Unions have been quick to condemn Australia’s new Agricultural Visa, which will give approved employers access to “skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled” workers from ASEAN nations and the UK from late this year.
ACTU president Michelle O’Neill has warned of a “second-class workforce” with “none of the protections or rights that all Australian workers should be able to rely on”. But many aspects of the visa are actually a step in the right direction and could provide unions with organising opportunities.
The scheme is being sold as a complement to two existing schemes, the Seasonal Worker Programme and the Pacific Labour Scheme.
In reality, it’s a concession to farmers who lost rights to British backpackers.
Australia waived the requirement for backpackers to extend their working holiday visas to complete three months of work in regional Australia as part of negotiations for a UK-Australia free trade agreement.
In filling the gap left by backpackers, the visa program has introduced provisions that will protect the interests of incoming workers.
The Seasonal Workers’ Program and the Pacific Labour Scheme bond workers to single employers, making it hard for them to escape mistreatment.
As the president of the Vanuatu Association of Public Service Employees, Dr Basil Leodoro, told me in my research, this leaves workers in trouble with no choice but to hide.
I think that’s, that’s their way of protesting the conditions that they have […] their way of saying they miss home, and they’d rather not do anything than work even more
By allowing movement between approved employers, the agricultural visa will give workers the ability to leave bad situations without having to abscond and endanger their migration status.
Better, but no silver bullet
Another feature of the Agricultural Visa which will separate it from the Seasonal Workers’ Program and the Pacific Labour Scheme is that it will offer a pathway to permanent residency.
The time limits on other visas have created problems for unions in the past, with mistreated workers keen to keep their heads down until they go home.
Horticulture is one of the few industries in which piece work is still legal. F Armstrong
Low unionisation, underpayment and illegal overtime are realities for agricultural employees regardless of their visa status.
Asmarina, an Australian citizen of Eritrean background whose family lives on the Mid North Coast of NSW, started working on the berry farms at the age of 10.
“People” she told me, “don’t know their legal rights on these farms.”
Many Eritreans work on the farms because language barriers make it difficult to find other work. The hours are long, the conditions are harsh and the pay is low.
Horticulture is one of the few industries in which piece work is still legal.
This is corroborated by Daisy, who travelled from Wollongong to Coffs Harbour for the harvest season at the end of 2020. She says though contractors promised workers could earn over the minimum wage if they worked hard enough, most were paid something nearer A$15 per hour.
Only the most experienced could pick enough to earn as much as a café worker.
The Agricultural Visa won’t solve these problems by itself, but it might make the recipients more receptive to organising than have other visas.
In Vanuatu, Dr Leodoro is gearing up for greater union involvement.
The Vanuatu National Workers Union has been collaborating with Australia’s United Workers’ Union to ensure that temporary migrants know their rights.
With union involvement, the Agricultural Visa could be a step in the right direction for agricultural migrant workers.
Rather than dismiss it out of hand, Australia’s union movement could ensure that the workers on it don’t become “second class” workers in the first place.
I know one of the interviewees personally through a charity group to which we both contribute- the Community Union defence League. This group has been involved in farmworker activism before.
Facebook has announced a research project that aims to push the “frontier of first-person perception”, and in the process help you remember where your left your keys.
The Ego4D project provides a huge collection of first-person video and related data, plus a set of challenges for researchers to teach computers to understand the data and gather useful information from it.
In September, the social media giant launched a line of “smart glasses” called Ray-Ban Stories, which carry a digital camera and other features. Much like the Google Glass project, which met mixed reviews in 2013, this one has prompted complaints of privacy invasion.
The Ego4D project aims to develop software that will make smart glasses far more useful, but may in the process enable far greater breaches of privacy.
a massive-scale, egocentric dataset and benchmark suite collected across 74 worldwide locations and nine countries, with over 3,025 hours of daily-life activity video.
Ego4D: Teaching AI to perceive the world through your eyes.
The “Ego” in Ego4D means egocentric (or “first-person” video), while “4D” stands for the three dimensions of space plus one more: time. In essence, Ego4D seeks to combine photos, video, geographical information and other data to build a model of the user’s world.
There are two components: a large dataset of first-person photos and videos, and a “benchmark suite” consisting of five challenging tasks that can be used to compare different AI models or algorithms with each other. These benchmarks involve analysing first-person video to remember past events, create diary entries, understand interactions with objects and people, and forecast future events.
The dataset includes more than 3,000 hours of first-person video from 855 participants going about everyday tasks, captured with a variety of devices including GoPro cameras and augmented reality (AR) glasses. The videos cover activities at home, in the workplace, and hundreds of social settings.
What is in the data set?
Although this is not the first such video dataset to be introduced to the research community, it is 20 times larger than publicly available datasets. It includes video, audio, 3D mesh scans of the environment, eye gaze, stereo, and synchronized multi-camera views of the same event.
Most of the recorded footage is unscripted or “in the wild”. The data is also quite diverse as it was collected from 74 locations across nine countries, and those capturing the data have various backgrounds, ages and genders.
What can we do with it?
Commonly, computer vision models are trained and tested on annotated images and videos for a specific task. Facebook argues that current AI datasets and models represent a third-person or a “spectator” view, resulting in limited visual perception. Understanding first-person video will help design robots that better engage with their surroundings.
Wikimedia: Future robotic agents will benefit from a better understanding of their environment
Furthermore, Facebook argues egocentric vision can potentially transform how we use virtual and augmented reality devices such as glasses and headsets. If we can develop AI models that understand the world from a first-person viewpoint, just like humans do, VR and AR devices may become as valuable as our smartphones.
Can AI make our lives better?
Facebook has also developed five benchmark challenges as part of the Ego4D project. The challenges aim to build better understanding of video materials to develop useful AI assistants. The benchmarks focus on understanding first person perception. The benchmarks are described as follows:
Episodic memory (what happened when?): for example, figuring out from first-person video where you left your keys
Hand-object manipulation (what am I doing and how?): this aims to better understand and teach human actions, such as giving instructions on how to play the drums
Audio-visual conversation (who said what and when?): this includes keeping track of and summarising conversations, meetings or classes
Social interactions (who is interacting with whom?): this is about identifying people and their actions, with a goal of doing things like helping you hear a person better if they’re talking to you
Forecasting activities (what am I likely to do next?): this aims to anticipate your intentions and offer advice, like pointing out you’ve already added salt to a recipe if you look like you’re about to add some more.
What about privacy?
Obviously there are significant concerns regarding privacy. If this technology is paired with smart glasses constantly recording and analysing the environment, the result could be constant tracking and logging (via facial recognition) of people moving around in public.
Facebook says it will maintain high ethical and privacy standards for the data gathered for the project, including consent of participants, independent reviews, and de-identifying data where possible.
As such, Facebook says the data was captured in a “controlled environment with informed consent”, and in public spaces “faces and other PII [personally identifing information] are blurred”.
But despite these reassurances (and noting this is only a trial), there are concerns over the future of smart-glasses technology coupled with the power of a social media giant whose intentions have not always been aligned to their users.
The ImageNet dataset, a huge collection of tagged images, has helped computers learn to analyse and describe images over the past decade or more. Will Ego4D do the same for first-person video?
We may get an idea next year. Facebook has invited the research community to participate in the Ego4D competition in June 2022, and pit their algorithms against the benchmark challenges to see if we can find those keys at last.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. You can sign up to NZ Politics Daily as well as New Zealand Political Roundup columns for free here.
Some people have reacted with moral outrage at the prospect of making a killer robot in the image of our loyal best friend. But if this development makes us pause for thought, in a way that existing robot weapons don’t, then perhaps it serves a useful purpose after all.
The response to Ghost Robotics’ latest creation is reminiscent of an incident involving Boston Dynamics, another maker of doglike robots (which, in contrast, strongly frowns on the idea of weaponising them).
In 2015, Boston Dynamics caused controversy after posting footage online of technicians kicking a doglike robot to demonstrate its stability. Many viewers sympathised with the robot, and claimed kicking it was morally wrong.
Ghost Robotics Chief Executive Jiren Parikh has offered an evolutionary explanation for the moral qualms about sniper robo-dogs, claiming they evoke our “evolutionary memories of predators” because they have legs.
But I’m not convinced. I think people are reacting strongly because the robots look like dogs.
A killer best friend?
Dogs are intelligent. When we see a weapon shaped like a dog, it becomes very easy to view that weapon in the same terms. We instinctively see it as a gun that makes its own decisions, because that’s what dogs do.
For many people, that is the true horror of automated weaponry: a deadly robot that makes its own choices about whom it kills. There’s no guarantee the choices the robot makes will be constrained by human morality.
In truth, the robots produced by Ghost Robotics are no more autonomous than existing weapons systems. Like most drones, these gun-toting robo-dogs are fully piloted by a remote operator.
But there’s a crucial difference in our perception: the doglike robots seem more like fully autonomous killing machines, even though they’re not. They just appear that way because we take the intelligence we associate with dogs, and project it onto a bunch of bolts, wires and guns that happens to look like them.
If robotic dogs equipped with sniper rifles fill us with unease, should we stop making them? Well, ideally yes. But if, as seems inevitable, humans are going to continue building robots with guns, maybe we should make them all look like dogs. Or, better yet, domestic pets more generally.
Pets are our family. We know our pets are largely free to act as they please, but the familial bonds we develop with them encourage us to feel accountable for their actions.
That’s because, although we see pets as having a capacity for choice, we also see them as morally inert. When a dog steals the last pork chop from the table, we don’t think the dog is morally culpable. Granted, we might say “bad dog”, but that’s just a way to curb its behaviour. A sharp tone and gruff voice discourage future chop theft, but we aren’t blaming the dog for doing what comes naturally.
Rather, it is we who must take moral responsibility for our pets. That means caring for them, avoiding cruelty and, above all, assuming responsibility if they do something wrong. If my dog bites someone, I feel morally bad even if the dog doesn’t.
