Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katherine (Kate) Power, Lecturer in Management, School of Business, The University of Queensland

Since former Australian of the Year Grace Tame declined to smile in a photo opportunity with Prime Minister Scott Morrison, debate has raged about what counts as politeness and impoliteness in Australian political debate.

Jenny Morrison recently told 60 Minutes she wants her daughters to grow up “fierce and strong” but also “be polite and have manners”.

Meanwhile, the gloves are well and truly off in Canberra. As Labor claimed Aged Care Services Minister Richard Colbeck had “failed in his job” and should be sacked, Morrison accused opposition leader Anthony Albanese of “clearly [being] on the side of criminals” (during debate about deportation legislation) and labelled deputy leader Richard Marles, a “Manchurian candidate” (over past comments on China).

As we head towards another federal election, the temperature of debate will only increase. Is politeness compatible with politics? And what standards should we expect from our leaders?

Defining “politeness”

In 1978, American linguists Penelope Brown and Stephen C Levinson developed “politeness theory”. This is the most influential scholarly work dealing with politeness. At its heart lies the notion of “face” or the public image we want for ourselves.

There are two types of “face”:

1. “positive face” – our desire to be “appreciated and approved of”. It can be threatened by accusations, insults and expressions of criticism or contempt.

2. “negative face” – our desire for autonomy, including both freedom to act and freedom from other people telling us what to do. It can be threatened by orders, requests, advice and threats.

Politeness might mean giving someone approval or praise, or minimising our imposition on them. But there are times when this is not possible or practical. In emergencies, for example, we might yell sharply at someone to get out of harm’s way, or to protect ourselves. As linguistic anthropologists Horst Arndt and Richard W. Janney observe,

To not do this would require a radical suppression of one’s own interests and feelings, and an almost slavish acceptance of those of others. The result would be a total loss of personal face.

In situations such as these, a lack of conventional politeness is not only understandable, it just might be essential.

Defining impoliteness

Politeness theory focuses on what we say, but impoliteness can also be communicated by non-verbal behaviour, such as facial expressions, eye contact, voice quality and body movements. So, not smiling in a photo opportunity may express positive impoliteness. Meanwhile, shaking someone’s hand when they don’t want you to arguably shows negative impoliteness.

Linguist Jonathan Culpeper says impoliteness involves “the absence of politeness […] where it would be expected”. And the more powerful and/or unfamiliar someone is to us, the more polite we are expected to be. He also explains that some behaviours can be perceived as impolite if they just clash with how someone expects or wants them to be.

So, who decides what counts as politeness? And what happens when we disagree?

Context matters

There is a longstanding consensus amongst linguists that nothing is inherently polite or impolite. Rather, the things we communicate take on these meanings from the cultures and contexts in which they happen.

For example, recent research suggests Australia’s brand of politeness prioritises “positive face,” with a high value placed on “being welcoming and showing solidarity and sympathy”. We also have an emphasis on what scholars call, “jocular mockery.” This includes various forms of teasing based on the view that people shouldn’t take themselves too seriously – or what is more commonly known as “taking the piss”.

Read more:
From ‘Toby Tosspot’ to ‘Mr Harbourside Mansion’, personal insults are an Australian tradition

But ideas about gender also play a significant role in our expectations here. For example, men who don’t smile when they are expected to might be seen as “tough” or “serious”, while women are labelled “rude” or “disrespectful”.

Politeness in politics

Politics is not a warm and fuzzy profession by any means. But in recent years, researchers have tracked a “shameless normalisation” of verbal aggression, insults, racist and misogynistic attacks and hostile forms of humour from leaders such as Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi.

Closer to home, last week outgoing Liberal MP Nicolle Flint decried the abuse she has received during her time in politics.

Men on the left, some of whom are public figures of influence, have done the following: they’ve stalked me, suggested I should be strangled, criticised the clothes I wear and the way I look, called me a whiny little bitch repeatedly, repeatedly called me weak, a slut […]

More generally, politicians and scholars have both observed that rudeness is not only expected but rewarded in parliamentary debates.

The risk here is that voters just tune out and turn off (as any regular viewer of parliamentary question time can attest).

Caution: election ahead

Of course there is a difference in how politicians or political opponents behave towards each other and how they behave towards the people whose votes they want.

Politeness can play a potentially important role in image-management. While he was opposition leader, for example, Tony Abbott was quick to distance himself from placards belittling then Prime Minister Julia Gillard, after speaking in front of them at a public rally.

But here voters should take note of linguist Manfred Keinpointner’s warning:

some forms of politeness, such as manipulative or insincere politeness, should be seen as […] impolite.

And as we reflect on what behaviour we expect and want from our political leaders and those who shape the national debate, we also need to ask to whose benefit it is to be – or seem to be – polite. Perhaps what we want more than conventional etiquette is what political scientists call civility – or “respect for the traditions of democracy”.

Katherine (Kate) Power receives funding from The Advance Queensland Industry Research Fellowships program.

– ref. Please excuse me, is there a place for politeness in Australian politics? – https://theconversation.com/please-excuse-me-is-there-a-place-for-politeness-in-australian-politics-177437

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Wark, Conjoint Professor, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

GPs can now prescribe antiviral pills for some of their vulnerable COVID-19 patients to take at home. More patients are expected to have access in coming weeks and months.

These drugs are given to people at greater risk of severe disease at the start of their infection, to stop them getting so sick they need to go to hospital. So they are an important next step in our fight against the pandemic. But we should look at these antivirals as another option to manage COVID-19, not a silver bullet.

These pills aren’t suitable for everyone, especially pregnant women, and need to be taken very soon after diagnosis. Not everyone benefits. Then there’s the theoretical risk they could help lead to more viral variants.

Read more:
Australia approves two new medicines in the fight against COVID. How can you get them and are they effective against Omicron?

Remind me, what are antiviral drugs?

Viruses cannot reproduce unless they invade a host cell, hijack its machinery and use it to replicate and spread to the next cell.

Antiviral drugs sabotage part of this process. They either prevent the virus from entering the cell, prevent it from replicating or stop it being released.

Unlike earlier COVID-19 antiviral drugs, such as remdesivir, these new antiviral pills will be taken at home. This makes them easier to use, potentially preventing people with COVID-19 deteriorating and needing to go to hospital.

These pills have also been designed specifically to target SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, including the Omicron variant.

Read more:
Why are there so many drugs to kill bacteria, but so few to tackle viruses?

Merck’s pill

One of the newly approved antivirals is molnupiravir (brand name Lagevrio). This causes fatal mutations in the virus as it tries to replicate.

In a recently published study, researchers treated 1,433 people within five days of symptoms and a COVID-19 diagnosis. Half took molnupiravir, the other half placebo, for five days.

All had at least one risk factor for severe COVID-19, such as diabetes, obesity, or serious heart, lung or kidney disease. None had been vaccinated.

In the molnupiravir group, 7.3% were admitted to hospital or died from any cause in the following month compared with 14.1% who took the placebo. That’s a 48% risk reduction when you compare the two. You would need to treat 15 people with the drug to prevent one hospitalisation or death. There were no serious side effects.

But we need to exercise caution. Molnupiravir damages the viral genes, causing mutations so the virus cannot replicate. So it also has the potential to damage human genes, especially in susceptible cells that are dividing, such as foetal cells. At least, that’s what laboratory studies show.

This means molnupiravir can’t be used in pregnancy or by breastfeeding mothers and it is recommended women of childbearing age use contraception while taking it. It theoretically could also cause mutations that, under rare circumstances, could lead to health issues in the mother and foetus.

There is also a theoretical risk mutations in the viral genome could lead to new viral variants resistant to the medication, or that can evade our immune response.

Molnupiravir is only used for a short time and this should be safe.

But concerns about inducing new viral variants or viral resistance limit its use in immunosuppressed people, who may need longer treatment courses, or in vulnerable people who have been exposed to the virus but do not yet show signs of infection.

Read more:
Take-at-home COVID drug molnupiravir may be on its way — but vaccination is still our first line of defence

Pfizer’s treatment

The other newly approved agent is a combination of two drugs – nirmatrelvir and ritonavir – called Paxlovid.

Nirmatrelvir blocks the action of an enzyme the virus uses to replicate while ritonavir (which is also used in an HIV drug) boosts the levels of nirmatrelvir to maintain its effectiveness.

Trial results for this agent have only just been published. The trial involved
2,246 unvaccinated people with at least one risk factor for severe COVID-19. Within five days of diagnosis, they were treated with either the drug or placebo.

Treatment resulted in an 89% reduction in COVID-19-related hospitalisations, or deaths from any cause, compared to placebo, in people treated within three days of symptoms starting. You would need to treat 16 people to prevent one hospitalisation or death. There were no serious adverse events.

This treatment is also not recommended in people who are pregnant or breastfeeding.

It can interact with many other medicines. And as it’s removed from the body by the liver and kidneys, it is not suitable for people with serious liver or kidney disease.

Read more:
Pfizer’s pill is the latest COVID treatment to show promise. Here are some more

Who will get them?

A word of caution. These antiviral drugs have only been assessed in unvaccinated people. So we’re not really sure how effective these agents will be if you’re vaccinated. With high levels of vaccination in Australia, including our most vulnerable populations, this may be an issue.

Initially, there is likely to be constraints on their supply and they will be prioritised for those most at risk of severe COVID-19.

For the vulnerable people we are most concerned about – such as people in residential aged care and with serious health problems – these antivirals may be too little too late.

That’s because by the time some people have become infected and develop symptoms, their immune response to infection causes severe disease. So elderly people may not get the same benefit as younger people from these antiviral agents.

We need to use them wisely

This new generation of antivirals is not a replacement for vaccination, masks or improved indoor ventilation. These measures prevent people from being infected in the first place.

If we use these antivirals unwisely, they will have side effects and may lead to the virus becoming resistant, just as we see with bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics.

Peter Wark receives funding from NHMRC Australia, Medical Research Futures fund, the US NIH. He has also received independent investigator funding from Glaxo Smith Kline and Vertex.

– ref. Taking COVID pills at home sounds great. But we need to use them wisely or risk drug resistance and new variants – https://theconversation.com/taking-covid-pills-at-home-sounds-great-but-we-need-to-use-them-wisely-or-risk-drug-resistance-and-new-variants-176235

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Finch, Lecturer in Structural Geology and Metamorphism, James Cook University

Two recent announcements hint at a seismic shift about to hit Australia’s coal industry.

Australian tech billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes and Canada’s Brookfield put forward an extraordinary joint bid to takeover AGL Energy, Australia’s biggest emitting company, over the weekend. If successful, it would see AGL’s coal-fired power stations shut down early. And last week, Origin Energy announced that the country’s largest coal plant, Eraring, will close seven years early.

These developments have confirmed what many already knew: the death of the coal industry is now inevitable.

Australia’s coal industry directly and indirectly supports less than 1% of the Australian workforce, with these jobs heavily concentrated in a handful of small regions in Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia.

Coal is the reason some of these communities exist. If we don’t transition carefully, these communities will break apart, as so many mining towns have before.

But Australia is also abundant in many of the minerals and rare earth elements our society will run on in the future, including lithium, cobalt and copper. If government and industry pivot from coal to green energy, Australian jobs in energy and the minerals industry will still exist. All we need is a plan.

But why did coal end up in these dense deposits in a small number of places? And how can we ensure the end of the coal industry happens in a way that doesn’t decimate people’s livelihoods? The answers to those questions can be found in Australia’s ancient past – let’s take a trip back 299 million years.

The past shapes the present

Our destination: eastern Australia, 299 million years ago during the Permian age. In this period, Australia was much further south, close to where Antarctica is now.

Australia was slowly emerging from a long, cold period which had lasted for millions of years. Ice sheets still covered parts of southern and western Australia and glaciers were common in the mountains of the eastern states.

As the world warmed and ice sheets melted, high rainfall saw dense forests grow in eastern Australia. Swamps and extensive river systems covered swathes of land.

In these dense, swampy forests, the most abundant trees were from a now-extinct group called Glossopteris. These trees, known as seed ferns, reached heights of 40 metres with long, bare trunks giving way to a dense canopy of branches bearing broad, tongue-shaped leaves.

Read more:
The epic, 550-million-year story of Uluṟu, and the spectacular forces that led to its formation

Australia’s animal life was vastly different to today. Our oceans were full of trilobites, which looked a little like slaters with a hard mineral exoskeleton. They lived underwater and had incredible vision with eyes made of calcite – the same mineral that makes up stalactites and stalagmites in caves.

On land, the vertebrate fossil record from this time is intriguingly sparse, but we suspect animals such as the Labyrinthodont wandered the swamps (think of a salamander but the size of a crocodile and with razor-sharp teeth).

It was in this glorious, terrifying swampy wonderland that eastern Australia’s coal deposits formed. When the towering Glossopteris died, they toppled into the swamps and rivers. High rainfall meant dead trees were completely covered by water so deep it contained little oxygen.

The lack of oxygen meant the trees didn’t break down like they normally would, instead retaining some of the energy they accumulated when alive. More and more plant matter was deposited, and the swamps and rivers deepened.

Under the weight from above, the lowest layers compacted and became more dense, eventually forming peat. When peat is buried deeper, compacted and heated it eventually forms a carbonaceous black rock: coal.

Coal is remarkably rare

Coal deposits are extraordinarily rare on Earth and require very specific circumstances to form. You need enormous volumes of woody plant matter being deposited into a swamp, river or shallow marine environment. Australia’s Glossopteris trees were uniquely adapted to grow prolifically in swamps and rivers, so they were the perfect coal ingredient.

But the coal checklist doesn’t stop there. The watery graveyard for the trees had to deepen over time to make room for more trees on top, while keeping the whole system covered in water. This environment had to exist for a very long time. To make a 1m-thick black coal deposit, you need a 10m-thick layer of trees.

Read more:
Plant fossils have a lot to teach us about Earth’s history

After the coal deposit forms, it needs to be preserved. That usually means no major tectonic activity after the deposit forms.

Australia’s deposits formed close to the coast. If the sea level had risen just a little, many coal deposits would be submerged and inaccessible.

In short, several environmental and geological processes have to occur at the same time for coal deposits to form. Australia’s eastern margin proved to be the perfect setting.

Using our geology for a just transition

Today, Australia is a coal giant, the world’s largest exporter of coking coal and second-largest of thermal coal. While this might be lucrative for the companies involved, coal is not compatible with a liveable climate. Every year, burning coal causes 40% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

Governments often hold up coal jobs as a reason Australia can’t part ways with coal mining. Recent modelling of a net-zero emissions by 2050 scenario shows between 100,000 and 300,000 jobs will be lost in Australia’s coal-mining communities.

