nineteenth century.
Until then, world population had grown very slowly. But from 1870 to 2000, it soared from 1.5 billion to 6 billion people, growing by a factor of four.
Over the same period, global GDP grew by a factor of 60 and fossil fuel use by a factor of more than 60.
This unprecedented growth was principally caused by investments in sanitation: in sewers and in clean drinking water.
A key side effect of increased fossil fuel use has been pollution of the air.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in has been increased from around 280 parts per million in pre-industrial times to more than 410 now, causing significant global warming and more frequent and more severe bushfires, floods and droughts.
Human health has been negatively impacted by an increase in nitrogen oxides (NOx) and particulates that are mainly produced by industry and vehicles using combustion. Particulates smaller than 2.5 microns in diameter (PM 2.5) have been shown to be particularly damaging because they penetrate deep into lungs and tend to stay there.
The World Health Organisation says PM 2.5 pollution causes 4.2 million premature deaths per year.
Particulates and NOx are prime causes of asthma and are associated with illnesses including heart disease and cancer, two of the biggest causes of death in developed countries.
Airborne pathogens including viruses, bacteria, mould, pollen and fungi also contribute to respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. In an average year prior to COVID, Australia lost about 2% of its GDP to unplanned health-related absences, most caused by respiratory illness.
Study after study has shown that human health is improved by improving indoor air quality. This is particularly evident in people who are older, have chronic diseases, or have bodies under stress during events such as pregnancy.
There are two main ways to do to air what we did to water. One is to reduce concentrations of particulates and nitrogen dioxide by transitioning to using renewable energy quickly.
The other is to improve the quality of indoor air by improving ventilation, both natural and mechanical.
Open windows don’t stay open
At times this will mean excluding outdoor air, such as in bushfires.
At other times this will mean ensuring windows are open. Under Australian building regulations, high occupancy facilities such as schools, nursing homes, pubs, nightclubs and shops can be solely reliant on ventilation from windows. This can work well while they are open.
Students doze off when CO₂ climbs. Shutterstock
When windows are shut, as they often are during hot or cold weather, ventilation is inadequate, particularly where occupancy is high, as in classrooms or common spaces in nursing homes. Nearly all COVID super-spreader events in Melbourne’s second wave occurred in buildings designed to rely on natural ventilation.
Falling asleep in class during winter is more than an indication of boredom; it’s also characteristic of high carbon dioxide levels, with a measurable impact on learning and cognition.
The simplest solution is to mandate mechanical “fallback” ventilation for naturally-ventilated public buildings in the National Construction Code, so that when the windows are closed filtered air circulates automatically.
The system would incorporate high-efficiency particulate absorbing (HEPA) filtration to deal with bushfire smoke, dust storms and particulates.
Building the Ventilation Revolution
Initially, the requirement would apply only to public buildings (Class 9 Buildings in the National Construction Code). But over time the regulations would be extended to all buildings that provide public access, including shops, pubs and restaurants.
Eventually, consistent national air quality standards would apply to all buildings.
Although this proposal would require a substantial investment, and would use some energy, the cost will be offset by reduced healthcare costs and improvements in student learning and worker productivity through better cognition and fewer absences.
Energy consumption can be tackled by producing more renewable energy and also by improving building thermal performance.
We are prepared to use energy to heat and cool buildings and to pump sewage and supply water. It would be odd if we weren’t prepared to use it to make our air as safe as our water.
By committing to a five-year program to improve ventilation and air quality in schools and aged care, the government could guard against future pandemics and would improve health and the quality of life.
How much would a program for schools and aged care cost?
Stage 1 would cost $13 billion
There are 9,581 schools with 4,030,717 students in Australia in 2021.
My architectural firm estimates the cost of upgrading all of these would be about A$10 billion in today’s dollars, or $2 billion per year over five years.
The cost of upgrading these would be about A$3 billion in today’s dollars, or $600 million per year over five years.
The total cost of ensuring the provision of clean air in both schools and aged care facilities would be about $13 billion – $2.6 billion per year over five years. These estimates would be refined by competitive tendering among mid-size contractors.
Improved indoor air quality would better prepare Australians for the next pandemic and help Australian children and workers learn and work more effectively. It would be value for money and a lasting legacy.
Geoff Hanmer has consulted to a number of organisations that are improving their ventilation to reduce the risk of COVID transmission, principally in a voluntary capacity. He has also assisted in assessing a number of air purification devices in a voluntary capacity, although ARINA has been provided with samples of equipment for test. He is a member of the OzSAGE Executive and chairs its ventilation group.