If robots with guns look and act like pets, and if we come to see them as such, then some of the moral responsibility we assume for pets might just rub off onto these robots. We may well be more willing to take moral responsibility for the actions of a doglike robot than a faceless military drone.
The real horror of autonomous weapons is not the potential they will turn against us in a Skynet-style robotic uprising. It is the horror of detachment. Autonomous weaponry makes it easy to distance ourselves from killing done in our name.
I’m not talking about physical distance (although that is certainly part of it), but rather about moral and emotional distance. Just as buying neatly packaged meat at a supermarket lets us feel detached from the violence done to animals in producing it, so we might feel morally distanced from violence against humans if perpetrated by a remote machine.
We need to discourage moral detachment from autonomous weapons. And our existing moral attitude to our pets might offer a shortcut to this goal.
Let me be clear: I don’t support the development of autonomous weaponry or weaponised artificial intelligence. But if we are going to develop such technology, let it be in the shape of pets. Maybe then we won’t kill quite so many people.
Sam Baron receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Vaccines save lives, and have been doing so since the development of the smallpox vaccine more than 200 years ago.
However, for vaccines to keep entire communities safe they need to be taken up by very large proportions of the population. Only then can the vaccinated offer protection to the unvaccinated, known as “herd immunity”.
Unfortunately, too often this doesn’t occur. Hesitancy around the measles vaccine, for example, contributed to a 30% increase in cases globally in 2019.
So, why does vaccine hesitancy occur? There are many reasons, and these will differ between people.
But, as clinical psychologists who study anxiety and avoidance, we think one big factor is fear – specifically the fear of death, and how we manage that fear.
Vaccination rates increasing, but fear still out there
In the case of COVID, refusing or delaying vaccination has been a significant problem, with anti-vax and freedom marches dominating news cycles over recent months.
In Australia, the issue of vaccine hesitancy remains significant, despite some reports to the contrary.
The article also claimed “vaccine fears have plunged to a record low”.
However, while the data were real, in our view, the interpretation of them was flawed.
Fear hasn’t substantially diminished. Instead, mandatory vaccination of certain groups in the community, and significant disadvantages for those who refuse to be vaccinated, is driving increases in vaccination uptake.
In several Australian states, mandatory vaccinations are in place for many professions, including quarantine workers, health workers, teachers, construction workers, aged-care workers and other groups. When you need to work to put food on the table, the decision to stay unvaccinated can become an impossible one.
What’s more, politicians have foreshadowed various freedoms for the vaccinated. For example, the freedoms currently afforded to fully vaccinated Sydneysiders, but not the unvaccinated, include: visitors to your home and access to gyms, pools, retail stores, hairdressers, nail salons, pubs, zoos, cinemas, theatres, museums and galleries.
If people weren’t vaccine hesitant, mandatory vaccinations and incentives wouldn’t be necessary. A substantial portion of the community don’t want to be vaccinated, and would choose not to be vaccinated, if it wasn’t for the strong arm of government.
So why do people delay or refuse to get vaccinated?
The WHO lists complacency among the leading reasons for vaccine hesitancy.
But how can this be the case? After all, COVID has already killed nearly five million people globally and infected over 240 million. In the face of these numbers, how could anyone remain complacent? Why do we see unmasked protesters, apparently oblivious to the threat?
The psychological theory that best explains these behaviours is “terror management theory”. According to this theory, humans are unable to face the stark reality of death, and often engage in various forms of denial.
We see ourselves as grander than the animals, immune to many of their problems, and destined for immortality with our gods. As one group of researchers put it, humans
could not function with equanimity if they believed that they were not inherently more significant and enduring than apes, lizards, or lima beans.
Hundreds of studies in social psychology laboratories have shown that subtle reminders of death (known as “death primes”) lead participants to vigorously defend their religious and cultural beliefs, and their freedoms.
In the process, we may defy the warnings of modern medicine, convinced of our own superiority. Researchers at the University of Chicago Divinity School reported half of their participants, all of whom indicated some religious affiliation, agreed with the statement “God will protect me from being infected”. To cope with our dread of death, we delude ourselves into thinking we are invincible: death might happen to other people, but not to me.
This effect will be magnified even further if the social groups to which we belong also endorse similar views. Reminders of death lead people to fiercely defend the values and beliefs of their group. In the context of COVID, this means we may become more individualistic, more distrustful of science or government, or more trusting in our god’s ability to protect us, if these attitudes are valued and shared by our culture or subgroup.
Living in the times of COVID has made us all participants in a social psychology experiment. Daily death counts and case numbers are regular reminders of death that have produced all the behaviours we see in the laboratory.
Early deaths associated with the vaccines themselves became another “death prime” that drove additional caution and avoidance.
Vaccine hesitancy will remain an urgent problem globally while we refuse to see ourselves for who we really are.
As COVID continues to mutate, the speedy uptake of vaccines may remain a pressing issue over coming years.
Vaccine hesitancy will continue to kill tens of thousands globally until its roots are fully understood and confronted.
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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Christoff, Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor, Melbourne Climate Futures initiative, The University of Melbourne
Prime Minister Scott Morrison is poised to take a 2050 net-zero emissions target to Glasgow. While this may seem like a milestone, Australia is still failing to abide by one of the core requirements of the Paris Agreement.
At Paris in 2015, Australia – like the rest of the world – signed up to toughening our emissions reduction targets every five years. We’ve now reached that point (factoring in a one-year COVID delay).
Yet Australia’s current 2030 targets remain no more ambitious than those we produced six years ago, and Morrison has all but ruled out increasing them ahead of the Glasgow summit.
This means Australia is undermining the international treaty central to combating climate change – and highlights yet again the need for Australia’s climate agreements to be written into domestic law.
Under the Paris Agreement, nations should increase their climate ambition every five years. Shutterstock
What is the Paris Agreement?
The 2015 Paris Agreement is a curious instrument, allowing countries to nominate their own emissions-reduction targets and related actions. This discretionary arrangement was the only option to ensure support and compliance by individual states, especially the United States and China.
In 2015, Australia’s first target was to reduce emissions by 26–28% below 2005 levels by 2030. It was well below the 45–65% reduction recommended by Australia’s Climate Change Authority.
In combination, the first emissions-reduction pledges made by the 195 signatories to the Paris Agreement was insufficient. They put the world on track for global warming of at least 3.5℃ above pre-industrial levels this century – far higher than the Paris Agreement goals of limiting warming to 2℃, while aiming for no more than 1.5℃ .
So the Agreement also requires nations to amend their targets every five years. These amendments are required to “represent a progression” beyond the last plan and “reflect a country’s highest possible ambition”.
Specifically, each country with a 2030 target – such as Australia – is expected to update its contribution by 2020 (a deadline pushed out by COVID to 2021).
The Paris Agreement entered into force in 2016, following the Paris climate change conference in 2015. Jacky Naegelen/AP/AAP
Breaking our legal obligations
A fundamental principle of international law – and arguably the oldest – is “pacta sunt servanda”, which means “agreements must be kept”. It is essential to the functioning of the global treaty system.
Although the Paris Agreement does not include enforcement mechanisms, it is nonetheless a legally binding treaty and so, according to the “pacta sunt servanda” principle, must be implemented in good faith.
In practice, major developed countries have shown they understand “updating” to refer to toughening short-term targets, separate from a commitment to the longer term aim of net-zero by 2050.
For example, in December 2020 the United Kingdom lifted its 2030 target from 57% to 68% below 1990 levels. Germany has increased its target from 55% to 65% below 1990 levels. The United States will now aim for a 50-52% reduction below 2005 levels by 2030.
Australia, on the other hand, has not budged on its short-term ambition. Its 2020 formal communication to the United Nations lists a raft of policy initiatives. But there is no change to its old 2030 target.
This failure builds on Coalition’s record of undermining international climate agreements, stretching back to 1997 when the Howard government first negotiated extraordinarily favourable emissions targets but ultimately refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
Howard’s recalcitrance contributed to an eight-year delay before the protocol came into legal force, and slowed global efforts to reduce emissions. Australia finally ratified the Protocol in 2007, under the Rudd government.
Morrison adds to this record as he continues to dither. His failure is puzzling, given the absence of threats to his prime ministership, and the clear support for tougher emissions targets from business, farmers and in crucial rural seats.
What’s more, Australia is actually already tracking towards emissions reductions of 30-38% below 2005 levels by 2030.
The Morrison government has not increased the ambition of its 2030 target. AAP
National climate target law
So how can we ensure Australia abides by international laws, both in terms of the letter and the spirit?
Under our Constitution, unless the substance of an international treaty signed by Australia is also enacted in Australian law, that treaty has no legal hold over domestic behaviour.
No federal government – Coalition or Labor – has embedded Australia’s emissions-reduction targets in law. Most recently, in 2018, then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull sought to do so as part of the proposed National Energy Guarantee. Internal party tensions forced him to dump that legislative plan – but not soon enough to prevent him being dropped as leader.
Those times have passed; parliamentary support for climate action is now overwhelming.
The absence of legislative teeth means no one can be held accountable if Australia misses its emissions goals. That means the Morrison government has been able to approve new coal mines and subsidise coal-fired power generation and gas expansion without fear of punishment or redress.
By contrast, many other countries – for instance, the UK, Austria, Denmark and Scotland – have established effective national climate laws, setting long-term and interim targets with associated mechanisms for reviewing and requiring progress.
Many include mechanisms for systematic review and are regularly amended to bring them into line with the targets and other provisions of the Paris Agreement.
The recognised gold standard for such climate legislation is the UK Climate Change Act 2008, which includes:
interim and final targets, and related implementation mechanisms
an independent committee with science-informed processes for reviewing progress
mechanisms for setting and regularly increasing ambition over time
parliamentary accountability mechanisms and the basis for whole-of-government planning and coordination.