Read more:
The end of coal is coming 3 times faster than expected. Governments must accept it and urgently support a ‘just transition’

This would be devastating for coal towns if it happened suddenly. But we don’t have to do it like that. If new industries are brought into these towns over the next 20 years, it may have minimal impact.

Not only that, but Australia will need mining workers for the foreseeable future – just not in coal.

Coal, gas and oil are quickly getting replaced with renewables, electric cars and battery storage, among other technologies. That means mining. To build wind turbines, solar panels and battery storage we need minerals such as copper, cobalt, lithium and rare earth elements.

Luckily, Australia’s geology means we have rich deposits of many of these minerals, too.

Like coal, these minerals are concentrated in particular regions. And like coal, they have been millions of years in the making. Mount Isa’s copper and rare earth element deposits formed when hot, salty fluids acted like a magnet for metals, bringing them up to the surface and depositing them in little pockets we can find by understanding the geology.

Much of this happened 1.5 billion years ago, but the deposits are still there, just under the surface.

Read more:
5 rocks any great Australian rock collection should have, and where to find them

Indeed, modelling suggests Australia’s switch to export clean energy and green technology minerals could generate 395,000 jobs in locations likely to be affected by global decarbonisation.

On a wider scale, the million jobs plan, proposed by the Beyond Zero Emissions thinktank, details how 1.8 million new jobs could be created in Australia in renewables and low-emissions technology.

We have the potential to be a global leader in climate action through our mining prowess and human capital coupled with our geological wealth of minerals vital to the decarbonisation push now under way. No one need be left behind in the coal towns – as long as our leaders plan for this now.

Melanie Finch is the President of the Women in Earth and Environmental Sciences Australasia (WOMEESA) Network. She is a 2021-2022 Science and Technology Australia Superstar of STEM.

Emily Finch has previously received funding from an Australian Postgraduate Award and a Society of Economic Geologists Graduate Student Fellowship.

– ref. How Australia’s geology gave us an abundance of coal – and a wealth of greentech minerals to switch to – https://theconversation.com/how-australias-geology-gave-us-an-abundance-of-coal-and-a-wealth-of-greentech-minerals-to-switch-to-173988

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sally Larsen, PhD candidate, Education & Psychology, University of New England

In Australia, around 30% of primary and 40% of secondary school children attend a private, or independent, school. School fees vary widely, depending on the type of private school and the different sectors that govern them. Catholic schools generally cost less than independent schools where families can pay fees of more than $40,000 per year.

Despite the term “independent school”, all schools in Australia receive government funding. On average, Catholic schools receive around 75% and independent schools around 45% of their funding from state and federal governments.

Research shows parents believe private schools will provide a better education for their children, and better set them up for success in life. But the evidence on whether this perception is correct is not conclusive.

What does the research say about academic scores?

Our recent study showed NAPLAN scores of children who attended private schools were no different to those in public schools, after accounting for socioeconomic background.

These findings are in line with other research, both in Australia and internationally, which shows family background is related both to the likelihood of attending a private school and to academic achievement.

While there may appear to be differences in the academic achievement of students in private schools, these tend to disappear once socioeconomic background is taken into account.

An analysis of 68 education systems (mainly countries, but some countries only include regions which are known as “education systems”) participating in the 2018 Programme for International Assessment (PISA) tests showed attendance at private schools was not consistently related to higher test performance.

The OECD report says:

On average across OECD countries and in 40 education systems, students in private schools […] scored higher in reading than students in public schools ([…] before accounting for socio-economic profile)[…] However, after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile, reading scores were higher in public schools than in private schools […]

Do private schools improve student achievement over time?

Another argument used to support Australia’s growing private school sector is the idea private schools actually add value to a child’s education. This means attending a private school should boost students’ learning trajectories over and above what they might have achieved in a public school.

Our research is the first to examine whether students differ in learning trajectories across the four NAPLAN test years (3, 5, 7 and 9) depending on the school type they attended.

We compared the NAPLAN scores of students who attended a public school, a private school and those who attended a public school in years 3 and 5 and then a private school in years 7 and 9. The students in the latter group scored highest in reading and numeracy tests in each of the four NAPLAN test years.

This group outperformed students who attended private schools at all years, and students who attended public schools at all years. But there was no evidence that making the switch to a private school added to students’ learning growth.

These high-performing students were already achieving the highest results in public school before they left for private school in year 7.

This suggests private schools may be be enrolling the highest achievers from public primary schools.

Other analyses in our paper showed that once socioeconomic background of these students was taken into account, apparent achievement differences between school sectors were no longer present.

Read more:
Public schools actually outperform private schools, and with less money

The other interesting point is that there were no differences in achievement trajectories between the groups. So, making the switch to private schools in year 7 did not affect the gains students were making in NAPLAN over time. Students in public schools made just as much progress as their peers who attended private schools.

This undermines claims private schools add value to students’ academic growth.

What about other private school benefits?

Some Australian research has shown students who attend private schools are more likely to complete school and attend university, and tend to attain higher rankings in university entrance exams. Indeed, the recent announcements of NSW students’ HSC results showed almost three-quarters of the 150 top-ranked schools were independent.

The concentration of higher-achieving students in private schools could also magnify any peer effects on students’ decisions about future career paths or attending university.

Read more:
More money for private schools won’t make Australia’s education fairer, no matter how you split it

Nonetheless the research on these questions is not definitive: it is very difficult to separate out the effects of background characteristics of students and the effects of the school sector given that more advantaged students tend to concentrate in private schools.

Some Australian research has shown the characteristics of students before they enter private schools have a larger effect on their aspirations, behaviour and attitudes than the school.

Rethinking the system?

While the capacity for parents to choose a school that best suits their child is often seen as an advantage, many disadvantaged families are a lot more constrained in their ability to choose, and pay for, private schools.

Students attending private schools may have access to other non-academic benefits, such as more opportunities for sports, excursions and other extracurricular activities.

But in terms of academic advantage, we know, from our research and other studies that explored similar questions, there is little evidence to show independent schools offer any. It is likely children will do equally well in any school sector.

Read more:
Schools have been ideological battlegrounds in the past. In the coronavirus crisis, they are again

Sally Larsen receives PhD research funding from the Australian Government Research Training Program.

Alexander Forbes receives PhD research funding from the Australian Government Research Training Program.

– ref. Going to private school won’t make a difference to your kid’s academic scores – https://theconversation.com/going-to-private-school-wont-make-a-difference-to-your-kids-academic-scores-175638

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Bendall, Research Fellow, Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University

In this new series, Remaking History, academics take a look at the ways they are recreating historical practices, and how this impacts their research today.

Although I have been sewing as a hobby for many years, making and wearing historical clothing was not something I imagined myself doing when I first began researching the history of corsets and hooped skirts.

But many years on – and many corsets later – the experimental process of reconstructing 400-year-old garments has taught me many things about historical making practices, women’s experiences and about not believing everything you read.

In my research, I look at women’s clothing from the 16th and 17th centuries. There are very few sources from this time where women themselves describe what it was like to wear “bodies”, “stays” and “farthingales” – the names given to corsets and hooped skirts at the time.

The philosopher Michel de Montaigne portrayed these garments as torture devices women used to become slender, reflecting their inherent vanity.

Other men blamed women for deforming their own bodies and that of their children, for causing infertility or miscarriage, and even for hiding sexually transmitted infections.

Yet, in the face of these criticisms, corsets and hooped skirts went from being elite garments worn by a few aristocrats in royal courts to common among many different classes of women in Europe. During the 17th and 18th centuries, women led the way in purchasing these garments and in dictating to their tailors what they wanted and why.

Despite the demonstrated popularity of this clothing among women, many myths persist. Without physical or historical proof to interrogate whether these garments were as restrictive or painful as they were made out to be, such myths are hard to overcome.

This is where reconstruction comes in.

Read more:
Remaking history: how recreating early daguerreotype photographs gave us a window to the past

Reconstructing early corsets

My work follows other approaches that have reconstructed surviving historical clothing.

I focus on making my corsets to the patterns and dimensions of surviving garments.

All my corsets (except one) were completely hand sewn using techniques and stitches visible in the originals.

For many of the reconstructions I kept an online diary of the making process, noting both my successes and failures as I attempted to replicate the work of master craftsmen with many more years of experience than myself.

Reconstructions of historical garments can never be exact replicas: it is always an act of interpretation. Informed compromises between modern and historical materials are necessary.

All my reconstructions are made from natural fibre fabrics that were available in the past such as silk and linen, but differences in modern fabric manufacturing make it impossible to precisely replicate historical fabrics.

Historical corsets often got their shape and stiffness from whale baleen. Commercial whaling was banned in 1986 and so I used modern synthetics specifically designed to mimic the properties of baleen.

Despite these challenges, making historical corsets taught me to think like a tailor, to understand why specific materials or techniques were used and to assess the artisanal making knowledge that we have lost.

Lessons in the wearing

Once the corsets were made, it was time for them to be worn. I both wore them myself, and observed other women in them.

I instructed models to sit down, bend over and reach up to test the ways these garments limited or impeded movement. I found corsets spanned a wide spectrum of comfort and restrictiveness depending on the design of the garment: the cut, the length and how much it was boned.

Early modern corsets could be uncomfortable if not fitted to individual measurements or made correctly. This shows the importance of well-tailored garment in times before modern off-the-rack standardised clothing made from stretch fabrics.

Most 17th-century garments are front lacing, giving women control over how they wore the garment at different times of the day. A woman could wear it loose or tight laced. She may also have worn it every day or only for formal occasions.

My experiments also showed the slenderising effects of these early corsets observed by Montaigne were largely due to the optical illusion of their cylindrical shape. My corsets didn’t reduce body measurements by much. I found the most restrictive feature of 17th century corsets to be their off-shoulder straps that limit arm movement, but this is not something unique to corsets.

One of my reconstructions was a maternity corset from the late 17th century. Placing it on a model with a simulated pregnancy bump showed how the design accommodated pregnancy: it supported the breasts and back, while not restricting the abdomen. This is far from the picture painted by sensationalist male moralists that warned of the dangers to pregnancy.

We may never know precisely how a 16th or 17th-century woman felt when she wore a corset, nor exactly recapture her bodily experiences. However, reconstructions can help us to assess how much written sources do or do not reflect the lived experiences of historical women – and go one step further in showing how many myths about early corsets written by men are exaggerations.

Read more:
Long before Billie Eilish, women wore corsets for form, function and support

Sarah Bendall receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Pasold Research Fund.

– ref. Remaking history: in hand-making 400-year-old corset designs, I was able to really understand how they impacted women – https://theconversation.com/remaking-history-in-hand-making-400-year-old-corset-designs-i-was-able-to-really-understand-how-they-impacted-women-175055

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

Tensions between Australia and China have increased further, after the Chinese shone a laser at a RAAF surveillance aircraft that was observing Chinese naval activity in Australia’s exclusive economic zone.

The incident comes as the government is set on ramping up the national security debate – despite pushback from some in the intelligence community – claiming an Albanese government would be soft on China.

Anthony Albanese on Sunday ensured Labor’s reaction to the incident was bipartisan, condemning it in the strongest terms.

Scott Morrison said the incident, which happened on Thursday, was an “act of intimidation”, unprovoked and unwarranted as well as irresponsible and dangerous.

Lasers can disable aircraft and blind crew members.

The Prime Minister told a news conference Australia would be “making our views very, very clear to the Chinese government”. Sources said later Australia had raised strong concerns in Canberra and Beijing through defence and diplomatic channels.

Albanese said China’s action was “an outrageous act of aggression that should be condemned”.

“The Australian government should be making the strongest possible statement about what is a reckless act,” he added.

Morrison said the incident, in the Arafura Sea, “only strengthens my resolve to ensure we keep going down the path of boosting Australia’s resilience, taking this issue as seriously as you possibly can take it, as we have always done.

“It has been our government that has stood up to these threats and coercion over many years now. We’ve shown that resolve, we’ve shown that strength.

“And we’ve done it in the face of criticism, including here in our own country from those who think an appeasement path should be taken.

“I won’t be intimidated by it. And the appeasement path is not something my government will ever go down.”

The shadow ministers for foreign affairs and defence, Penny Wong and Brendan O’Connor respectively, said Labor was seeking a detailed briefing from the Defence Department.

“These are not the actions of a responsible power,” they said in a joint statement. “It is consistent with Beijing’s growing regional aggression.

“China must understand that such action will only engender further mistrust.”

They stressed “support for our defence force is bipartisan and unwavering. On issues of national security, the focus should remain solely on Australia’s national interest and not political interests.”

The Saturday Defence statement said that on February 17, “a P-8A Poseidon detected a laser illuminating the aircraft while in flight over Australia’s northern approaches.

“The laser was detected as emanating from a People’s Liberation Army –
Navy (PLA-N) vessel. Illumination of the aircraft by the Chinese
vessel is a serious safety incident.”

The vessel, with a second PLA-N ship, was sailing east through the Arafura Sea when the incident happened.

Read more:
Explainer: what was the Chinese laser attack about and why does it matter?

Defence said such acts had “the potential to endanger lives. We strongly condemn unprofessional and unsafe military conduct”.

Such acts were “not in keeping with the standards we expect of
professional militaries.”

Defence said the two ships had gone through the Torres Strait and were in the Coral Sea.

Defence Minister Peter Dutton said it was important to understand this was a military grade laser – not a sort of laser “you would see from time to time that […] kids might have or a pointer somewhere”.

Australia was right to call out this sort of behaviour, Dutton said. “There’s a lot of aggression going on by China at the moment.”

“Like in any circumstance, you can’t deal with a bully in the schoolyard or a workplace from a position of weakness. You need to stand up and to push back on that aggression”.

Morrison said China would “have to explain their own actions”.

That was “not just important for Australia, but I think all around the region this explanation should be provided as to why a military vessel, a naval vessel, in Australia’s exclusive economic zone, would undertake such an act, such a dangerous act in relation to Australian surveillance aircraft”.

The aircraft had been “doing their job, being where they have every right to be. And that act of intimidation is not just a message that I suppose they’re trying to send to Australia, a message that we will respond to.

“But it is a sign of the sort of threats and intimidation that can occur to any country in our region. And that’s why we need to band together.”

Australia’s exclusive economic zone extends from 12 nautical miles to 200 nautical miles from its coastline. Within the zone Australia has sovereign rights to explore, use, conserve and manage its natural resources.

On Ukraine, Morrison said Australia would work with its partners on a response if the Russians went ahead and invaded, making it clear a response would involve new sanctions.