Brace for the federal election – the transport promises have begun. Some are pretty big, such as Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce’s A$678 million for the Outback Highway, and Opposition leader Anthony Albanese’s $500 million down-payment on faster rail between Newcastle and Sydney. If history is any guide, a rush of small local promises won’t be far behind.
As a new report from Grattan Institute reveals, federal government spending on small local transport projects has grown dramatically in recent years.
Under the two most recent Labor terms of government, each electorate received an average of $26 million worth of small transport projects (projects worth up to $10 million each) per year. In the following three Coalition terms, that number increased tenfold to $264 million per electorate per year, on average.
Federal government spending on small local transport projects has grown dramatically in recent years. Grattan Institute, Author provided
But just because there’s more spending on small local projects, does it follow that it’s partisan political spending, or “pork-barrelling”? This new report shows what really matters is whether or not the money is allocated under objective, transparent criteria.
One part of the Urban Congestion Fund, the $660 million commuter carpark fund, attracted public interest after the auditor-general published a scathing report on it last year. Shutterstock
Taking a closer look at transport spending patterns
Two long-standing transport programs allocate federal funds according to relatively objective criteria: the Black Spot program, and Roads to Recovery.
The Black Spot program helps fund road-safety initiatives. To be eligible for funding, initiatives must have a benefit-to-cost ratio of at least 2-to-1, and the site must have a history of at least three casualty crashes in the past five years. The program was worth $104 million in 2020–21.
Roads to Recovery helps fund maintenance of local roads. The federal government provides funding to all local councils, using a formula based on population and road length. The program was worth $592 million in 2020–21.
Both programs are designed to favour rural and remote electorates. And that’s what’s happened under both Labor and Coalition governments, even though rural and remote seats are mostly held by the Coalition, often very safely.
In urban areas, too, the pattern of distribution of funds under these two programs has been remarkably similar under both Labor and Coalition governments. Black Spot and Roads to Recovery funds have been about as likely to go to safe as to marginal seats, and about as likely to go to government-held as to opposition-held seats.
Two long-standing transport programs allocate federal funds according to relatively objective criteria. Grattan Institute, Author provided
In contrast, the $4.9 billion Urban Congestion Fund does not have eligibility criteria on its website. It’s the clearest case of a slush fund on the federal government’s books.
One component of the Urban Congestion Fund, the $660 million commuter carpark fund, has attracted significant public interest since the auditor-general published a scathing report on it last year. But the allocation of the remaining $4.2 billion has received less attention.
Grattan Institute’s latest report shows marginal seats clearly get a bigger share of funds than safe seats under the Urban Congestion Fund. More funding has gone to the most marginal seats, such as Lindsay in Sydney, Higgins in Melbourne, Moreton in Brisbane, Hasluck in Perth, and Boothby in Adelaide.
And seats held by a Coalition member get a bigger share of the funds than seats held by Labor, the Greens, other minor parties, or independents.
For instance, the luckiest electorate in Sydney was Lindsay, centred on Penrith, which received close to $200 million; Melbourne’s Aston, centred on Boronia, received close to $300 million; and Brisbane’s Forde, centred on Beenleigh, received $234 million.
Meanwhile, the electorate containing Sydney’s CBD got no funding, the electorate containing Melbourne’s CBD got $5 million, and the electorate containing Brisbane’s CBD got $2 million.
Marginal seats clearly get a bigger share of funds than safe seats under the Urban Congestion Fund. Grattan Institute, Author provided
Some might say a similar pattern of allocation of small funds, regardless of which party is in government, looks like a fair distribution. But there’s a broader issue: there has been massive growth in these small grants in recent years.
Aggregate federal transport spending has crept up only modestly over recent years, so a bigger proportion of the aggregate is now being directed to small projects – which is the proper and agreed remit of the state or local government, not the federal government.
The spending on small local projects by a national government should stop. Whichever party wins the 2022 federal election should strengthen the transport spending guardrails.
Instead of sprinkling public money on small projects around the country, the federal government should retreat to its proper transport funding role as a national government – no more roundabouts, overpasses, or carparks, just nationally significant infrastructure funded in an even-handed way.
Instead of sprinkling public money on small projects around the country, the federal government should retreat to its proper transport funding role as a national government – no more roundabouts, overpasses, or carparks. Shutterstock
Grattan Institute began with contributions to its endowment of $15 million from each of the Federal and Victorian Governments. In order to safeguard its independence, Grattan Institute’s board controls this endowment. The funds are invested and Grattan uses the income to pursue its activities. Marion Terrill does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any other company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.