Four Australian states and territories – Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT – have developed similar tough framework legislation. Indeed, recent research shows we were once global leaders: South Australia was the first jurisdiction in the world to enact such a law.
The administration of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson has enshrined the nation’s climate targets in law. AP
Overcoming past failures
Without a stringent and binding plan to minimise national emissions in the short term, a 2050 net-zero target is vacuous.
Without a national climate law, the problems of the past will persist. National policies and effort will remain uncoordinated, investors will face continued uncertainty and economic opportunities will continue to be lost.
If Australia is really serious about climate action, Morrison must announce a new, tougher 2030 goal and enshrine it in law. This law must also include clear processes for coordinating, reviewing and enhancing national climate action.
The urgency and scale of the climate crisis demands it.
Peter Christoff 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.
Before COVID, university and vocational education students were at high risk of developing mental disorders, such as depression and anxiety. This is because they already experience much higher levels of psychological distress than the general population.
But since COVID, this group is even more at risk. Our study has found the percentage of university and vocational education students reporting extremely high levels of distress during the pandemic (23%) was higher than before the pandemic (19%).
We also compared the percentage of Australian adults in the general population reporting extremely high levels of distress before (3%) and during (13%) COVID. In this population too, distress levels have increased significantly.
So, overall, the percentage of tertiary students reporting extremely high levels of distress (23%) has remained much higher than for adults in the general population (13%).
Women and international students among worst affected
Pandemics increase the amount of stressors people are subjected to for a number of reasons. In university students, these include health impacts associated with illness, worrying about becoming ill, being unable to work, having to study online and being separated from friends and family.
Results of studies conducted in the United States and China have also shown COVID has increased levels of distress and mental health problems in university students.
In our yet-to-be-published study, we measured distress in 1,072 students enrolled in university and vocational education and training across Australia. We did this using an online survey consisting of demographic questions and the Kessler 10 Item Psychological Distress Scale (K10) — a global measure of distress and symptoms of depression and anxiety.
The survey asks ten questions such as “in the past four weeks, about how often did you feel hopeless?” and “in the past four weeks, about how often did you feel so restless you could not sit still?”
For each question, respondents have to signify whether this is “all of the time”, “most of the time”, “some of the time”, “a little of the time” or “none of the time”.
In part one of the study, we compared current levels of student distress to distress in students before the pandemic, also measured using the K10, and found current levels were higher.
Women, international students and students with a history of mental health issues had the highest rates of depression and anxiety symptoms. Shutterstock
The groups displaying the highest levels of distress were younger students, women, international students, students living in Queensland, and those who have had a previous diagnosis of a mental disorder, as well as those receiving mental health care.
We recently conducted a review of studies (yet-to-be published) designed to promote mental health and stress resilience among university students. We found:
focusing attention on the present moment was the most reliable exercise for reducing symptoms of anxiety
engaging in enjoyable and personally meaningful activities was the most effective exercise for reducing symptoms of depression
positive relations with others decreased symptoms of anxiety and paranoia, and improved positive emotions
humour relieved symptoms of anxiety
keeping a journal relieved symptoms of anxiety. Doing this may also improve positive emotions
acceptance during difficult circumstances also relieved symptoms of anxiety, but not as effectively as focusing attention on the present moment, humour, journaling or positive relationships
gratitude, optimism, self-compassion, being aware of emotions and taking probiotics all helped to improve mental health, but not as effectively as the other exercises outlined above
exercise relieves symptoms of depression and anxiety and can also improve positive emotions if the participant does not push too far beyond their ability level.
Preventive measures are important
Most Australian universities already offer mental health support programs to students. But these are typically focused on treating distress rather than preventing it. Where stress management training does exist, this generally occurs through isolated programs.
This is in contrast to national medical health strategies that rely heavily on preventive health initiatives. These are generally educational campaigns that teach people how to look after their health instead of waiting for them to turn up at hospital emergency departments. Campaigns start in early school years and continue throughout life.
Australia’s national mental health plan also includes preventive strategies but it doesn’t involve educating people on how to look after their own mental health in the same way preventive medical health training does.
Research shows every $1 universities spend on preventive mental health programs saves more than $6 in health-care costs and waste from non-completion of courses.
In vocational education and training, this amount increases to more than $11 saved for every $1 spent. This is due to fewer on-campus mental health resources and training in these institutions compared to universities.
The Productivity Commission has recommended preventive mental health programs be mandated at universities and other tertiary training institutions. There is an even greater need for this now due to the negative impact of the pandemic.
If you are experiencing extreme levels of distress that you cannot manage, it’s advisable to talk to your GP about creating a mental health plan, or contact the counselling service of your educational institution.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
David Tuck receives funding from an Australian Goverment Research Training Grant.
Joshua Wiley receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Emily Berger and Lefteris Patlamazoglou 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.
Australia has been built on immigration. In recent years it has been skilled migration, and that will continue to be important to us, especially as we recover from the COVID economic malaise.
Skilled migrants are offered visas that can lead to permanent residency, whereas those with lesser skills are normally only offered visas without such pathways.
As we emerge from the COVID crisis, groups such as the Grattan Institute have been calling for an even greater focus on skilled migration, saying it will deliver us Australians who are younger, smarter and richer.
But COVID has underscored how much we also depend on low-skilled workers, especially in agriculture, hospitality, aged and disability care and construction.
Shortages in aged care alone are projected to approach one million by 2050.
Ageing means all types of workers will become more scarce. The 40-year projections in this year’s Intergenerational Report have the number of working-age Australians for each Australian aged over 65 shrinking from four to 2.7.
(Though the projection is less dramatic than presented. The ratio of working Australians to both older and younger Australians of dependent age is expected to decline more modestly over the 40 year period, from 1.8 to 1.6.)
Low-skilled workers are increasingly valued
Similar falls in the ratio of workers to dependants are expected in much of Europe and in Japan, Korea, Singapore and China, meaning Australia will face competition for workers.
Things are starting to move. The recently announced Agricultural Visa will give migrants from the UK and the ASEAN region who want to work in agriculture, fisheries and forestry sectors a pathway to permanent residency.
The Joint Standing Committee on Migration has recommended the temporary skilled workers (visa subclass 482) also be given a pathway to permanent residency and that it be made easier in regional areas.
Japan has changed course
Japan’s population is increasingly old. Suptar/Shutterstock
Japan, which has traditionally made migration difficult, is offering skilled migration pathways for foreigners without tertiary degrees in occupations including agriculture, aged care and construction.
These were previously seen as unskilled or semi-skilled occupations. After five years, workers on these visas will have their skills assessed and can apply to become permanent residents.
While the impact of this scheme is too early to assess, the important point is that there is public support for it in Japan. People there now recognise “the country would not be able to sustain its industries, social security system and cultural heritage without admitting migrants with a broader range of skill sets”.
Australia is facing competition
The post-pandemic era provides a rare opportunity for Australia to rethink its migration system. The Japanese case study warrants a closer look at how we define skills and shortages and the balance between the type of workers we want.
There’s a looming war for manual and low-skilled labour.
There are risks that the Agricultural Visa could undermine these existing schemes and bring with it challenges in protecting the rights of the workers who take it up.
But it’s a battle we might have to be part of. Migrants of all kinds have served us well in the past. We are likely to need those we are used to calling “low skilled” as well as those with high skills in the future.
Garry Goddard contributed to this piece. Garry has been Deputy Chief Executive at the South Australian Department of Treasury and Finance and Chief of Staff to the South Australian Minister for Innovation and Skills.
George Tan is a member of the Ministerial Advisory Council for Skilled Migration for the Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs.
Adam Graycar 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.
I came across Hannah Kent some years ago, hearing from colleagues at another university that she was a particularly impressive student, and I should stay alert for what she might deliver. Not long after, Burial Rites (2013) – a fictional account of the last public execution in Iceland in 1830 – appeared, to popular and critical reception.
I couldn’t finish the book; having come to know the main character, Agnes Magnúsdóttir – “know”, that is, in the way readers connect to those who are only squiggles on a page – I just couldn’t watch her die.
Her next book, The Good People (2016), again dealt with an historical legal case, this one set in Ireland in 1825. As in her previous book, Kent’s deft portraiture and capacity for empathy meant the whole work sang; the people, the physical and built environments, even the unfamiliar systems of belief were visceral, resonant.
In Devotion, again set in the 19th century, she has turned from crime to community. The story is based on the migration of the Old Lutherans from Hamburg to South Australia.
Kent engages here, she writes in the preface, with the lives of the individuals and families who made the traumatic journey across the globe. And particularly, she engages with what is largely excluded from the formal record: girls and women; their friendships; and the chains of love between them.
There are empathically drafted portraits of love in all its complexities: between mothers and daughters, between siblings and neighbours. But at the heart of the novel is what Kent terms “a queer love story” between the narrator, Hanne, and her friend Thea.
Deftly crafted
Both are exquisite characters. Hanne is tall, uncomely and, to a distressing extent, unloved. The daughter of an elder in their church, she frets within the cramped confines of their version of faith, with its rigid doctrines and its denial of the body’s need for physical connection.
‘The Zebra’, one of the boats which brought German migrants to the colony of South Australia. State Library of South Australia
Thea is at the other end of the scale: the child of a woman considered by many to be just too close to witchcraft. But her parents are warm, playful, affectionate and imbue her with confidence in her nature, and in her rights to think, and to perform.
This sets the architecture for a novel filtered through Hanne, while crafting a 3D image of the whole community. All its members are deftly and generously characterised in their struggles to pick a path through life, to balance its inevitable slings and arrows against adherence to their version of the word and will of God.
Hanne and Thea are both mid-teens, and while the trope of the adolescent outsider is a very familiar one, Kent does something fresh and convincing. She lifts her characters beyond the type, and allows them to sustain interest and attention.
