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

The government’s decision to target net-zero emissions by 2050 will leave each Australian nearly A$2,000 better off by then compared to no Australian action.

That’s what we were told in a six-point summary of the government’s economic modelling released at a press conference on Thursday October 26, days before the prime minister left for the Glasgow climate talks.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said at the time the actual modelling would be released “in due course”, later clarifying that it might not be released for a fortnight, after which the Glasgow climate talks would be almost over.

The 100-page summary of modelling prepared by the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources and the consultancy McKinsey & Company was released on Friday afternoon as the climate talks were concluding.

The document tells us both how the $2,000 figure was arrived at and the question that was asked.

The question that was asked

McKinsey and the department were asked to compare economic outcomes in 2050 after 30 years of “no Australian action” with economic outcomes in 2050 after 30 years of “the plan”.

“No Australian action” meant that every developed country other than Australia cut its emissions to net-zero by 2050, and all of the world apart from Australia did whatever else was needed to hold global warming to 2°C.

Australia would find it harder to raise money because of its reluctance to commit to net-zero (meaning its borrowing costs would incorporate a “risk premium”) and would get access to only those improvements in technology that were available elsewhere.

“The plan” involved Australia continuing “to invest in technological breakthroughs,” acting as an “enabler to support consumer choice and voluntary adoption of other technologies”.

Australia would adopt a target of net zero by 2050, escaping a risk premium.

The government would invest more than A$21 billion to support the development and deployment of low emissions technologies including clean hydrogen, ultra low-cost solar, energy storage, low-emissions materials, carbon capture and storage and soil carbon to 2030, and continue to play a “direct role” beyond that.

Read more:
Between the lines, the plan has coal on the way out, the future bright

Otherwise, emissions would be reduced on “a voluntary basis”.

Importantly, and so the size of the voluntary action can be incorporated into the modelling, the voluntary emissions reductions are assumed to be the same as what would be expected if Australians faced a carbon price (or tax) that climbed to A$24 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050.

Emitters finding it hard to cut emissions as much as they or consumers or investors wanted would be able to buy international “offsets” (overseas emissions reductions) at a price that would climb to A$40 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050.

$2,000 per person better off

The modelling concludes that under “the plan” each Australian would be almost A$2,000 better off in 2050 compared with under “no Australian action”.

That’s $2,000 per year in so-called gross national income per capita, but it’s less impressive than it sounds. The latest stats have gross national income per capita approaching A$80,000.

That’s not what’s received by any one individual, but what’s received by businesses and all sorts of other entities averaged across the population.

Compounding economic growth means that by 2050 that dollar sum will be two to three times as big, against which (and given all the uncertainties) a projection of an extra $2,000 amounts to little difference.

A reasonable way to interpret the modelling is that, compared to “no Australian action”, the “plan” won’t impose significant costs on Australians.

Where the $2,000 comes from

Which isn’t to say that there won’t be big costs.

The world will move away from coal and liquefied natural gas – two of Australia’s biggest exports – but what is assumed is that will happen in any event, under both “the plan” and the “no Australian action” scenarios.

Unless you were to assume that the rest of the world won’t pull its weight in getting to net-zero (and the modelling does not assume this) Australia not pulling its weight does almost nothing to rescue its exports.

Read more:
COP26: what the draft agreement says – and why it’s being criticised

The $2,000 comprises two parts. $375 is the benefit to Australia of avoiding investors being less keen to invest in a country that isn’t pulling its weight.

The modelling says Australia would score an average of 5.5% less investment per year under the “no Australian action” scenario compared to under “the plan”.

The other $1,625 derives from the development of new industries, spurred in part by the government’s $21 billion, the most important being hydrogen production which by itself would lift national income per person by about $1,000 of the $2,000.

What was released Friday afternoon is not the modelling itself but a government-authored “summary”.

Although it is difficult to compare the McKinsey modelling with the Treasury modelling prepared for the Gillard government ahead of the 2012-2014 carbon pollution reduction scheme, it is notable that both arrived at a similar conclusion: that over time, action to reduce emissions will cost Australia little.

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. How government modelling found net-zero would leave us better off – https://theconversation.com/how-government-modelling-found-net-zero-would-leave-us-better-off-171743

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

The response to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s announcement of an electric vehicle policy has focused on its inconsistency with his derisive statements in 2019 that the technology would “end the weekend”.

What’s more important, however, is whether the policy is consistent with the government’s belated commitment to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Examining the modelling behind the commitment allows us to assess this, and possibly helps explain the timing of Morrison’s rhetorical pivot.

Transport is covered only briefly in the modelling, which was released late on Friday, and the government does not set out technological goals. However, it is assumed by 2050, the proportion of electric vehicles will have risen to 90%, compared to around 1% at present.

2050 is a long way off, but motor vehicles are long-lived pieces of capital equipment. If we’re going to replace 90% of the existing fleet with electric vehicles, we must start now.

Simple arithmetic

The average age of Australian cars is about ten years, implying they last about 20 years on average. So, the shift to electrics will need to be well under way ten years from now – by about 2030.

To illustrate the speed of the adjustment needed, suppose electrics represent 50% of new car sales by 2030. This was the target proposed by then-Labor leader Bill Shorten at the 2019 election. Morrison rejected it the time, but now appears to have tacitly embraced something similar.

Given the 2030 starting point, and assuming a 20-year vehicle life, how fast would the share of electric vehicles need to grow to reach 90% of Australia’s fleet by 2050 – and how fast would the sale of conventional cars have to fall?

According to my calculations, the sale of traditional vehicles would have to cease completely by 2038 to reach the government’s target.

Roughly speaking, Australians buy 1 million new vehicles a year, with a total stock of 20 million.

If the share of traditional vehicle sales falls from 50% to zero between 2030 and 2038, that leaves about 2 million traditional vehicles, or 10% of the total fleet, remaining on the road by 2050 (with the rest being electric vehicles).

Read more:
As the world surges ahead on electric vehicle policy, the Morrison government’s new strategy leaves Australia idling in the garage

A challenging task

This estimate assumes the number of cars sold every year remains constant. But in fact, it has been increasing over time, which has a couple of effects.

First it means newer cars are over-represented, relative to the case of constant sales. That implies the expected lifetime of cars is actually longer than 20 years. And if the number of cars keeps growing, the task of decarbonising is even harder.

A policy of electrification should be accompanied by measures to encourage the use of public transport, cycling and walking, as well as remote work and other ways of reducing unnecessary travel.

In view of the magnitude and urgency of the task, the Morrison government’s commitment to spend A$250 million on electric vehicle charging stations (about $10 for each person in Australia) is nowhere near sufficient.

To electrify Australia’s vehicle fleet in time, the government must either provide price incentives to consumers or mandate improvements in fuel efficiency across the vehicle fleet. Such government interventions appear anathema to Morrison’s new mantra of “can-do capitalism”. But something of the the kind will be necessary.

The simplest approach would be a combination of tax relief and subsidies. This would reduce the cost difference between electric and traditional vehicles, which one estimate puts at $20,000-$30,000. This is partly offset by fuel savings and the lower repair costs of electric vehicles.

A subsidy or tax exemption of $10,000, declining over time as the cost advantage of traditional vehicles diminished, would promote fairly rapid uptake of electric vehicles. The likely cost would be around $1 billion a year, or $20 billion over the transition.

Getting a handle on the numbers

To put these numbers in perspective, comparisons are useful.

The New South Wales government has just announced $100 million to cover the cost difference for electric vehicles bought by councils, taxi companies and other fleet operators. This, covering part of the fleet in one state, comes on top of $490 million announced in the state’s June budget.

As NSW Treasurer Matt Kean pointed out, his Liberal-Nationals government is taking the electric vehicle transition much more seriously than its federal counterpart.

Alternatively, we could look at the inland rail scheme, a proposed 1,700km freight rail line between Melbourne and Brisbane. The National Party demanded the project be accelerated as part-payment for their acceptance of a 2050 net-zero target.

This likely white elephant is budgeted to cost $14.5 billion, an amount which will almost certainly blow out. It will reduce the use of fuel for trucks, but at an immense cost.

For the amount paid to placate one noisy lobby group, we could cover most of the cost of electrifying Australia’s road vehicle fleet.

Not there yet

There is an alternative, recommended by bodies including the federal government’s own Climate Change Authority. It would involve a fuel efficiency requirement for new car sales, which would work similarly to the Renewable Energy Target.

Vehicle importers could decide whether to meet the target by shifting to electrics or more fuel efficient traditional vehicles.

Over time the target would fall to zero, requiring complete electrification. The cost would be spread across importers and car buyers.

A third approach would be to do nothing now, but pay owners of traditional vehicles to scrap them before the end of their working life.

This would involve something like the Cash for Clunkers scheme adopted in the United States under the Obama administration and briefly floated by the Gillard government in 2010. While enabling government to defer action, it would cost more in the long run.

The Morrison government’s commitment to a 2050 net-zero target is a welcome step, if long overdue. But as far as motor vehicles are concerned, the policies to get there are badly lagging the ambition.

Read more:
Take heart at what’s unfolded at COP26 in Glasgow – the world can still hold global heating to 1.5℃

John Quiggin is a former Member of the Climate Change Authority and took part in the preparation of its report proposing a Fuel Efficiency Target

– ref. Government assumes 90% of Australia’s new car sales will be electric by 2050. But its a destination without a route – https://theconversation.com/government-assumes-90-of-australias-new-car-sales-will-be-electric-by-2050-but-its-a-destination-without-a-route-171741

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

It’s not often that leaders get the blunt question 3AW’s Neil Mitchell threw at the prime minister on Friday. “You ever told a lie in public life?”

What could Morrison say?

“Yes” – the frank answer, and the discussion would turn to where and when. “No” – and that would invite sceptical responses and provide another opportunity to put French President Emmanuel Macron’s now-famous interview clip on repeat.

Morrison opted for denial. “I don’t believe I have, no.” Inevitably this set off claims that here was another lie.

It was put to him at his press conference later: “You said earlier today you’ve never lied in public life, is that really true?” “That’s what I think to be true,” he replied. “What are you suggesting? What do you think I did?”

Macron’s skilfully delivered political dagger, in the row over the French submarines, set off the current debate about Morrison’s honesty, or lack of it. And Malcolm Turnbull chimed in with the accusation his successor was a serial liar.

Coincidentally, all this has been given some underpinning by Sean Kelly’s just published book The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, which analyses the PM’s character.

Recent events have provided traction to an existing perception that the PM is inclined to say anything that suits his immediate purpose.

“Lies”, it should be noted, are not the same as “broken promises” (unless the intention always was to break the undertaking). In fact, Morrison may be more careful than some predecessors about the latter, because the voters have become increasingly censorious of governments flouting pledges.

Many politicians are accused of lying. The dangerous difference for Morrison is that he risks the tag being attached to him like a sewn-on label, and a subject of conversation when voters think about him.

Nailing particular “lies” can be a tricky business, however, because “lies” shade into “being slippery with the truth”.

Take his words on electric cars this week. At one point he was asked, “How can you honestly spruik electric vehicles when you campaigned against them in the last election?”

He replied: “But I didn’t. That is just a Labor lie. I was against Bill Shorten’s mandate policy, trying to tell people what to do with their lives, what cars they were supposed to drive and where they could drive.”

It might be right that in 2019 Morrison said at some point he wasn’t against electric cars as such. But on any normal reading of what he said, he was condemning them.

How otherwise to characterise his hyperbole that Shorten would destroy the weekend – the electric cars wouldn’t be able to tow your trailer or boat?

The facts are somewhat murkier with Macron.

It’s clear enough the French were deliberately deceived. What we can’t know is precisely how Morrison deployed his words.

If there was a transcript of the Morrison-Macron mid-year conversation in Paris, would a straight-out lie be found? Or was it a matter of misleading by the impression given, then and in later Australian interactions with the French?

So in dealing with what Morrison says, it can be important to distinguish between the actual words and the sense that a person would get from the words.

For example, when recently asked why the government supported Clive Palmer’s case against the Western Australian government over its closed border, Morrison told parliament “The government did not pursue that case at all”.

Literally, he could say this was correct. It’s all about the word “pursue”. The government dropped off the case for political reasons. But anyone unfamiliar with what had happened could think from Morrison’s answer that it had not been involved.

When a person’s integrity is beyond question, one doesn’t need to be so careful; if they are slippery, every nuance must be studied. This is even more so in the age of “spin” when the spinners and their bosses live by the maxim “what the traffic will bear”.

A politician says, in a campaign, that the government “plans” to do something. This can be a statement of firm intent – or something that’s deliberately hedged so it can be reviewed later.

Kelly (a former Labor staffer who has observed a few politicians up close) argues Morrison doesn’t feel untruthful because he believes what he says “in the moment”.

Whatever he might think at the time, Morrison’s tactic often is just to slide away when confronted. Pressed by Mitchell on whether he wasn’t worried when Macron and Turnbull call him a liar, Morrison said no, because he was making the “right decisions” on defence and you shouldn’t be in the PM’s job if you couldn’t deal with the sledges.

He’s asking people to look beyond the claims about lies, suggesting they are just a nasty part of the political environment.

Many people may think the same. But past a tipping point, having the reputation of being a liar cuts through. The question is whether Morrison has reached that point with voters.

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. View from The Hill: Scott Morrison caught in catch-22 over the issue of his integrity – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-scott-morrison-caught-in-catch-22-over-the-issue-of-his-integrity-171750

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

The government’s decision to target net-zero emissions by 2050 will leave each Australian nearly A$2,000 better off by then compared to no Australian action.

That’s what we were told in a six-point summary of the government’s economic modelling released at a press conference on Thursday October 26, days before the prime minister left for the Glasgow climate talks.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said at the time the actual modelling would be released “in due course”, later clarifying that it might not be released for a fortnight, after which the Glasgow climate talks would be almost over.

The 100-page government summary of modelling prepared for it by the consultancy McKinsey & Company was released on Friday afternoon as the climate talks were concluding.

The document tells us both how the result was arrived at and the question that was asked.

The question that was asked

McKinsey was asked to compare economic outcomes in 2050 after 30 years of “no Australian action” with economic outcomes in 2050 after 30 years of “the plan”.

“No Australian action” meant that every country other than Australia cut its emissions to net-zero by 2050, and that every country other than Australia did whatever else was needed to hold global warming to 2°C.

Australia would find it harder to raise money because of its reluctance to commit to net-zero (meaning its borrowing costs would incorporate a “risk premium”) and would get access to only those improvements in technology that were available elsewhere.

“The plan” involved Australia continuing “to invest in technological breakthroughs,” acting as an “enabler to support consumer choice and voluntary adoption of other technologies”.

Australia would adopt a target of net zero by 2050, escaping a risk premium.

The government would invest more than A$21 billion to support the development and deployment of low emissions technologies including clean hydrogen, ultra low-cost solar, energy storage, low-emissions materials, carbon capture and storage and soil carbon to 2030, and continue to play a “direct role” beyond that.

Read more:
Between the lines, the plan has coal on the way out, the future bright

Otherwise, emissions would be reduced on “a voluntary basis”.

Importantly, and so the size of the voluntary action can be incorporated into the modelling, the voluntary emissions reductions are assumed to be the same as what would be expected if Australians faced a carbon price (or tax) that climbed to A$24 per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050.

Emitters finding it hard to cut emissions as much as they or consumers or investors wanted would be able to buy international “offsets” (overseas emissions reductions) at a price that would climb to A$40per tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2050.

$2,000 per person better off

The modelling concludes that under “the plan” each Australian would be almost A$2,000 better off in 2050 compared with under “no Australian action”.

That’s $2,000 per year in so-called gross national income per capita, but it’s less impressive than it sounds. The latest stats have gross national income per capita approaching A$80,000.

That’s not what’s received by any one individual, but what’s received by businesses and all sorts of other entities averaged across the population.

Compounding economic growth means that by 2050 that dollar sum will be two to three times as big, against which (and given all the uncertainties) a projection of an extra $2,000 amounts to little difference.

A reasonable way to interpret the modelling is that, compared to “no Australian action”, the “plan” won’t impose significant cost on Australians.

Where the $2,000 comes from

Which isn’t to say that there won’t be big costs.

The world will move away from coal and liquefied natural gas – two of Australia’s biggest exports – but what is assumed is that will happen in any event, under both “the plan” and the “no Australian action” scenarios.