Move over Mark McGowan and make some space for South Australia’s Peter Malinauskas on Scott Morrison’s recently-installed couch of Labor “besties”.
After Malinauskas’ sweeping victory on Saturday, Morrison told his Sunday news conference he’d already spoken to the premier-elect.
We had a very constructive discussion about the many projects that are already underway in South Australia […] And I look forward to working with him on those many projects.
The Morrison government might have bagged Labor states at various times over the last two years – Western Australia, Queensland, and Victoria all received criticism – but that’s history.
As far as the PM is concerned, just now he’s at a high point of co-operative federalism.
The SA election has only limited federal implications – we all know people distinguish their federal and state votes.
Nevertheless, the result – the first time since COVID a state or territory government has lost an election – has some federal relevance. So close to the national election, it does affect the vibe.
Think of it this way: if Steven Marshall had had an unexpected victory, what would have been the reaction? People would have said it showed again how wrong polls can be. The result would have inserted a discount into assessments of Anthony Albanese’s chances.
SA Labor’s win will be a psychological boost for the federal opposition, and a further dampener on the government’s mood.
The Marshall government’s loss will reduce the enthusiasm and probably the resources of the local Liberals’ federal campaign in that state. And that’s at the least – the worst thing for the federal Liberals would be if their SA brethren, who are faction-riven, fell into a nasty blame game.
Fortunately for Morrison, SA has minimal seats at risk of changing. Mainly the contest will centre on Boothby where Liberal Nicole Flint is retiring.
Nationally, attention this week will quickly move on from South Australia, as the Morrison government ramps up its public preparation for Tuesday week’s budget and pre-releases various measures.
On Friday, Josh Frydenberg set out the budget’s priorities, which boiled down to giving some relief to people feeling cost of living pressures, and starting to address budget repair and Australia’s high debt.
The cost of living has rapidly escalated as a major issue for the May election.
Whatever the government does, there will be some smoke and mirrors. For example, the budget is set to contain an early payment for low and middle income earners. But the trade off is said to be that it won’t roll over the tax offset that would have given them a rebate in 2023.
Frydenberg has said the cost of living measures will be “targeted” and “proportionate”. There’s been pressure for the government to act on petrol excise, but increasingly strong arguments against doing so.
Deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce said last week that cutting the excise wouldn’t ease the cost of living and would take money away from roads.
The Deloitte Access Economics budget monitor, released Monday, says in framing the March 29 budget the government is in a better position than it earlier expected. This is due to a combination of the economy recovering faster than anticipated and rising commodity prices.
But that first factor fades over time […] And the second factor is also only a temporary tailwind,“ the monitor says. “In other words, the Lucky Country becomes less lucky over time.
Just at the moment, the opposition finds itself more than a little distracted from the pre-budget debate, as friends of the late senator Kimberley Kitching continue to prosecute their claims that she was bullied by Labor’s Senate leadership team – claims denied by the three senior Senate women, Penny Wong, Kristina Keneally, and Katy Gallagher.
The three senators, and many of their accusers will be at Kitching’s funeral at St Patrick’s Cathedral in Melbourne on Monday. As well as being a deeply sad occasion for a grieving family, it will be a fraught one for Labor.
Albanese has not been handling the issue of the allegations well, and Wong was unconvincing when she appeared on Nine on Sunday. She was keeping a commitment arranged earlier, but the interview inevitably was dominated by the bitter Kitching controversy.
Wong said: “There is a common decency that I think we would all hope […] is demonstrated when someone has died. And I would invite some of those making claims and sharing views to consider and reflect on whether or not they have demonstrated that now.”
The trouble with that superficially plausible plea is that it is Kitching’s friends who are making the claims (whether these are justified or not) because they believe she was treated badly.
The government has to be careful with such a sensitive matter, but it is pushing hard. “This is a very, very serious issue,” Morrison said on Sunday. “They’re serious issues that Anthony Albanese has to deal with. This is on his watch.”
The Liberals are trying to turn it into a character test for Albanese.
On a day when you would have expected he might have relished a public appearance, the opposition leader didn’t make one on Sunday.
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.
In the end, the results came in much more quickly than expected. Due to COVID and the general trend to postal voting, the results of the South Australian state election were not anticipated until at least the middle of next week.
But about an hour and half after polls had closed, the results indicated a brutal loss for Steven Marshall’s one-term Liberal government.