Opening of the Free Chapel at Angaston, German Pass, South Australia in February 1844, illustrated by George French Angas (1822-1886). National Library of Australia
A good part of this is, I suspect, because of the world we see through Hanne’s eyes. It is shot through with a sort of magic, constant reminders of the co-presence of everything, and evidenced in Hanne’s sympathetic attunement to her surroundings. While this is at odds with her joyless church, it fills Hanne, she says,
with gratitude to God […] I reconciled divinity with the smell of spa, imagined the Lord’s mansion as a wilderness.
She hears trees call her; listens to what the wind has to say; knows the song of the ocean. She knows, too, time is not mere linearity. When she joins her voice to her fellow travellers in a hymn of farewell to Europe, the pure sound she produces will, she avers, continue across history. This is a sort of Einsteinian river of time concept: that the way we understand time is an illusion. This idea is lightly touched on in the first half of the novel and takes on a new weight in the second half (no spoiler alert needed; I shan’t tell you any more of the plot).
Queer love
Hanne’s loneliness and her longing to be seen and cared for combine in the tumultuous love she finds in Thea, and Thea in her. It’s a portrait of that sort of high, innocent, and hungry passion that is a part of adolescence. But it is more than just that; it is also an avowal of possibility, of difference, and of rights to follow all sorts of paths through this life.
Though her community see queer love as utterly sinful, so wrong it cannot even be spoken, Thea and Hanne find ways to be themselves, together and apart. Desire asserts in them its own identity: a shimmering yearning to be close to each other’s bodies, and to share minds committed to unconditional trust.
The German settlement of Bethany, at the foot of the Barossa Hills in 1847. illustrated by George French Angas (1822-1886). State Library of South Australia
The openness they have to each other, and to all around them, allows Kent to subtly but clearly chart the process of settlement: the knowledge and generosity of the Indigenous people whose land they have claimed, and the phenomenological qualities of country – of plant and soil and animal, and of the humans who inhabit the space with them.
Devotion is a rich, often surprising novel, written with the sort of prosody poets like me are always seeking.
Jen Webb receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Geography Photos/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Microplastics are found in the most remote places on land and in the ocean as well as in our food. Now severalstudies around the world have confirmed they are also present in the air we breathe.
In our research, published today, we investigated for the first time how airborne microplastics behave in the atmosphere and whether they contribute to a warming or cooling of Earth’s climate system.
Other types of airborne particles (aerosols) such as dust, sea spray and soot either scatter or absorb sunlight, and as a consequence they cool or warm the climate system. We found microplastics do both.
In this first study to link airborne microplastics and climate change, we highlight just how widespread microplastic pollution is and the potential it has to influence climate on a global scale.
The current concentration of microplastics in the atmosphere is low and they have only a very small influence on global climate at this point. But given projections for a doubling of plastic waste over coming decades, we expect microplastics could have a larger impact on Earth’s climate system, unless we take action to address plastic pollution.
Microplastics are tiny fragments or fibres shed during the degradation of larger pieces of plastic. They are light enough to be transported by the wind over large distances.
Microplastic sampling at Kaitorete Spit in Canterbury. Alex Aves, Author provided
Other studies have shown that once microplastic pollutants enter the ocean, they don’t necessarily remain there but can leave the sea with sea spray and, driven by wind currents, return to the atmosphere.
This has led us to think of a plastic cycle: microplastics don’t stay in soils, rivers, the ocean or air, but move between different parts of the Earth system.
Initially, we expected airborne microplastics would scatter sunlight like most aerosols, which act like tiny disco balls and reflect sunlight back to space. This has a cooling effect on Earth’s climate.
Most types of aerosols in Earth’s atmosphere scatter light – therefore in general, aerosols have partially offset greenhouse gas warming in recent decades. One exception is soot (or black carbon), which is good at absorbing sunlight and has a warming effect.
We found that, overall, airborne microplastics are efficient at scattering sunlight, which implies a cooling effect on climate. However, they can also absorb radiation emitted by the Earth, which means they contribute, in a very small way, to the greenhouse effect.
Microplastic impacts on climate
The highest reported concentrations of airborne microplastics (thousands of fragments per cubic metre of air) were measured at urban sampling sites in London and Beijing.
We don’t know yet how far up into the atmosphere microplastics have reached, but an aircraft-based study found them at altitudes of up to 3.5 kilometres.
This presents additional questions whether microplastics could alter atmospheric chemistry by providing surfaces for chemical reactions to occur on, and how they interact with clouds.
Billions of tonnes of plastic waste are already in landfills and the environment, degrading into smaller fragments. Shutterstock/Mohamed Abdulraheem
The magnitude of microplastics’ influence on climate varies in our climate model simulations, depending on assumptions we made about how the plastic fragments are distributed throughout Earth’s atmosphere.
Because airborne microplastics research is so new, we had a limited number of studies to inform our research.
Our study shows the influence of microplastics on global climate is currently very small, and a cooling effect dominates. However, we expect it to increase in future, to the point that airborne microplastics exert a climate influence comparable to other types of aerosols.
An estimated 5 billion tonnes of plastic waste has already accumulated in landfills or the environment to date. This figure is projected to double over the next three decades. Without serious efforts to address microplastic pollution, mismanaged plastic waste will continue to increase the abundance of airborne microplastics, and their influence on the climate in the future.
Laura Revell receives funding from the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, and the Deep South National Science Challenge.
The government has blocked an inquiry into whether Christian Porter breached parliamentary privilege in refusing to reveal who donated to his legal costs.
This was despite Speaker Tony Smith giving the Labor motion for the reference precedence to be debated, which would normally see the house send the matter to the privileges committee.
Manager of opposition business Tony Burke said this was the first time a government had voted against a privileges referral to which a speaker had given precedence.
After Labor argued on Monday Porter should be referred, Smith announced on Wednesday that “based on my careful consideration of all of the information available to me, I am satisfied that a prima facie case has been made out”.
Smith made it clear that saying this “does not imply a conclusion that a breach … has occurred”.
House of Representative practice specifies that to grant precedence to a privilege motion the speaker must be satisfied “a prima facie case of contempt or breach of privilege has been made out”.
The government opposed the motion, which was then voted down.
Burke said the government had abandoned a principle that had been a “a key protection against corruption” since the federal parliament came into existence.
“That means we may never learn the truth about who paid Mr Porter’s legal bills and what they may expect in return.
“This is a disgraceful, shameful moment in Australian political history,” Burke said in a statement.
Porter was forced to step down from the ministry last month because he would not supply names of those who donated to a “blind trust” to help with his bills for the defamation action he took against the ABC. He said he didn’t know the names, and was “not prepared to seek to break the confidentiality of those people who contributed to my legal fees”.
The leader of the house, Peter Dutton, in opposing the reference, told the house there was a much broader issue because there were “a number of other cases which are of a similar ilk”.
Dutton has written to privileges committee chairman Russell Broadbent asking the committee to clarify what the MPs’ register requires when members receive third party contributions or assistance, including from crowd funding and political parties, for personal legal matters, or any other matters.
The letter specifies assistance for legal costs in the form of financial or non-financial contributions and provision of legal services on a reduced or no-fee basis.
In parliament Dutton instanced crowd funding by Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young for her legal action against then senator David Leyonhjelm.
He pointed to a number of names that obviously were made up.
Hanson-Young said she had received 1800 donations, with only eight donations above the disclosable $300 threshold.
“I have declared all donations in the spirit of members and senators interests and Mr Porter should do the same.”
A spokeswoman said those with false names were all under the threshold.
Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
In fact, Baird, who is not accused of any wrongdoing, told the hearing he was “incredulous” when he found out about the relationship between Berejiklian and former MP Daryl Maguire, and believed she ought to have disclosed it.
In the wake of the ICAC hearings, questions are also emerging about the system surrounding, and potentially enabling, perceived actions of political integrity.
We are witnessing a moment that will test widely held assumptions about politics beyond NSW alone. Integrity has become stock and trade in Australian politics. It crystallises views on what is, and what isn’t, good government. Faith in political systems depends on it. Democracy requires us to trust the integrity of political structures, elections, parliament, and parliamentarians.
The most experienced political actors know this. That’s why they return to the issue of integrity, repeatedly, both in the bluster of attack, and in the stiff resolve of defence. Berejiklian did just that in her recent resignation speech. She said
History will demonstrate that I have always executed my duties with the highest degree of integrity for the benefit of the people of NSW.
That is precisely the proposition ICAC is testing. Its investigation into whether Berejiklian engaged in conduct that “constituted or involved a breach of public trust” will substantially shape the historical record.
The integrity of the political processes behind the deployment of public funds in NSW has again been drawn into question. It is not the first time, and if we look at recent history, it may be that hints of structural vulnerability were emerging.
Asked late last year about accusations of pork barrelling Berejiklian replied, “It’s not an illegal practice”. It was a curious response; a frank admission that electoral imperatives influence the stewardship of public resources. Nevertheless, she was right.
The ICAC inquiry will examine whether Gladys Berejiklian breached public trust while in office. AAP/Bianca de Marchi
The integrity of the system is not, according to the NSW Ministerial Code of Conduct, compromised if ministers make decisions that might result in the “expectation that the manner in which a particular matter is dealt with will enhance a person’s or party’s popular standing”.
But, the code warns, ministers do “have a responsibility to avoid or otherwise manage appropriately conflicts of interest to ensure the maintenance of both the actuality and appearance of Ministerial integrity”. That’s the issue here.
The current ICAC proceedings are examining whether the former premier – who has denied wrongdoing – failed to declare a “conflict of interest” regarding her relationship with McGuire in relation to decisions on the allocation of public funds to particular projects in his electorate of Wagga Wagga.
On this issue, the comments from Baird – Berejiklian’s predecessor – at ICAC were pointed. His remark that her relationship with Maguire “should have been disclosed” goes to the heart of the matter.