Unless you were to assume that the rest of the world won’t pull its weight in getting to net-zero (and the modelling does not assume this) Australia not pulling its weight does almost nothing to rescue its exports.

Read more:
COP26: what the draft agreement says – and why it’s being criticised

The $2000 comprises two parts. $375 is the benefit to Australia of avoiding investors being less keen to invest in a country that isn’t pulling its weight.

McKinsey says Australia would score an average of 5.5% less investment per year under the “no Australian action” scenario compared to under “the plan”.

The other $1,625 derives from the development of new industries, spurred in part by the government’s $21 billion, the most important being hydrogen production which McKinsey says by itself could lift national income by about $1,000 per person.

What was released Friday afternoon is not the modelling itself but a government-authored “summary”.

Although it is difficult to compare the McKinsey modelling with the Treasury modelling prepared for the Gillard government ahead of the 2012-2014 carbon pollution reduction scheme, it is notable that both arrived at a similar conclusion: that over time, action to reduce emissions will cost Australia little.

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

– ref. Here’s how the government’s modellers concluded net-zero would leave us better off – https://theconversation.com/heres-how-the-governments-modellers-concluded-net-zero-would-leave-us-better-off-171743

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Rigby, Adjunct Research Fellow, University of Southern Queensland

Earlier this week, the International Space Station (ISS) was forced to maneouvre out of the way of a potential collision with space junk. With a crew of astronauts and cosmonauts on board, this required an urgent change of orbit on November 11.

Over the station’s 23-year orbital lifetime, there have been about 30 close encounters with orbital debris requiring evasive action. Three of these near-misses occurred in 2020. In May this year there was a hit: a tiny piece of space junk punched a 5mm hole in the ISS’s Canadian-built robot arm.

This week’s incident involved a piece of debris from the defunct Fengyun-1C weather satellite, destroyed in 2007 by a Chinese anti-satellite missile test. The satellite exploded into more than 3,500 pieces of debris, most of which are still orbiting. Many have now fallen into the ISS’s orbital region.

To avoid the collision, a Russian Progress supply spacecraft docked to the station fired its rockets for just over six minutes. This changed the ISS’s speed by 0.7 metres per second and raised its orbit, already more than 400km high, by about 1.2km.

Orbit is getting crowded

Space debris has become a major concern for all satellites orbiting the Earth, not just the football-field-sized ISS. As well as notable satellites such as the smaller Chinese Tiangong space station and the Hubble Space Telescope, there are thousands of others.

As the largest inhabited space station, the ISS is the most vulnerable target. It orbits at 7.66 kilometres a second, fast enough to travel from Perth to Brisbane in under eight minutes.

Read more:
China’s Tiangong space station: what it is, what it’s for, and how to see it

A collision at that speed with even a small piece of debris could produce serious damage. What counts is the relative speed of the satellite and the junk, so some collisions could be slower while others could be faster and do even more damage.

As low Earth orbit becomes increasingly crowded, there is more and more to run into. There are already almost 5,000 satellites currently operating, with many more on the way.

SpaceX alone will soon have more than 2,000 Starlink internet satellites in orbit, on its way to an initial goal of 12,000 and perhaps eventually 40,000.

A rising tide of junk

If it was only the satellites themselves in orbit, it might not be so bad. But according to the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office, there are estimated to be about 36,500 orbiting artificial objects larger than 10cm across, such as defunct satellites and rocket stages. There are also around a million between 1cm and 10cm, and 330 million measuring 1mm to 1cm.

Most of these items are in low Earth orbit. Because of the high speeds involved, even a speck of paint can pit an ISS window and a marble-sized object could penetrate a pressurised module.

The ISS modules are somewhat protected by multi-layer shielding to lessen the probability of a puncture and depressurisation. But there remains a risk that such an event could occur before the ISS reaches the end of its lifetime around the end of the decade.

Watching the skies

Of course, no one has the technology to track every piece of debris, and we also don’t possess the ability to eliminate all that junk. Nevertheless, possible methods for removing larger pieces from orbit are being investigated.

Meanwhile, nearly 30,000 pieces larger than 10cm are being tracked by organisations around the world such as the US Space Surveillance Network.

Read more:
It’s not how big your laser is, it’s how you use it: space law is an important part of the fight against space debris

Here in Australia, space debris tracking is an area of increasing activity. Multiple organisations are involved, including the Australian Space Agency, Electro Optic Systems, the ANU Institute for Space, the Space Surveillance Radar System, the Industrial Sciences Group, and the Australian Institute for Machine Learning with funding from the SmartSat CRC. In addition, the German Aerospace Center (DLR) has a SMARTnet facility at the University of Southern Queensland’s Mt Kent Observatory dedicated to monitoring geostationary orbit at a height of around 36,000km – the home of many communication satellites, including those used by Australia.

One way or another, we will eventually have to clean up our space neighbourhood if we want to continue to benefit from the nearest regions of the “final frontier”.

Mark Rigby is a Fellow of both the International Planetarium Society and the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a former Curator of the Sir Thomas Brisbane Planetarium.

Brad Carter works for the University of Southern Queensland, and is the recipient of funding from the Australian Research Council. He is a member of the Australian Institute of Physics, the Astronomical Society of Australia, and the International Astronomical Union.

– ref. A chunk of Chinese satellite almost hit the International Space Station. They dodged it – but the space junk problem is getting worse – https://theconversation.com/a-chunk-of-chinese-satellite-almost-hit-the-international-space-station-they-dodged-it-but-the-space-junk-problem-is-getting-worse-171735

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Adams, Professor of Corporate Law & Head UNE Law School, University of New England

The High Court of Australia has today refused to hear Volkswagen’s appeal against the record A$125 million fine imposed on it for deliberately deceiving regulators and customers about the environmental performance of its cars.

The $125 million fine is the largest penalty ever imposed on a company in Australia for misleading consumers. It relates to the so-called “dieselgate” scandal, by which the German car company used secret software to beat emissions standards and tests in multiple countries.

This is a significant win for the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in its ongoing battle against “greenwash”, by which companies make false environmental claims to mislead consumers.

Research shows greenwashing harms the market for environmentally friendly products. Without being able to distinguish between genuine and dubious claims, consumer cynicism about all claims increases.

The Australian Consumer Law adequately prohibits greenwashing claims through its provisions covering false and misleading practices. But this evidence the consumer watchdog is enforcing these laws, and that the courts are upholding them, will build confidence that environmental claims can be trusted.

Background to the ‘dieselgate’ case

The ACCC initiated Federal Court proceedings against Volkswagen in September 2016, a year after the US Environmental Protection Agency revealed the car company had used “defeat” software in diesel vehicles since 2009 to produce lower greenhouse gas emissions during “laboratory” tests.

This software shut off during road use, meaning the cars performed better, but then produced nitrogen oxide pollution up to 40 times that permitted by US law.

Volkswagen had used its software globally. The ACCC alleged the car maker sold 57,000 cars with these defeat devices in Australia between 2011 and 2015.

Volkswagen initially fought the case by the ACCC, but in 2019 agreed to settle for a fine of $75 million (and $4 million in court costs).

Read more:
Volkswagen’s record settlement payout: treating the symptom not the disease

When this was taken to the Federal Court for ratification (approval) the judge, Justice Lindsay Foster, rejected the deal as “outrageous”. He called the “agreed statement of facts” about the harm caused “a bunch of weasel words”. In his ruling in December 2019 he doubled the penalty to $125 million.

Volkswagen appealed this judgement to the full bench of the Federal Court (the equivalent of a court of appeal), arguing it was manifestly excessive. In its ruling (in April 2021) the full bench disagreed and upheld the A$125 million penalty.

This led to Volkswagen appealing to the High Court (Australia’s ultimate court of appeal). Today it refused “special leave” (permission to bring the whole case) to challenge the ruling and the large penalty. Which means the A$125 million fine stands.

This sends a strong message

This decision will send a very strong message to other manufacturers and sellers of products making environmental claims.

The Australian Consumer Law’s provisions against greenwashing are contained in Section 18 of the act, dealing with misleading or deceptive conduct.

As the market for “green products” has expanded over the past few decades, so too has the temptation for unsavoury producers and marketers to make misleading statements.

In response, some consumer groups and activists have demanded new laws to prevent greenwash. But my research with Marina Nehme (now associate professor of corporate law at UNSW) led us to to the view the existing laws actually cover all the relevant situations.

The High Court decision today demonstrates this. There are hundreds of examples of the consumer watchdog successfully pursuing greenwashers, but the size of the fine in this case will stand out and serve to deter others.

Michael Adams 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. High Court decision on $125 million fine for Volkswagen is a warning to all greenwashers – https://theconversation.com/high-court-decision-on-125-million-fine-for-volkswagen-is-a-warning-to-all-greenwashers-171733

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Associate Professor of the Sydney Pharmacy School, University of Sydney

Pfizer says its antiviral COVID treatment Paxlovid cuts the chance of ending up in hospital or dying by 89%.

What differentiates this from other medicines we have used since the start of the pandemic is it provides the opportunity for patients to be treated at home, with a combination of a capsule and a pill.

The phase 2/3 trial data on which those hospitalisation rates are based have yet to be independently verified. Nor has the treatment been approved by any country for use outside a clinical trial.

Yet this development adds to our growing portfolio of potential options to directly target SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and to treat COVID symptoms.

What is it?

Paxlovid is a combination of two different drugs – the HIV drug ritonavir (a capsule) and an experimental drug PF-07321332 (a pill).

Ritonavir protects the body from metabolising PF-07321332. It acts by being broken down by the body first (known as a sacrificial chemical) to ensure enough PF-07321332 reaches the virus intact.

PF-07321332 is a so-called protease inhibitor (as is ritonavir). It blocks the action of a vital enzyme (protease) and stops SARS-CoV-2 from making copies of itself.

What did the trial show?

The trial included 1,219 “high risk” adults with COVID who were not in hospital. Each person had at least one characteristic or underlying medical condition associated with an increased risk of developing severe COVID. One group received the treatment, the other placebo.

The trial’s interim results showed a reduction in the risk of hospitalisation or death by 89% in the Paxlovid group compared to placebo.

At day 28, there were no deaths reported in the Paxlovid group, compared with ten deaths in the placebo group. Side-effects were similar in both groups and were generally mild.

Read more:
Could a simple pill beat COVID-19? Pfizer is giving it a go

The company said the results were so promising it was recommended no new patients needed to be enrolled into the study. And the company was recommended to submit the data to the US Food and Drug Administration for emergency use approval.

Before the drug could be used in Australia, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) would need to assess its efficacy and safety.

Just as importantly, the TGA would need to decide who may prescribe it and under what conditions. This may include whether it would be available from GPs, and what sort of patient risk factors would be considered.

Read more:
What is sotrovimab, the COVID drug the government has bought before being approved for use in Australia?

One of several potential antiviral drugs

Paxlovid is one potential COVID drug for use at home. The idea is these could be prescribed at the first sign of infection to prevent serious illness and death. People would manage their own symptoms, monitored while at home, and only be transferred to hospital if their condition deteriorates.

Merck has its own antiviral drug, molnupiravir, also for home use. It’s been approved for use in the UK, and is being considered for use in Australia.

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

Then there’s AstraZeneca’s emerging COVID drug Evusheld. The TGA has just given this “provisional determination”, meaning the company can now submit data for evaluation.

Evusheld contains two long-acting monoclonal antibody drugs – tixagevimab and cilgavimab. It’s an injection that could be given in hospital or as an outpatient to prevent infections from getting worse.

Human trials have shown when Evusheld was used before exposure to COVID, there were significantly fewer symptoms.

Although Evusheld may potentially be used to prevent COVID, it would not be a substitute for vaccination. But it could provide additional protection for people who may have an inadequate response to vaccination or who cannot be immunised.

Read more:
Stopping, blocking and dampening – how Aussie drugs in the pipeline could treat COVID-19

Treating COVID symptoms

We also have a range of existing and emerging treatments for use in hospital to treat the symptoms of infection – inflammation on the lungs and difficulty breathing.

If patients with mild COVID have certain risk factors for disease progression, such as diabetes or a heart condition, doctors may consider using hospital administered treatments such as sotrovimab, Ronapreve, or inhaled budesonide to prevent disease progression.

According to Pfizer’s trial results, Paxlovid could be used as an alternative to in-hospital treatment for preventing disease progression in patients with the same risk factors.

Read more:
Here’s what happens when you’re hospitalised with COVID

Where next?

There are several steps before we can routinely expect to take COVID drugs at home to prevent the worst of the symptoms. We need independent verification of these drugs’ efficacy and safety, and of course, regulatory approval.

Then there’s the issue of cost.

Developing new medicines, particularly at the pace required because of COVID, means these new drugs aren’t cheap. One consideration for state and federal governments will be balancing the costs of the medicines against health outcomes.

The daily cost of a patient in hospital is around A$5,000 for an uncomplicated (non-COVID) admission. This is much more than the reported cost of a full course of molnupiravir to the US government at US$700 (about A$960).

But the costs of Paxlovid, and other new COVID medicines, have not been released and may be very much higher than the hospital costs. Some medicines subsidised by the government for other conditions can cost almost A$19,000 per pack of tablets.

Associate Professor Wheate in the past has received funding from the ACT Cancer Council, Tenovus Scotland, Medical Research Scotland, Scottish Crucible, and the Scottish Universities Life Sciences Alliance. He is Fellow of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and a member of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association. Nial is science director of the medicinal cannabis company Canngea Pty Ltd, a board member of the Australian Medicinal Cannabis Association, and a Standards Australia committee member for sunscreen agents.

Elise Schubert is a registered pharmacist and a PhD Candidate receiving scholarship from the University of Sydney and Canngea Pty Ltd.

– ref. Pfizer’s pill is the latest COVID treatment to show promise. Here are some more – https://theconversation.com/pfizers-pill-is-the-latest-covid-treatment-to-show-promise-here-are-some-more-171589

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

University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor Professor Paddy Nixon discuss the week in politics.

They canvass Scott Morrison’s early start to campaigning for next year’s election, as the government lags behind in the polls. The PM has been out and about in NSW and Victoria for photo opportunities and to spruik his climate plan.

But his release of the government’s electric vehicles policy ran into immediate trouble when Morrison was confronted with his exaggerated attack on Labor’s policy in 2019.

And the now-perennial issue of trust dogged him, By week’s end he was claiming he had never lied in public life.

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 Scott Morrison seeking to reconnect with voters – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-scott-morrison-seeking-to-reconnect-with-voters-171726

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kris Gledhill, Professor of Law, Auckland University of Technology

Most lawyers are happy to accept we’ll never be as popular as doctors. We are probably on a level with dentists: nobody really wants to see them – until they have a toothache.

Same with lawyers. Having to sort out a legal dispute without a lawyer can often be as problematic as doing dentistry on yourself.

Disputes about all sorts of things – bullying bosses, violent spouses, governmental overreach, custody of children, what happens to people with dementia – can end up in court. Judges are given significant powers over us. They can take away liberty, property and children; they can order psychiatric treatment.

That is why the right to a fair trial is such a fundamental one – and why the legal aid system is integral to that fairness. So, the recent
Law Society survey of lawyers that found the legal aid system is “on life support” is cause for deep concern.

Balancing the odds

Our court system is largely based on the adversarial model, whereby arguments are made from those involved and the neutral judge (or judge and jury) makes a decision. This requires what is termed “equality of arms” – essentially, equal access to lawyers.

Otherwise, there is an imbalance, which might lead to an unfair result with significant adverse consequences. This is also why legal aid is of fundamental importance to a society that values equity.

Governments, corporations and well-resourced organisations will invariably have lawyers. Society pays for these in full if they are working for public bodies. Society also pays in part for lawyers who represent commercial bodies, since their fees will be allowable against income and so, will reduce taxes paid.

Read more:
Protesting during a pandemic: New Zealand’s balancing act between a long tradition of protests and COVID rules

It has long been accepted that society has to provide lawyers for those who face the power of the state in criminal proceedings. In 1912, the New Zealand Parliament enacted a legal aid system for criminal defendants who did not have sufficient means. The starting point was to pay those lawyers at the same rate as prosecuting lawyers.

But many important decisions are also made in the civil courts. A legal aid scheme for civil proceedings was introduced in 1939, aimed at “poor people”.