“There’s never been any contemplation of Australian troops being deployed,” he said.

Meanwhile the Liberal chairman of the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security James Paterson said all sides of politics should heed the warning of ASIO’s head Mike Burgess, who last week made it clear he was unhappy with ASIO being dragged into the political debate.

“We should [all] be careful in referring to classified information,” Paterson told the ABC.

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

– ref. Chinese laser incident feeds into national security debate – https://theconversation.com/chinese-laser-incident-feeds-into-national-security-debate-177526

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Blaxland, Professor, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University

Just after midnight last Thursday, a transiting Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA-N) vessel shone a military-grade laser at an Australian air force plane conducting coastal maritime surveillance.

This did not happen in the South China Sea near China’s coastline, but rather in the Arafura Sea, within Australia’s exclusive economic zone off the north coast of the country. From what we can ascertain, this is the closest an attempt at military intimidation by China has gotten to our shores.

The Chinese vessel has since steamed through the Torres Strait at the northern tip of Queensland accompanied by another PLA-N ship, heading towards the Coral Sea off the Great Barrier Reef.

They may be intending to monitor upcoming Australian military exercises off the Queensland coast, which is a legitimate act as long as the ships stay outside Australia’s territorial waters, which stretch 12 nautical miles from the coast.

The laser pointing, though, was not a legitimate or appropriate act.

The Department of Defence condemned “the unprofessional and unsafe military conduct” by the Chinese ship. This was quickly followed up by Prime Minister Scott Morrison declaring the incident an “act of intimidation” that put military lives at risk. Defence Minister Peter Dutton labelled it an “aggressive, bullying act”.

In seeking to put this in context, it’s important to understand what a laser attack is, what these lasers are used for, and how dangerous they are. We also need to consider the possible reasons China would engage in such an act.

What are laser attacks?

All modern warships are equipped with lasers. These are used largely to determine the firing range and designate a target immediately before discharging a weapon. It is routinely practiced against dummy targets.

It is considered dangerous for at least two reasons. Pointing a laser is often referred to as “painting a target” before firing live munitions, such as artillery shells, machine guns or missiles. It is widely seen as a hostile act, just short of crossing the threshold of open conflict or war.

This is because laser pointing is separated from firing a missile with hostile intent by a mere split second. This can be a nerve-wracking experience for those subjected to such beams.

In addition, laser beams themselves are dangerous because they can cause permanent blindness if shone into someone’s eyes, as well as damage to important navigational and other related systems critical to air safety.

Laser pointers were popular in schools for a while until the potential for harm was recognised. These lasers are exponentially more powerful and harmful.

So, why would China do this?

Naval vessels operating in the contested waters of the South China Sea are frequently confronted by PLA-N, Chinese Coast Guard and Chinese militia vessels.

And these Chinese vessels have been engaging in this kind of behaviour for some time against Australian, US and other aircraft.

This kind of assertive and adversarial behaviour is not what is normally expected in uncontested waters closer to Australia – or within any nation’s exclusive economic zone. This is also not a tactic known to have been used by Australia against other nations’ naval vessels, particularly not close to or within China’s exclusive economic zone. So, this seems to be an escalation.

Read more:
Does the US have the right to sail warships through the South China Sea? And can China stop them?

China may be seeking to send a message to Canberra that its naval patrols in the South China Sea are not welcome. The US Navy also engages in these patrols – calling them Freedom of Navigation Operations, or FONOPS – as do other nations such as Japan, the UK and France.

China sees these FONOPS as provocative, given it claims nearly the entirety of the South China Sea contained within the so-called “nine dash line”. The Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague dismissed China’s maritime claims in 2016 and upheld the application of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), but China wants to re-write the rules regardless.

How should Australia respond?

There are two obvious deductions to make from the events over the past few days. First, China is ratcheting up its pressure on Australia. Second, Australian politicians remain prepared, eager even, to use heightened tensions with China to draw attention to themselves in the lead-up to the election.

With the stakes rising, and an election looming, there is a need for issues like this to be handled firmly, but delicately. We must avoid making undue concessions to China’s adversarial tactics, while also seeking to avoid escalation and politicisation of an issue of significant importance to the future security and stability of the region.

In considering how best to manage this in the future, Australian diplomats should be looking to enlist the support of nations in the region, such as the member states of ASEAN, our Quad partners (India, Japan and the US) and beyond.

Read more:
Explainer: why is the South China Sea such a hotly contested region?

There is strength in solidarity. China is testing to see what limits it can reach while demonstrably avoiding crossing the threshold with an act of war.

Beijing knows that openly provoking conflict will have major repercussions for the country’s reputation and image. It also doesn’t want to damage its attempts to undermine American and US-aligned security policies supportive of the Court of Arbitration ruling on the South China Sea.

Australia’s actions have an effect on the region. Our neighbours in Southeast Asia and the Pacific will be watching closely to see where the limits of our tolerance lie and how far we are willing to push back against Chinese assertiveness – without crossing the threshold of open conflict, as well.

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

– ref. Explainer: what was the Chinese laser attack about and why does it matter? – https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-was-the-chinese-laser-attack-about-and-why-does-it-matter-177524

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

Australia’s leading economists have overwhelmingly endorsed a return to the highest immigration intake on record, saying Australia should aim for at least 190,000 migrants per year as it opens its borders, up from the target of 160,000 per year set ahead of COVID.

More than a third of those surveyed believe 190,000 isn’t enough, arguing that a “catch up” will show Australia is open to the world.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison cut Australia’s migration ceiling from 190,000 to 160,000 places per year in March 2019, in order to “tackle the impact of increasing population in congested cities”.

The 49 economists who took part in the Economics Society of Australia poll were selected by their peers for their expertise in macroeconomics, microeconomics and economic modelling. One is a member of the Reserve Bank board.

Ahead of COVID, Australia’s permanent intake has only been as high as 190,000 on five occasions, during the five years 190,000 was the official target.

Annual migrant intake in the years leading up to COVID

The government’s intergenerational report) released mid last year assumed a return to an intake of 190,000 per year in 2023-24.

Only four of the 49 economists surveyed by The Economic Society and The Conversation wanted less migration than Australia had going into COVID.

Their concerns were that growing population numbers put pressure on “fragile resources and infrastructure”. Slower population growth would “ease pressures on the environment, housing prices, infrastructure and emissions”.

Adelaide University labour market specialist Sue Richardson said there was no evidence high levels of migration raised GDP per person, as opposed to GDP.

Congestion and the environment matter

“In terms of living standards, it is the per capita measure that matters,” she said. “And it should be adjusted for increased traffic congestion, urban density and pressures on the health and other important social systems.”

The six economists who thought an annual intake of 160,000 was about right made the point that what mattered more was the composition of the intake. There should be less unskilled migration, more skilled migration and a “decent humanitarian program”.

The 19 economists who went for 190,000 argued less would show a “lack of ambition” for lifting economic growth.

Helen Silver, chief general manager at Allianz Australia and a former head of Victoria’s Department of Premier and Cabinet said a higher target would be both a “catch up” and would act to symbolise Australia was more open to the world.

Australia benefits from being open

Any target would need to be flexible and responsive to the capacity of Australia’s heath and other systems given the ongoing pandemic.

Melbourne University economist John Freebairn said a larger population would enable Australia to capture economies of scale and fill gaps in high skill and low skill jobs caused by labour market rigidities and failures in training systems.

It would increase the government’s tax take net of spending and help build a more dynamic and interesting society, as it had in the past.

The 18 economists (37.5% of the total) who said 190,000 was not enough argued that Australia’s status as a nation of immigrants gave it a formidable advantage.

190,000 could be considered a floor

UNSW economist Gigi Foster said in the wake of Australia’s responses to COVID its challenge was not so much what target to set, but rather how to convince immigrants to come here.

Melbourne University ‘s Chris Edmond said if Australia had the same per capita target as Canada it would have a permanent intake of 250,000 per year.

The University of Sydney’s James Morely said 190,000 was less than 1% of the population and was in any event not a target for net migration as that would be determined by the number of Australians who left and returned, and the number who came in temporarily under other schemes.

Given low birth rates and a need for a balanced age profile Australia should probably target permanent visas of 320,000 – 1.25% of the current population.

Read more:
Top economists say cutting immigration is no way to boost wages

RMIT’s Leonora Risse said what mattered was that the migration intake was accompanied by policies designed to ensure migrants reached their potential.

When considering an upper limit on migration, we should keep in mind that 30% of all Australians were born overseas. For 20% of Australians, one or both parents were born overseas. Australia would not be what it was were it not for migration.

Notably absent from most of the 49 responses was discussion of the impact of migration on wages and the employment of locals.

The experts surveyed seemed to regard these impacts as not particularly big in either direction compared to the impacts of migration on dynamism, Australia’s place in the world, and its environment, infrastructure and social cohesion.

Detailed responses:

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

– ref. When we open up, let’s open up big: top economists say we need more migrants – https://theconversation.com/when-we-open-up-lets-open-up-big-top-economists-say-we-need-more-migrants-177359

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Ward, Fellow in Historical Studies, The University of Melbourne

The Australian government has decided not to establish a federal anti-corruption watchdog this parliamentary term, despite a promise in December 2018 to deliver an integrity commission

with teeth, resources and proper processes that will protect the integrity of Australia’s Commonwealth public administration

In the three years since that promise was made, Australia has slipped further down the international corruption league tables.

On the respected Corruption Perceptions Index compiled by Transparency International, it is now in 18th position, down from 13th in 2018.

A decade ago Australia was seventh.

The Corruption Perceptions Index both ranks and rates countries on a scale out of 100. Australia’s score in 2012 was 85. In 2021 it was 73.

This 12-point drop is, along with Hungary’s fall from 55 to 43, equal worst among the 38 nations in the OECD – the economies with institutions and cultures most comparable to Australia.

New Zealand, by comparison, has consistently been in the top three, with scores between 88 and 91.

Does Australia’s decline in this index really matter? Its score is, after all, still comparatively high, and the Corruption Perceptions Index is only a proxy measure of corruption.

Yes, it does. Dozens of studies have demonstrated the corrosive economic effect of corruption, and perceptions are almost as important as reality in guiding economic decisions.

Read more:
Australia and Norway were once tied in global anti-corruption rankings. Now, we’re heading in opposite directions

Based on studies correlating corruption indices with economic impacts, I estimate the difference between Australia’s 2012 and 2021 ratings equates to 0.6% lower economic growth.

This translates to about 60,000 extra new jobs and an extra A$10 billion in government revenue a year.

The value of measuring perceptions

Because corruption is hard to measure – not least because it’s generally illegal – the Corruption Perceptions Index does the next best thing.

Measuring perceptions is useful, particularly when considering economic impacts. Perceptions are critical in investment decisions – whether it be a major corporation investing in a billion-dollar project, a small business borrowing money to expand, or an individual taking on a debt to get a university degree.

Any impression a system is “rigged”, and that “who you know” is more important than how hard or smart you work, acts as a disincentive against taking risks.

Read more:
It’s the luxuries that give it away. To fight corruption, follow the goods

The Corruption Perceptions Index’s credentials are strengthened by it being a survey of expert surveys, drawing on 13 different data sources from 12 authoritative institutions.

These include the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey, the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index, the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Country Risk Ratings and the World Bank’s Policy and Institutional Assessment.

The index is focused on public-sector corruption – from misusing public institutions for private or political gain to outright fraud and bribery. Many of its sources also incorporate perceptions of broader corruption.

According to a 2018 World Bank review of eight major corruption measures, this “composite methodology” makes the Corruption Perceptions Index the most valid measure of the magnitude of overall corruption in many countries.

Calculating economic impacts

To estimate the economic impact of Australia’s falling score, I’ve drawn on the extensive body of economic research done over the past 30 years quantifying the impact of corruption on economic growth.

A useful overview of these many studies came from a 2011 meta-analysis for the United Kingdom government by University of London economists Mehmet Ugur and Nandini Dasgupta.

They sorted through more than 1,000 papers, analysing 115 of those studies in detail to calculate concrete numbers for the relationship between corruption index scores and economic performance.

Read more:
Equality: our secret weapon to fight corruption

They created a six-point corruption scale from “0” (very corrupt) to “6”.

Every one-point change on this six-point scale, they calculated, increased or reduced per capita economic growth by, on average, 0.86% a year.

Each one-point change on their scale equals a 17-point change on the Corruption Perceptions Index 100-point scale, meaning Australia’s 12-point decline suggests 0.6% less income per capita.

What this means for Australia

It suggests that if Australia had the same Corruption Perceptions Index score as in 2012, therefore, it would enjoy GDP per capita growth of 2.2% over the next few years instead of Treasury’s forecast 1.6%.

In terms of jobs, the Treasury forecasts 1.6% annual growth between 2022 to 2025 – about an extra 200,000 jobs per year. An extra 0.5% would lift that growth by 60,000 jobs per year.

The calculations are necessarily rough. International averages don’t automatically translate to a specific nation’s circumstances. However, Ugur and Dasgupta’s study finds higher economic effects apply in wealthier countries, meaning applying the average effect to Australia might produce an underestimate.

The result is also broadly consistent with an International Monetary Fund study, published in 2016 linking a 22-point improvement on the Corruption Perceptions Index to a tax revenue increase equal to 0.88% of GDP.

Applying this to Australia’s performance would suggest its 12-point decline is costing government revenue some 0.5% of GDP – that’s $10 billion – a year.

Perceptions of corruption do matter. These results suggest they go well beyond integrity and good governance.

Simply put, an effective integrity commission and other steps tackling corruption are both sensible economic management and good budget repair.

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

– ref. Perceptions of corruption are growing in Australia, and it’s costing the economy – https://theconversation.com/perceptions-of-corruption-are-growing-in-australia-and-its-costing-the-economy-176562

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rahul Sen, Senior Lecturer, School of Economics, Auckland University of Technology

You don’t have to be an economist to know New Zealand faces its highest annual inflation rate in 30 years – 5.9% as of December 2021. Visit a supermarket or petrol station and the evidence is right before your eyes.

The average price of petrol per litre is now up by 31% compared to last year. In some places, it has already hit NZ$3 a litre. To take just one grocery example, tomatoes doubled in price during the same period, contributing to the highest annual food price inflation since 2011.

These severe price hikes are a direct reflection of the impact of the global pandemic on tradable inflation – that is, goods and services we either import for our own consumption or as components in our own manufacturing and exporting processes.

Since mid-2021, annual tradable inflation has been outpacing non-tradable inflation (the rising price of goods and services we produce and consume domestically) – 6.9% versus 5.3% at December 2021.