The integrity of the deployment of public funds, in Baird’s view, relies on appropriate public disclosure. The varied treatment of that proposition, both politically and under the code, is becoming clearer. But what about the public service?
Public servants are there to advise ministers and ensure public monies are spent well. Indeed, the Government Sector Employment Act 2013 provides a list of four core values – integrity, trust, service and accountability. It also lists 18 principles guiding how these values should be implemented for those employed in the public service and wider government sector. In particular, the act requires public servants to make decisions that result in the fair provision of services.
Importantly, the act stipulates public servants should be “fiscally responsible and focus on efficient, effective and prudent use of resources”.
To protect public servants from compromise, the ministerial code specifies that ministers have a “responsibility to ensure that they do not act in a way that would place others, including public servants, in a position that would require them to breach the law or their own ethical obligations”.
But as with most sets of rules, exceptions apply. The code does not “limit Ministerial discretion to make decisions and direct departments in accordance with the principle of departmental responsibility to Ministers, including to disagree with advice and recommendations put to them by public servants”.
Where political integrity lies in all of this remains to be seen. If pork barrelling is okay, and disclosure discretionary, then the basis of public trust in politicians and political processes is also drawn into question.
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.
Many allegations have been leveled against Papua New Guinea’s disciplinary forces over the years, alleging that police and soldiers sell firearms.
However, Papua New Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) Commander Major-General Gilbert Toropo denies these claims, saying all firearms are inspected and are accounted for on a fortnightly basis.
He said that the military had a system in place to ensure accountability for weapons in the force.
PNGDF commander Major-General Gilbert Toropo … “Today, people can get such military specification weapons anywhere through the borders.” Image: Wikipedia
With recent reports of the use of firearms in tribal fights across parts of the country, many have started to ask where they are getting the guns from.
General Toropo said such statements must be backed up with evidence.
“Today, people can get such military specification weapons anywhere through the borders,” he said.
“So these allegations have to be supported with evidence. It is unfair to make generalised statements which only undermine our efforts to make PNGDF a force that our people and governments can trust.
“It’s easy for people to make statements that only discredit the force [and] that are very hard to retract,” he said.
Attempts made to get comments from the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary (RPNGC) were unsuccessful.
Unwritten rule Back at Independence in 1975, there were already a few guns in the community, but as the former Provincial Secretary of Chimbu, Barungke Kaman, said some 40 years ago, there was an unwritten rule that they would not be used in tribal fights, where participants would stick with traditional weapons.
When asked about the consequences of those unwritten rules being dropped, Kaman responded at that time that “there would then be mayhem”.
Well those rules have long since been dropped, said Institute of National Affairs (INA) executive director Paul Barker.
Barker said tribal leaders today were hiring gunmen — or hitmen — often from outside their own clans, to target opponents, and the other side responded in the same way.
“We had the gun summit and task force, led by former commander Jerry Singirok and respected senior police officers, like John Toguata, but little action has ever been taken by government to follow up,” he said.
“This is partly because those that are involved in the gun trafficking and arming of groups, sometimes called warlords, are often closely linked to politics and politicians, helping deliver support and countering opponents, or law enforcement officials.”
According to the United Nations Trust Facility Supporting Cooperation on Arms Regulation (UNSCAR) that backs action on guns regulation, Papua New Guinea has about 51,957 illegal and unlicensed firearms.
Tougher PNG gun laws In 2018, to address the widespread use of firearms in crimes and in tribal fights, Parliament passed tougher gun laws that included penalties of up to K10,000 (NZ$4000) or five years’ jail for the use of unlicensed firearms or the misuse of licensed weapons, with the manufacturing of guns now attracting up to 10 years’ jail time.
But Barker said users and manufacturers of guns seemed to consider themselves astonishingly immune from arrest and prosecution by law enforcement.
Some operating within PNG’s cities have even been ready to be interviewed by international film crews and barely conceal their identities or whereabouts or activities, as though they consider themselves protected from police action.
New Zealand today reported a drop by a third in the number of new community cases of covid-19 to 60 after a record high yesterday.
The Ministry of Health said 56 of today’s cases were in Auckland and four were in Waikato.
Yesterday the ministry reported 94 new community cases — the highest number since the pandemic began.
There were also two cases reported at the border today.
Authorities also reported that three positive covid-19 cases staying at an Auckland managed isolation facility allegedly escaped last night.
There were two separate escapes involving the three people who were staying at the Holiday Inn Auckland Airport managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facility in Māngere, South Auckland.
Two were caught five minutes later.
The other involved a woman with covid-19 who has since handed herself in to the police after fleeing quarantine in Auckland last night.
Police said she was being taken to a custody unit before appearing in Manukau District Court tomorrow on a charge of failing to comply with a health order.
She was allegedly on her way from hospital to a quarantine facility and had stopped to collect belongings from home, when she fled.
Twenty-two of today’s 60 cases are yet to be linked to earlier cases. There are 166 unlinked cases from the past 14 days.
43 people in hospital There are 43 people in hospital, including five in intensive care.
The number of community cases connected to the current outbreak is now 2158 and there have now been 4854 cases in this country since the pandemic began.
In announcing today’s new covid-19 case numbers, Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield said infections were still expected to rise and daily numbers would bounce around.
He continued to encourage New Zealanders to get tested for the virus.
“Of the four new cases today in Waikato, two of those are close household contacts who were already in a quarantine facility and the other two were also known to have likely links to existing cases.”
The total number of cases in Waikato was now 56, 10 of whom have now recovered.
Dr Bloomfield again urged people in Waikato to get tested
“Yesterday, New Lynn’s Shadbolt Park was classified as a location of interest. It’s now been reclassified as an exposure event and has been taken down from the Ministry of Health website.
“Having looked further into the event, which was being managed by a PHU elsewhere in the country it is now being assessed as an exposure event with a small number of people who are contacts.
“They are all known, have all been contacted and are now isolating.”
42,809 vaccine doses given There were 42,809 vaccine doses given yesterday — 10,392 first doses and 32,417 second doses.
He said health teams in Auckland had moved away from using suburbs of interest as part of their testing regime because the infections are widespread across the city.
Testing instead was going to be focused in areas where there was a higher test-positivity rate, where the risk of unidentified cases is considered potentially higher.
“People with symptoms and even if they are mild symptoms, even if you are vaccinated in New Lynn and the North Shore suburbs of Rosedale, Redvale and Bayswater please do go and get tested as soon as possible,” Dr Bloomfield said.
He said it was important to determine whether there were undetected cases in those communities.
Dr Bloomfield also said from Thursday healthcare employees working into quarantine and isolation facilities would be allowed to work in other healthcare facilities without the need for a 48-hour stand-down period and negative test requirement.
“This will allow greater flexibility in using that MIQ workforce and of others being able to supplement that workforce and reduce some of the real pressure that is under that workforce,” he said.
Third dose for some He said information was going up on the Health Ministry’s website soon relating to the third dose of the Pzifer vaccine for immuno-compromised people.
It would include the inclusion criteria, including how this small group of people would be identified and when they would receive their third vaccination.
“You will not be able to book a third vaccine on the Book My Vaccine website … details will be up on the website later this afternoon,” he said.
A leading anti-independence politician in New Caledonia, Sonia Backes, has rejected calls for the referendum on independence from France to be postponed, saying it should be held as planned.
Pro-independence politicians have asked Paris to postpone the vote — due on December 12 — until next year because of the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the Kanak population.
About 10,000 mainly Kanak people have been infected since early September and more than 200 patients have died.
Southern Province President Sonia Backes … argues that campaigning should resume as vaccinations are being ramped up after the Kanak population has been hit badly by the delta virus outbreak.
In a letter to her rivals, Backes, who is the president of the Southern Province government, said campaigning should resume as vaccinations are being ramped up, and soon 80 percent of those over 12 would be vaccinated.
She said it was the pro-independence side, which in April unanimously wanted to have this third referendum, when there could have been the option of negotiating a way forward instead of seeking a divisive vote.
Backes said talk of a boycott was misplaced because there was no basis for such a stance, wondering how the United Nations and the observers would be able to understand such a move.
She said waiting for an outcome of the vote stops all initiative, hampers economic development and discourages people who wanted to have a perspective and a future.
French Overseas Minister Sebastien Lecornu, who met New Caledonian leaders in Noumea last weekend, wants to maintain the December date he set in June.
He said only an out-of-control pandemic could justify a postponement.
In 2018 and 2020, a majority voted against independence, but the winning margin shrank from 56.7 percent to 53.3 percent.
The officers, who are fully vaccinated, were received by the French High Commissioner Patrice Faure and General Jean-Marc Descoux, who oversees security for the referendum process.
Minister Lecornu said a total of 2000 police would be brought in for the plebiscite, marking a substantial strengthening of the force compared to the previous two referendums in 2018 and 2020.
He said in a great democracy there could be no feeling of insecurity.
After the 2018 plebiscite, rioting south of Noumea closed the main road, which police managed to reopen after two days.
Lecornu, who ended a two-week visit to New Caledonia on Monday, confirmed Paris wanted the referendum to be held well before the French presidential election due in April.
According to the Noumea Accord, the third and last vote must be held within two years of the previous vote.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
SPECIAL REPORT:By Sri Krishnamurthi for Asia-Pacific Report
“Public interest journalism plays a crucial role in promoting the quality of public life, protecting individuals from misconduct on the part of government and the private sector, and giving real content to the public’s ‘right to know’.” – The Crucial Role of Public Interest Journalism in Australia and the Economic Forces Affecting It, by Henry Ergas, Jonathan Pincus and Sabine Schnittger, 2017.
No sooner had New Zealand’s $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund (PIJF) been announced back in February than the howls of prejudice from the privileged few bubbled to the surface.
The notion that the PIJF was a political construct as the fund is overseen by the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and administered by NZ On Air, whose board members are appointed by the Minister for Broadcasting, Kris Faafoi, found favour in the apprehension of the displeased.