When the system was revised and extended in 1969, the aim was to make better provision for those of “small or moderate means”. This also proposed that legal aid lawyers should be paid 85% of the rate they would otherwise have charged.

Lawyers abandoning legal aid

Much has changed since. If you get legal aid now, it is in the form of a loan – rarely written off – bearing interest and leading to caveats on any assets.

But it is more likely you won’t be granted legal aid at all, because only those with severely constrained resources qualify.

Read more:
NZ’s hate speech proposals need more detail and wider debate before they become law

And, as the Law Society survey shows, even if you do qualify there is a good chance you won’t be able to find a lawyer. The survey found over 60% of lawyers have no interest in doing legal aid work. Of those who are willing, many have to limit the numbers of cases they can take on.

This means legally aided clients are more likely to be turned away. The situation will probably worsen, too, because a quarter of those willing to do legal aid are planning to do less in the future.

Red tape and low pay

Among the other problems identified by the surveyed lawyers is the level of bureaucracy they face. This can be traced back to a review of legal aid in 2009, which led to the current legislative framework under the Legal Services Act 2011.

The review placed a heavy reliance on anecdotal evidence of misbehaviour by some lawyers. It has always been true that legally aided spending has to be justified, but the current regime seems to be micro-managed.

The other significant problem is that legal aid pay rates are low and haven’t changed for many years. It’s not just that lawyers can earn more – a lot more – if they avoid legal aid. It’s that legal aid rates sometimes barely cover their costs.

When legal academics ask law students why they want to be lawyers, the desire to help people in difficult situations is a common answer. This can be especially true for students from groups who face more disadvantage, including Māori, Pacific Island and refugee communities.

But those desires can only go so far if the work does not provide a living.

Read more:
Criminal lawyers are regularly exposed to trauma — how can NZ’s justice system look after them better?

Eroding the right to justice

Of course, it is easy to be cynical about lawyers asking for funding for lawyers. This comes back to the image problem. Contrast it with medical professionals calling for a better-funded health service, including better pay for doctors and nurses. The public is generally sympathetic.

But just as access to health is a good thing, so is access to justice. They are both prerequisites for a decent society.

If we go back to the origins of legal aid, it involved a recognition that relying on charity was not an appropriate response when the stakes are high. There was an acceptance fair trials are a keystone of the justice system, and legal aid can contribute to equal access to justice for all.

This right to justice is recognised in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. But it is being hollowed out as time goes by, as fewer people can obtain legal aid and fewer lawyers are willing to do such work.

The Law Society survey suggests urgent action is required to avoid a justice gap that should be unacceptable in modern New Zealand.

Kris Gledhill is affiliated with the Criminal Bar Association, which represents both defence and prosecution lawyers, and regularly works with lawyers, including those who undertake legally aided work; he used to be a barrister in England and Wales, where the majority of his work was paid under legal aid.

– ref. New Zealand’s legal aid crisis is eroding the right to justice – that’s unacceptable in a fair society – https://theconversation.com/new-zealands-legal-aid-crisis-is-eroding-the-right-to-justice-thats-unacceptable-in-a-fair-society-171663

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Goodman, Professor of Chinese Politics, Acting Director of China Studies Centre, University of Sydney

As the Chinese Communist Party’s sixth plenary session wraps up in Beijing, much of the focus outside China has been on two key aspects.

The first is the meeting was primarily designed to strengthen the political position of Xi Jinping as both general secretary of the CCP and president of the country heading into next year’s Party Congress when he looks certain to secure a third five-year term as leader.

The second is the approval of a resolution on Communist Party history. This was intended not only to cement Xi’s position in the party, but also determine the official narrative of CCP history that will provide an ideological guide to future policies.

Notwithstanding Xi’s centrality in all of this – as well as the significance of a resolution on party history – these interpretations of the events may be somewhat misleading.

How Mao and Deng cemented power

The inner political dynamics of the CCP’s leadership are largely unknown. Commentators guess intelligently about groups and factions, about policy divides and preferences, about past experiences and future visions.

Xi occupies the leading position in the political system, and has done since 2012. At the same time, Xi’s current position in the party is different to that of former leaders Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping when they initiated the previous resolutions on party history in 1945 and 1981, respectively.

Both Mao and Deng had well-established political authority that was in many ways independent of their formal positions in the CCP.

Read more:
‘To get rich is glorious’: how Deng Xiaoping set China on a path to rule the world

From 1927 to the early 1940s, Mao had been on the outside of the party leadership in many ways. It was his insistence on a rural-based, guerrilla strategy to acquire national political power and to fight the Japanese that eventually proved successful – and proved others wrong. This became the political base of the CCP that was celebrated in 1945.

When the CCP used this strategy to take control of China in 1949, it essentially bestowed on Mao an almost unchallengeable authority over others, including apparently close colleagues (including Deng). That authority was a major contributing factor in the development of the Cultural Revolution.

A recognition of the “political errors” of the years from 1966 to Mao’s death in 1976 was a major point of the 1981 resolution on party history, passed under Deng’s leadership.

Deng was able to bring about China’s opening up and economic reforms in the late 1970s. He also had the power to re-interpret the past because of his role in the CCP’s early development, and the fact he had been a victim of the Cultural Revolution, as well as one of Mao’s righthand men from the early 1930s.

During those years, he developed close relationships with others in the CCP’s leadership, which helped him when he was in trouble, such as during the Cultural Revolution.

How strong is Xi’s support?

It is reasonable to assume Xi has had close supporters within the leadership of the CCP, and even among former leaders. However, they are not as visible, for the most part, as was the case for Mao and Deng.

In both their cases, many of their supporters and allies were relatively well-known. In Xi’s case, this is remarkably less the case.

At the moment, he certainly does not have the degree of independent political authority enjoyed by Mao and Deng, though he may be considerably respected in his positions as the Chinese president and general secretary of the CCP.

The CCP’s formal events, such as this week’s plenary session and next year’s Party Congress, do not determine policies or party ideology, or decide on appointments and leaders. All these actions are settled well in advance. The purpose of such meetings is to transmit political messages.

Much attention will inevitably be paid to how the new resolution on party history deals with the interpretation of the past 100 years since the founding of the CCP. Of more immediate interest, though, are the pointers to the future.

Xi’s role is clearly seen as central to the party’s leadership, and especially its ideological development.

Much has been made of the change to the PRC constitution in 2018 to remove the two-term limit on presidents, enabling Xi to stay in the office after 2023. Interestingly, though, there have never been any term limits to the significantly more important position of CCP general secretary.

Only time will tell whether this will result in a personal political position with the same kind of authority and independence as Mao or Deng, as some have claimed, or the further manifestation of the coalition of ideas, people and forces who have supported him since 2012.

What other messages emerged from the meeting?

The party meeting is also significant because it confirms recent shifts in the party’s policies and strategies. These are not as dramatic as those formulated in 1981 when the country opened up, but they are likely to prove significant not just for China, but also the rest of the world.

Much of the recent commentary on political change in China over the last few years, for example, has highlighted the CCP’s appeals to nationalism and patriotism.

The communique from the meeting reinforces this, focusing on the strength of China’s emerging position in both the region in the world.

China was content in the early years of its post-Mao economic growth to keep a low profile internationally. Now, however, it has become more assertive in its international reach, not only towards Hong Kong and the South China Sea, but also through international economic institutions and strategies such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative.

At the same time, domestic considerations are central to the CCP’s new ideological goals. Most obvious is the drive to grow a middle class consumer society, a goal frequently described by the CCP as creating an “olive-shaped” society.

The new (but so far largely undetailed) policy goal of “common prosperity” is designed to assist poorer people to learn new skills to improve their economic positions, while reassuring the still relatively small middle class their social status and economic wealth are not under threat.

The party was less explicit, however, in how it will deal with the likely challenge of generational change in China and the public’s continued belief in the CCP’s centrality in political life and wider society.

Read more:
Xi Jinping’s grip on power is absolute, but there are new threats to his ‘Chinese dream’

Generational change within the CCP leadership may also be of concern to many of its senior members.

This is where Xi may play a central role in holding together the CCP’s leadership coalition. Certainly this would seem to be the case from the formal communique of the party meeting.

Xi’s contributions to the party’s leadership since 2012 and for the future are indeed emphasised. At the same time, this is part of a historical trajectory that highlights not only Mao and Deng, but also Xi’s immediate predecessors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.

David Goodman 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. Xi Jinping puts his stamp on Communist Party history, but is his support as strong as his predecessors? – https://theconversation.com/xi-jinping-puts-his-stamp-on-communist-party-history-but-is-his-support-as-strong-as-his-predecessors-170874

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joe McIntyre, Senior Lecturer in Law, University of South Australia

The Australian red ensign – a red version of the familiar Australian flag – has appeared all over the news and social media in recent months. The question is, why?

Historically associated with Australia’s commercial shipping vessels, the merchant navy, the flag has recently been adopted by people involved in anti-lockdown and anti-government movements.

It’s almost certain the flag has gained popularity due to its use by Australia’s sovereign citizen (or “SovCit”) movement, a fringe group who believe laws do not apply to them.

Since 2019, I’ve been researching the SovCit movement and the insights it reveals into public (mis)understanding of our legal order.

To understand why this particular flag is being flown requires a detour into their strange, conspiracy-laden, pseudo-legal culture.

Read more:
Many anti-lockdown protesters believe the government is illegitimate. Their legal arguments don’t stand up

Who are the sovereign citizens?

Self-identifying sovereign citizens – and their counterparts the “Freemen on the land” – believe they possess a pure and true understanding of the legal system. The movement emerged in America, and has spread to Australia and other countries.

According to their version of the law, individuals are “sovereign”, meaning they are not bound to the laws of the country in which they live, unless they waive those rights by accepting a contract with the government.

While the movement has no single leader or central doctrine, SovCits believe that by reciting certain phrases, such as “I am a natural living being” or “I do not consent”, they can lawfully avoid any obligation to obey laws and regulations.

Like a magic spell, these phrases grant them a cloak of legal immunity, and beneath that cloak, there is no need to wear masks, pay taxes, or hold a driver’s licence.

To those with any understanding of the legal system, these arguments are without foundation. It’s not surprising SovCits struggle to distinguish between valid and fanciful legal arguments: we do a poor job of educating Australians about how the legal system operates, and the system remains irreducibly complex and profoundly inaccessible to most Australians.

Nevertheless, SovCit arguments are devoid of any legal merit.

It is a mistake to think such eccentric movements are benign. Some SovCits have been identified as anti-government extremists and a potential terrorism threat in Australia, as well as in America.

The movement has gained prominence during the pandemic, with the “pick-and-choose” approach to legal obligations attracting anti-health measure activists, such as the infamous “Bunnings Karen”.

By encouraging people to disregard laws they don’t like, the SovCit movement presents an insidious threat to our legal order.

So what is the Australian red ensign?

Back to that strange flag. The Australian red ensign is the official flag flown at sea by Australian registered merchant ships.

The flag was developed as part of the Commonwealth government’s 1901 federal flag design competition, which resulted in two flags: the familiar Australian blue ensign for official Commonwealth government use and our national flag, and the Australian red ensign for the merchant navy, which refers to our shrinking commercial shipping fleet.

In the early years of federation, the red ensign was an important symbol of Australian identity as the main flag used by private citizens on land and at sea. Australians have fought under it during both world wars.

Read more:
Public protest or selfish ratbaggery? Why free speech doesn’t give you the right to endanger other people’s health

So, are fringe groups using it to suggest they are private citizens? The flag’s history suggest it’s not that simple.

At federation, Australia was not an independent country, but a dominion of the British empire. Australian citizenship did not exist until 1948, and the UK parliament could theoretically pass laws governing Australia until 1986.

So, in the half century after federation, the official flag for general use was the Union Jack.

Like the current governor-general’s flag, the Australian blue ensign was used only by the Commonwealth government. It did not become the general national flag until 1953.

Before that date, if citizens wanted a distinctive flag to signify an Australian rather than a British identity, they tended to (mis)use the Australian red ensign.

Why do SovCits use the Australian red ensign?

Unfortunately, the decentralised nature of the SovCit movement makes it difficult to reach definitive conclusions.

For a movement that has an inherent distrust of government, the flag’s historical usage as a “people’s flag” must seem appealing.

A similar appeal may derive from the fact the ANZACs fought under this flag (as Australian divisions of the British Army).

In both cases, though, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In both cases, those historical usages spoke more to Australia’s identity as a British dominion.

Indeed, RSL Australia has condemned the flag’s use by protesters as disrespectful.

Alternatively, the usage may derive from the maritime nature of the flag. One of the more outlandish claims of the SovCits is that the only valid sources of law are the common law and “admiralty law”. As such, a maritime people’s flag must seem like the perfect symbol.

There are darker possibilities, too. For some people, it could be an attempt to mirror the use of the Canadian red ensign by the far-right. In Canada, white supremacists see their red ensign as a
throwback to a time when Canadians were overwhelmingly white.

In the US, the SovCit movement has explicitly racist and antisemitic roots, emerging from the Posse Comitatus movement led by the notorious preacher William Potter Gale.

A similar undertone may underpin the use of the flag in Australia, a racist yearning for a non-existent “golden age” when Australia was “free” and “white”.

To me, the use of this flag also suggests a yearning for certainty and a simpler past, that, though misguided and exclusionary, perhaps emerges from the collective trauma of the last two years.

In the minds of these fringe protesters, they are not law-breakers, but patriots who possess a deep and true understanding of the law.

Like the Australian red ensign itself, these movements take familiar images and ideas and twist them.

Joe McIntyre 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. What is the Australian merchant navy flag, the red ensign? And why do anti-government groups use it? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-australian-merchant-navy-flag-the-red-ensign-and-why-do-anti-government-groups-use-it-170270

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeremy Moss, Professor of Political Philosophy, UNSW

For the Glasgow climate summit to be judged a success, a key outcome had to be that parties agree the majority of the world’s fossil fuel reserves need to be left in the ground.

As recent research suggests, 89% of coal and 59% of gas reserves need to stay in the ground if there’s to be even a 50% chance of global temperature rise staying under the crucial limit of 1.5℃ this century.

The summit, COP26, has not lived up to that ambition because there are too many loopholes for the fossil fuel industry to exploit.

Some promising proposals have been put forward, including the pledge to cut methane emissions, some increased emissions reductions targets at the national level, limits to deforestation, and ending some overseas funding of fossil fuels. Yesterday, 13 countries launched a new alliance to end gas and oil production within their borders, led by Denmark and Costa Rica.

But most proposals suffer either from a lack of ambition or a lack of participation from key countries.

Take the pledge to cut methane emissions. Some of the biggest methane emitters such as Russia, China and Australia failed to sign up. Similarly, the plan to phase out coal allows some signatories such as Indonesia to keep building coal-fired power plants.

Read more:
Australia’s refusal to sign a global methane pledge exposes flaws in the term ‘net-zero’

What these proposals and, indeed, the whole COP process, suffer from is an inability to address the fact that if we’re to avoid the worst of climate change, we simply can’t keep extracting fossil fuels.

While national governments and their negotiators remain willing to listen to the interests of fossil fuel lobbyists, the COP process will continue to be riddled with loopholes that will derail the achievement of real targets. Five big loopholes come to mind.

1. Subsidies and finance

Much has been made of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ), a global coalition of financial institutions which aims to accelerate the decarbonisation of the economy.

But many of its efforts will be undermined while governments continue to subsidise the fossil fuel industry. With fossil fuel subsidies globally running at US$11 million (A$15 million) every minute, GFANZ is insufficient to halt emissions because subsidising the cost of production and sale of fossil fuels continues to make the industry feasible.

Moreover GFANZ is voluntary, when we need commitments to be binding. It also includes banks who have recently provided US$575 billion (A$787 billion) in fossil fuel finance to some of the world’s biggest polluters.

Governments should not wait for future COPs to address this issue. Countries such as Australia should immediately start reining in the subsidies that make the industry profitable and should not entertain new subsidies, such as the National Party’s proposal in Australia for a coal rail line to Gladstone.

2. New production

Despite the overwhelming evidence that most of the world’s fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground, governments are still approving new projects. The UK government has 40 fossil fuel projects in the pipeline despite being host of COP26.