While tradable inflation accounts for about 40% of New Zealand’s overall inflation, the pace at which it’s growing means external sources are increasingly fuelling inflationary pressure.

Pandemic pressures

Much of this can be sourced back to the effects of the pandemic on global supply lines. Three key factors are driving the pressures:

1. Costs of raw materials and other inputs are rising at each stage of the supply chain, with factories closing and reopening due to changing restrictions. The semiconductor industry, for example, has been facing a chip shortage since 2021.

2. Logistics and transport costs are rising due to massive disruptions at the distribution end of the supply chain. Reduced airline capacity and rerouting of cargo, coupled with lockdowns and isolation requirements, have led to delays in unloading cargo at ports and slower turnaround times for ships. Freight company Mainfreight, for example, expects delays of 20-30 days above normal shipping times for Auckland.

3. Energy costs are rising, partly due to recovery in global demand in 2021, combined with supply shortages and cartel-controlled production.

Read more:
Energy prices: how COVID helped them to surge – and why they won’t go down any time soon

These combine to cause disruption at each stage of supply chain – production, transportation and distribution – forcing New Zealand to “import” more inflation on top of what is being generated from within its own economy. Vehicles, fuel, clothing, processed foods and manufacturing materials have all been affected.

Supply chain vulnerability

The rising cost of house construction provides an illustrative example. Prices go up when, say, imported iron girders cost more to produce in their country of origin, in turn caused by costlier imports of iron and steel.

On top of this there can be delays in shipping the materials due to port closures or workforces affected by the pandemic.

Similarly, the scarcity caused by a worldwide semiconductor shortage means higher costs of production for electronic products and new vehicles, pushing up retail prices for imports.

Read more:
Inflation is raising prices and reducing real wages – what should be done to support NZ’s low-income households?

Above all, rising energy costs are a financial body blow to the transport and logistics sector – the backbone of the local economy. The geopolitical tensions over Ukraine and Russia – both major oil and gas producers – simply add to the risk of spiking imported energy costs.

The pandemic has exposed New Zealand’s ever-present vulnerability to global supply chain disruptions. If the emergence of new COVID-19 variants affects New Zealand’s major trading partners (China, Australia, US, EU and Japan) imported inflation will remain a problem throughout 2022.

No quick fix

The unpredictable impacts of the pandemic on supply chain-led tradable inflation create a tough balancing act for policymakers because the causes are out of their direct control.

The Reserve Bank’s use of interest rates and monetary policy to maintain short-term price stability has worked well when domestic factors drove inflation. It’s a lot trickier when external supply shocks become the key drivers, and inflation predictions are clouded by global uncertainties.

Read more:
How to prevent disruptions in food supply chains after COVID-19

Some relief could be provided by the government reducing GST and fuel taxes, but this is not a quick fix. In the medium to longer term, New Zealand needs to diversify risk and bring some supply chains back within its own borders.

The government could take a cue from the trilateral supply chain resilience initiative (SCRI) launched last year by two of New Zealand’s main trading partners, Australia and Japan, and the fastest-growing emerging global market, India. Its aim is to identify key sectors vulnerable to supply chain shocks and invest in their resilience to future uncertainties.

For now, however, New Zealand can count on an unpredictable road ahead, and should be ready for the possibility of even higher inflation than the year before.

The author is Senior Lecturer, School of Economics, Faculty of Business Economics and Law, AUT. The views expressed here are personal.

The author is Lecturer, School of Economics, Faculty of Business Economics and Law, AUT. The views expressed here are personal.

– ref. The pandemic exposes NZ’s supply chain vulnerability – be ready for more inflation in the year ahead – https://theconversation.com/the-pandemic-exposes-nzs-supply-chain-vulnerability-be-ready-for-more-inflation-in-the-year-ahead-176232

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Garnett, Professor of Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University

Australia is losing its birds at an alarming rate – one in six species are now threatened with extinction, predominantly due to climate change, land clearing and worsening bushfires.

Last year, when we met in a Darwin cafe to discuss Anthony’s PhD on the impact of environmental art on conservation, we wondered if his project could contribute to saving threatened birds.

Could we, perhaps, harness the beauty of birdsong to help Australians care about what they were losing?

Throughout history, humans have been inspired by the complex melodies and rhythms of birdsong. It’s a natural, daily celebration of our biodiversity, and has shaped the evolution of human speech and song for millennia.

Our idea was to let the threatened birds speak directly to those who might help them.

Teaming up with renowned bird recordist David Stewart, we created a CD for the music charts consisting entirely of bird calls, titled Songs of Disappearance. For the title track, the Bowerbird Collective’s Simone Slattery arranged a fantasy dawn chorus of 53 threatened species.

As of February 18, the CD – now with a video by Senior Gooniyandi artist Mervyn Street and Bernadette Trench-Thiedeman – was sitting at No.2 on the charts.

Among the stars

Launched on December 3, 2021, the album debuted at No.5 on the ARIA charts, in part because the conservation organisation BirdLife Australia alerted its supporter base to a wonderful Christmas present that would also help bird conservation.

Some calls on the CD are astonishing for their rarity. Night parrots, critically endangered with a bell-like call, were lost for a century before they were rediscovered in 2013. Regent honeyeaters are now so scarce that young birds lack models from which to learn their soft, warbling calls.

Others are poignant cries of a disappearing landscape – the creaking calls of gang-gangs, buzzing bowerbirds and the mournful cry of the far eastern curlew.

Some purchasers of the CD have written to say they have the 53 calls on loop.

Two weeks after its release, the CD reached number 3, ahead of such artists as Taylor Swift, Mariah Carey and Michael Bublé.

“I’m very happy to have birds flying above me!” Paul Kelly told us when Songs of Disappearance displaced his Christmas Train album.

Suddenly, retail giants wanted our album in their stores. Media requests flowed in from around the world. Our CDs are being manufactured and distributed for release in the United States.

Read more:
Regent honeyeaters were once kings of flowering gums. Now they’re on the edge of extinction. What happened?

Now it’s at number 2 on the ARIA charts – a pretty good result for threatened species from a project with a zero marketing budget. It may also be the first time, anywhere in the world, that a university research project has hit the music charts.

Will the calls be answered?

In December last year, more than 300 of Australia’s leading ornithologists released the Action Plan for Australian Birds 2020. It found 216 Australian birds are now threatened with extinction, mainly due to climate change.

The devastating findings of the action plan are what spawned our idea. The resulting combination of research, conservation, and creativity told a story that has resonated globally, something the action plan alone would never have achieved.

But will it make a difference?

Certainly the profits, which go to BirdLife Australia, will be put to good use. However, the 200 Australian bird taxa identified in the action plan need far more assistance to survive than one CD can provide.

The question is, can art help change population trajectories? Or, as cultural policy expert Christiaan De Beukelaer writes, will these haunting bird calls just “naturalise the awful future it wishes to avert”, like other climate apocalyptic art?

The answer is that we do not know – hence our ongoing research. However, we do know that, 60 years ago this year, the fear of losing birdsong implied by conservationist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring helped launch the environmental movement.

Where will the songs lead us?

Songs of Disappearance now presents a fascinating opportunity to understand whether it can catalyse some of the same impetus for change.

Those who purchased the album have been invited to complete a survey to help us understand whether this project and others like it can have a lasting effect on conservation outcomes.

We wish to know, for example, whether the CD has affected people emotionally. Conservation, like art, is a belief system driven by deep emotions. As 2020 research suggests, empathy for wildlife is strongly linked to a sense of moral justification for preventing extinctions.

Read more:
More than 200 Australian birds are now threatened with extinction – and climate change is the biggest danger

So, has the CD changed behaviour? We know bird song, like music, boosts mental well-being. But can it turn intention into action? And if so, what sort of action? We also aim to learn lessons from this experience that might be transferred to other projects involving the arts and conservation.

The disappearance of Australian bird song is by no means inevitable. How wonderful if the songs of the birds themselves can help secure their future.

Stephen Garnett receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with BirdLife Australia for which he coordinates the threatened species committee.

Anthony Albrecht is co-founder of the Bowerbird Collective

– ref. How our album of birdsong recordings rocketed to #2 on the ARIA charts – https://theconversation.com/how-our-album-of-birdsong-recordings-rocketed-to-2-on-the-aria-charts-177070

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Thompson, Associate Dean (Education) – Science, Monash University

Aahh, the Australian summer. When the temperatures top 40℃ and only the bravest or most foolhardy would venture outside in bare feet, there’s a cherished old saying: “it’s so hot outside you could fry an egg on the footpath!”

But what does the science say? Does this claim stack up, or it half-baked?

To answer this question, we need to understand the chemicals inside an egg, what happens to them during the cooking process, and whether the footpath really gets hot enough to drive these chemical changes.

The first and most obvious point is that the egg’s yolk and white are chemically very different. The white, which makes up about two-thirds of an egg’s mass, is roughly nine parts water and one part protein. The key here is that the protein’s structure changes if you heat it above a certain temperature.

About half the yolk’s mass is water, about a quarter is “fat”, about one-sixth is protein, and less than 5% is carbohydrates. The protein in the yolk is a completely different type of protein, but much like with the egg white, it’s how the protein responds to heat that gives us the texture of fried, scrambled, poached or hard-boiled eggs.

Ok, so how does this work?

We can think of proteins as being long chains of molecules called amino acids. In a raw egg, the protein is suspended in the watery mixture. The chain is curled up in a very particular way, held in shape by weak chemical bonds between different parts of the chain as it folds over on itself (the animation below shows the folded structure of ovalbumin, the main protein in egg white). This keeps it stable, and able to mix with the water.

But once it’s heated up, the heat energy starts to break these weak chemical bonds and the chain begins to uncurl, rearrange itself and stick together again in a completely different way.

Suddenly, these reconfigured clumps of protein molecules are no longer water-soluble, and so they solidify. This is why eggs get harder if you cook them for longer.

This process is called denaturation, and it can happen to any type of protein. Denaturation is what turns milk into curds and whey, and changes the texture of meat as it cooks.

Read more:
Kitchen Science: the chemistry behind amazing meringue and perfect cappuccino

For eggs, denaturation begins at around 60℃, but this is likely to only slightly cook the egg whites, and the yolk will not turn solid at all.

As you slowly go from 60℃ to 70℃, however, there is more heat energy available and all of the egg’s proteins now begin to denature. The egg white begins to turn gel-like and eventually rubbery, and the yolk begins to solidify into a viscous goo, before eventually becoming solid or even slightly powdery in texture.

Get the temperature right and this process unfolds nice and gradually, which means with a bit of practice you can get your eggs to turn out exactly how you like them.

Righto, so is a footpath hot enough for this?

That leaves us with the crucial question: how hot does pavement get on a scorching summer day? Does it reach the almost 70℃ you would need for a footpath fry-up?

This depends on a lot of factors, including the air temperature, direct sunlight, the footpath material and even its colour. Black-painted concrete, for example, absorbs more heat than white or unpainted concrete.

All in all, at the peak of these conditions, on a boiling summer day, a footpath can potentially just about reach the right temperature. But sadly, that’s still not enough to sizzle an egg.

First, concrete is a poor conductor, so it will transfer heat to the egg much more slowly than a metal frying pan. Second, after cracking the egg onto the footpath, the footpath’s temperature will drop slightly.

Read more:
Why you can’t fry eggs (or testicles) with a cellphone

So if you were hoping for a cheap way to cook your sunny-side-up eggs on the footpath this summer, you might be disappointed. It’s much wiser to head back indoors to the kitchen. Your egg will be hotter, and you’ll be much cooler.

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

– ref. Sunny side up: can you really fry an egg on the footpath on a hot day? – https://theconversation.com/sunny-side-up-can-you-really-fry-an-egg-on-the-footpath-on-a-hot-day-172616

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn J. Whitaker, Senior Lecturer in New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity

Over the past week, Australians have heard Scott Morrison make several explicit references to his faith. Given Morrison has placed his faith front and centre of his public persona, it is helpful to try to understand how he perceives his faith and how it might intersect with his job as prime minister.

For me, Morrison’s recent comments about faith and prayer reveal a pattern of human passivity, dependence on divine intervention, and potential abnegation of power.

For example, in his 60 Minutes interview, Morrison’s response to a question about his empathy was:

I’ve worn out the carpet on the side of my bed […] on my knees, praying and praying […] praying for those who are losing loved ones, praying for those who couldn’t go to family funerals, praying for those who are exhausted […]

To be fair to Morrison, it would be odd for a person of any faith not to include prayer as part of their expression of concern for those who suffer or struggle. Such an approach has a long tradition. But we might expect more than just prayer from a devout Christian who also happens to be the prime minister.

In this response, he appears to prioritise prayer over action, which is astonishing given the power he holds due to his position. In the Christian tradition, prayer informs and even motivates action; it does not replace it. Such a response is also, of course, a way of signalling his piety to certain constituents.

It is not an isolated example. Take, for instance, his address to the Australian Christian Churches National Conference in 2021, where he told the crowd:

I can’t fix the world, I can’t save the world, but we both believe in someone who can.

That someone, of course, is God.

On the one hand, it shows admirable humility to acknowledge that even the prime minister cannot “fix the world”. But in alluding to the “someone who can”, Morrison appears to be giving over his agency and responsibility to God. Leave it up to God to act.

More recently, in a speech commemorating 14 years since the Rudd government’s “sorry” to Indigenous peoples, Morrison shifted the focus to forgiveness, which sparked fury.

Morrison explicitly stated that forgiveness was an individual, not a “corporate” matter, expressing a hope for the kind of healing that came through forgiveness. His desire to move from apology to individual forgiveness is entirely consistent with his stated spirituality which emphasises individual and personal faith.

But it is also theologically thin. Trawloolway man and theologian Garry Deverell was quick to point out the prime minister had missed a step. In the Christian tradition, no apology can insist on forgiveness, and seeking forgiveness for harm done requires repentance, acts of restitution, and attempts to address injustice. The spiritual cannot be divorced from the physical, tangible, social, and political dimensions of life.

While acknowledging, rightly, that forgiveness is hard and cannot be earned, Morrison had put the onus on those wounded by systemic justice to do the work of forgiveness, rather than on those with power to do the work of restitution.

Read more:
Christians in Australia are not persecuted, and it is insulting to argue they are

Prayer and action go hand in hand

There’s a classic story that does the rounds in Christian circles of a guy who gets trapped when his town floods. In a desperate attempt to avoid the rising floodwaters he climbs onto his roof and prays to God to save him.

Soon a rescue crew in a boat come past and invite him into their boat, but he refuses. “God will save me,” he says.