Accusations of media bias in favour of the incumbent government, instilling Article 2 of the Te Tiriti o Waitangi as well as the perception that Māori were being given preferential treatment in the PIJF have since been debated long and hard.
Goal 3: The PIJF says: “Actively promote the principles of Partnership, Participation and Active Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi acknowledging Māori as a Te Tiriti partner.”
“You have to wonder, does that buy compliance or what? And if it doesn’t buy compliance then why is part of that, that says that you’ve got to be seen to be promoting the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, what the hell has this got to do with it,” Collins said with incredulity in an interview played on RNZ’s Mediawatch.
“You are talking about free media, free speech and you’ve got a government going around telling people we’ll help you out in the media because we think its good for you to have a media but you have to say what we think, I don’t buy it and I don’t think media should be buying it, obviously some have completely drunk the kool-aid.”
“We’re in a situation where the government has spent $55 million on a public interest broadcasting fund. [This] is something the media can apply for to get grants and one of the conditions of doing that is they have to, if you like, speak out in favour of this Treaty partnership agenda.”
A grain of truth? Is there a grain of truth to some of the critique and to the accusations of the media selling out its independence?
“The line that once separated journalism from activism is being erased, and it’s happening with the eager cooperation of the mainstream journalism organisations that are lining up to take the state’s tainted money. We are witnessing the slow death of neutral, independent and credible journalism.
“Last month, The Dominion Post published a letter from me in which I challenged an article by Stuff editor-in-chief Patrick Crewdson headlined, ‘Why government money won’t corrupt our journalism’, in which Crewdson insisted Stuff’s editorial integrity wouldn’t be compromised by accepting government funding.
“I wrote: “ … what he doesn’t mention is that before applying for money from the fund, media organisations must commit to a set of requirements that include, among other things, actively promoting the Māori language and ‘the principles of Partnership, Participation and Protection under Te Tiriti o Waitangi’.
“In other words, media organisations that seek money from the fund are signing up to a politicised project whose rules are fundamentally incompatible with free and independent journalism.
“The PIJF should be seen not as evidence of a principled, altruistic commitment to the survival of journalism, which is how it’s been framed, but as an opportunistic and cynical play by a left-wing government — financed by the taxpayer to the tune of $55 million — for control over the news media at a time when the industry is floundering and vulnerable.”
‘Politicised project’ As Melissa Lee, National’s broadcast spokesperson, who is a former Asia Down Under broadcaster, said in the House during question time on August 4:
“Any news outlet that seeks money from the fund is signing up to a politicised project whose rules are fundamentally incompatible with free and independent journalism.”
Media consultant and former New Zealand Herald editor-in-chief Dr Gavin Ellis, who was one of a group of independent assessors who made initial assessments and had his Knightly Views column come under scrutiny from former North and South, Newsroom and Spinoff journalist Graham Adams, who wrote on the Democracy Project that:
“Some of journalism’s grandees have derided critics of the fund who object to its Treaty directions as ‘embittered snipers’ and as members of the ‘army of the disaffected’.
Media analyst Dr Gavin Ellis … dismisses critical colleagues as ‘siding with conspiracy theorists who are convinced the nation’s mainstream media are in the government’s pocket’. Image: Knightly Views
“In a column titled ‘Trashing journalists is not in the public interest’, Gavin Ellis, a former editor-in-chief of the NZ Herald, dismissed critical colleagues as ‘siding with conspiracy theorists who are convinced the nation’s mainstream media are in the government’s pocket’.
“He also passed off criticisms of ‘the emphasis on the Treaty of Waitangi in the criteria’ with: ‘There is no doubt that part of the funding will redress imbalances in that area and some of the already-announced grants aim to do that.’
“Given the fund’s criteria, redressing ‘imbalances’ can only mean amplifying the prescribed notion of the Treaty as a partnership — and certainly not questioning whether that interpretation is logically or constitutionally defensible.”
‘Sheer nonsense’ However, Dr Ellis wouldn’t have a bar of the insinuation that the media had sold out.
“The suggestion the media have been bought off is sheer nonsense,” Dr Ellis says.
“Look at it rationally: This is a modest amount of money spread over a number of years and across all eligible media organisations.
“If they were capable of being bought off – and I contend they are NOT – this would hardly be a winning formula for achieving it. Frankly, I think every working journalist in this country would be insulted by this suggestion.”
Faafoi was adamant that the fund remained independent of political interference.
“I am confident that any decision made around funding support announced recently is completely and utterly clear of any ministerial involvement, and quite rightly is undertaken by New Zealand on Air,” Faafoi said.
To the widespread view pushed by those suspicious of the PIJF that it would impact on media freedom and create bias, Selwyn Manning, publisher of Evening Report, says nothing could be further from the truth.
‘Simply silly’ argument “The argument that the PIJF is an instrument of a Labour-led government is simply silly. The reality is, the lead appointment of the PIJF (NZ on Air Head of Journalism, Raewyn Rasch) is a former executive producer of TVNZ’s Seven Sharp.
“She was the executive producer when right-wing shock-jock Mike Hosking was the lead-host of that show.
“It beggars belief that some right-wing elements from within mainstream media are harping on that the PIJF will impact on media freedom,” Manning says.
“Now, I don’t know the politics of this former executive producer, but if the Labour-led cabinet was truly controlling NZ on Air operations, I doubt it would appoint Mike Hosking’s former gatekeeper into the key role of overseeing who and what gets a slice of the millions being dished out of the PIJF.”
The suggestion that the media had been ‘bought’ by the government earned a rebuke from Manning.
Multimedia’s Selwyn Manning … “The PIJF is designed to serve the public interest — not entrap an independent Fourth Estate.” Image: Evening Report
“The claim is absolute tripe. The same people who make the accusation are the very ones who have benefited from decades of corporate employment,” he says.
“Their former employers failed to develop new-century business models, and, many who believed they had a job for life, found themselves having to share the experience of the unemployed.
‘Smug mainstream complacency’ “Once cast into the wild, their lack of logic follows their years of smug mainstream complacency. The PIJF is designed to serve the public interest — not entrap an independent Fourth Estate. I’m not surprised that these practitioners of self-interest fail to understand the difference.”
Meanwhile, MP Melissa Lee has been conducting her own review into the media.
“Having met with dozens of broadcasting, media and content creators and industry leaders around New Zealand it is clear there needs to be a fundamental shift in the understanding of the future of media,” Lee says.
“Not just in funding, but in regulation and creativity in New Zealand; in other parts of the world global content creation platforms are innovating and embracing local markets and this needs to be considered within the framework as to how we fund these directly from the Crown and taxpayer.
MP and former broadcaster Melissa Lee … “outside of directly non-commercial content there is a serious question as to some of the things we are seeing NZ on Air and other public-funded platforms supporting.” Image: FB
“If there are commercial markets open to adapting Kiwi Stories that may have not had the same level of marketability before. We should be championing and discussing better partnerships on shore with all international and domestic content creators.
“When I set out on my own review, it showed me the industry, not the government and actually, not the taxpayer either, should be front-footing the future of their sector.
“Simply put, outside of directly non-commercial content there is a serious question as to some of the things we are seeing NZ on Air and other public-funded platforms supporting.”
Google and Facebook issue As hinted by Minister Faafoi, the government may follow Australia’s lead, in seeking advertising revenue from Google and Facebook which was legislated for last year.
“Media is changing, the way people are consuming media is changing. We do think we need to assist some of the changing business models in the media at the moment,” he said in a recent podcast with Spinoff’s ‘The Fold’.
“At the time it was happening I said we wouldn’t take a similar approach and we haven’t.
“They have got an outcome and we have had discussions at the start of the year.
“If those (further) discussions happen it might go some way to replacing some of the revenue; we have put the PIJF to assist in the transition so we are keeping a very close eye on those discussions.
“We’ve sent the message to both Google and Facebook, after the round of talks (with local media). I would like to see more momentum there having said that officials are giving us advice on what other options are available to us.”
For once, Lee was in agreement with Faafoi as to the time limitation on the fund. Nor would she suggest a revenue gathering model for the industry to adopt.
‘Excessive level of funding’ “The government considers the PIJF to be a short term measure so I’m hoping it won’t be there when National returns to the Treasury benches. I wouldn’t support the model and the excessive level of funding that has been given in its current format and heavy conversations need to actually be had with the people of New Zealand as to what they want in the future of publicly funded journalism,” she said.
Dr Ellis considers that some form of assistance will need to go to the industry after its three-year duration.
“I sense that there will need to be ongoing support for initiatives like the Local Democracy Reporting (LDR) and the court reporting scheme, among others. However, we should not forget that among the grants are a number of (mainly TV and radio) programmes that have already been receiving long-term support from NZ on Air that have been moved into the PIJF.”
“Look at the Freedom Index. New Zealand sits alongside those Nordic countries in terms of government attitudes to non-interference in media,” Dr Ellis says.
“There is a fundamental difference between trying to persuade — and all governments do that — and the type of coercion that ‘buying off the media’ suggests. There are legislative and constitutional safeguards against it.”
Māori and iwi journalism One of the areas that has caused much consternation is under “Māori and iwi journalism in the general criteria is the section which says: “This spectrum of reporting is integral to the protection of te ao Māori under article 2 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi and includes (but is not limited to) focus areas such as: ● Te reo Māori and tikanga ● Political matters ● Historical accounts ● Profile-based reporting ● Tangihanga ● Māori interest ● Sports (Ki O Rahi, Waka Ama, Touch Nationals etc.) ● Civil Emergencies “
Yet under the what PIJF is NOT section, is the offending topic “National Political coverage”.
Although it has tried to justify this by comparing mainstream journalism with Māori journalism that is culturally specific.
That has been troubling for Manning, who saw it as a deficiency of the PIJF.
“A failure of this year’s PIJF remit was to exclude from consideration foreign affairs reporting and political reporting efforts,” he says.