Australia, too, continues to approve new gas and coal developments. The NSW government has approved eight new projects since 2018, despite the state’s target of 50% emissions reduction by 2030.

Until future climate negotiations put a ban on new fossil fuel projects and agree to a clear and rapid phase out of current production levels, the fossil fuel industry will continue to thrive.

3. Business as usual

A further loophole for the fossil fuel industry is how it’s being allowed to continue its huge levels of production because it has committed (in some cases) to making its operations greener.

Measures such as carbon capture and storage and offsetting have been touted by some governments as solutions to bringing the industry’s emissions down. But these are not real solutions if they simply allow fossil fuel production and use to continue at dangerous levels.

Read more:
Big-business greenwash or a climate saviour? Carbon offsets raise tricky moral questions

While offsetting will have to play a role in reducing emissions in some hard-to-abate sectors such as aviation and agriculture, it is not a substitute for genuine cuts to fossil fuel use and misleadingly gives the impression fossil fuel companies are going green.

4. Influence

These loopholes that allow fossil fuel production are, of course, no accident. The largest group of representatives at COP26 were from the fossil fuel industry.

One of the striking and disturbing characteristics of government approaches to climate change is the impact of fossil fuel companies on decision making. It’s hard to think of other issues (smoking, peace negotiations) where we tolerate this kind of influence.

The industry’s influence on successive Australian governments has been well documented, with over A$136.8 million in donations recorded between 1999 and 2019.

Having a display by gas company Santos (a major donor to Australian political parties) at Australia’s COP26 pavilion rightly provoked ridicule.

5. Decoupling production

The failure to address these loopholes will mean the production of fossil fuels in countries like Australia will continue for much longer than it should.

The fact there are still willing buyers for fossil fuel assets such as BHP’s Queensland coal mines indicates investors are anticipating years of profits (and few climate liabilities) from fossil fuels, despite the measures proposed at COP26.

Read more:
BHP is selling its dirty oil and gas assets, but hold the applause

One of the most glaring failures of COP26 is the failure to connect emission cuts with production cuts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in countries such as Norway which have impressive domestic reduction targets (55% by 2030) yet continue to champion fossil fuel production through oil and gas exploration.

A key to progress at future COPs and domestically is ending the false idea one can make progress on climate by cutting domestic emissions while simultaneously supporting fossil fuel production. If countries such as Australia and Norway can’t come together to agree on cutting support for production, then we will continue to see loopholes that allow the industry to flourish.

Some countries are taking positive steps. The Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance that aims to phase out production is key to cutting supply of fossil fuels.

Multilateral action such as this, whether as part of COP or outside it – and, crucially, the pressure from below that causes it – must be a focus if we’re to avoid climate change.

Read more:
‘Try harder. Try harder’: Today, COP26 negotiators will fight to save life on Earth. The next decade will reveal if they succeeded

Jeremy Moss receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. COP26 leaves too many loopholes for the fossil fuel industry. Here are 5 of them – https://theconversation.com/cop26-leaves-too-many-loopholes-for-the-fossil-fuel-industry-here-are-5-of-them-171398

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nathan Cooper, Associate Professor of Law, University of Waikato

As the COP26 climate summit draws to a close, debate continues on one key issue in particular: a new rule book for global carbon trading to allow countries to purchase emissions reductions from overseas to count towards their own climate action.

The world has generally welcomed headline-grabbing agreements on halting deforestation and tackling methane and coal. Likewise ambitious commitments from some large polluters, most notably India’s pledge to reach net zero carbon by 2070.

But the devil is in the detail and there is serious concern that some of these commitments are only voluntary, while others look unachievable.

Defining the rules for international carbon trading is a contentious agenda item — but one that will partly determine whether countries can meet their pledges and collectively limit global warming to as close to 1.5℃ as possible.

The new rules, known as Article 6 under the Paris Agreement, will be important for New Zealand.

During COP26, New Zealand announced its new Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to reduce emissions by 50% on 2005 levels by 2030.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described this as “our fair share” and it is indeed a significant step up on New Zealand’s previous pledge to cut emissions by 30%. It leaves the country with 571 Megatons of CO₂-equivalent emissions to “spend” between 2022 and 2030.

Read more:
COP26: New Zealand’s new climate pledge is a step up, but not a ‘fair share’

New rules for global carbon trading

The New Zealand government stated its “first priority” was to reduce domestic emissions, but it acknowledged that alone could not meet the country’s new pledge. In fact, two thirds of the promised emissions reductions will have to come through overseas arrangements, especially with nations in the Asia-Pacific region.

The Climate Change Commission has been critical of this approach, describing it as “purchasing offshore mitigation, rather than [doing] what was necessary to achieve actual emissions reductions at source”.

But the approach is allowed under the Paris Agreement, which all states at COP26 have signed up to.

This would allow one country to buy credits from another country that has exceeded its NDC, or to carry out activities that reduce emissions in another (host) country and count those towards its own NDC. It also supports non-market approaches to climate cooperation between countries around technology transfer, finance and capacity building.

But these provisions have proved contentious, not least because they could result in double counting of emissions reductions, unless clear and robust operational rules are agreed. The COP26 summit has made some progress on this, but many finer details are yet to be resolved.

Read more:
Big-business greenwash or a climate saviour? Carbon offsets raise tricky moral questions

Cutting emissions at home versus elsewhere

Uncertainty about carbon market rules will be particularly problematic for New Zealand, given its reliance on overseas activities to meet its new NDC. There are also practical questions around how much of these activities will count towards New Zealand’s NDC, and how ready potential partners in the Pacific are for such carbon market trading mechanisms.

Pacific Island nations are not currently trading or part of established carbon markets. They may not be able to develop the necessary technical expertise to ensure fairness, compliance and transparency well in advance of 2030.

Read more:
COP26: time for New Zealand to show regional leadership on climate change

While there is scope to pursue opportunities to reduce emissions beyond our shores, we should be looking harder at what can be done domestically to help fulfil our NDC in the short time available.

Public consultation on the government’s first emissions reduction plan is currently underway until November 24. A final version is due in May 2022 and is expected to set out strategies for specific sectors (transport, energy and industry, agriculture, waste and forestry) to meet emissions budgets.

It will also include a multi-sector plan to adapt to climate change, and to mitigate the impacts emissions cuts may have on people.

It’s not ideal that a concrete plan for domestic emissions reductions is still six months away. But this does provide opportunity for people and interest groups to help shape priorities and pathways, and to encourage the government to set bolder domestic targets than would otherwise have been likely.

The Climate Change Commission has already produced recommendations for a low-emissions Aotearoa, including the rapid adoption of electric vehicles, reduction in animal stocking rates and changing land use towards forestry and horticulture.

Now is also the time to start building capacity to support Pacific Island nations in designing their carbon market policies. New Zealand has already pledged NZ$1.3 billion in funding for climate change aid, about half of which will go to Pacific Island countries.

Allocating some of this to enhancing technical know-how will help create a level playing field in carbon trading. It would ensure that whichever overseas arrangements materialise, these will be fair and deliver an “overall mitigation in global emissions”, as the Paris Agreement requires.

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. COP26: New Zealand depends on robust new rules for global carbon trading to meets its climate pledge – https://theconversation.com/cop26-new-zealand-depends-on-robust-new-rules-for-global-carbon-trading-to-meets-its-climate-pledge-171194

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Ireland, Senior Research Scientist at the Australian E-Health Research Centre., CSIRO

While the art of conversation in machines is limited, there are improvements with every iteration. As machines are developed to navigate complex conversations, there will be technical and ethical challenges in how they detect and respond to sensitive human issues.

Our work involves building chatbots for a range of uses in health care. Our system, which incorporates multiple algorithms used in artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, has been in development at the Australian e-Health Research Centre since 2014.

The system has generated several chatbot apps which are being trialled among selected individuals, usually with an underlying medical condition or who require reliable health-related information.

They include HARLIE for Parkinson’s disease and Autism Spectrum Disorder, Edna for people undergoing genetic counselling, Dolores for people living with chronic pain, and Quin for people who want to quit smoking.

Research has shown those people with certain underlying medical conditions are more likely to think about suicide than the general public. We have to make sure our chatbots take this into account.

We believe the safest approach to understanding the language patterns of people with suicidal thoughts is to study their messages. The choice and arrangement of their words, the sentiment and the rationale all offer insight into the author’s thoughts.

For our recent work we examined more than 100 suicide notes from various texts and identified four relevant language patterns: negative sentiment, constrictive thinking, idioms and logical fallacies.

Read more:
Introducing Edna: the chatbot trained to help patients make a difficult medical decision

Negative sentiment and constrictive thinking

As one would expect, many phrases in the notes we analysed expressed negative sentiment such as:

…just this heavy, overwhelming despair…

There was also language that pointed to constrictive thinking. For example:

I will never escape the darkness or misery…

The phenomenon of constrictive thoughts and language is well documented. Constrictive thinking considers the absolute when dealing with a prolonged source of distress.

For the author in question, there is no compromise. The language that manifests as a result often contains terms such as either/or, always, never, forever, nothing, totally, all and only.

Language idioms

Idioms such as “the grass is greener on the other side” were also common — although not directly linked to suicidal ideation. Idioms are often colloquial and culturally derived, with the real meaning being vastly different from the literal interpretation.

Such idioms are problematic for chatbots to understand. Unless a bot has been programmed with the intended meaning, it will operate under the assumption of a literal meaning.

Chatbots can make some disastrous mistakes if they’re not encoded with knowledge of the real meaning behind certain idioms. In the example below, a more suitable response from Siri would have been to redirect the user to a crisis hotline.

The fallacies in reasoning

Words such as therefore, ought and their various synonyms require special attention from chatbots. That’s because these are often bridge words between a thought and action. Behind them is some logic consisting of a premise that reaches a conclusion, such as:

If I were dead, she would go on living, laughing, trying her luck. But she has thrown me over and still does all those things. Therefore, I am as dead.

This closely resemblances a common fallacy (an example of faulty reasoning) called affirming the consequent. Below is a more pathological example of this, which has been called catastrophic logic:

I have failed at everything. If I do this, I will succeed.

This is an example of a semantic fallacy (and constrictive thinking) concerning the meaning of I, which changes between the two clauses that make up the second sentence.

This fallacy occurs when the author expresses they will experience feelings such as happiness or success after completing suicide — which is what this refers to in the note above. This kind of “autopilot” mode was often described by people who gave psychological recounts in interviews after attempting suicide.

Preparing future chatbots

The good news is detecting negative sentiment and constrictive language can be achieved with off-the-shelf algorithms and publicly available data. Chatbot developers can (and should) implement these algorithms.

Generally speaking, the bot’s performance and detection accuracy will depend on the quality and size of the training data. As such, there should never be just one algorithm involved in detecting language related to poor mental health.

Detecting logic reasoning styles is a new and promising area of research. Formal logic is well established in mathematics and computer science, but to establish a machine logic for commonsense reasoning that would detect these fallacies is no small feat.

Here’s an example of our system thinking about a brief conversation that included a semantic fallacy mentioned earlier. Notice it first hypothesises what this could refer to, based on its interactions with the user.

Although this technology still requires further research and development, it provides machines a necessary — albeit primitive — understanding of how words can relate to complex real-world scenarios (which is basically what semantics is about).

And machines will need this capability if they are to ultimately address sensitive human affairs — first by detecting warning signs, and then delivering the appropriate response.

Read more:
The future of chatbots is more than just small-talk

If you or someone you know needs support, you can call Lifeline at any time on 13 11 14. If someone’s life is in danger, call 000 immediately.

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

– ref. We studied suicide notes to learn about the language of despair – and we’re training AI chatbots to do the same – https://theconversation.com/we-studied-suicide-notes-to-learn-about-the-language-of-despair-and-were-training-ai-chatbots-to-do-the-same-169828

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chloe Yap, MD-PhD candidate, The University of Queensland

There has been much speculation that the community of bacteria living in the gut – known as the microbiome – may be different among people on the autism spectrum than the wider population. This has led some researchers and clinicians to speculate that gut bacteria could cause autism.

But our new research, published today in the journal Cell, turns this theory on its head.

Rather than differences in gut bacteria influencing brain development, our research suggests changes in gut bacteria are driven by restricted diets, or “picky eating”.

Restricted diets are more common among children with autism because of their sensory sensitivities and restricted and repetitive interests. Some may have strong preferences for a select few foods, while others find some flavours, smells or textures unpleasant or off-putting.

What’s the theory?

You may have heard claims the microbiome is related to autism: it may have a “causal” role, or microbiome “therapies” can alter autistic behaviours.

Read more:
What causes autism? What we know, don’t know and suspect

Interest in the autism gut microbiome first came from observations people on the autism spectrum are more likely to experience gut problems, such as constipation and diarrhoea.

Further studies seemed to suggest children on the autism spectrum had different combinations of bacteria living in their gut.

These intriguing relationships inspired studies of mice and rats, some of which indicated the microbiome may cause differences in behaviour.

But the excitement has been misguided.

Assessing the evidence

Weighing up all the findings, the evidence linking the microbiome to autism is highly inconsistent and many studies have significant problems with their scientific design.

There are also problems in relating mouse studies to humans, because autism does not exist in mice.

Despite the uncertainty in the science, the hype around the microbiome and autism has continued to gather momentum.

Out of this momentum emerged speculative therapies claiming to support children with autism by altering the microbiome, including faecal microbiota transfers and diet therapies.

These “therapies” were long on hope but short on evidence for efficacy and safety, and come with their own risks and substantial costs.

What our study did

We worked with the Australian Autism Biobank, which includes extensive clinical and biological data from children on the autism spectrum and their families, as well as the Queensland Twin Adolescent Brain Project.

We compared microbial DNA from stool samples of 99 children on the autism spectrum to two groups of non-autistic children: 51 of their siblings and 97 unrelated children.

We also looked at clinical, family and lifestyle information, including about the child’s diet, for a comprehensive, broad look at factors that may contribute to the their microbiome.

What we found

We found no evidence for a relationship between autism and measures of the microbiome as a whole, or with microbiome diversity.

Only one bacterial species out of more than 600 showed an association with autism. We found no evidence for other bacterial groups that have previously been reported in autism (for example, Prevotella).

Instead, we found children on the autism spectrum were more likely to be “picky eaters” – consistent with reports from earlier studies – and this was related to particular traits associated with autism, such as restricted interests and sensory sensitivity.

We also found pickier eaters tended to have a less diverse microbiome, and runnier (more diarrhoea-like) stool. We’ve also known for some time children on the autism spectrum are more likely to have gastrointestinal issues such as constipation, diarrhoea and abdominal pain.

The genetic information told a similar story: autism and restricted interests corresponded to a less-diverse diet, but not directly with the microbiome.

These genetic data are critical, because they rule out other environmental factors that may have influenced the findings.

Overall, our results did not support the popular view that gut microbes cause autism.

What we propose instead is strikingly simple: autism-related traits and preferences are associated with less-diverse diet, leading to a less-diverse microbiome and runnier stool.

What do our findings mean?

Our findings have important implications for the autism community.

First, microbiome interventions for autism, such as faecal microbiota transplants, should be viewed with caution. Our findings suggest they are unlikely to be effective and may do more harm than good.

Read more:
These 4 diets are trending. We looked at the science (or lack of it) behind each one

Our study also draws attention to the importance of diet for children on the autism spectrum. Poor diet in children and young people is a major public health concern in Australia, with important implications for their well-being, development and health conditions such as obesity.

We need to do more to support families at mealtimes, in particular for families with autistic children, rather than resorting to fad “therapies” that may do more harm than good.

Chloe Yap receives funding from the University of Queensland, the Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism (Autism CRC), and the Australian-American Fulbright Commission.

Andrew Whitehouse receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council, and the Autism CRC.

Jake Gratten receives funding from the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the Cooperative Research Centre for Living with Autism (Autism CRC).

– ref. Gut bacteria don’t cause autism. Autistic kids’ microbiome differences are due to picky eating – https://theconversation.com/gut-bacteria-dont-cause-autism-autistic-kids-microbiome-differences-are-due-to-picky-eating-170366

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Flannery, Professorial fellow, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, The University of Melbourne

At COP26 in Glasgow, the announcements came so fast there was barely time to give each proper scrutiny before the next arrived. I’ve attended many United Nations climate change conferences, but this fortnight felt different. The feeling of momentum was palpable.