Later a helicopter flies by and a man descends on a rope. He is offered a way off the roof by the rescue crew, but again he refuses. “God will save me.”

Eventually the man dies and goes to heaven, but he is confused. “Why didn’t you save me God?” he asks. “I’ve been a faithful Christian my whole life.”

And God replies: “What do you mean I didn’t save you? I sent a boat and a helicopter. You refused them both.”

Such parabolic stories demonstrate a Christian theological belief that God works through and with human activity, not despite it. It points to the need to integrate belief, prayer and action.

Theology – how we think and talk about God – matters precisely because of its implications for human activity. I have no reason to doubt that when Morrison talks about his faith he is sincere, and when he expresses his care for people primarily through prayer he is behaving in a normal way for his faith community. Yet this kind of passivity and trust in divine intervention is not the only or even the fullest expression of Christian faith.

Faith and power should integrate, not separate

The danger of emphasising personal prayer as the primary expression of Christian care is that social responsibility can be abdicated. Pray and leave it up to God can be a cop-out, particularly for those with power. It can be a way to ignore systemic injustice by reducing faith to something personal and private.

As Brittany Higgins put it so eloquently in her recent National Press Club address: “I didn’t want his sympathy as a father, I wanted him to use his power as prime minister.”

Theologians like Dietrich Bonhoeffer offer an alternative expression of Christian faith. Bonhoeffer lived and wrote during the early 20th-century rise of Nazism in Germany. In his well-known book The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer writes about “cheap grace”, which is the kind of faith that wants forgiveness without actual repentance, and justice or peace without personal cost. Cheap grace wants the inner spiritual resolution without the outward costly work.

For Bonhoeffer, that outward work included vocal criticism of the Nazi regime and of Christians who were silent bystanders. Bonhoeffer saw the way of Jesus was one that demanded practical help for victims of injustice and, where necessary, resistance to government. Arrested for conspiring to rescue Jews, Bonhoeffer was imprisoned before being executed at the Flossenbürg concentration camp in 1945.

Not every Christian needs to become a martyr, but as Garry Deverell writes:

The Christian is called not to separate but to integrate their faith and their public presence, work or office.

This broader view of faith is seen in the call of Tim Costello for the prime minister to act on his faith when it comes to climate change, or in the urging of church leaders for more compassionate action for refugees based on Christian values. After all, Jesus teaches that whatever one does for the least among us (defined as those who are hungry, poor or imprisoned) one does for Jesus.

Morrison is not the first prime minister to be a person of deep faith, nor will he be the last. That is not the issue. All politicians are informed by their value systems and beliefs, regardless of the religious or non-religious traditions that shape them.

Neither am I criticising Morrison for speaking out about his faith. I am, however, critical of the highly individualistic, spiritualised version of faith Morrison espouses, which allows him to shirk personal responsibility and action when convenient.

There are millions of faithful Christians in this country who also wear out the carpet in prayer every week. The difference is they do not hold the highest office in the land, nor have Morrison’s power to enact change.

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

– ref. Morrison’s Christian empathy needs to be about more than just prayer – it requires action, too – https://theconversation.com/morrisons-christian-empathy-needs-to-be-about-more-than-just-prayer-it-requires-action-too-177248

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

University of Canberra Professional Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Associate Professor Caroline Fisher discuss the week in politics.

In this episode they review the penultimate sitting weeks in the parliamentary term, with only budget week left before the election.

In parliament we saw Labor ramp up its attack on the aged care crisis, calling for the resignation of the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services, Richard Colbeck.

Meanwhile the government has brought national security centre stage, accusing Labor of being soft on China, with Scott Morrison even going so far as dubbing deputy opposition leader Richard Marles a ‘Manchurian candidate.’ Unusually, we saw the current and a former head of ASIO entering the debate.

Michelle and Caroline also take a look at THAT 60 Minutes program, which put a lot of focus on Jenny Morrison.

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

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on the Morrison government weaponising national security – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-the-morrison-government-weaponising-national-security-177440

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andreea Lachsz, PhD Candidate, University of Technology Sydney

Content warning: This article contains details readers may find distressing including discussion of excessive or gratuitous violence, abuse and mental illness.

In December, the Victorian Court of Appeal found certain routine strip searches in prison breach human rights to privacy and dignity in detention. The decision highlights how traumatising, unnecessary and degrading the routine practice of strip searching people can be.

In Victoria’s prisons, strip searches involve forcing a person to remove their clothing, stand with their legs apart and bend over in full view of prison guards. There is some variation in strip-searching processes in other states and territories.

Throughout Australia, police and prison officials conduct strip searches as a matter of routine. They are commonly conducted upon entry into custody, after legal and family visits and hearings, when moving between secure locations or before drug testing.

For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, who are more likely to be policed, imprisoned, subjected to abuses of power and violence within prisons, and strip searched, the court’s decision is important. Victoria’s criminal and legal systems are built on Australia’s violent colonial history, and routine strip searches are a modern form of this violence.

The Victorian Court of Appeal case is an opportunity for real systemic reform. The Victorian government must now decide whether it will maintain this violent practice.

Read more:
Excessive strip-searching shines light on discrimination of Aboriginal women in the criminal justice system

The case of Thompson v Minogue

In 2020, Dr Craig Minogue successfully challenged a prison order that he submit to a urine test and routine strip search before that test. In the Supreme Court, Minogue successfully argued this direction was in breach of his rights to privacy and dignity in detention. The state of Victoria appealed.

The Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service (VALS) was granted leave to intervene in the appeal as a “friend of the court” to make written and oral submissions.. Although Minogue is not Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, VALS believed it was critical to provide the court information on the harmful impact of strip searching and urine testing on First Nations people.

The Victorian Court of Appeal upheld the Supreme Court’s ruling that routine strip searches prior to urine testing breached Minogue’s human rights and the government did not properly consider human rights when making strip-searching policies.

The Court found these routine strip searches were “extremely invasive and demeaning” procedures which can constitute “a severe limitation upon […] privacy and dignity rights”.

Both the Supreme Court and Court of Appeal found the government did not back up its claims that routine strip searches prior to urine tests were necessary or effective. The government did not sufficiently explain why pre-existing and less harmful alternatives, such as x-ray body scanners, were not used.

However, the Court of Appeal reversed the Supreme Court’s decision on urine testing and found this procedure did not breach Minogue’s human rights. Minogue has sought to appeal this aspect of the decision to the High Court.

Now, it is up to the Victorian government to decide whether it will implement changes to strip-search policies and laws to end this practice across all police stations and prisons.

Read more:
Dragging its feet on torture prevention: Australia’s international shame

The human rights of people in prison

Evidence and data in Australia show strip searches are often over-used, ineffective in uncovering contraband and unnecessary. Strip searches are also prone to being a tool for abuses of power and misconduct.

A 2021 IBAC report exposed serious misconduct in the management and conducting of strip searches in Victoria. Staff were unfamiliar with human rights standards and prisons did not properly investigate complaints about inappropriate searches.

The general manager of Port Phillip Prison was reported to have said strip searches were “one of the options available to assert control” over people in prison. Reports from other states tell the same story of unlawful searches being used to degrade and humiliate prisoners.

Under both the Victorian human rights charter and international law, people in prison are entitled to the same human rights as those outside of prison. This includes a right to privacy, including bodily and psychological autonomy, and to be treated with humanity and respect.

International law dictates that, given the harmful impact of strip searches, alternatives such as x-ray scanners should instead be used in prisons.

Independent scrutiny of human rights in prisons is also vital, including preventive oversight under the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture (OPCAT). Australia has ratified this protocol, but has missed the January 20, 2022, deadline to meet its obligations to set up an independent oversight system of places of detention.

Strip searches are inherently harmful

There is evidence Aboriginal people are subjected to disproportionate rates of strip searching. Many Aboriginal people who are incarcerated have disabilities and histories of trauma. Strip searches can compound this trauma and impede a person’s ability to recover and heal.

In a 2016 Four Corners episode, entitled Australia’s Shame, footage was shown of a young Aboriginal child in the Northern Territory being stripped naked. This horrified Australians and led to a royal commission.

Years later, however, it is still lawful in Victoria and other states and territories to subject Aboriginal children to traumatic strip searches.

The evidence is indisputable – strip searches do not work, are inherently harmful, and disproportionately impact Aboriginal people.

Rather than persist with this archaic practice, all Australian governments must end the use of strip searches.

Andreea Lachsz is the Head of Policy, Communications and Strategy at the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service.

Sarah is a Senior Lawyer / Advocate at the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service (VALS) and represented VALS in the Court of Appeal matter of Thompson v Minogue, referred to in this article.

– ref. Strip searches in prison are traumatising breaches of human rights. So, why are governments still allowing them? – https://theconversation.com/strip-searches-in-prison-are-traumatising-breaches-of-human-rights-so-why-are-governments-still-allowing-them-174463

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme Orr, Professor of Law, The University of Queensland

In case you missed it, election season is upon us again. Like the elongated summers caused by climate change, campaigning is intensifying and being spread over longer periods every election.

Although polling day is not due until May, this year’s campaign kicked off nine months out with billionaire Clive Palmer’s plunge into spam texts, and big spending on YouTube ads and billboards.

Campaigning may be well under way, but the rules governing the election are still being finessed. Some of this is administrative and technological, such as tweaks to ensure COVID-safe voting at polling places.

However, in the past week, a more substantial campaigning bill sailed through parliament. Its title, the Electoral Amendment (Foreign Influences and Offences) Bill 2022, is clunky, but suggestive.

The bill creates several new offences, limiting “foreign” persons or entities from fundraising for or directly spending on electioneering – or even authorising electoral matter – to influence a Commonwealth election.

This new law has received minimal attention. Aside from a commentary piece by a Liberal MP, there’s been scant reporting or analysis.

Instead, it has been subsumed by concerns over foreign interference or disinformation campaigns in the upcoming federal election. These concerns were amplified by revelations about alleged Chinese attempts to inject funding into the Australian political system.

The Morrison government has sought to leverage the heightened tensions by claiming “Beijing backs Labor”. In response, the head of ASIO warned against politicising the issue. Any risk of inappropriate overseas influence in the election affects all sides.

What the new law will do

The new “foreign influences” bill was hurried through the Senate at the end of last week, then passed the House on Wednesday. Unlike almost all electoral reforms, it was not subject to committee, let alone public, scrutiny.

This suggests both major parties are genuinely concerned about beefing up the law or at least sending a strong signal against overseas assistance to Australian parties, candidates or electoral lobby groups that may hope to benefit from it.

The bill builds on existing offences against “foreign” donations to parties, MPs or electoral lobby groups in Australia, which were enacted after long debate in 2018. These already cover gifts on behalf of a “foreign” donor to candidates – the alleged scheme recently involving Chinese money and potential Labor candidates.

Read more:
Federal government’s foreign donations bill is flawed and needs to be redrafted

“Foreign” is a slippery concept, and not easy to define. This is a reason why the bill needed more debate – and may be partly unconstitutional.

In our electoral act, the term “foreign” covers overseas governments or corporations, as well as any non-citizen, either in Australia or overseas. These include some refugees and those in Australia on working or business visas (however long-term), but not permanent residents.

Of course, such foreigners cannot vote in our elections. And the 2018 ban on these individuals donating to electoral campaigns was sensible.

Yet, the new law now threatens fines of up to $26,000 for merely authorising election material. This would include small things like pamphlets, or YouTube content that costs any money to produce.

Many of the guest workers we rely on to work on farms or in the hospitality industry face objectively poor conditions and legal rights. Under this new law, they are permitted to contribute to discussion of these issues, but would be prohibited from trying to sway Australians to vote to address them.

On its face, this breaches freedom of political communication. This freedom is not an individual right, it’s a collective ideal. Its rationale is to ensure we, as an electorate and society, can be informed about politics and government.

Limits on this freedom of political communication have to be proportionate or the High Court can strike them down.

Read more:
The NSW political donations case: the implied freedom of political communication strikes again (after 21 years)

More systemic issues to worry about

For over a century, Australian law accepted foreign influence in our politics. A British lord tipped $1 million into Liberal Party coffers before the 2004 election. US agencies have helped fund liberty-oriented expression.

Some argue that because goods and finance flow easily internationally, and problems like climate change and pandemics know no borders, foreign influence is not only unavoidable but essential. We live in an integrated world, where interests are intermingled.

Some say these laws are xenophobic against China. But we should be concerned about Chinese influence, due to its sheer size, resources, and opaque and unaccountable system of government.

The bigger problem is we have been focusing on the mote of foreign influence, without addressing the beam in our eye – the broader systemic weakness of our political finance regime.

Read more:
$177 million flowed to Australian political parties last year, but major donors can easily hide

Our national election act, despite years of debate, still lacks expenditure limits and donation limits. The US, UK, New Zealand, Canada and most Australian states have one or both of these limits. Capping campaign spending helps maintain political equality, while capping donations inhibits those who would give big, behind the scenes, to buy political influence.

Nor do we regulate misleading political ads at the national level.

Foreign money and disinformation is a worry. But even more so are the much larger sources of both, generated entirely inside the country.

In 2019, for instance, Palmer spent a record-shattering $83 million to influence the federal election. Parliament had three years to fix this problem. It didn’t; now we get to relive it.

Graeme Orr has received ARC grant funding in the past to research electoral law and work with electoral commissions. He is currently an expert member of the NSW iVote Panel. He also gives pro bono advice to groups lobbying for reform of electoral law.

– ref. Stronger laws on ‘foreign’ election influence were rushed through this week – limiting speech but ignoring our billionaire problem – https://theconversation.com/stronger-laws-on-foreign-election-influence-were-rushed-through-this-week-limiting-speech-but-ignoring-our-billionaire-problem-177147

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gemma Carey, Professor, UNSW Sydney

Newly released Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data show people living in poverty or disadvantage are three times more likely to die from COVID than the wealthy.

This statistic is alarming, but it gets worse when we begin to look more closely at particular communities.

ABS data show the rate of death from COVID for people living in Australia who were born overseas was almost three times more than those born in Australia when standardised for age (6.8 deaths per 100,000 vs 2.3 deaths).

The rate of death from COVID for people living in Australia from the Middle East was over 12 times that of people born in Australia (29.3 people per 100,000).

These statistics are damning. They tell us you’re more likely to survive COVID if you were born here, grew up speaking and reading English, are educated, and earn a good income.

They undermine the idea that Australia has good quality universal health care that has been accessible during the pandemic.

Poverty makes you sick

Most health problems, and the care needed to address them, follow what we call “the social gradient”.