‘Two vital elements’ “To me, that decision stripped two vital elements of public interest journalism from securing access to sustainable funding.
“It follows that communities, ethnicities that make up Aotearoa’s diverse multicultural experience, see politics and Pacific-wide affairs as essential components of their make-up.
“It is in the public interest that their experience and intellectual interaction with politics, and the world, be encouraged, supported and funded. But this was excluded from even being considered.
“That decision simply amplifies a Eurocentric bias. It was eyebrow-raising, to say the least, that New Zealand on Air stated to applicants that politics and foreign affairs reportage was excluded as it was already satisfactorily covered.”
It was a foible that drew the attention of Lee who said the fund draws over the cracks when it came to pluralism.
“I was deeply troubled and concerned at NZ on Air deciding to allow some forms of political journalism funding but not others and have yet to see a clear rationale for this from them or a clear answer from the Minister if he believes such funding plans were in scope for his policy proposals,” she says.
“While more ethnic media may get a temporary uplift through the fund, the reality is an effort to ensure diversity in reporters should be industry-led and not something that needs to be prescribed.
The Public Interest Journalism Fund payout in rounds one and two. Graphic: NZ On Air
‘Other ethnicities excluded’ “One of the more discriminatory elements of the way the PIJF has been established is to pre-suppose Māori political reporting should be allowed but other ethnicities is excluded because for some reason the government believes Māori culture is innately political but other political reporting based on different ethnicities is barred; that is simply not right.”
Manning has another view on why Māori media matters specifically to New Zealand.
“Let’s seek some solutions. Ideally, the PIJF effort should be split into two camps; the first where Māori media develop an expression of public interest journalism that serves the needs of the Māori community; the second where all others express the development of public interest journalism through a multicultural frame.
“If that was embarked upon, then the challenge of measuring reach and diversity would be resolved through meritocracy and need, as opposed to racial through Eurocentric considerations,” Manning said.
He pulls no punches when he casts a caustic eye on media saying they are as much to blame for young talent not emerging from their own ranks as the Crawford Report in the Fund’s Stakeholder consultations and recommendations noted: “There was a consensus that the pipeline of talent into NZ journalism is broken. Newsrooms cannot find experienced journalists to fill vacancies and many in the industry believe the tertiary sector is not supplying sufficiently skilled graduates.”
As Manning explains: “If I may, I’ll speak to the degrees of blame emitting from mainstream media outlets. I’ll try to explain… The fact is the business models of many mainstream media are beyond their golden years.
“They cannot sustain the viability of their effort for much longer. They operate within a competitive paradigm where the value of an investigation is calculated by how popular it is; how it affects the time-on-site analytics; and how it may devalue an opponent’s brand (clickbait).
Reasons for journalism “Public interest doesn’t come into it, that is unless it serves these elements. Nor does holding the powerful to account.
“Or creating an understanding that promotes common ground or positive change. A Fourth Estate endeavour couldn’t be farthest from their managers’ minds.
“Compare this to the reasons why young professionals study journalism and choose it as their preferred career path.
“I’d suggest 90 percent of those graduating with tertiary degrees majoring in journalism have made the commitment due to a desire to make a difference; to hold the powerful to account; to serve the public interest, and are dedicated to the ethics and ideals of a real Fourth Estate.
“The two cultures: the old corporate conservative dinosaur and the young idealistic professional, simply do not mix well. I fail to see any common ground between them.
“The consequence is a well-healed blame-game where the former media elites complain about the quality of entry-level journalists, and the rarity of the experienced.
“The reality is they want underpaid journalists, of all levels, that will serve them rather than public interest ideals”
Fourth Estate recognition heartening Manning, in his final thoughts on the PIJF, said:
“If New Zealand on Air is sincere in its resolve (i.e. to learn from the PIJF early rounds) then a solid sustainable funding framework will emerge. From a media point of view, it is heartening that our democracy’s executive government has recognised how important is to have a sustainable Fourth Estate.
“It is disappointing in equal measure that the PIJF effort’s biggest critics come from mainstream media backgrounds.
“I suggest this reveals a pathetic state of intellectual decay that sadly is rife among those who once were journalists but are now yesterday’s news.”
That is the nature of the still-evolving media industry.
Half of all adult mental health issues emerge before the age of 14, with 14% of Australian children aged four to 17 currently impacted by poor mental health.
These are the drivers for the first National Children’s Mental Health and Well-being strategy, developed by the National Mental Health Commission and released by the government last week.
The strategy suggests viewing children’s mental health and well-being along a continuum of well–coping–struggling–unwell, and recommends focusing on support, prevention and early intervention before mental illness occurs.
The strategy also calls for “integrated child and family well-being services to better support families”. This means focusing on all the environments in which a child lives, learns and plays.
So what does the strategy recommend? And why is it important to get family involved in children’s mental health care?
Supporting the child’s family, school and community
The strategy recommends focusing on four key areas to improve Australian children’s mental health and well-being:
1. Empowering families to play a role.
This means having access to mental health information and education, and allowing parents to better identify the signs of poor mental health in their child. Families should be supported to access services in the community before their child becomes significantly unwell, potentially decreasing the need for more acute support.
2. Closing the gaps in access.
More than 50% of children with mental health issues are not receiving professional support, highlighting a significant gap in access. The strategy notes ways for services to better support families, including:
improvements in system navigation so families can find the right help at the right time
building the system to support children with complex care needs, for example, by providing support to engage with multiple government agencies
upskilling the existing workforce to increase capacity.
3. Increasing the role for schools in supporting children’s well-being and mental health.
This includes:
creating a culture within schools where well-being is nurtured
providing targeted responses for at-risk youth
supporting the development of educators that are trained and equipped to deliver well-being support.
While some of this work is already underway, the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, extended school absence and facial coverings on children cannot be underestimated.
4. Use treatments based on evidence.
Therapeutic treatments and supports should be based on scientific evidence from high quality research.
Why involve the family?
Therapies are increasing involving parents and other family members. Shutterstock
While therapies for children vary according to the issue of concern, more and more are integrating families at various stages to increase their effectiveness.
So how do they work? Let’s take a closer look at these examples.
Oppositional defiant disorder
Young people with oppositional defiant disorder display a frequent and persistent pattern of anger, irritability, arguing and defiance towards authority figures.
Parent management training for the disorder focuses on spending quality time with your child, providing positive reinforcement (such as praise) for desired behaviour and setting consistent limits for undesirable behaviour.
Family therapies vary, but typically ask all household members to attend sessions together. Discussion points may include understanding each family member’s views of the concern, identifying family strengths, exploring challenges and conflicts, encouraging consistency between parents and strengthening family bonds.
Research combined with our own clinical experience suggests including parents and/or family members in treatment results in better outcomes for children that are maintained longer, and typically in fewer sessions.
Anorexia nervosa
Family support is the gold standard in the treatment of anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders.
Anorexia nervosa is a psychological illness that results in low body weight and body image distortion. Young people with anorexia nervosa restrict the types and amount of food they eat and will often engage in extreme forms of weight loss, such as excessive exercise.
Outcomes for young people tend to improve when their parent(s) are supported to better understand and manage the symptoms of the eating disorder.
It’s about consistency and support
Families are sometimes anxious about joining therapy, often due to fears regarding perceived blame. In reality, clinicians understand most families are doing the best they can with the resources they have.
By integrating parents and other family members in therapy, it is hoped young people will have consistent support between the therapy space and their home environment. Family members can also be important advocates and cheerleaders for their children, as well as challenging symptoms of concern.
Children’s lives and obligations are much broader than ever before. They typically spend a significant time outside of their family and school such as sporting groups, church, social activities and the online space. To provide truly targeted, child-centred care, services will need to consider all domains of the young persons’ world.
Associate Professor Jade Sheen has received research grants from the Australian Government and Victorian Government.
Amanda Dudley 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.
A View from Afar - Supply-chain bottlenecks, Geo-Economic Resets, Post-Pandemic Security - Buchanan and Manning analyse.
A View from Afar – In this podcast, Paul G. Buchanan and Selwyn Manning will analyse how supply-chain bottlenecks, a global economic reset, and post-pandemic security are about to trigger a new era in geo-economics.
Wherever you are around the world, if you haven’t yet experienced the impact of supply-chain pressures, then you soon will.
As 2021 edges toward a conclusion, everyone and everything is impacted by supply-chain pressures. This problem laps at your front door with you waiting for your online-ordered-product to be delivered. And, it scales up to monumental proportions as global super economies wait for the latest shipment of iron ore or semi-conductors to dock in port.
At this stage along the global-pandemic timeline, supply-chain bottlenecks are a huge problem that impacts on every sector of our lives from the petrol our vehicles consume to the rice we have with our meals.
And this problem is going to get more challenging as countries move to seek a best-case-economic-advantage as the world slowly emerges out from the shadow of Covid-19.
We have all heard a lot about a new world emerging in the post-pandemic period.
But what will this look like?
What impact will global change have on domestic, regional, and global economies?
And, how will global powers react to a redefined world economic order?
If change is coming, and it is, then how can the world re-emerge from this pandemic-period, and ensure progress and security are in sync?
Progress and security, that will be the next challenge of our times.
Join Paul and Selwyn for this LIVE recording of this podcast while they consider these big issues, and remember any comments you make while live can be included in this programme.
You can comment on this debate by clicking on one of these social media channels and interacting in the social media’s comment area. Here are the links:
Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
The stories of international students’ struggles amid the challenges and uncertainties of the COVID-19 pandemic seem to have reached the stage of psychic numbing. Despite their numbers, their voices have been largely neglected. They are still waiting to be heard, and that includes the nearly 100,000 Indian international students who make up the second-largest population of the international cohort in Australia.
The students I interviewed in 2020 were a part of my PhD study that examined Indian students’ experiences in student-staff partnership projects. They were all enrolled as international students in Australian universities.