Countries that in past years fought tooth-and-nail against stronger action stepped up with new commitments. Many of them joined an array of new partnerships and alliances struck in the first week.

As I write, negotiators are locked in tense talks to try and land the final COP26 agreement. But whether the summit succeeds or fails doesn’t depend solely on the decisions reached this week.

From the outset, COP26 was seen not as an end point, but a kickstart to a decade of truly transformative action. Only in coming years will we know if the event was a real game-changer for the planet, or just empty promises and spin.

COP26: a journey, not a destination

The UK government, as the conference hosts, knew early on that most countries would bring new climate ambition – known in COP-speak as “nationally determined contributions”. But it also knew these pledges would never be be enough.

For COP26 to be successful in getting the world on the path of limiting global warming to 1.5℃ this century, two things were required.

First were a series of side deals to kick things along. These came in the form of a new global pledge to reduce emissions of methane – a highly potent greenhouse gas – as well as deals on coal phase-out, deforestation, climate finance and more.

Second, countries would have to further ratchet up their commitments in coming years. That means the final negotiated outcome of COP26, due on Friday Glasgow time, must require nations to make immediate further increases in emission-reduction ambition.

As I write, that outcome is uncertain at best.

The first draft of the final agreement urges countries that didn’t bring a new and stronger 2030 target to Glasgow – such as Australia – to do so within a year.

Read more:
Take heart at what’s unfolded at COP26 in Glasgow – the world can still hold global heating to 1.5℃

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Australia is among a group of nations working to have that part of the text softened, or removed from the final agreement entirely. That is a worrying sign, though there will be many other countries fighting hard to ensure it stays in.

Negotiators have spent countless hours arguing over the minutiae of the final text, and there’s still a way to go yet. But if the final agreement is too weak, the 1.5℃ goal is at serious risk.

The draft wording is weaker than that sought by a group of 50 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, which want national commitments to be reviewed and strengthened each year between now and 2025. However, the wording is still stronger than many observers anticipated.

And while COP26 is not yet over, it’s so far fallen short on one crucial measure – climate finance. More than a decade ago, developed nations agreed to mobilise US$100 billion a year by 2020 to support climate action in developing countries. This pledge has not yet been fulfilled.

Australia outdid itself

Being an Australian at international climate talks is rarely a comfortable experience. Australia long ago cemented its reputation as a drag on global climate cooperation – known for its weak targets, obstructive approach and demands for special treatment.

However, even seasoned observers have been taken aback by Australia’s actions before and during COP26.

Australia went to Glasgow as just about the only developed country without a new and significantly stronger 2030 emissions reduction target.

The Morrison government then proceeded to use the Australia pavilion inside the COP venue to promote the interests of fossil fuel companies such as Santos.

Australia also refused to sign up to two signature deals at COP26 – the global pledge to cut methane emissions, and one to phase out coal-fired power.

Read more:
The fate of our planet depends on the next few days of complex diplomacy in Glasgow. Here’s what needs to go right

Despite Australia’s recalcitrance, the coal pledge, in particular, is a big step forward in global terms.

In years past, nations agreeing to a coal phase-out were not particularly reliant on coal. This time, signatories included big coal-using nations such as Vietnam, Indonesia, Poland, the Ukraine and South Korea.

One energy-related announcement in Glasgow was particularly important for Australia. Japan and South Korea, the second and third biggest buyers of Australian liquified natural gas (LNG) both signalled their desire to shift to hydrogen and renewables.

This development, among others, makes one thing abundantly clear: the world is moving fast while Australia stands still. Sooner rather than later, Australia will feel the cost of its inaction – not just in the hit to our international reputation, but in foregone economic opportunities in the clean industries of the future.

‘Try harder. Try harder’

International climate talks can feel far removed from the urgent reality of the climate crisis. But at every COP, someone invariably manages to cut through the noise with a brutally honest and rousing contribution.

This year it was Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who at the outset of the conference excoriated leaders for failing on the promises of the Paris Agreement.

Mottley’s commanding eight-minute speech was a show-stopping moment. As world leaders including US President Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson looked on, Mottley declared a 2℃ increase in global temperatures would be a “death sentence” for small developing island nations.

She went on:

For those who have eyes to see. For those who have ears to listen. And for those who have a heart to feel … We do not want that dreaded death sentence, and we have come here today to say ‘Try harder. Try harder’.

So did the world try harder in Glasgow? The progress we’ve so far seen during the conference, and in the lead up, would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. The surprise pact between the US and China – in which the two nations recognised climate change as an “existential threat” – is a case in point.

But the summit’s final outcome is still likely to fall massively short of what the science demands. The real test of COP26 is whether pledges are honoured, and if the talks have triggered a virtuous cycle of increased ambition and action over the next decade.

Climate Council research director Simon Bradshaw, who travelled with Tim Flannery to COP26, assisted with the drafting of this article.

Tim Flannery works for the Climate Council and the not-for-profit Ocean Forests Foundation. He receives funding from both organisations. He is affiliated with the Australian Museum and Melbourne University’s Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute.

– ref. ‘Try harder. Try harder’: Today, COP26 negotiators will fight to save life on Earth. The next decade will reveal if they succeeded – https://theconversation.com/try-harder-try-harder-today-cop26-negotiators-will-fight-to-save-life-on-earth-the-next-decade-will-reveal-if-they-succeeded-171661

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn Eckersley, Professor of Political Science, School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne

As the COP26 climate talks wind up in Glasgow, Australia has again proved itself a climate laggard on the world stage. Prime Minister Scott Morrison might be a marketing supremo, but he can’t spin his way out of his government’s failures.

Indeed, it is baffling the prime minister would think his new commitment to net zero emissions by 2050 would be enough to warrant a plane ticket to Scotland.

But while Morrison does not appear to understand – or care – what is required from Australia under the 2015 Paris Agreement, and what is at stake at COP26, his refusal to ramp up emissions reductions is starting to backfire.

‘The Australian way’

In announcing his net zero commitment last month, Morrison declared “Australians will set our own path by 2050 and we’ll set it here by Australians for Australians”. This was also the message he took to the world stage at COP26, where he described his policy of “technology not taxes” to be the core of “the Australian way”.

Most countries have a pavilion at the climate negotiations, where they host events and showcase their efforts to negotiators and observers. The Morrison government appeared to mistake COP26 for a fossil fuel expo – its pavilion was branded as “Positive energy the Australian way”, which touted fossil fuels and carbon capture and storage.

At Glasgow, the Morrison government also stuck with its paltry 2030 target, set in 2015 by the Abbott government, making it an extreme outlier among developed countries. It also refused to join the pledge to reduce methane emissions and another to phase out coal.

Morrison set the tone at the G20 meeting in Rome, just days before Glasgow, when Australia joined China and India in blocking a proposed coal phase-out. Minister for Resources Keith Pitt has since made the government’s position clear: Australia will continue to export coal for decades.

Australia already had a bad reputation

Australia already had a reputation for “gaming” the processes of carbon accounting. But Morrison took creative carbon accounting to a new level at US President Joe Biden’s climate summit in April.

Seasoned climate analysts were shocked at the metrics used, such as excluding emissions associated with extracting fossil fuels for export. This breaks with the official methodology for measuring all emissions produced within a country’s territory.

Read more:
Take heart at what’s unfolded at COP26 in Glasgow – the world can still hold global heating to 1.5℃

At COP26, the Morrison government has enhanced the size of its climate finance – to help Pacific and Southeast Asian neighbours with the effects of climate change – from A$500 million to A$2 billion over the next five years. However, this is well below Australia’s fair share of US$2.9 billion (A$3.96 billion) per year, based on responsibility, economic capacity and population.

Aside from the Trump administration, since 2018 Australia is also the only developed country to refuse to channel its climate finance through the multilateral Green Climate Fund. According to Donor Tracker, in recent years, Australia’s climate-related aid has had “cross-cutting objectives” and none of it went to projects that address climate change as a “principal goal”.

‘Aiming low’

The annual climate COPs are, among other things, a global “show and tell”. The problem for Australia is that it had nothing to show, and no amount of telling can cover this lack. As Lord John Deben, the UK’s chief climate advisor told the ABC this week, “it was just a whole series of words”, with no understanding of “the urgency of what we have to do”.

Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama tried a different tactic. At COP26, after urging Morrison to halve Australia’s emissions by 2030, he handed him a copy of Fiji’s Climate Change Act “as a guide – it is our uniquely Fijian way of following the science to keep faith with future generations”.

The rise of “scorecard diplomacy” based on ratings and rankings of national climate performance has also made marketing cover-ups impossible.

Key examples include Climate Action Tracker, which has rated Australia’s overall performance as “highly insufficient”, and the Climate Performance Index, which ranked Australia seventh last overall – and behind Russia – in the most recent assessment announced at COP26 this week.

The “Fossil of the Day” awards go to those parties “doing the most to achieve the least” at the annual climate negotiations. Organised by Climate Action Network International, made up of over 1,500 environmental groups from around 140 countries, they are a talking point among negotiators. So far at COP26, Australia has won five fossil awards, more than any other country.

This includes the award for “aiming low” on the first day of COP26.

Australia, we’ve come to expect some unconscionable behaviour from you on climate change but this time you’ve truly outdone yourself.

Flying in the face of Paris

The Morrison government’s stubbornness on its 2030 target flies in the face of not only the goals and rules but also the core equity principles in the Paris Agreement.

These principles require developed countries to take the lead in climate mitigation in line with their greater historical responsibility and economic capabilities. They are also required to mobilise climate finance to support to mitigation and adaptation in countries with minimal responsibility for emissions, high vulnerability and weak capacity.

The Morrison government lives in a parallel universe to the Paris Agreement in its defence of the “Australian way”. This signalling can only mean one of two things.

The first is that the rest of the world, including poor countries, must compensate by carrying most of Australia’s burden if we are to hold warming to the necessary 1.5℃ this century. The second is that the government has no interest in “keeping 1.5℃ alive,” on the assumption Australia can adapt to a hotter world and never mind the enormous suffering elsewhere.

Commitments and performance (not branding)

In international climate politics, a country’s reputation is determined by the credibility of commitments and performance over time in relation to the collective goals, principles and rules negotiated by the parties.

It is not a brand or image that can be created in Canberra and then marketed to the world like Vegemite.

Australia’s COP26 diplomacy is damaging its reputation further. There is rising anger from developing countries, which constitute the majority of world’s states.

There is also deep anxiety in our regions, among Pacific nations, where Australia is an increasingly awkward partner. Tuvalu’s foreign minister Simon Kofe filmed his COP26 speech standing thigh-deep in the ocean.

Even Australia’s closest allies, the United States and the United Kingdom, are frustrated about our the government’s stubbornness.

The free ride will end

Australia’s free ride will come to end sooner or later, as our trading partners consider imposing carbon tariffs and the export market for coal and gas shrinks.

Read more:
Australia is undermining the Paris Agreement, no matter what Morrison says – we need new laws to stop this

However, the reputational damage arising from Australia’s great refusal may come to haunt us when we seek the cooperation of others. As the oceans rise, it should also haunt Australians that Fiji sent military engineers during the Black Summer fires of 2019-2020.

We may not be able to count on such help in future.

Robyn Eckersley has receive funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. ‘The Australian way’: how Morrison trashed brand Australia at COP26 – https://theconversation.com/the-australian-way-how-morrison-trashed-brand-australia-at-cop26-171670

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dot Dumuid, Senior Research Fellow, Allied Health & Human Performance, University of South Australia

For students, as for all of us, life is a matter of balance, trade-offs and compromise. Studying for hours on end is unlikely to lead to best academic results. And it could have negative impacts on young people’s physical, mental and social well-being.

Our recent study found the best way for young people to spend their time was different for mental health than for physical health, and even more different for school-related outcomes. Students needed to spend more time sitting for best cognitive and academic performance, but physical activity trumped sitting time for best physical health. For best mental health, longer sleep time was most important.

It’s like a game of rock, paper, scissors with time use. So, what is the sweet spot, or as Goldilocks put it, the “just right” amount of study?

Read more:
Back to school: how to help your teen get enough sleep

Using our study data for Australian children aged 11 and 12, we are developing a time-optimisation tool that allows the user to define their own mental, physical and cognitive health priorities. Once the priorities are set, the tool provides real-time updates on what the user’s estimated “Goldilocks day” looks like.

More study improves grades, but not as much as you think

Over 30 years of research shows that students doing more homework get better grades. However, extra study doesn’t make as much difference as people think. An American study found the average grades of high school boys increased by only about 1.5 percentage points for every extra hour of homework per school night.

What these sorts of studies don’t consider is that the relationship between time spent doing homework and academic achievement is unlikely to be linear. A high school boy doing an extra ten hours of homework per school night is unlikely to improve his grades by 15 percentage points.

There is a simple explanation for this: doing an extra ten hours of homework after school would mean students couldn’t go to bed until the early hours of the morning. Even if they could manage this for one day, it would be unsustainable over a week, let alone a month. In any case, adequate sleep is probably critical for memory consolidation.

Read more:
What’s the point of homework?

As we all know, there are only 24 hours in a day. Students can’t devote more time to study without taking this time from other parts of their day. Excessive studying may become detrimental to learning ability when too much sleep time is lost.

Another US study found that, regardless of how long a student normally spent studying, sacrificing sleep to fit in more study led to learning problems on the following day. Among year 12s, cramming in an extra three hours of study almost doubled their academic problems. For example, students reported they “did not understand something taught in class” or “did poorly on a test, quiz or homework”.

Excessive study could also become unhelpful if it means students don’t have time to exercise. We know exercise is important for young people’s cognition, particularly their creative thinking, working memory and concentration.

On the one hand, then, more time spent studying is beneficial for grades. On the other hand, too much time spent studying is detrimental to grades.

We have to make trade-offs

Of course, how young people spend their time is not only important to their academic performance, but also to their health. Because what is the point of optimising school grades if it means compromising physical, mental and social well-being? And throwing everything at academic performance means other aspects of health will suffer.

US sleep researchers found the ideal amount of sleep for for 15-year-old boys’ mental health was 8 hours 45 minutes a night, but for the best school results it was one hour less.

Clearly, to find the “Goldilocks Zone” – the optimal balance of study, exercise and sleep – we need to think about more than just school grades and academic achievement.

Read more:
‘It was the best five years of my life!’ How sports programs are keeping disadvantaged teens at school

Looking for the Goldilocks Day

Based on our study findings, we realised the “Goldilocks Day” that was the best on average for all three domains of health (mental, physical and cognitive) would require compromises. Our optimisation algorithm estimated the Goldilocks Day with the best overall compromise for 11-to-12-year-olds. The breakdown was roughly:

• 10.5 hours of sleep

• 9.5 hours of sedentary behaviour (such as sitting to study, chill out, eat and watch TV)

• 2.5 hours of light physical activity (chores, shopping)

• 1.5 hours of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity (sport, running).

We also recognised that people – or the same people at different times — have different priorities. Around exam time, academic performance may become someone’s highest priority. They may then wish to manage their time in a way that leads to better study results, but without completely neglecting their mental or physical health.

To better explore these trade-offs, we developed our time-use optimisation tool based on Australian data. Although only an early prototype, the tool shows there is no “one size fits all” solution to how young people should be spending their time. However, we can be confident the best solutions will involve a healthy balance across multiple daily activities.

Just like we talk about the benefits of a balanced diet, we should start talking about the benefits of balanced time use. The better equipped young people and those supporting them are to find their optimal daily balance of sleep, sedentary behaviours and physical activities, the better their learning outcomes will be, without compromising their health and well-being.

Dot Dumuid is supported by an Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Early Career Fellowship GNT1162166 and by the Centre of Research Excellence in Driving Global Investment in Adolescent Health funded by NHMRC GNT1171981.

Tim Olds receives funding from the NHMRC and the ARC.

– ref. How much time should you spend studying? Our ‘Goldilocks Day’ tool helps find the best balance of good grades and well-being – https://theconversation.com/how-much-time-should-you-spend-studying-our-goldilocks-day-tool-helps-find-the-best-balance-of-good-grades-and-well-being-171399

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

This week the prime minister entered full marketing mode.

Scott Morrison’s topic was climate change and his plans to get to net-zero.

At the Victorian Chamber of Commerce and Industry on Wednesday, he tried out a few slogans.