This term is shorthand for the idea that those with the most resources – be it money or education – have better health and get better treatment than those with fewer resources.

In short, poverty makes you sick. It does this by limiting your access to services and supports, through money or other factors such as the type of job you work.

People at the “lower end” of the social gradient also tend to receive poorer quality health care.

Unfortunately, this social gradient is now clear in the data on Australian COVID deaths.

For example, some people from Middle Eastern countries and other migrant or refugee communities have poorer employment conditions, such as janitorial jobs in hospitals. These jobs expose people to COVID, who then bring the virus home. They have also needed to keep working in these high risk jobs throughout the pandemic so they can afford basic living costs like food and rent.

There are also major barriers to medical care for, and information about, COVID for particular communities. During the Delta variant wave in Victoria and New South Wales, we saw this result in people from refugee and migrant backgrounds dying at home before receiving any medical care for COVID.

Authorities attributed this to a reluctance to seek health care. This reluctance can stem from a lack of culturally and linguistically appropriate health care communication and services.

Read more:
Using military language and presence might not be the best approach to COVID and public health

Many people also distrust authorities, including the police and army, due to experiences in people’s home countries. Being scared of authorities is a legitimate fear when you have come from a country where authorities may kill you.

This has been exacerbated by governments in Australia choosing to “police” the pandemic. Large fines were threatened to people who broke COVID public health orders.

This fear of fines and authorities likely contributed to a reluctance to seek medical care, and in turn more deaths. And messaging around authoritarian approaches to those who break COVID health orders are likely to have exacerbated this.

Many have also been excluded from government support.

Australian governments and health services have been failing parts of our community, from those with low incomes to people from non-English speaking backgrounds.

What can we do right now?

There are a range of actions we can take to rectify the high rates of death amongst refugee and migrant communities.

Policy wise, the federal government could extend access to Medicare and social safety net support for people experiencing issues with temporary visas, such as asylum seekers living in the community who are appealing a decision on a visa application, and are not eligible for Medicare. Adding specific Medicare items for refugees and migrants may also encourage more culturally and linguisticaly inclusive medical care in the health system.

These changes would help provide more affordable, accessible and inclusive health care, particularly for asylum seekers and refugees dealing with visa issues, and help prevent loss of life.

Governments should also involve refugee and migrant communities in the development and implementation of actions to reduce COVID deaths. Communities know what they need in a crisis – we need to find new ways of listening. A top-down, middle class response to a pandemic will create services and supports that only work for the middle class.

It’s vital we look to the evidence of what may best help refugee and migrant communities reduce the risk of infection, involve them meaningfully in this process, and sharpen our focus on making life in Australia fairer, more inclusive and, hopefully, safer for all.

What has to happen next?

Currently, there are major gaps in understanding what may best support refugee and migrant communities to reduce the risk of infection and harm from COVID.

More research is needed. However that research needs to be led by peers in communities and be easy to access and participate in. In other words, we cannot repeat the mistake of creating approaches that work for just the middle class.

Best practice tells us multiple forms of research are required, and in culturally and linguistically inclusive ways.

Read more:
The real challenge to COVID-19 vaccination rates isn’t hesitancy — it’s equal access for Māori and Pacific people

Survey-based research must be conducted in hospitals, health centres and other clinical environments to understand how barriers to medical care and information for COVID can be addressed to better meet the needs of people from refugee and migrant communities. The research could identify more culturally inclusive ways of managing vaccinations, testing and recovery from virus symptoms.

This must be backed up by in-depth research to explore the experiences of a diverse range of communities. Just as disadvantaged groups are not all alike, neither are refugee and migrant communities (despite being commonly lumped under the term “culturally and linguisticaly diverse”).

Communities who are recently arrived or longer settled – all from different countries – have different needs.

We need more listening, and less punitive approaches.

Ben O’Mara has previously received funding from VicHealth, the Department of Heath and Ageing and the Australian and New Zealand School of Government. O’Mara also works as an Adjunct Fellow at Swinburne University and he is the Information Resources Manager at Motor Neurone Disease Australia.

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

– ref. Australia is failing marginalised people, and it shows in COVID death rates – https://theconversation.com/australia-is-failing-marginalised-people-and-it-shows-in-covid-death-rates-177224

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By K M Shahunja, PhD candidate, The University of Queensland

One in every nine people in Australia has asthma. It is a health burden for many children, and expensive for families because of medication, hospital and out-of-hospital expenses.

The pandemic has added further stress and extra testing measures to check respiratory symptoms. COVID infection can co-exist with asthma and, although research shows allergic asthma does not increase the risk of COVID infection and death, keeping asthma symptoms under control remains important.

At home, tobacco smoke, pollen, mould, dust, pet dander and harmful gases can initiate or worsen asthma symptoms. Our recent study – a review and analysis of Australian research – identifies the most significant culprits. Passive smoking, synthetic pillows or quilts, and gas heating in your house are the most frequently identified triggers for the highest rates of asthma in the home. Preventing these common household environmental factors could better control asthma.

Read more:
We expected people with asthma to fare worse during COVID. Turns out they’ve had a break

Nasties in the home

Prior research reports various environmental factors can trigger asthma symptoms. But the relevant factors and the size of the effect varies widely in different countries and populations. Knowing the most common environmental triggers that can initiate asthma symptoms in Australia can help us tailor prevention strategies.

We examined the evidence based on the research conducted in Australia to determine significant family environmental factors associated with asthma. We looked at 56 studies that involved 137,840 people in Australia. The combined data confirm passive smoking, synthetic bedding and gas heating in households are significant triggering factors for asthma symptoms. These household features are noted in more homes where people have asthma and need more asthma treatment.

Being around smokers, such as at home or in the workplace is the most commonly reported indoor exposure for people with asthma. Breathing in smoke disrupts normal lung and immune system development and causes airway irritation. This can lead to asthma symptoms and other lung diseases. The main sources of secondhand smoke in Australia were identified as smoking by a parent or other family member at home and by colleagues in the workplace. Children were the main victims of secondhand smoke, exposed to their parents’ smoking – especially mothers – at home.

Read more:
We boosted babies’ immune systems and it protected them from serious lung infections: new research

Bedding and heating

The second most commonly reported household trigger was bedding from unnatural fibres, such as microfibre, nylon or acrylic materials. Synthetic bedding items have higher house dust mite allergen levels than feather-bedding items.

They also increase exposure to volatile organic chemicals. These are gases emitted from certain solids and liquids found in many household products. These gases can accumulate in higher concentrations inside and cause health problems.

Synthetic pillows are also more likely to trap cat and dog allergens than feather pillows. The firmer weave of feather pillows makes them a more protective barrier to allergens that could otherwise lead to respiratory irritation. Households of children prone to asthma or allergies should pay extra attention to the bedding they choose.

Finally, both flued and unflued gas heaters can emit nitrogen dioxide gas that can irritate the respiratory tract and trigger asthma symptoms. It’s better to get rid of gas heaters or heating systems, if possible, in households where asthma is an issue.

Read more:
Gas cooking is associated with worsening asthma in kids. But proper ventilation helps

Asthma risks we can control

Our research shows the importance of emphasising prevention of some common family environmental factors to prevent asthma symptoms. These factors may remain less acknowledged despite their notorious effect on asthma.

The scientific evidence that shows active tobacco smoking is detrimental for asthma control is well understood by the general public. But people may be less aware of the effect of passive smoking on asthma.

There is also scope to build awareness around gas heaters and synthetic bedding as asthma triggers. These environmental factors lurking in homes should be better communicated to families who could be affected, especially in a country where asthma is a major public health problem. Elimination of these factors may help control asthma symptoms and reduce COVID testing during the pandemic.

Read more:
Air pollution: over three billion people breathe harmful air inside their own homes

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Passive smoking, synthetic bedding and gas heating in homes show the strongest links to asthma – https://theconversation.com/passive-smoking-synthetic-bedding-and-gas-heating-in-homes-show-the-strongest-links-to-asthma-176677

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Starling, Postdoctoral researcher, University of Sydney

The recent ABC TV series Muster Dogs has brought into sharp focus the incredible skills of our working stock dogs.

It’s not just their sensitivity to livestock movement that makes them so good at what they do.

They are also agile endurance athletes that can work long hours in very hot conditions. During peak times, working kelpies have been recorded travelling over 60km just in one work day.

There are dog breeds all over the world that have been selectively bred over many generations to work with stock. That selective breeding has shaped them to be best suited to the specific environment they work in and the style of work they are required to do.

If you’re interested in the history, traits and skills of these amazing dogs – and perhaps have wondered about owning one yourself – here’s what you need to know.

Read more:
How hot is too hot? Here’s how to tell if your dog is suffering during the summer heat

Shaped for Australian conditions

The Australian Working Kelpie was shaped for Australian conditions to use what’s known as a “strong-eyed style” of herding, which is to adopt a low posture and use eye-stalking (keeping its eyes fixed on the livestock) to track the herd’s movement. The Border collie also uses this style.

They control the movement of the herd with exquisite sensitivity with their overall presence.

Their behaviour includes that characteristic stalking posture with head and body low, and quiet, controlled steps.

This is how a predator would approach a herd of prey animals if it were hunting.

The strong-eyed herding dog stalks, stares, holds position, and rushes; it is not just where they are that controls the herd, but what they are doing.

Most other herding breeds have a looser style of herding, where they work with their heads up and use their body position to influence the movement of the herd.

Herding dogs that use eye-stalking also often work the front of the herd, turning it towards the handler. The looser style herding dogs tend to drive the herd from the rear.

Bred for bravery

Australian Working Kelpies were developed from British farm collies in the late 1800’s.

Some claim there is dingo infused in the breed to add resilience, but this remains subject to debate.

Signals of selection in the Australian Working Kelpie DNA suggest one very important trait is the ability to withstand prickly terrain; a working dog that cannot ignore burrs and spines to continue working is of little use to the farmer.

Other traits prized by the handlers are bravery and a level head. In other words, a dog that doesn’t panic under pressure.

Unlike many other herding breeds, the Kelpie is often asked to work independently from the handler and to think for itself.

Owning a working dog

Working breeds can be very rewarding canine companions for people that don’t have stock for them to work. But prospective owners need to understand the selective breeding that makes these dogs so good at herding can also make them a handful in a suburban setting.

They are of course extremely active; most need a few hours of high intensity exercise a day just to keep them from destroying the home and yard when they are young.

They are also highly alert and often extremely aroused by movement. The faster and more chaotic the movement, the more powerfully they are drawn to control that movement as they would a herd.

This can make playing with kids, ball games, bikes and skateboards, and even encountering other dogs in the dog park a real challenge.

Working breeds also sometimes have a tendency to rush in and bark at an object that is bothering them, just as they would rush and bark at cattle looking to break away from the herd.

Some good lessons for owners

The television program Muster Dogs presented some core messages applicable to any pet dog, as well as working dogs that are pets at home. These include:

1. Early exposure

Ensuring puppies have positive experiences with stimuli they’ll encounter often in life early is crucial. They must be taught to accept activities they need to be tolerant of, and be comfortable with handling and restraining themselves.

2. Responsiveness

The owner must build strong foundations in the areas of coming when called, staying close while off leash, and maintaining a connection with the handler even around distractions.

3. Impulse control

This is particularly important for working dogs keen to participate in exciting activities. In fact, all dogs can benefit from learning to control their impulses and not chase, jump up, or use their mouth every time the urge takes them.

It takes a special kind of dog to be able to face animals 20 or more times their size that can easily cause them serious damage.

To do it all day in the hot and rough terrain of inland Australia takes a dog with a tremendous desire to work.

This should never be forgotten by those of us living in more comfortable environments when we think we want a working dog to accompany us through our suburban lives.

Read more:
At home with your dog? 3 ways to connect and lift your spirits

Melissa Starling owns an animal behaviour consulting business called Creature Teacher.

Claire Wade has previously received funding from the Working Kelpie Council of Australia. She is affiliated with the Royal NSW Canine Health and Welfare Charity.

– ref. A strong-eyed style: what makes Australian muster dogs unique – https://theconversation.com/a-strong-eyed-style-what-makes-australian-muster-dogs-unique-177143

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Wardlaw, Research Associate, University of Tasmania

Southern Tasmania’s tall eucalyptus forests are exceptionally good at taking carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and converting it into wood.

For many years, we have believed these forests had a reasonable buffer of safety from climate change, due to the cool, moist environment.

Unfortunately, my research published today shows these forests are closer to the edge than we had hoped. I found during heatwaves, these forests switch from taking in carbon to pumping it back out.

That’s not good news, given heatwaves are only expected to increase as the world heats up. While we work to slash emissions, we need to explore ways to make these vital forests more resilient.

From carbon dioxide in to carbon out

It’s well established from forest sampling that moist, cool environments like southern Tasmania provide ideal growing conditions for tall eucalypt forests.

We had believed these types of forests would have a buffer against the worst effects of climate change to come, and perhaps even benefit from limited warming.

But this is no longer the case.

I monitored what happened to a messmate stringybark (Eucalyptus obliqua) forest during a three week heatwave in November 2017. Under these conditions, the forest became a net source of carbon dioxide, with each hectare releasing close to 10 tonnes of the greenhouse gas over that period.

A year earlier during more normal conditions, the forest was a net sink for carbon dioxide, taking in around 3.5 tonnes per hectare.

How can we know this? The forest I studied is at the Warra Supersite in the upper reaches of the Huon Valley, one of 16 intensive ecosystem monitoring field stations making up Australia’s Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network.

Instruments mounted on an 80-metre-tall tower at Warra give us great insight into how the forest is behaving. We can measure how much, and how quickly, carbon dioxide, water and energy shuttle between the forest and the atmosphere.

Read more:
Australian forests will store less carbon as climate change worsens and severe fires become more common

So what actually happened in the forest during the hot spell? Two crucial things.

The first was that the forest breathed out more carbon dioxide. This was expected, because living cells in all air-breathing lifeforms (yes, this includes trees)
respire more as temperatures warm.

But the second was very unexpected. The forest’s ability to photosynthesise fell, meaning less solar energy was converted to sugars. This took place while the trees were transpiring (releasing water vapour) rapidly.

Until now, we’ve seen falls in photosynthesis output in heatwaves because the trees are trying to limit their water loss. They can do this by closing their pores on their leaves (stomata). When a tree closes its stomata, it makes it harder for carbon dioxide in air to enter the leaves and fuel the photosynthesis process.

By contrast, this heatwave saw trees releasing water and producing less food at the same time.

So what’s going on? In short, the temperatures were simply too hot for the forests in southern Tasmania. Every forest has an ideal temperature to get the best results from photosynthesis. We now know this temperature in Australia is linked to the historic climate of the local area.