This was expected to be a very tight election – most likely resulting in a hung parliament, with either side reliant on key independents. This, after all, has been a common pattern in South Australia.
Going into the election, the picture was delicately balanced. Marshall’s Liberals held 20 seats in the 47-seat chamber, while Peter Malinauskas’ Labor Party held 19 seats, with six independents on the cross-bench.
The Marshall minority government was propped up by a number of those independents, including former Liberal and current Speaker of the House Dan Cregan in the seat of Kavel.
However, the final polls and betting odds were indicating that a change of government was possible, perhaps even by a solid margin. By the end of Saturday evening, the extent of the loss was clear: Labor had already secured enough support to win 25 seats, with 24 needed to form a majority government.
According to the ABC, there are still nine seats in doubt. In what would be a truly remarkable outcome, Labor is predicted to finish with 28 seats, the Liberals reduced to 14, with a cross-bench of five.
Two key factors shaped the election result. First, as ABC election analyst Antony Green put it, Nick Xenophon has had “more impact on this election than the last one”. In 2018, a resurgent SA Best, led by Xenophon, had secured strong support in key seats, with 15-20% of the vote in many marginals. What happened in South Australia this year is that a much higher proportion of those voters decided to support the Malinauskas challenge, showing a loss of faith in Marshall’s government.
Steven Marshall’s Liberals have been consigned to a single term in office, following a brutal defeat in the 2022 SA election. Matt Turner/AAP
Second, the Liberals lost ground in those key suburban seats, especially those surrounding Adelaide. The key target marginal seats, including the ultra-marginal Newland, King and Elder, and Adelaide itself, all fell quickly to Labor.
This pattern reflects a familiar structural problem for the Liberals in South Australia, where its support base has disproportionately been in rural and regional areas. However, the swing to Labor was enough this time to see them take Davenport, and potentially Gibson, which had previously been held by Liberals by relatively strong margins.
What went wrong for Marshall?
In his moving poem, The Mistake, the poet James Fenton reflects upon the agonies of hindsight. Given the surprising scale of Labor’s win, we should caution against simplistic judgements about the result. But there are a range of factors that seemingly shaped the removal of Marshall’s government.
In 2018, Marshall had a set of policies around land tax, payroll tax, shopping hours deregulation, and reducing the cost of living through reductions in taxes such as the emergency services levy. It didn’t help that Marshall couldn’t deliver on some of these pledges.
This time around, the Liberals’ spending promises were modest, and its overall macro-economic strategy was less clear.
In contrast, Labor tapped into a public appetite for more significant infrastructure spending, crucially in the realm of health. The issue of hospital ramping has bedevilled South Australia for a long time, and it was an ongoing pressure point for the Liberals. Labor was cannily able to use the issue to build its campaign around new public funding in this area.
Labor used the ongoing issue of hospital ramping to great effect in its election campaign. AAP/Ben MacMahon
The politics of COVID was also a likely factor. This was the first time an incumbent government had been ejected in an election since the pandemic. Yet, what’s clear is voters are comfortable with ambitious spending policy agendas – and new forms of stimulus. COVID has changed electoral dynamics, and Marshall’s government paid a price for a reasonably well-handled approach to the pandemic.
Implications for the federal election
Will the South Australia result impact the imminent federal election? Only indirectly. Australians tend to treat state and federal elections separately, and distinctive local and national factors shape the results of each.
However, indirectly, the failure of the Marshall government is really a story about the fragmentation of the right in Australian politics. The absence of a strong Nationals presence in the state arguably throws out of balance the ideological differences within the Liberal party.
The fraying of the Liberals, and the inability of Marshall to keep factional balances and in-fighting in check, reflects a more general national trend for independents to challenge in “non-Labor” seats.
Given the Marshall government delivered successful and progressive social reforms, not least the decriminalisation of abortion and introducing euthanasia legislation, it ironically reflects the structural failure of moderate liberalism in the country.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison, a far more conservative-minded leader, and an electoral drag in South Australia, faces a sterner challenge in reconciling this fragmented politics.
Near the end of his poem, Fenton intones the protagonist to “lay claim to this mistake”. Given the outgoing premier’s upbeat assessment of his single term of office, it might take a new generation to learn the lessons from this devastating loss.
Rob Manwaring does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
Matt Turner/AAP
With 54% of enrolled voters counted in Saturday’s South Australian election, the ABC is calling Labor wins in 25 of the 47 seats, enough for a three-seat majority. The Liberals have won nine seats and independents four. The current final results prediction is Labor 28, Liberals 14 and independents five.