Among those he test marketed:

• can do capitalism, not ‘don’t do governments’

• no one passed a law or introduced a tax or passed a resolution at the UN that led to the world developing a COVID vaccine, no one passed a law for the world to move digital, Google and Cochlear were not invented at a UN workshop or summit

• Australia has already reduced our emissions by more than 20%, now, our emissions are going down, not up, they’re down by more than 20%

He said a bunch of other stuff, but those are my top three.

He wants to contrast his approach with certain United Kingdom and US environmentalists, who do indeed want to restrict what people can buy or do. Ideas like mandatory “meatless Mondays” and banning advertising for SUVs do indeed have no place in Australia, or even in the UK for that matter.

Read more:
Economists back carbon price, say benefits of net-zero outweigh costs

And nor does telling people where to drive, although the prime minister assured us he was not going to tell people “where to drive or where they can’t drive.

Economists don’t like such ideas either. The whole idea behind a price on carbon (whether through a carbon tax or a system of tradable permits) is to respect people’s preferences, while making sure their decisions take account of the costs they impose on others.

Innovations often come from government

His second claim was that innovation (things like the COVID vaccine, Google search and digitisation) isn’t sparked by governments.

While it’s true that “Google and Cochlear were not invented at a UN workshop or summit”, to suggest that governments played no role is to wilfully ignore history.

The miraculous Moderna mRNA vaccine was developed… checks notes… in partnership with the US National Institutes of Health. Moderna received nearly US$10 billion in taxpayer funding.

Much of the work on the Cochlear ear implant was done at the largely government-funded University of Melbourne; the internet revolution grew from the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency; and Google’s search algorithm was developed by fully-funded graduate students at Stanford University, whose endowment is tax exempt.

Very often, cuts in emissions come from government

Morrison emphasised on Wednesday that Australia has reduced emissions by 20%.

It’s natural to ask what brought it about. Much of it was a cutback in land clearing, which is counted as emissions reduction under the rules. Land clearing is regulated by government.

Much of the rest happened during the two years Australia had a carbon price in place, as this chart shows.

Australian emissions excluding land use, land-use change and forestry

The claimed 20% reduction owes much to the laws and summits the prime minister derides.

All prime ministers are politicians, so isn’t surprising they spin narratives. But to spin one so sharply at odds with reality is surprising.

When it comes to “technology not taxes”, the truth is it is often taxes that drive the development and uptake of technologies.

Read more:
Top economists call for measures to speed the switch to electric cars

Importantly, taxes don’t specify the particular technologies that will emerge.

Perhaps that’s why the nation’s peak body for can-do-capitalitsts – the Business Council of Australia – has asked the government to subject more businesses to Australia’s existing little-known (weak) price on carbon.

If we are going to get to net-zero, we need less marketing and more markets. Now there’s a slogan.

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

– ref. Vital Signs: Marketing is getting in the way of markets that could get us to net-zero – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-marketing-is-getting-in-the-way-of-markets-that-could-get-us-to-net-zero-171602

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jarrod Hore, Co-Director & Postdoctoral Fellow, New Earth Histories Research Program, UNSW

Colonial history overflows with commodities. From the early 1800s, wool generated extraordinary wealth for squatters and pastoralists and substantial investment in the Australian colonies. In the 1850s, gold motivated tens of thousands of people to work the earth or service the diggings. Coal, copper, tin, wheat, barley and cotton all assumed importance at different times.

In those great cathedrals of late 19th century colonial self-representation, the International Exhibitions, any visitor would have immediately noticed the way New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania sought to identify with the commodities produced in these places.

In a photograph from 1879, the NSW Department of Mines filled its portion of the exhibition building, the Garden Palace, with gold ingots, silver ores and samples of tin. On the balconies above were coal sections and geological maps.

Walking through these displays a visitor would also have noticed walls of landscape photographs, which, mirroring the extractive logic of settler colonialism itself, worked to bring all these raw materials together in a vision of abundant nature.

Photographers captured images of budding settlements, seemingly empty vistas, and stunning panoramas of emerging colonial cities.

The increasing popularity of these photographs throughout the final decades of the 19th century shows colonial expansion was not just generated by the search for raw materials to extract and exploit. Colonial Australia was also a product of vision and imagery: literally developed through chemicals, glass and light.

I have studied over 2000 early landscape photographs, taken by six settler photographers between the 1850s and the 1930s. They show how colonisation was re-enacted in the imagination of places, rather than simply through the movement of people from one site to another, the Lockean mixture of labour and earth, or the transfer of deeds.

Visions of nature allowed for a different kind of investment in the colonial earth. They paid off in feelings of belonging even for those who never turned a sod. These photos reveal, as the American environmental historian William Cronon has insisted, that nature itself is a profoundly human artefact.

In settler colonies, landscape photography framed nature as beautiful, available and empty. In Victoria and Tasmania especially, landscape photography flourished. And although this mode of photography was not uniquely antipodean – it was pioneered, then perfected in the American West by photographers like Carleton Watkins and Eadweard Muybridge – it did have remarkable purchase in the Australian colonies.

A photographic sleight of hand

Figures such as Nicholas Caire, John Lindt, and John Beattie took up the camera to encourage settlers to feel at home in Australian environments. This perspective disguised the ancestral ownership and continuing presence of First Nations peoples, turning their homelands into a wilderness through a photographic sleight of hand.

Read more:
Indigenous knowledge and the persistence of the ‘wilderness’ myth

The best example of this was in Victoria, where Caire and Lindt began framing the stretch of bush between Healesville and Narbethong as a kind of wilderness retreat from the late 1870s.

Caire, born in Guernsey in 1837, came to this collaborative work via South Australia, the forests of Gippsland and the Goldfields. Lindt, originally from Frankfurt, had just finished photographing Bundjalung and Gumbaynggir people along the Clarence River in northern NSW.

Around 1878 Caire captured Fairy Scene at the Landslip, Blacks’ Spur, which quickly became one of his most popular photographs.

In it, Caire focuses on a glade of tree-ferns clustered on the side of a gully. Writing in 1904, Caire and Lindt boasted about the wildness of this pocket of the Great Forest, the ancient age of the trees, and the “refreshing” seclusion of Fernshaw. Lindt wrote that the allure of places like this came back to their capacity to “carry you back to the morning of time”.

The empty natures of the Yarra Ranges relied on the removal and containment of Woiwurrung, Bunurong, and Taungurong people at the Coranderrk mission. Located just kilometres away from Lindt and Caire’s “refreshing” forest, Coranderrk helped the photographers create a partition between the environment and its ancestral owners.

The mission became a complementary site of interest. When promoting the natural features of the Yarra Ranges, Lindt and Caire wrote about Coranderrk as a place where tourists could mimic the anthropologist, just as they mimicked the geographer or explorer while traipsing through sylvan glades or gazing up at giant mountain ash.

At about the same time that Caire and Lindt were developing their visions of nature in the Yarra Ranges, the photographer Fred Kruger was taking influential shots of life on the reservation. One of the key challenges for aspiring landscape photographers in the 1870s and 1880s was to deal with this presence of Aboriginal people in landscapes that were becoming coveted for their natural beauty.

Caire and Lindt took up an established tradition of photography at Coranderrk, combining it with a new interest in wilderness, balancing the apparent contradiction between Indigenous presence and absence.

The Tasmanian sublime

In Tasmania, too, photographers began constructing a similar wilderness tradition from the 1870s. Emigrating from Scotland in 1878, John Beattie, the so-called “prince of landscape photographers in Australasia”, settled with his family in New Norfolk, about 30 kilometres up the Derwent valley from Hobart.

This was a perfect location for a budding photographer, and Beattie made attractive pictures of the river and its hop gardens in the 1890s, but the interior of the island offered a different order of beauty.

In 1879 Beattie began making expeditions into the bush around the valley, onto the central highlands, and eventually all the way to the remote Lake St. Clair. In 1882 he joined the Anson Brothers’ photographic studio and quickly became their most important artist.

An Anson Brothers image from 1887 is quite likely Beattie’s work, showing a stand of ferns on the Huon Road. Unlike Caire’s shot, however, this image includes a group of settlers enjoying exactly the kind of immersion in nature that these photographs were designed to evoke.

Many of Beattie’s photographs are deeply Romantic. Between 1896 and 1906 he conducted regular presentations in Hobart and Launceston based on the wild features of the Tasmanian landscape, cultivating a high wilderness aesthetic in his magic lantern shows.

Read more:
Friday essay: journey through the apocalypse

Photographs of Lake Marion and the Du Cane Range and another of Lake Perry and The Pinnacles trade in the sublime. Beattie evoked the great American transcendentalist poets in his respect for the mountaintop, which often moved him to wordlessness: “I am struck dumb, but oh! my soul sings.”

These sublime sentiments relied on old Romantic ideas that stretched back to Edmund Burke and William Wordsworth, but they rested just as heavily on new experiences of space. Beattie’s breakthrough years were in the 1890s, a decade in which depictions of wilderness in Australian Romantic painting went into terminal decline and were replaced by photographic visions of nature.

Romanticism, through photography, came to influence how environments were envisioned and how histories of dispossession were remembered. The high wilderness imagery of settler photography came to support a fantasy of spatial control, delivering reproducible, enduring symbols of the natural world.

Aboriginal extinction and Romantic communion

Just as Caire did, Beattie divided his visions of nature and his portraits of native people. He was an insatiable and opportunistic collector of photographs of the “last” Tasmanians, leaning into and commercialising the myth of Tasmanian Aboriginal extinction.

Sometimes advertisements for these pictures featured on the back covers of Beattie’s landscape collections, gently leading interested audiences to the other side of the partition.

Read more:
Friday essay: painting ‘The Last Victorian Aborigines’

Most of Beattie’s photographs of Aboriginal people were simple reproductions of the portraits that Francis Nixon, the first Bishop of Tasmania and amateur photographer, took in 1858 at putalina (Oyster Cove). Nixon took pictures of the few remaining Aboriginal people, who had survived exile on Wybelenna Station on Flinders Island and a decade of surveillance at the former penal probation station just south of Hobart.

In the 1890s Beattie copied these images and labelled each of them with the phrase “the last of the race”.

It is no simple coincidence that this language was adopted by one of Australasia’s most successful landscape photographers. Aboriginal extinction and Romantic communion with the wilderness were the twin fantasies that shaped settler visions of nature in the late 19th century.

This dynamic influenced landscape photography well beyond the Australian colonies. Across the Tasman in New Zealand, the Dunedin photographer Alfred Burton became famous for an 1885 album called The Maori at Home, which delicately balanced ethnographic and wilderness imagery, much as Caire did.

Burton used the camera to carve the the local Māori from their ancestral homes, creating a “terra incognita”. He created visual partitions between the traditional custodians, Ngāti Maniopoto, and the landscapes of the Waikato and divided the people of Ngāti Tūwharetoa from the monumental geography around Tongariro, Ngāuruhoe, and Ruapehu.

Burton and a party of adventurers returned a year later, in 1886, to immerse themselves more fully in these sublime environments. More settlers would follow in Burton’s footsteps from the mid 1890s, when, after a long struggle with Ngāti Tūwharetoa, the heights around Tongariro became New Zealand’s first national park.

The same kind of processes shaped settler attitudes to one of the United States’ most famous national parks, Yosemite, where photographers like Watkins and Muybridge erected similar partitions between their natural and human subjects.

This division was spectacularly represented in a set of photographs that used the still waters of Yosemite’s reflective lakes to capture stunning landmarks. In these works, the myth of empty wilderness was turned into the beautiful motif of a glassy lake.

We might expect that Caire, Beattie, and Burton consciously adopted this technique from their American kin but there is no evidence this was the case.

Control over land

It’s more likely that comparable visions of nature developed in parallel, drawing from similar histories of dispossession and environmental transformation in different settler colonies.

In a whole range of places where pastoralists failed to graze their herds and geologists struggled to identify economic deposits, photographers helped colonists continue the cultural work of establishing dominion over stolen land.

The earliest visions of nature in Australia perfectly captured this drive, fixing its orientation to the physical world and its settler colonial history onto glass negatives, lantern slides and paper cards.

And here is where the commodities come back into the story. Settlers adopted the holistic vision of landscape photography to exert control over land. Figures like Caire and Beattie perfected a kind of environmental image-making and storytelling that encouraged settlers to feel an affinity with the natural world.

Their customers were drawn to breathe in the highly oxygenated forest air or pursue the Romantic thrill of summiting a mountain. These experiences became a commodity in and of themselves, and so did the photographs documenting them. They adorned sitting rooms, galleries and exhibition halls – summoning memories and lending a new assurance to the settler enterprise.

Jarrod Hore’s book, Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism, is available for pre-order now.

Jarrod Hore receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Friday essay: beautiful, available and empty – how landscape photographers reinvented the colonial project in Australia – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-beautiful-available-and-empty-how-landscape-photographers-reinvented-the-colonial-project-in-australia-169945

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

It seemed remarkable chutzpah that Scott Morrison, back from Glasgow where Australia remains a criticised laggard despite its embrace of a 2050 target, would hit the trail to campaign on climate policy.

Alternatively, as some suggest, perhaps the prime minister just wanted to tick that box early, before moving onto more congenial issues.

Either way, it didn’t turn out well.

His policy to promote electric cars, which contained minimal substance, backfired. And he wedged himself with a too-smart-by-half attempt to wedge Labor on carbon capture and storage.

Morrison surely must have seen the dangers of exposing himself on electric cars, after all he’d said in denouncing Bill Shorten’s policy in 2019.

The quotes from then were grenades for the throwing. Shorten wanted to end the Aussie weekend, Morrison declared; such a vehicle “won’t tow your trailer. It’s not going to tow your boat. It’s not going to get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family.”

How did Morrison believe he could execute a turnaround in the harsh political spotlight without being called to account? Especially when his political honesty is under the most intense questioning.

Sean Kelly, columnist and former staffer for Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, writes in his just-published The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison that the PM, “never feels, in himself, insincere or untruthful, because he always means exactly what he says; it is just that he means it only in the moment he is saying it. Past and future disappear.”

Unfortunately for Morrison, the electronic clips don’t disappear. Those on electric cars were there to be played again and again.

Read more:
Scott Morrison spruiks electric vehicles – but rules out subsidies and an end-date for petrol cars

Morrison himself explained his about-face by claiming it was a “Labor lie” that he had campaigned against EVs in 2019. “I didn’t. […] I was against Bill Shorten’s mandate policy, trying to tell people what to do with their lives, what cars they were supposed to drive and where they could drive.”

There was another problem with Morrison’s decision to climb into a hydrogen-fuelled car during his first visit to Melbourne in a very long time.

His policy – $178 million for charging and refuelling infrastructure and the like – lacked substance. It had no subsidies, with the government claiming they would not be a good use of taxpayers’ money.

Within hours of the announcement, a devastating critique of the policy came from his own side of politics, delivered by NSW Environment Minister Matt Kean.

Speaking to ABC 7.30, Kean contrasted Morrison’s weak policy with NSW’s robust approach and spelled out how Morrison should be acting.

“I would encourage the federal government to be looking at doing things like providing direct support for people who want to purchase an EV. There are a range of taxes and charges that could be waived,” Kean said.

“We want to see things like the federal government investing more heavily in electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The funding that they’ve put on the table doesn’t even match the funding that we’ve put here just for the state of New South Wales.

“But the biggest thing the federal government can do is deal with the issue of fuel standards. Australia has some of the worst fuel standards anywhere in the world”, which meant it “is becoming the dumping ground for the vehicles the rest of the world doesn’t want”.

The NSW government is forward-leaning on climate issues, and Kean and Morrison have some interesting history. The PM sledged him spectacularly last year after Kean said “some of the most senior members” of the Morrison government were concerned about its climate change policies.

Read more:
Morrison to link $500 million for new technologies to easing way for carbon capture and storage

In one of those “in the moment” prime ministerial statements, Morrison responded that Kean “doesn’t know what he’s talking about” and declared “most of the federal cabinet wouldn’t even know who Matt Kean was”.

They certainly know now. Kean is treasurer as well as environment minister in the Perrottet government, and that government is willing to chivvy the Feds when it feels like it.

In another climate announcement this week, Morrison said the government would contribute $500 million for a new $1 billion fund, administered by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, to help small companies commercialise low-emissions technology.