That means the trees at Warra require lower temperatures to optimally feed themselves, compared to most other Australian forests.

During the 2017 heatwave, the temperatures soared well outside the forest’s comfort zone. In the hottest part of the day, the forest was no longer able to make enough food to feed itself.

Outside the forest’s comfort zone

For now, the forest at Warra is still intact. After the heatwave, the messmate stringybark forest quickly recovered its ability to feed itself, and became a carbon sink again.

But as the world warms, these forests will be pushed outside their comfort zones more and more. They can only endure so many of these kinds of heatwaves. If they keep coming, there will be a tipping point beyond which the forest can no longer recover.

What then? We can see a disturbing glimpse when we look at Tasmania’s oceans, which are a marine heatwave hotspot. Fully 95% of Tasmania’s giant kelp forests are now gone, killed off by temperatures beyond their ability to tolerate.

It is no exaggeration to say that the rapid increase in temperatures are the most serious threat to the health of tall eucalypt forests I’ve encountered during 40 years of studying forest health and threats in Tasmania.

Unlike the kelp forests, our tall eucalyptus forests have not yet hit their tipping point. We still have time to lessen the risk global heating poses.

Read more:
Can selective breeding of ‘super kelp’ save our cold water reefs from hotter seas?

There is already work under way to test promising new methods for making future forests better able to cope with the new climate they find themselves in.

These techniques include climate adjusted provenancing, where forest managers sow seeds of local species collected from areas at the hotter end of their range. Another being tried for giant kelp is finding individual plants with better heat tolerance and breeding them.

Our eucalyptus forests will need our help, more and more. The better engaged and informed we are about the risks to forests we long thought were highly resilient, the likelier we will be to be able to preserve them.

One way we could do this is by making our monitoring data publicly accessible in real time, so we can grasp the strain our forests are under as the world warms.

Tim Wardlaw is affiliated with the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network.

– ref. In heatwave conditions, Tasmania’s tall eucalypt forests no longer absorb carbon – https://theconversation.com/in-heatwave-conditions-tasmanias-tall-eucalypt-forests-no-longer-absorb-carbon-176979

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brock Bastian, Professor, Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne

Have you looked at the international rankings of the world’s happiest countries lately?

Measuring a country’s subjective levels of happiness has become something of an international sport. People look with interest (and a little jealousy) to nations such as Denmark, which consistently tops the world happiness rankings.

It has also led to Danish practices such as the “hygge” lifestyle gaining popularity elsewhere. If only we could add more cosiness to our lives, perhaps we would be as happy as the Danish!

But is living in one of the worlds happiest nations all it’s cracked up to be? What happens if you struggle to find or maintain happiness in a sea of (supposedly) happy people?

In our new research, published in Scientific Reports, we found that in countries which rank the highest in national happiness, people are also more likely to experience poor well-being due to the societal pressure to be happy.

So living in happier countries may be good for many. But for some, it can end up feeling like too much to live up to, and have the opposite effect.

Broadening our search

For several years, my colleagues and I have been researching the social pressure people may feel to experience positive emotions and avoid negative ones.

This pressure is also communicated to us through channels such as social media, self-help books and advertising. Eventually people develop a sense of what kinds of emotion are valued (or not valued) by those around them.

Read more:
So many in the West are depressed because they’re expected not to be

In an ironic twist, our past research has shown that the more people experience pressure to feel happy and not sad, the more they tend to experience depression.

While this previous research has mostly focused on people living in Australia or the United States, we were curious about how these effects might also be evident in other countries.

For our latest study we surveyed 7,443 people from 40 countries on their emotional well-being, satisfaction with life (cognitive well-being) and mood complaints (clinical well-being). We then weighed this against their perception of social pressure to feel positive.

What we found confirmed our previous findings. Worldwide, when people report feeling pressure to experience happiness and avoid sadness, they tend to experience deficits in mental health.

That is, they experience lower satisfaction with their lives, more negative emotion, less positive emotion and higher levels of depression, anxiety and stress.

Interestingly, our global sample allowed us to go beyond our prior work and examine whether there were differences in this relationship across countries. Are there some countries in which this relationship is especially strong? And if so, why might that be?

Not a uniform problem

To investigate this, we obtained data for each of the 40 counties from the World Happiness Index, collected by the Gallup World Poll. This index is based on the subjective happiness ratings of large-scale nationally representative samples.

It allowed us to determine how the overall happiness of a nation, and therefore the social pressure on individuals to be happy, might influence individuals’ well-being.

We found the relationship did indeed change, and was stronger in countries that ranked more highly on the World Happiness Index. That is, in countries such as Denmark, the social pressure some people felt to be happy was especially predictive of poor mental health.

That’s not to say on average people are not happier in those countries – apparently they are – but that for those who already feel a great deal of pressure to keep their chin up, living in happier nations can lead to poorer well-being.

Why might this be the case? We reasoned that being surrounded by a sea of happy faces may aggravate the effects of already feeling socially pressured to be happy.

Of course, signs of others’ happiness are not limited to the explicit expression of happiness, but are also evident in other more subtle cues, such as having more social contact or engaging in pleasurable activities. These signals tend to be stronger in happier countries, ratcheting up the effects of social expectations.

In these countries, feeling happy can easily be viewed as the expected norm. This adds to the social pressure people feel to adhere to this norm, and exacerbates the fallout for those who fail to achieve it.

What’s the solution?

So what can we do? At a personal level, feeling and expressing happiness is a good thing. But as other research has found, it’s sometimes good to be sensitive about how our expression of positive emotion may affect others.

While it’s good to bring happiness and positivity to our interactions, it’s also good to know when to tone it down – and avoid alienating those who may not share our joy in the moment.

More broadly, perhaps it’s time to rethink how we measure national well-being. We already know that flourishing in life isn’t just about positive emotion, but also about responding well to negative emotion, finding value in discomfort, and focusing on other factors such as meaning and interpersonal connection.

Perhaps it’s time to rank countries not only by how happy they are, but how safe and open they are to the full range of human experiences.

Read more:
How to avoid ‘toxic positivity’ and take the less direct route to happiness

Brock Bastian receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Research finds countries that focus the most on happiness can end up making people feel worse – https://theconversation.com/research-finds-countries-that-focus-the-most-on-happiness-can-end-up-making-people-feel-worse-177323

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sara Alidoust, Lecturer in Planning, The University of Queensland

The severe lack of affordable housing is hurting Australians right across the community – from young renters, to families seeking to buy and older people needing a stable home.

The number of Australians over 55 who are homeless jumped by 28% between the 2011 and 2016 censuses.

An increasing lack of affordable housing is forcing some older people to take unconventional approaches to finding a home. One of these is house-sitting.

My new research published in Australian Geographer, looks at how this works – and how it doesn’t – for this often-vulnerable group.

What is house-sitting?

In exchange for free accommodation, house-sitters take care of the house (and garden and pets), while the owner is away. House-sitting episodes can be as short as one day to more than three years.

House-sitters use different methods to find a potential house-sitting property. Most rely on house-sitting websites and specific Facebook groups. Some people also find house-sitting opportunities through referrals and repeat bookings.

Our study

In the first analysis of its kind, a colleague and I interviewed 20 Australians between 53 and 78, who had been house-sitting for more than a year.

Read more:
‘I tell everyone I love being on my own, but I hate it’: what older Australians want you to know about loneliness

Half our interviewees had permanent housing (either rental or owned) and were mainly casual house-sitters. The remaining were house-sitting full-time and had no permanent address.

We asked people about their experiences as older house-sitters and the impact of this type of housing on their well-being.

A temporary relief from rental stress

Almost half of the house-sitters we interviewed reported financial issues, such as unemployment, unstable or low-paid jobs and unaffordable housing as the main reason for starting house-sitting. Relationship breakdown that left people without a secure housing was the second most common reason.

They told us house-sitting provided temporary relief from the high and unrelenting costs of paying rent. As one interviewee noted:

It [house-sitting] is pretty essential, where would we live otherwise? So, we did rent for a little while, but money is an issue, because I am not earning enough yet to be paying rent […] [It] just happens to be a really good solution to the situation that we happen to be in.

In turn, this freed up funds to spend on other things, such as their health and social life.

My husband gets his pension this year. So, [if we house-sit] it means that we will actually have an income, which means in theory we might actually save some money.

Less common reasons for starting house-sitting included free accommodation for travelling and spending time with animals.

‘Gorgeous pets’

Apart from saving money, interviewees described multiple benefits of house-sitting. The majority referred to the opportunity to travel and experience different places.

Participants also appreciated the opportunity to live in pleasant houses and meet new people. They liked the freedom, variety and “getting rid of unnecessary stuff”.

As one interviewee noted:

we were able to live in some beautiful homes and with gorgeous pets.

But not feeling secure

However, house-sitting, was not seen as a long-term option. Interviewees were concerned about the lack of security and increasing health needs as they aged.

Well, for short stays and holidays this [house-sitting] is viable, but for long-term you need to have plan B and C. As you see when COVID struck, it affected many people and some are staying in their cars even.

Most sitters also found the temporary, short-term nature of house-sitting made it difficult to engage in the local community and develop a sense of belonging.

You might make temporary friends, but then you move on and leave the community.

Constant moving around also makes it hard to acquire local knowledge, which is particularly important in unforeseen circumstances, such as natural disasters. As one interviewee explained:

It was quite scary in the bushfire […] when suddenly you need to know […] where to go, where’s the evacuation centre […] If I was at home in my own place, I might be talking to friends or neighbours and making decisions together but […] the loneliness becomes obvious when something like that happens.

Lack of transparency

A further issue is the power imbalance. House-sitters have few, if any rights – home owners have ultimate control over their properties. House-sitters referred to a range of challenges because of the lack of clear agreement between parties.

Read more:
What sort of housing do older Australians want and where do they want to live?

These included disputes over the cost of housing repairs and disagreement on the property status when departing, such as how clean the house and how tidy garden should be.

Unexpected changes or cancellation of the house-sitting schedules by owners also contributed to feelings of insecurity and distress among older house-sitters.

Making house-sitting more stable

House-sitting may not yet be a widespread practice, but it is growing. As it gains more prominence, we need transparent policies to specify the rights and entitlements of owners and sitters and address the inherent power imbalance.

We also need to investigate ways of making house-sitting a more secure proposition for people in the longer-term.

And to prioritise informed discussions about secure housing options for people as they age.

This work was supported by The School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland.

– ref. ‘Where would we live otherwise?’: the rise of house-sitting among older Australians – https://theconversation.com/where-would-we-live-otherwise-the-rise-of-house-sitting-among-older-australians-173984

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephanie Wong, Lecturer/Research Fellow in Psychology, Flinders University

Many of us will have experienced some unexpected honesty from the older people in our lives. Whether it’s grandma telling you your outfit is unflattering or grandpa saying he doesn’t like the meal you’ve prepared, we often explain it away by saying “Oh, don’t mind grandpa, he’s just lost his filter”.

But do we really have a “filter”, and do we lose it as we get older?

What do we mean when we say ‘filter’?

When someone has no “filter”, it means they say things without thinking about their audience. They may blurt out something rude, inappropriate, or unkind, without considering the likely consequences.

“Filters” are an important part of our everyday social interactions. A brief Monday morning chat with your boss is more complex than it may seem. For example, you might stop yourself from telling them they smell awful after their morning bike ride into the office and should’ve showered before your meeting. You might consider telling them about the fungal infection you discovered on your toenail over the weekend but decide against it. Of course, what you do or do not say also depends on how well you know them and what’s considered socially acceptable in your workplace.

Your “filter” relies on cognitive processes such as inhibitory control, which stops you from saying the first thing that pops into your mind. It also relies on social cognition, which refers to the ability to understand and predict other people’s behaviours, thoughts, and intentions. This helps us to recognise what behaviour is appropriate in a particular social setting and to adapt our behaviour based on this.

The prefrontal cortex, which is located within the frontal lobes of our brains, acts as our “filter”, helping us say and do things in a socially appropriate way. When this part of the brain isn’t functioning properly, we might act as though we’ve lost our “filter”.

Read more:
Five common myths about the ageing brain and body

What happens to our ‘filter’ as we age?

As we get older, our brains start to shrink. This is a normal part of the ageing process known as brain atrophy. It affects how well our brain cells can communicate with one another. Importantly, brain atrophy doesn’t happen to all areas of the brain at once. It is particularly noticeable in the frontal lobes.

Researchers have linked age-related shrinking in the frontal lobes with declines in inhibitory control and social cognition. Studies have also found older adults respond differently to socially awkward situations than younger adults.

For example, older adults have more difficulty recognising when someone’s said something embarrassing or tactless, and show poorer understanding of sarcasm.

So as we get older, normal ageing processes in our brains may make it much easier for things to slip out through our “filters”.

Read more:
What’s happening in our bodies as we age?

What if it’s more than just a few slip-ups?

In some rare cases, losing your “filter” can be a sign of something more serious, such as damage to the frontal lobes due to a brain injury or stroke, or a neurodegenerative condition such as frontotemporal dementia.

People with frontotemporal dementia present with striking changes in their personality and social behaviour. This could involve losing their normal inhibitions, disregarding social conventions and other socially inappropriate or embarrassing behaviour.

However, these changes are completely out of character and are typically accompanied by other symptoms such as rigidity, loss of empathy, apathy, difficulties with reasoning and judgement, overeating or unusual food preferences and declines in self-care and personal hygiene.

Read more:
Explainer: how is frontotemporal dementia different and what are the warning signs?

What other things could be at play?

Aside from changes in the brain that impact inhibitory control and social cognition, it could simply be that as we get older, we care less about what others think.

Compared to younger adults, older adults are less self-conscious, reporting fewer experiences of emotions such as shame, guilt, and embarrassment. They also have higher overall levels of happiness and life satisfaction.

Perhaps we learn to let go of our “filters” and embrace the social awkwardness as we get older. Perhaps grandpa really didn’t like your cooking, and feels secure enough to tell you.

So, what does this mean for those of us who seem to be losing our “filter”?

Based on what we know about the brain and ageing, blurting out a remark without thinking isn’t necessarily something to be alarmed about. And if you’re on the receiving end, try not to take it too personally. If these remarks seem out of character or extreme, however, consider raising this with other family members or a doctor.

Stephanie Wong receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

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

– ref. Do we really ‘lose our filter’ as we age? – https://theconversation.com/do-we-really-lose-our-filter-as-we-age-176248

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Baak, Senior Lecturer, UniSA Education Futures, University of South Australia

After August 2012, the Australian government introduced “deterrence policies” for asylum seekers who arrive here by boat. Part of this is keeping them on temporary visas and giving them almost no feasible pathway to permanent residency.