Vote shares are 40.4% Labor (up 7.7% since the 2018 election), 34.6% Liberals (down 3.4%), 9.6% Greens (up 2.9%), 3.8% Family First (up 0.8%), 2.7% One Nation and 8.7% for all Others – mainly independents (up 3.3%). The big crash was Nick Xenophon’s former SA-Best, which was down 14.0% to just 0.2%.
Labor gained the four very marginal Liberal seats of Adelaide, Elder, King and Newland, which were all held by 2% or less. They also gained Davenport, which the Liberals held by an 8.1% margin. The Liberals lost Stuart to independent Geoff Brock, who had contested this seat after his political base was moved out of Frome in a redistribution.
Votes counted so far include only those cast on election day in home electorates. A large number of pre-poll, postal and election day absent votes remain to be counted; this will occur next week. Postal votes nearly always favour the Liberals strongly relative to other votes in Australia, while the smaller numbers of absent votes favour Labor.
The Liberals have many seats where they are currently just ahead, but are likely to extend their leads in those seats once all votes are counted. A Labor win in Gibson, where they currently lead by 51.6-48.4, is more doubtful.
Analyst Kevin Bonham has a discussion of messy seats. In Finniss, the Liberals are well ahead on primaries, with independent Lou Nicholson just behind Labor. If Nicholson maintains her current position in the remaining vote, she probably passes Labor on minor party preferences, and goes on to win Finniss.
In Waite, Labor is just ahead of the Liberals on primary votes with 27.4% to 24.5%. Liberal MP turned independent Sam Duluk is on 18.9%, another independent on 15.3% and the Greens 12.0%. While it’s possible one independent makes the final two, it’s more likely this is a Labor vs Liberal contest. The electoral commission needs to re-do its two candidate count so it’s between the Liberals and Labor.
Federal implications and poll performance
After 16 years of Labor government in SA from 2002-18, the Liberals were defeated after a single term. The federal government’s unpopularity will be blamed for the state Liberal loss, and it will be seen as a pointer to the federal election expected in May.
We already know from the federal polling, such as the last Newspoll that gave Labor a 55-45 lead, that the federal government is currently in trouble. What matters from a federal election perspective is not the SA result, but what happens in federal polling between now and the election. It’s unlikely, but still possible, that the government recovers by the election.
The final SA state Newspoll had Labor winning by 54-46 from primary votes of 41% Labor, 38% Liberals, 9% Greens and 12% Others. A YouGov poll had Labor winning by 56-44, from primary votes of 41% Labor, 33% Liberals, 11% Greens and 15% Others. While both polls were conducted by the same company, they were not the same due to different weighting – see this Poll Bludger post.
When all votes are counted, the Liberals are likely to finish between the 33% and 38% these two polls gave them, with Labor below the 41% both polls had and the Greens on 9%, close to Newspoll. Although Newspoll was likely more accurate, both polls did reasonably well.
The worst poll catastrophe was an early February seat poll for Stuart from uComms, reported by The Poll Bludger, that gave Brock just 11.3% of the primary vote; he’s currently on 48.5%!
Eleven of the 22 upper house seats were up for election. SA uses statewide proportional representation with optional above the line preferential voting. A quota is one-twelfth of the vote, or 8.3%.
With 53% of enrolled voters counted for the upper house, Labor had 4.45 quotas, the Liberals 3.97, the Greens 1.18, One Nation 0.50, the Liberal Democrats 0.42, Family First 0.39, Legalise Cannabis 0.27 and Animal Justice 0.18.
Four Labor, four Liberals and one Green will be elected. One Nation is likely to win one seat, but the big question is Labor. On current counting, Labor would win a fifth upper house seat, but the danger is that their vote slides in late counting, putting their surplus after four quotas behind the Lib Dems and Family First.
In this case, Labor will need preferences from the Greens, Legalise Cannabis and Animal Justice to overcome a deficit. But above the line preferencing is optional in SA.
Despite Labor’s thumping victory in the lower house, there is some chance that the upper house is 6-5 to right-wing parties with One Nation and either the Lib Dems or Family First joining four Liberals.
Even if Labor wins the last seat, Labor and the Greens would not control the upper house as the 11 members elected in 2018 are not up until 2026. These members are four Liberals, four Labor, two SA-Best and one Green. SA-Best won just 0.13 quotas, so their two members elected in 2018 are very unlikely to survive 2026.
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.