The legislation will contain a provision widening the remit of the CEFC to allow it to invest in carbon capture and storage, which it is banned from doing at present.

Labor has consistently opposed such a widening, so the government briefed that this would put pressure on the opposition. But Labor took one look at the trap and seems determined to avoid it. It indicated it might support the change, given the $500 million would be “new money” for the CEFC rather than a redirection of existing funds. In the meantime, a couple of renegade Queensland Coalition senators, Matt Canavan and Gerard Rennick, flagged they’d vote against the fund.

More generally, Morrison this week sharpened the Coalition-Labor contrast he has set up on climate policy, between a government that encourages and supports and an opposition that would regulate and tax.

He encapsulated his desired dichotomy by saying that “we believe climate change will ultimately be solved by ‘can do’ capitalism, not ‘don’t do’ governments seeking to control people’s lives and tell them what to do, with interventionist regulation and taxes that just force up your cost of living and force businesses to close”.

Indeed, he seeks to use the contrast broadly. “I think that’s a good motto for us to follow not just in this area, but right across the spectrum of economic policy in this country,” he told a business audience. “We’ve got a bit used to governments telling us what to do over the last couple of years. I think we have to break that habit.”

This reverts to Liberal Party “free enterprise” ideology, which has had to take a battering in the pandemic as the government spent wildly to keep things afloat. It also taps into the post-lockdown sentiment of those exhausted by restrictions and orders and welcoming “freedom” again.

But in terms of climate policy, the reality is far from so simple.

Read more:
Book review: Sean Kelly’s The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison

The point has been made many times that “taxes” – taxpayers’ money – are financing the multiple billions the Morrison government has committed to encouraging “capitalist” solutions.

While expounding “can do capitalism”, the government is in fact pursuing an interventionist approach by putting all its eggs in the technology-support basket and not enough in the market-creation one.

“Scotty from Marketing” likes slogans, but “can do capitalism” doesn’t ring like one with a future. “Capitalism” works as an economic system (with more than a little help from governments), but it is beyond clunky as part of a sound bite.

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: Scott Morrison has a bingle or two on the campaign trail – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-scott-morrison-has-a-bingle-or-two-on-the-campaign-trail-171678

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bridget Harris, Associate professor, Queensland University of Technology

Mobile phones and online technologies are frequently used by perpetrators of domestic and family violence to coerce, control and restrict the freedoms of victims and survivors.

Recent death reviews have found that stalking by technology and the use of fake social media identities are becoming more common elements in cases of domestic and family violence homicide.

In Australia, there are two leading agencies working to reduce this kind of technology-enabled abuse: WESNET and the eSafety Commissioner. Both provide training for advocates and practitioners, as well as resources for victims and survivors. WESNET also provides replacement phones.

Their work – and the “safety work” of people experiencing violence – is made more difficult by tech products and services that treat user safety as an afterthought. Platforms and the tech industry can do a lot to reduce harm by building in user safety from the earliest stages of product design.

Creating risk

At present, major tech companies often design and manage devices and digital media without considering user vulnerabilities.

Until 2020, Google allowed spyware and stalkerware – software designed to be covertly installed on a phone to monitor and record photos, videos, texts, calls and other information – to be freely advertised on its platform. It banned the ads amidst mounting evidence that this kind of software is used to enact intimate partner violence.

In April 2021 Apple released coin-sized tiles called AirTags intended to help people keep track of belongings via Bluetooth signals. After they were criticised as presenting a serious security risk by enabling stalking of intimate partners, Apple updated the devices to make them beep at random intervals if they were away from the owner’s phone.

Facebook’s new smart glasses have also sparked privacy concerns, like Snapchat’s Spectacles and Google Glass before them. The glasses contain cameras and microphones that enable (potentially covert) recording.

Facebook did consult groups such as the US National Network to End Domestic Violence in an effort to “innovate responsibly”, though there are still concerns about how the glasses might be used.

Read more:
Can Facebook’s smart glasses be smart about security and privacy?

Recognising user realities and threat

Traditional ideas of cybersecurity are focused on “stranger threats”. However, to reduce and combat digital domestic and family violence we need an “intimate threat” model.

Partners and family can compel others to provide access to devices. They may be linked to online accounts or able to guess passwords, based on their intimate knowledge of the owner.

Read more:
Technology-facilitated abuse: the new breed of domestic violence

In this context, technologies that enable surveillance and recording can be used to constrain and threaten victims and survivors in alarming ways, in everyday life.

Understanding and seeking to alleviate risk posed by abusers requires platforms and industry to think proactively about how technologies may be co-opted or weaponised.

Safety by Design

The eSafety Commissioner’s Safety by Design initiative aims to make user safety a priority in the design, development and deployment of online products and services. The initiative revolves around three basic principles.

The first is that service providers are responsible for making user safety the number one priority. This means platforms and other companies work to anticipate how their products may facilitate, increase or encourage harm. In this way the burden of safety will not fall solely on the user.

The second is that users should have power and autonomy to make decisions in their own best interest. Platforms and services should engage in meaningful consultation with users, including diverse and at-risk groups, to ensure their features and functions are accessible and helpful to all.

The third principle is transparency and accountability about operations and published safety objectives is essential. This also helps users to address safety concerns.

There is growing support for these principles among tech companies. Last year IBM published its own guide to “coercive control resistant design”.

Effective approaches must also acknowledge how intersecting or overlapping forms of structural or systemic oppression shape an individual’s experience of technology and can deepen social inequalities.

To realise the goals of safety by design or coercive control resistant design, we will need to review not only the policies but also the actual practices of platforms and industry, as they emerge.

How tech can improve

eSafety has produced Safety by Design assessment tools to improve and innovate based on good practice and evidence-informed resources and templates.

Platforms and industry have a key role to play in addressing the impacts of domestic and family violence through design. They can and should do more in this space.

Bridget Harris receives funding from The Australian Research Council. She has previously conducted research for the eSafety Commissioner and worked on research with WESNET.

– ref. Technology-enabled abuse: how ‘safety by design’ can reduce stalking and domestic violence – https://theconversation.com/technology-enabled-abuse-how-safety-by-design-can-reduce-stalking-and-domestic-violence-170636

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christina N. Zdenek, Lab Manager/Post-doc at the Venom Evolution Lab, The University of Queensland

Environmental scientists see flora, fauna and phenomena the rest of us rarely do. In this series, we’ve invited them to share their unique photos from the field.

Australia’s largest parrot, the palm cockatoo, is justifiably famous as the only non-human animal to craft tools for sound. They create drumsticks to make a rhythmic beat. Sadly, the “Ringo Starr” of the bird world is now threatened with extinction – just as many other parrots are around the world.

This week, the Queensland government moved this species – also known as the goliath cockatoo – onto the endangered list, due to our research on palm cockatoo populations over more than 20 years.

Our analysis predicts a severe decline from 47% to as high as 95% over the next half-century. Given the current population is estimated at just 3,000 birds, it is likely to drop to as low as 150 birds. They could all but disappear from Australia in our lifetimes.

Is it too late? Not yet. There are concrete ways to protect these magnificent, elusive birds by conserving habitat and their all-important breeding hollow trees, by reintroducing cool burns (including unburnt areas), and finding out more about these special parrots.

So why are palm cockatoos in trouble?

Palmies, as we call these charismatic birds, hail from an ancient lineage on the parrot evolutionary tree. In Australia they only live on the Cape York Peninsula in far north Queensland, where they face a perfect storm of threats and vulnerability.

They’re losing habitat due to poor fire management and ongoing land-clearing, but they also have extremely low breeding rates, with females laying a single egg every two years.

Of the offspring, only 23% of their chicks live until they fledge. On average, this means each breeding pair successfully raises just one chick every 10 years. And who knows if that fledgling will make it to sexual maturity at five or more years old?

Read more:
Bird-brained and brilliant: Australia’s avians are smarter than you think

One challenge in studying these birds is the difficulty in identifying individual birds over time. To date there has been no successful capture of palmies to mark them via leg bands or GPS trackers. Without knowing who’s who, major problems with breeding success could be masked by an ageing population, given their life expectancy is up to 60 years.

Our research on palm cockatoo genetics and vocal dialects reveals their three major populations on the peninsula are poorly connected, meaning little movement of birds between groups.

Each group has developed “cultural” traits which have not spread between the populations. For example, the famous drumming display mainly occurs in the eastern population, where the birds also make distinctive calls including a unique human-like “hello”.

The downside is that if one population is in trouble, the others are unable to pick up the slack and provide breeding reinforcements.

How do we save them?

Palmies are in real trouble. Saving them from extinction will take a concerted effort.

We urgently need a better understanding of why they have such trouble breeding, to figure out if it’s similarly bad across all three populations, and to work out how palmies use the landscape.

At the same time, we have to get better at managing the landscape they need to survive. What does that look like? It means cool burns to prevent extreme bushfires burning down their ancient nesting trees – plus avoiding any further felling of these priceless trees.

These trees are a key part of the puzzle. Palmies are picky breeders. For these birds, not just any tree hollow will do. They require large, old hollow-bearing trees to breed in, which can be up to 300 years old.

The hollowing process typically starts with a small burn at the base, giving termites access to the insides of the trunk. Eventually, these trees resemble vertical hollow pipes. The palmies then spend months splintering sticks and bringing them to the hollow to make a nesting platform up to a metre deep – the only parrot to do in the entire world.

Unfortunately, these “piped” trees are especially vulnerable to big fires, which also lower termite populations and reduce the chances of future hollows being formed.

Protecting their habitat

We’ve found using a brush cutter and rake to clear the grass and debris for three metres around nesting trees is enough to save them from fires. This is of course labour intensive.

A longer-term strategy is to manage fire better. The frequency and intensity of bushfires in tropical Australia has changed for the worse since Europeans started managing the landscape. A return to the traditional cool burns employed by indigenous people from the Uutaalnganu, Kanthanampu and Kuuku Ya’u language groups could largely resolve this problem.

Read more:
It’s not too late to save them: 5 ways to improve the government’s plan to protect threatened wildlife

Land clearing also reduces habitat. Though long saved by distance, Cape York is now seeing strip-mining, road building, and quarrying, which all contribute to habitat loss. We can reduce the damage done if skilled ecologists survey proposed clearance areas ahead of time.

Another vital step towards keeping this species alive is to broadly assess and protect as much as possible of the remaining palm cockatoo breeding habitat on Cape York.

We also need better ways of detecting their nest hollows. We’ve researched these birds for over two decades, and can confidently say that birds don’t come any harder to study than palmies.

Hunting for their nests is time consuming and expensive because palmies can lay their egg any day in an eight month breeding season, with pairs often switching among several hollows on their territories. This spreads our survey teams thin.

We’ve also found that palmies go quiet during nesting and are super wary of humans, making finding their nesting hollows especially difficult.

Despite all the challenges in saving them, it is worthwhile. Even after watching them for 20 years, we have not tired of their company. They’re magnificent birds with unique behaviour and a surprising number of parallels with humans, such as drumming, blushing, tool-making, and their “Hello” call.

To bring them back from the edge, we must work quickly to figure out why and where their breeding survival rates are so low, improve how we use fire, and protect their habitat and the all-important old trees.

Christina N. Zdenek receives funding from the Australian Research Council and has worked as a biological consultant for both a mining company and ecological consulting company on Cape York Peninsula.

Rob Heinsohn receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. The ‘Ringo Starr’ of birds is now endangered – here’s how we can still save our drum-playing palm cockatoos – https://theconversation.com/the-ringo-starr-of-birds-is-now-endangered-heres-how-we-can-still-save-our-drum-playing-palm-cockatoos-169534

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Director, Health and Aged Care Program, Grattan Institute

When I went out in Melbourne for a coffee with a friend earlier this week, the waiter verified my vaccination status before allowing me to sit down. But for the unvaccinated in Victoria, New South Wales, and the ACT, it’s a case of no clubbing, no coffee catch-ups, no movies.

Many employers have even gone beyond the government-mandated minimum and required all staff to be vaccinated as part of ensuring a safe workplace.

These mandates are designed to reduce the number of COVID-19 outbreaks and their consequences as Australia’s “lockdown states” open up. Introducing different rules for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated also gives people an incentive to get vaccinated as soon as possible.

Singapore went a step further this week, announcing people who are unvaccinated by choice will have to pay for their own health care.

This isn’t the right way to encourage vaccination, and shouldn’t be replicated in Australia.

What if an unvaccinated Singaporean gets COVID?

Singapore has a complicated system of health insurance which includes “medical savings accounts” from which people can pay for their health care and keep the balance for distribution to their estate when they die.

Read more:
Creating a better health system: lessons from Singapore

Under the new policy, unvaccinated Singaporeans will still get care, but could be substantially out-of-pocket when or if they recover. COVID-related hospital care can be expensive and so could easily wipe out a medical savings account balance.

Singapore’s new policy is implemented with the best intentions – to reduce demand on a stretched health system by reducing the number of avoidable hospital admissions among the unvaccinated.

Why some are calling for us to follow Singapore’s lead

Despite high rates of vaccination in Australia (more than 80% of over-16s are double-dose vaccinated) and COVID cases trending down, hospitals in NSW, Victoria, and the ACT are still under pressure.

And even though the unvaccinated are only a small proportion of the population in those jurisdictions, almost everyone with COVID in an intensive care unit bed is unvaccinated.

Former NSW premier Bob Carr endorsed the Singaporean approach and called for Australia to follow suit.

Others have hopped on the bandwagon. I strongly disagree.

The importance of universal coverage – for everyone

Australia’s Medicare system provides universal coverage for medical and public hospital care. It’s not a system just for the poor, or just for the well-behaved. It promotes social solidarity.

Widespread vaccination was always going to be the best way out of lockdowns and the path to reopening Australian and state borders. Grattan Institute’s Race to 80 report supported vaccine passports and other strategies to encourage vaccination. But how far should these nudges to increase vaccination rates go?

Undermining Medicare’s universality – by excluding the unvaccinated from its financial protection – is a bridge too far.

Sure, I think anti-vaxxers should know better; their vaccination status poses a risk to themselves and all of us.

But the Singaporean policy statement has hidden in it the root of the problem – it is targeted at those who are unvaccinated by choice.

The evidence shows vaccination in Australia – like other aspects of health care – suffers from a distinct social gradient. Poorer people and those less well educated have lower rates of vaccination.

This may be because their lives are less well organised, and they can’t take time off from precarious employment to get vaccinated. It may be they are more susceptible to misinformation campaigns.

Whatever the case, their “choice” may not be a fully informed and freely made one.

Read more:
Just the facts, or more detail? To battle vaccine hesitancy, the messaging has to be just right

Failures in the government’s vaccination program

Penalising unvaccinated Australians by excluding them from Medicare would be a convenient way of shifting responsibility on to individuals for government failures.

Early on, the federal government did not make vaccination easy to get. And the government has failed to ensure the whole population has all the information it needs to make good vaccination decisions.

If the unvaccinated were barred from Medicare, these government failures would magically become a problem for a small number of individuals, and no longer a political failure.

If we exclude unvaccinated people, where to next?

If we exclude the unvaccinated from Medicare’s protection today, tomorrow we might exclude the smoker, the day after the drinker, or the person who did not go out jogging, or has not taken up private health insurance.

Hospital emergency department staff regularly have to care for a drink driver and their victim on the same day. They have an ethical obligation to treat everybody equally. Similarly, as frustrating as it might seem, the health system must still be there for the unvaccinated.

The health system needs to be there for everyone, not just people who look like us, nor just for people we like, nor just for people whose choices we endorse.

Nudges to encourage people to get vaccinated are good public policy. But if they undermine the universality of health care, these well-intentioned policies would cause more harm than good.

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

– ref. People who choose not to get vaccinated shouldn’t have to pay for COVID care in hospital – https://theconversation.com/people-who-choose-not-to-get-vaccinated-shouldnt-have-to-pay-for-covid-care-in-hospital-171669

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Director, Health and Aged Care Program, Grattan Institute

When I went out in Melbourne for a coffee with a friend earlier this week, the waiter verified my vaccination status before allowing me to sit down. But for the unvaccinated in Victoria, New South Wales, and the ACT, it’s a case of no clubbing, no coffee catch-ups, no movies.