Many linger in detention centres, while others who may be in community detention still face constraints on their freedoms. Many live below the poverty line and suffer significant mental health issues. They are also locked out of many education opportunities.

Temporary visas for asylum seekers include:

• temporary protection visas (TPV), granted for three years. Holders can work, access Medicare and some social security payments

• safe haven enterprise visas (SHEV). These are granted for five years and require holders to work or study in a part of regional Australia. At the end of five years, SHEV holders may apply for a permanent visa

• bridging visas (BV). Holders can live in the community but don’t receive housing support and have limited other supports.

One of the possible pathways to transition from a SHEV to a permanent visa is having been enrolled in full-time study in a designated regional area for at least three and a half years. This makes education a crucial pathway to staying in Australia, as well as to employment.

Read more:
Asylum seekers left ‘desperate’ and ‘helpless’ when they try to find work in Australia

Education also provides opportunities to learn and develop English, interact with the broader community and develop skills and qualifications.

But asylum seekers have no way of paying the international fees required to study at a university, and those still at school can’t stay there after they turn 18. There are no known cases of people successfully meeting the criteria to transition from a SHEV to a permanent visa.

How asylum seeker students are locked out

We are conducting an ongoing study which investigates how schools foster resilience in refugee students.

All children aged under 18 on temporary visas can go to school. But once they turn 18, they can no longer get government-funded schooling, even if they have not finished school.

A school leader told us that once students turned 18

[…] The department would not fund them. If the school wanted to keep them it would be at the school’s cost and we’d have to write a very compelling statement about why they should stay.

This particular school advocated for the around 20 students who were affected, and they were able to stay at the school. But new students aged over 18 were not allowed to enrol.

Read more:
Refugee students struggle with displacement and trauma. Here are 3 ways schools can help them belong

For other schools in our study without the knowledge and ability to advocate, students had to leave high school. Beyond being deprived of the opportunity to finish school, it is even more difficult for students on temporary visas to attend university.

A recent publication by Deakin University contains a case study of Hadi, a student from Afghanistan on a temporary visa. Hadi says:

[…] the fear of not being able to study at university would always keep me up at night. My teachers were also concerned because I was categorised as an international student and I was not eligible for a government funded place at university.

The exact number of students impacted by these preventative policies is not known. But those who gain admission to a university would have to pay around $30-40,000 per year. This is unaffordable for them.

A school finance officer from a school participating in our study said:

[Students on protection visas] come to us for education. We want to do our bit and then they finish with us and they achieve an ATAR that’s got value for a university. And then the university says well we can’t take you unless we treat you like an international student. They just can’t do that.

What universities are doing

Twenty-five Australian universities and one other higher education provider offer scholarships for students on temporary visas. These generally cover the tuition fee and some universities provide a stipend. There are about 15 universities without such scholarships.

Deakin University, for example, provides a Deakin Sanctuary Scholarship to successful applicants holding a TPV, SHEV or relevant BV. This covers 100% of tuition fees and provides recipients with $6,000 per year towards study expenses.

The University of Adelaide provides an annual Refugee and Humanitarian Scholarship to TPV, SHEV or relevant BV holders. This also covers 100% of tuition fees and gives recipients a one-off $2,500 payment.

Scholarship holders at University of Adelaide are restricted in the undergraduate programs they can undertake and cannot pursue degrees such as medicine, dentistry, occupational therapies, as well as double or combined degrees.

A South Australian school principal in our study told us these scholarships weren’t easy to get:

When they get to the end of school you sometimes watch that fall apart a little because their options are very limited beyond school. They can’t afford university. We hear talk of scholarships but trying to navigate that system is almost impossible and unless you’re a 95-plus student you probably won’t get one of those scholarships.

There are success stories from these scholarship programs, such as Farzaneh Dehghani who graduated as a civil engineer from RMIT and subsequently got a job in her field – but the competition for a limited number of scholarships is high.

What needs to be done

Two simple measures would improve this situation.

Governments in other countries offer access to higher education for students on temporary protection or asylum visas. In Scotland, asylum-seeking students under 25 are who have lived there for at least three years are treated as “home” students. This means they access higher education for free.

In Germany, asylum-seeking students have the same rights to access higher education as local students and can apply for exemptions to university fees.

Read more:
How people seeking asylum in Australia access higher education, and the enormous barriers they face

Given the relatively small number of students on temporary visas in Australia and the significant equity benefits of providing scholarships – such as improved settlement outcomes, pathways into employment and opportunities for pathways to permanent visas – all Australian higher education providers should be making such provisions.

Ultimately, Australians can help asylum-seeker students gain access to university by pressuring governments to scrap the punitive and arbitrary visa system which ignores the well-being of young people and dehumanises them for political ends.

Melanie Baak receives funding from the Australian Research Council (LP170100145), Department of Education (Qld), Department for Education (SA), Catholic Education South Australia.

Bruce Johnson receives funding from the Australian Research Council (LP170100145), Department of Education (Qld), Department for Education (SA), Catholic Education South Australia. He is also a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts.

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

– ref. Education is a human right, but for most asylum seekers in Australia, university is an impossible dream – https://theconversation.com/education-is-a-human-right-but-for-most-asylum-seekers-in-australia-university-is-an-impossible-dream-174881

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW Sydney

Thursday brought news that Australia’s official unemployment rate in January remained at a historically low 4.2%. In parliament, Prime Minister Scott Morrision boasted of the nation being on track to achieve a rate “with a 3 in front of it” this year.

It’s entirely possible the unemployment rate will drop further. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s central forecast is 3.75% by the end of 2022. Some economists have suggested it could be driven down below 3%.

With economic management is a key issue at any election, it is clear the state of the labour market will be a big part of the Coalitions re-election narrative.

But the story on wages is not impressive.

Real wages (that is, wages adjusted for inflation) have not grown strongly in recent years. From 2013 to 2018 they grew at 0.5%, compared with 0.8% from 2008 to 2012, and 1% from 2001 to 2007.

Australia is not alone in this respect. Growth in real wages has been sluggish since 2013 in many advanced economies. For the average American worker they haven’t budged in 40 years.

Annual growth in real wages

There are many reasons for this. Labour-saving technologies are reducing demand for all sorts of human workers, from truck drivers and cashiers to junior lawyers and accountants. Globalisation and international trade have increased competition for less-skilled labour.

What economists call “skill-biased technical change” – new technologies requiring workers to have more skills – has increased wage inequality. The question is what to do about all of this.

Market forces prevail

The first-order policy response should be recognition that a tighter labour market than in the past is now needed to drive wages growth. That is, to get wages up we need to get unemployment down even further – and keep it there.

There is some resistance to this idea.

One argument is that Australia’s labour market isn’t all that competitive – that it’s full of all sorts of regulatory institutions such as the award system and enterprise bargaining that obscure or even break the relationship between unemployment and wages growth.

Read more:
Why there’s no magic jobless rate to increase Australians’ wages

This has never been a persuasive argument. At most these institutions mean there will be lags in adjustment – with the Fair Work Commission reviewing awards once a year and enterprise agreements typically negotiated every three years.

Yet even these lags are less important than they used to be, now the percentage of private-sector workers covered by enterprise agreements is just 10.9% compared with nearly a quarter in 2010.

What governments can and can’t do

The reality is that the majority of Australian workers have their pay determined by market forces, mediated by individual agreements. Supply and demand in the labour market is the key determinant of wage outcomes.

Understanding this helps frame what governments can and can’t do about wages.

They certainly can enact policies that drive unemployment down and hence wages up. On this count the Morrison government gets high marks and deserves due credit.

Read more:
Vital Signs: wages growth desultory, unemployment stunning

They can also help provide workers with better skills, which lead to higher wages. One of the central lessons from economics is that people basically get paid for their skills.

Australia’s major political parties could do a much better job of formulating a comprehensive education and training policy.

On the Labor side, announcing a few new apprenticeships is fine but really just tinkering. On the Liberal side, whining about postmodernism isn’t going to provide students with more human capital.

Governments could also encourage schemes to give workers a stake in the profits of the enterprises they work for – through employee share ownership or worker ownership schemes. Rosalind Dixon and I have proposed a “shadow equity” scheme as one way to implement this.

What governments can’t do is turn back the tide of globalisation and pretend automation won’t continue to replace or reduce demand for human labour.

It is futile, for example, to seek to resurrect Austrlia’s car manufacturing industry. Sure, let’s talk about developing new manufacturing industries, such as in battery technology, but a 1970s-style industry policy won’t bring back the jobs.

Read more:
An unemployment rate below 4% is possible. But for how long?

To get wages growth moving again we need lower unemployment, and to ensure it stays low. That won’t happen effectively by just mandating higher wages. It will happen by ensuring workers have the skills the market values, and by keeping macroeconomic policy settings tuned for low unemployment.

Richard Holden is President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

– ref. Vital Signs: Unemployment steady at 4.2%, but it will need to go lower still to lift wages – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-unemployment-steady-at-4-2-but-it-will-need-to-go-lower-still-to-lift-wages-177218

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

If you were to believe the Morrison government, you’d think Anthony Albanese as prime minister would sell out Australia’s interests to China, give criminals a break, and perhaps sneak in a death tax.

You’d question whether this man, who held senior positions in the Labor years, including briefly being deputy PM, could run a competent government. Because, you see, he didn’t have an economic or national security portfolio.

Scott Morrison is determined to do what Malcolm Turnbull refused to do in the 2016 election – run a ferocious, no-holds-barred negative campaign to try to trash his opponent.

The trouble with being a small target, which has been Albanese’s strategy all this term but especially recently, is that your opponent will still seek to turn you into a big target, indeed a scary risk to the nation.

The government’s campaign over the past fortnight’s parliamentary sitting has been full of gross exaggeration and, on the issue of policy on China, it has been outrageous and irresponsible. It’s a mark of Morrison’s desperation, and it carries risks of backfiring.

The question remains, however, whether the assault will be effective. Or will the government just harm itself by going over the top?

We’ve seen many scare campaigns through the years that have had little regard for the truth. Labor’s “Mediscare” claims in 2016 about an alleged Coalition threat to Medicare was potent, despite lacking substance. But the Morrison government’s effort is among the most brazen.

Without a compelling positive agenda of its own, the government believes – or hopes – that Albanese, who is still not well defined in the public’s mind, is potentially a soft target in the two key policy areas where the Coalition usually has an advantage – national security and economics.

It has gambled that in our fast-moving media cycle it can get away with extraordinary claims, helped by sections of the media.

But in its national security attack on Labor, the government this week ran into some heavy counter fire it would not have expected, from impeccable sources. The current and a former chief of ASIO weighed in against the Coalition’s crude attempt to wedge Labor over China.

The saga started when Defence Minister Peter Dutton declared last week that “the Chinese Communist Party, the Chinese government” had picked Albanese as “their candidate” in the coming election.

Dutton led with his chin, saying he was reflecting on what had been reported and commented on by the ASIO director-general, Mike Burgess.

Burgess, in his “Annual Threat Assessment” speech the previous evening, had said ASIO recently disrupted “a foreign interference plot in the lead-up to an election in Australia”. He didn’t name the country or the jurisdiction. Burgess related how a wealthy “puppeteer” had hired an employee to identify potential target candidates.

This week Morrison dipped back into the China well.

On Wednesday, he told parliament the Chinese government “have picked their horse” (Albanese) and labelled Labor’s deputy leader, Richard Marles, a “Manchurian candidate” for remarks Marles made some years ago. (“Manchurian candidate” is a reference from a political thriller to someone brainwashed and manipulated by an enemy power.)

The stakes were raised for the government when, in a rare TV appearance on Wednesday night, Burgess made it clear he was less than impressed with ASIO, which was “apolitical”, being drawn into political infighting.

Then on Thursday the government received a massive whack from Dennis Richardson, who is not only a former ASIO head but also a former secretary of the defence and foreign affairs departments and was Australia’s ambassador in Washington.

Richardson denounced the government’s “attempt to create an artificial division where one in practice does not exist”, saying that only served “the interests of one country. And that’s China.”

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He described the tactic as “grubby beyond belief”.

Morrison was not put off, later that day saying Albanese “is the Chinese government’s pick at this election”.

The government’s sledges against Albanese on the economic and law-and-order fronts were less spectacular but equally stretched.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg last week delved into the archives, back to when Albanese, as a Labor Party official from the left in the early 1990s, moved a motion at a conference calling for consideration of an inheritance tax. From this, Frydenberg asserted, “he stands for death duties”.

In promoting legislation to make it easier to deport visa holders convicted of serious crimes, Morrison accused Albanese of being “clearly on the side of criminals”.

In defensive tactics, Albanese has been extremely surefooted.

Thus, after Burgess’s revelation about foreign interference, the opposition leader immediately contacted him and was able to report that ASIO has no problem with any of Labor’s federal candidates.

As Morrison attacked Labor’s credentials on national security, Albanese tabled a letter from the PM last year thanking him for supporting the government on the AUKUS agreement.

Albanese met the “scare” around his one-time backing for an inheritance tax three decades ago with ridicule, waving around an economics essay he’d written four decades ago.

Efforts by the government to wedge Labor on the visa legislation and legislation on guns fell in a heap. The opposition waved the bills through the House of Representatives with little prospect of them being considered in the Senate before the election.

The government’s effort last week to wedge Labor on the religious discrimination legislation ended with it being wedged by its own rebel backbenchers.

Albanese has covered off every angle that’s come up.

For instance, on Thursday he told parliament in a personal explanation that he had consulted Burgess before attending the opening of the Chau Chak Wing Museum at Sydney University in 2020. He added that he had obtained Burgess’s permission to say this to parliament.

Earlier this week a Labor senator named, under parliamentary privilege, businessman and political donor Chau as the “puppeteer” referred to in the Burgess speech, something Burgess declined to be drawn on.

In his statement to parliament, Albanese said he did “regularly consult with our national security agencies, because I take their role seriously as leader of the opposition”.

However neat Albanese’s moves, however reprehensible the government’s, Labor doesn’t fool itself. Morrison and his ministers have sown the seeds for a national security scare, and it’s too early to know whether they will germinate.

What we do know is that the Chinese government must be enjoying this spectacle immensely.

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Morrison has sown the seeds for a scare campaign, and Albanese doesn’t know whether they’ll grow – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-morrison-has-sown-the-seeds-for-a-scare-campaign-and-albanese-doesnt-know-whether-theyll-grow-177368