Many employers have even gone beyond the government-mandated minimum and required all staff to be vaccinated as part of ensuring a safe workplace.

These mandates are designed to reduce the number of COVID-19 outbreaks and their consequences as Australia’s “lockdown states” open up. Introducing different rules for the vaccinated and the unvaccinated also gives people an incentive to get vaccinated as soon as possible.

Singapore went a step further this week, announcing people who are unvaccinated by choice will have to pay for their own health care.

This isn’t the right way to encourage vaccination, and shouldn’t be replicated in Australia.

What if an unvaccinated Singaporean gets COVID?

Singapore has a complicated system of health insurance which includes “medical savings accounts” from which people can pay for their health care and keep the balance for distribution to their estate when they die.

Read more:
Creating a better health system: lessons from Singapore

Under the new policy, unvaccinated Singaporeans will still get care, but could be substantially out-of-pocket when or if they recover. COVID-related hospital care can be expensive and so could easily wipe out a medical savings account balance.

Singapore’s new policy is implemented with the best intentions – to reduce demand on a stretched health system by reducing the number of avoidable hospital admissions among the unvaccinated.

Why some are calling for us to follow Singapore’s lead

Despite high rates of vaccination in Australia (more than 80% of over-16s are double-dose vaccinated) and COVID cases trending down, hospitals in NSW, Victoria, and the ACT are still under pressure.

And even though the unvaccinated are only a small proportion of the population in those jurisdictions, almost everyone with COVID in an intensive care unit bed is unvaccinated.

Former NSW premier Bob Carr endorsed the Singaporean approach and called for Australia to follow suit.

Others have hopped on the bandwagon. I strongly disagree.

The importance of universal coverage – for everyone

Australia’s Medicare system provides universal coverage for medical and public hospital care. It’s not a system just for the poor, or just for the well-behaved. It promotes social solidarity.

Widespread vaccination was always going to be the best way out of lockdowns and the path to reopening Australian and state borders. Grattan Institute’s Race to 80 report supported vaccine passports and other strategies to encourage vaccination. But how far should these nudges to increase vaccination rates go?

Undermining Medicare’s universality – by excluding the unvaccinated from its financial protection – is a bridge too far.

Sure, I think anti-vaxxers should know better; their vaccination status poses a risk to themselves and all of us.

But the Singaporean policy statement has hidden in it the root of the problem – it is targeted at those who are unvaccinated by choice.

The evidence shows vaccination in Australia – like other aspects of health care – suffers from a distinct social gradient. Poorer people and those less well educated have lower rates of vaccination.

This may be because their lives are less well organised, and they can’t take time off from precarious employment to get vaccinated. It may be they are more susceptible to misinformation campaigns.

Whatever the case, their “choice” may not be a fully informed and freely made one.

Read more:
Just the facts, or more detail? To battle vaccine hesitancy, the messaging has to be just right

Failures in the government’s vaccination program

Penalising unvaccinated Australians by excluding them from Medicare would be a convenient way of shifting responsibility on to individuals for government failures.

Early on, the federal government did not make vaccination easy to get. And the government has failed to ensure the whole population has all the information it needs to make good vaccination decisions.

If the unvaccinated were barred from Medicare, these government failures would magically become a problem for a small number of individuals, and no longer a political failure.

If we exclude unvaccinated people, where to next?

If we exclude the unvaccinated from Medicare’s protection today, tomorrow we might exclude the smoker, the day after the drinker, or the person who did not go out jogging, or has not taken up private health insurance.

Hospital emergency department staff regularly have to care for a drink driver and their victim on the same day. They have an ethical obligation to treat everybody equally. Similarly, as frustrating as it might seem, the health system must still be there for the unvaccinated.

The health system needs to be there for everyone, not just people who look like us, nor just for people we like, nor just for people whose choices we endorse.

Nudges to encourage people to get vaccinated are good public policy. But if they undermine the universality of health care, these well-intentioned policies would cause more harm than good.

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

– ref. No, people who choose not to get vaccinated shouldn’t have to pay for COVID care in hospital – https://theconversation.com/no-people-who-choose-not-to-get-vaccinated-shouldnt-have-to-pay-for-covid-care-in-hospital-171669

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

With the Glasgow conference nearly over and the government promising to release its climate policy modelling before parliament resumes later this month, eyes are turning to Labor for its long-awaited alternative.

Climate change spokesman Chris Bowen says the policy will be both “realistic and ambitious” – which of course neatly embraces the debate within Labor about how far to differentiate itself from the government on an issue that caused it grief at the 2019 election.

“I hope and intend to be the climate change minister within six months. So anything we say […] it’s got to be realistic. But it will be realistic and ambitious. Both of these things can be true.”

Bowen slates the government for its lack of ambition. “We like to be an influential country and we have never been as out of touch on any issue ever in our foreign affairs than we are on climate change. So I think there’s a particular onus on Australia.”

On one of the issues to the forefront this week – ways to encourage electric cars – Bowen says there’s “a legitimate conversation to be had” about fuel standards (which NSW environment minister Matt Kean says should be addressed by the federal government).

Labor earlier this year announced measures on electric cars and has more policy to come.

Bowen says Morrison’s attempt to wedge Labor by linking an expansion of the remit of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to the $500 million for a new fund to encourage the commercialisation of technology, has backfired.“Two coalition senators have come out and said they’re crossing the floor to vote against it. […] He’s wedged himself.”

Asked about the claims the renewable sector won’t produce as many jobs as the old fossil fuel sector, Bowen says: “Every dollar spent on renewable energy and energy efficiency creates three times more jobs than a dollar spent on traditional energy.

“And that’s also true when you consider some of the other things the country has to do […] we also have to upgrade our transmission massively to get renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s consumed. Our electricity grid can’t cope. So we need billions of dollars of investment to upgrade our transmission grid. We have a policy to do that and that’ll create lots of jobs.”

“I see it as a positive story to say we’re going to diversify regional economies, create new jobs, have lots of regional job creation as we go. And that’s a positive story for Australia’s regions.”

But, Bowen says, “it is dishonest to pretend that coal communities aren’t going to be impacted by reducing coal exports as countries move away from coal fired power.”

“We’re also going to have detailed plans for communities. We’re also going to have an opportunity for them to have a say from the ground up in their economic future.”

Speaking more generally about what the Labor party stands for today, Bowen says: “We still stand for growth and opportunity, which is what I’ve always said Labor stands for. Economic growth lifts people out of poverty. It turns aspiration into reality and we stand for giving people the opportunity to make the most of that. Though I do not mean a sort of narrow ‘equality of opportunity’ frame. I mean, the opportunity to live their lives to their fullest capacity.”

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Chris Bowen says Labor’s climate policy will be ‘realistic and ambitious’ – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-chris-bowen-says-labors-climate-policy-will-be-realistic-and-ambitious-171672

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Diana Jefferies, Senior lecturer, Western Sydney University

The period after birth of a child is supposed to be a time of great happiness for women. However, a significant number of new mothers will experience a mental illness at this time.

One is postnatal psychosis (also known as postpartum or puerperal psychosis). It’s not related to postnatal depression.

Postnatal psychosis affects one to two in every 1,000 new mothers, or about 600 women each year in Australia.

But our interviews with women who have been diagnosed with this rare but serious condition show their symptoms were often dismissed as a normal part of adjusting to motherhood.

What is postnatal psychosis?

Postnatal psychosis affects women across all cultures and geographic areas.

The condition can put a woman at risk of self-harm or suicide and, on rare occasions, of harming others including her new baby or other children.

We don’t know what causes it. But contributing factors may include sleep deprivation, and rapid hormone changes associated with pregnancy and childbirth.

The risk of postnatal psychosis increases if a woman has a history of bipolar disorder or has had postnatal psychosis before.

What are the symptoms?

Symptoms can begin in the first few days after giving birth but may not appear until up to 12 weeks afterwards.

Some women have manic symptoms

• manic symptoms include feeling they do not need to sleep, and are powerful and strong

• women may have unusual experiences, such as seeing or hearing things others cannot. They may believe things that are not true

• they can also make unrealistic and impulsive plans, can be disorganised or forgetful, and talk very quickly

• their moods may change rapidly or they may seem excessively happy.

Others have depressive symptoms

• depressive symptoms include a loss of energy and an inability to sleep or eat

• women may have thoughts or auditory hallucinations that they are a bad mother and they may say they wish to die. Hallucinations or delusions (false beliefs) point to postnatal psychosis rather than to postnatal depression

• women may find it difficult to complete activities, such as caring for themselves or their baby, or attending to other tasks in the home

• they may believe they are helpless, hopeless and worthless, especially as a mother

• they can become isolated and no longer enjoy activities.

Women say it’s traumatic

Women say postnatal psychosis is traumatic, especially if they do not get help when they first report symptoms. But it can be challenging to diagnose because of the stigma surrounding mental illness around the time of giving birth.

Women say they are reluctant to disclose unusual symptoms as they feel ashamed they are finding motherhood difficult and worry they may lose custody of their baby.

When we interviewed ten women, who had experienced an episode of postnatal psychosis in the past ten years, we discovered another barrier to diagnosis.

Women said they knew they had unusual symptoms, such as not being able to sleep or changes in the way they thought or behaved, but they found it difficult to get help. Often, they were told these symptoms were a normal part of adjusting to motherhood.

Their postnatal psychosis was not identified until their only option was admission to an acute mental health unit and separation from their baby.

So we need more education about the condition for health-care workers. By identifying the condition earlier, this gives women more treatment options.

There are treatments

Once diagnosed, the condition can be treated with antipsychotic and mood stabilising medication, prescribed by a psychiatrist or other treating doctor.

This is very effective but medication is often not started until the symptoms have become very severe and the woman requires hospitalisation in an acute mental health unit, without her baby. This separation can compromise the developing bond between them.

So early diagnosis can potentially reduce the time a woman may spend in an acute mental health unit.

Read more:
Postpartum psychosis: as we work to find causes, mothers still aren’t getting the support they need

Admission to a mother-baby unit

Best practice is to admit women and their babies to a mother-baby unit, which is usually linked to a hospital. This allows women to continue to care for their babies with the support of child and family health-care professionals.

However, publicly funded units are only available in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland. In New South Wales, two public mother-baby units are being built. In NSW, the only existing one is a private facility, which many families cannot afford.

Read more:
Historical hospital records can show us what not to do in helping psychosis patients

Helping others

The women we interviewed said they developed support networks with each other. One woman told us:

You feel like, okay, that was such a hard experience, is there a way that we could make that a little less hard for the women who are going to go through it next time?

Women wanted to tell their stories so others would better understand postnatal psychosis and could find it easier to get help.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, contact the following organisations for more information or support: Perinatal Anxiety & Depression Australia (PANDA), 1300 726 306; Centre of Perinatal Excellence; Beyondblue,
1300 22 4636; Lifeline, 13 11 14. You can also contact your GP or go to your nearest hospital emergency department.

Diana Jefferies 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. Postnatal psychosis is rare, but symptoms can be brushed aside as ‘normal’ for a new mum – https://theconversation.com/postnatal-psychosis-is-rare-but-symptoms-can-be-brushed-aside-as-normal-for-a-new-mum-170278

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Black, PhD Candidate, School of History, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University

“How can you tell if a politician is lying?” It is a favourite joke of my grandfather’s, and the punchline is all too obvious: “His mouth will be moving.”

The joke gives succinct expression to a cynicism that has shaped Australian politics since the introduction of self-government in the 1850s. The implication, of both the joke and the culture informing it, is that the politician’s lies reflect solely on their kind and reveal nothing about the rest of us.

In his newly published profile of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Sean Kelly flips this way of thinking on its head. The Game offers many powerful and revealing insights into Morrison’s career and the tricky political tactics that have characterised it. But the most important revelations in this book are about the society that created our prime minister, and the structures and cultures that facilitated his path to the Lodge.

Kelly explains, for example, that Morrison worked hard to be a “blank canvas” in the public eye until perhaps 2015, at which point he became the more recognisable suburban “good bloke down the road”.

This persona, replete with the “ScoMo” nickname, has characterised his public performances ever since. But the performance only matters because it finds in the Australian community “a willing audience” who, recently at least, like to have what novelist E.M. Forster called “flat characters” (or instantly recognisable “types”) in their newspapers and their parliaments.

Formerly a self-described “spin doctor” for both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, Kelly studies Morrison’s public persona not just with the eye of a Canberra insider, but also with the lens of a cultural critic. In this “land of extremes”, he says, Australians are

always splitting ourselves in two, then ignoring the half that discomfits us.

For Kelly, this mentality explains why the so-called “quiet Australians” have indulged “the game” that Morrison plays, while the others have rejected him entirely (“I am completely different”).

Given Kelly’s Labor connections, cynics might expect a partisan hit-job on the prime minister. This portrait is no hit-job, but it is, unsurprisingly, unflattering.

Read more:
Grattan on Friday: If the government is re-elected it may be in spite of Scott Morrison rather than because of him

Kelly gives Morrison the benefit of the doubt with respect to the early stages of the pandemic, “a situation unlike anything those involved had dealt with before”. There is recognition, too, of the burdens that Jenny Morrison and her daughters have borne in service of public life. But the portrait of Morrison himself is a study of duplicity and hollowness.

There are criticisms of Morrison’s more tone-deaf and morally dubious performances, none more so than the forced handshakes with reluctant bushfire survivors and firefighters during that black summer of 2019-20.

But the most important conclusion about Morrison in this book relates to the way he thinks. Kelly suggests Morrison’s mind does not think in narratives, but only in images or snapshots (think of the punchline of the tourism ad he commissioned, “Where the bloody hell are ya?”). This, Kelly reasons, is why he can say one thing with such apparent conviction today, and the opposite with equal fervour tomorrow.

For a public figure, this inconsistency would be impossible “if it were not a central aspect of their experience of the world”. The psychological analysis here is sweeping, its inferences devastating.

There are many praiseworthy qualities in Kelly’s study. Serious issues, from asylum-seeker policy to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine roll-out, are given ample coverage. But this is no traditional biography, and these debates are not its central concern.

The main subject of this book is the performance of politics itself, and the narratives that mediate the public’s relationship with its representatives. The idea of “performance” seems resurgent in political theory and history, and its capacity for revelation is rich.

In some ways, Kelly’s book builds on an older tradition of political profiles that took performance as their main subject. Graham Little’s Strong Leadership (1988) and Judith Brett’s Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (1992) stand tall in that tradition, using psychosocial theory to unpack the hearts and minds of Australian liberals from Menzies to Malcolm Fraser. Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002) is equally important, part-memoir, part-meditation and part-psychological study of Paul Keating as prime minister, written from the intimate perspective of a prime ministerial speechwriter.

In each case, the biographer’s goal was to explain not just who the prime minister was, but how their way of thinking engaged with the world around them.

Kelly does not try to discover the “real” Scott Morrison, a task rendered almost impossible by the vacuousness of the prime minister’s performances and the role of the media in presenting him to us.

Instead, he evokes the divided community to whom Morrison performs, and the social and cultural processes that allow those performances to take place and, at least sometimes, hit their mark. Kelly’s method is to home in on public speech, its sounds and cadences, as well as the often elusive messages and impressions that Morrison seeks to convey with his words.

The chief limitation of The Game is that, relying largely on public material, it cannot take us into the institutions that empower Morrison, other than the media.

Read more:
‘I don’t think, I know’ – what makes Macron’s comments about Morrison so extraordinary and so worrying

We don’t learn much about the Prime Minister’s Office, other than that it failed to respond to Brittany Higgins’s alleged rape in Parliament House in an appropriate fashion.

Parliament itself is a stage here, but scarcely recognisable as an institution that makes laws. The public service is invisible. National Cabinet is, according to Kelly, little more than an “aesthetic change” from the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) that preceded it.

It says something about the condition of contemporary politics that it is hard to say whether these absences are a flaw in the author’s approach, or inevitable given the style of leadership it so astutely anatomises.

In the end, The Game invites us to look toward the next election. That poll will, Kelly implies, reveal something more of ourselves, or at least those “quiet” Australians who are supposed to have voted for Morrison in 2019. Like most of us, Kelly is unsure who will have the last laugh.

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

– ref. Book review: Sean Kelly’s The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison – https://theconversation.com/book-review-sean-kellys-the-game-a-portrait-of-scott-morrison-171489