The students offered personal accounts of their experiences of financial strain, mental stress and alienation amid the pandemic. This article is both a call for compassion and a reminder of the perils of treating international students as customers. And if we insist on treating them as customers, some of these customers are unhappy.
Students expressed disappointment about the quality of education they received in return for high international student fees.
Vani (all names are pseudonyms) is a postgraduate student. She had extensively researched the options of studying in Canada and the UK before narrowing down her choice to one of the Australian universities. She was dismayed when her university education quickly moved online within months of her arrival in the country.
“I completely understand everything was happening in a hurry in 2020, and moving online was the only option. The library, the labs and other facilities were not accessible. Still, we were paying the same fees for amenities. For what?”
Another student, Beena, said her university missed the opportunity to demonstrate human-centric education.
“Apart from a few academics, there was no checking-in, no poster of ‘R U OK?’ when I needed it the most.”
Many students talked about how mental stress affected their academic performance. One detailed how at the peak of the pandemic he struggled to book an appointment with the university-appointed counsellor. The wait times were very long.
It was difficult for Indian students to find part-time work, which they depended on. Their struggles intensified as a result of the lack of immediate government support.
Raised in an Indian culture, the students felt it was their responsibility to take care of their parents. The students explained how, as adults, they felt overwhelmed by having to ask their parents for help to sustain them. Kinjal, a postgraduate student, shared her experience of dealing with plummeting job opportunities.
“At one stage of this pandemic, I was literally scavenging for work. I handed my resume to random offices and outlets as if it was a promotional brochure. Those were the moments when the gravity of the situation sank in.
“I remember attending the video call to my parents in pretend formal wear. The least I could do was not let them worry about me. I am already guilty of putting them into financial burden with a student loan for my overseas education.”
When Prime Minister Scott Morrison told international students to head back to their country in April 2020 it had a powerful emotional impact. A 18-year student enrolled in a computer science degree said:
“I know we really do not belong in this country. I have made peace with random racial slurs. I do not feel threatened with the occasional loud screams on the quiet street – ‘Aye, you curry muncher, go back where you come from.’
“But the news headline was a tight slap. Words matter. I have engaged with various groups in a conversation about this statement, about righteousness and ethical dilemmas of politics. All I can say is that – you are asking a loyal customer to leave the store.”
Students also drew comparisons with other countries’ treatment of international students and skilled workers, specifically Canada. They felt developed countries such as Australia need to follow the humane approach of other countries.
Feeling helpless as COVID swept India
The students were also terribly concerned for the well-being of their family members, relatives and friends as India’s healthcare system collapsed under the second wave of the pandemic. Many students expressed difficulty in managing the stress of living a double life.
“It was business as usual in my university, while Indians were fighting for their breath. When I saw my dad in the hospital through a WhatsApp call, it was devastating. It was a hard call to make. Leaving the country would mean never coming back and still paying fees for a course run online. Not going back may mean a lifetime of regret. These decisions are complicated, and it takes a mental toll.”
The experiences of these students affirm that it is time to rethink higher education and look beyond just the economic imperatives. We need to have the moral courage to stop commodifying education.
In future, one of the metrics for universities’ rankings should be how humanely they treat their students. There needs to be a place for respect and compassion for international students in educational policies.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone
you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Preeti Vayada is an Indian student enrolled in the PhD program at The University of Queensland. She is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
My utopia is based on one simple idea: we should all become citizen scientists.
Why? Because citizen scientists can overturn the information inequity that plagues much of our collective decision-making. If citizens immerse themselves in gathering knowledge and asking questions, they gain power – and are far more likely to engage in participatory democracy. This is fundamental to achieving sustainable environmental change.
Let me give you an example. Over the last 25 years, I’ve been lucky enough to be an active participant in the development of marine spatial plans in many countries.
These plans aim to deliver win-win outcomes for nature, climate, the economy and equity. If you protect marine areas from fishing and other human uses, the fish and other species will bounce back, increasing the number of fish we can catch outside the parks.
But there’s a problem. To work, these plans need buy-in from everyone from artisanal fishermen to national governments. Ideally, that means people need to be able to understand fish growth, movement and population dynamics to be able to discuss the issues on a level playing field. At present, that isn’t always possible.
That’s why I have my hopes pegged on a rapid expansion and celebration of citizen science.
public participation and collaboration in scientific research with the aim to increase scientific knowledge.
In short, it’s where lay people collect and sometimes analyse, interpret and share scientific information.
Finding out which species live where is often the first step to becoming a citizen scientist. Many people do this without realising.
Birdwatchers are often engaged in citizen science without even knowing it. Shutterstock
Every day, thousands of birdwatchers enter data about birds they’ve seen into apps. This collective undertaking can become almost addictive for the user. On a mass scale, it allows us to produce maps showing where species are present, where they are not, and in some cases their abundance.
This citizen-collected data is exactly the kind we need for better spatial planning and environmental regulations. Collecting this data across large areas quickly would be almost impossible without the help of citizen scientists.
A huge body of scientific literature has been built around assembling, analysing and interpreting community-gathered spatial data.
Citizen science also creates informed citizens who ask crucial questions.
Are there errors in the data and do they matter? How can we make distribution maps when so many parts of Australia are rarely visited by people? What does this data tell us about whether species are becoming more or less abundant, or changing their distribution?
If we collectively create and share data on species distributions, that allows communities to meaningfully discuss thorny issues such as the tension between threatened species and urban development.
Is a block of koala habitat important even if no koala has been seen in it for a couple of years? Should we be planting koala habitat in other areas?
The next fundamental question – what is changing? – is what leads citizen scientists further into engagement with science and collective decision-making.
This question has been important in improving policies for more than 50 years. Rachel Carson’s groundbreaking book about environmental science, Silent Spring, was inspired in part by data collected by birdwatchers in the US showing some species were declining rapidly. That book led to changes in pesticide policy and gave rise to the modern environmental movement in the US.
To truly understand change, citizen scientists ideally collect data in the same way, at the same locations and across many years. Though this type of data requires more commitment and more attention to process, it produces the most valuable outcome: information on changes in species distribution and abundance.
Observing changes in where species live and their abundance provides vital data. Shutterstock
But this index would not have been possible without the data generated by citizen scientists (and researchers and governments). It was the quality of the data that made clear the alarming trends for our wildlife.
Knowing that the sky is falling is necessary, but it’s not enough. Knowing what to do about the falling sky is much more useful. This happens when a citizen scientist begins asking how our actions cause change.
In my ideal world, everybody in Australia would not only be asking questions about what causes changes to the environment but would also be involved in solving the problems we face and making the most of whatever opportunities emerge.
For example, we have found that the work of recreational fishers in monitoring species abundance and size of fish in and outside of protected areas proves powerful advocacy for more marine zoning.
When people see with their own eyes how fish increase in size in protected zones compared to fishing zones, they often become advocates for protected areas. To me, this is a clear example of the power of information and connected knowledge in locally managed ecosystems.
Citizen science can help capture changes in fish abundance and distribution in real time. Shutterstock
Any utopia requires decision-making by the people, for the people. For us to make good decisions together, we need to have equal access to information – not only consumption, but production.
That’s why I see citizen science as so important. It’s information produced by the people for everyone’s benefit. Its power lies in the opportunities it gives anyone to learn about the world, to ask questions about how it is changing, and and how our actions are affecting that change.
More and more citizen scientists are willing to speak up and speak out about matters they care about, and to question policies or decisions they disagree with. Science has given them power to speak with authority. If we were all citizen scientists, information inequities would be a thing of the past.
This piece has been adapted from Professor Possingham’s essay in Griffith Review 73: Hey, Utopia!
Hugh Possingham works for The Queensland State Government and The University of Queensland . He receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with BirdLife Australia, Birds Queensland, Accounting for Nature, Ecological Society of Australia, Ecological Society of America, Australian Academy of Sciences, Nature Conservation Society of South Australia. and several other science and environmental organisations.
Review: Home Truths: A Memoir by David Williamson (HarperCollins)
Is playwright David Williamson a “Bad Art Friend”? The ethical questions raised by the viral New York Times article about two writers’ friendship, which imploded when one used the other’s kidney donation as inspiration for a short story without permission, reverberate through his memoir, Home Truths. In fact, the tale could be a Williamson play.
Throughout Home Truths, Williamson reflects on taking creative licence with others’ lives. Who has the rights to their conversations, characteristics and intimacies? But he rejects Bob Ellis’ infamous accusations that he stole the idea of his play The Removalists (1971), and plagiarised in the film Gallipoli (1981). He’s not that “Bad Art Friend”.
Stunningly prolific, Williamson has crafted 56 plays since his debut, The Indecent Exposure of Anthony East, in 1969. Don’s Party also premiered in 1971, and The Club in 1977. Williamson’s final plays, Family Values and Crunch Time, were staged in 2020 in the shadow of COVID-19.
In this same half-century, he wrote or co-wrote 26 film and television screenplays, including adaptations of his plays. Unsurprisingly, he is honoured in the Live Performance Australia Hall of Fame.
Ever the dramatist, Home Truths reads like Williamson is on a stage narrating a monologue of his life with the lights sporadically falling on actors performing an anecdote or play extract, written in vignettes of script throughout the book.
Home Truths is over 400 pages long, which makes for a bulky beach read in hard cover. Its length and chronological structure from childhood to Williamson’s self-declared retirement in Noosa suggests the book is really an autobiography.
Thanks to the “memoir boom”, memoir is a more marketable term. However, memoir is a “slice of life” whereas autobiography is traditionally a grand, chronological narrative. In Home Truths, Williamson hasn’t written a slice of life but given readers the whole cake.
Both memoir and autobiography have expectations of accuracy and authenticity even if memory can be subjective. Fake memoirs are now routinely exposed or the author’s claims scrutinised, as has happened with former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham’s recent memoir. Williamson fact checked using the meticulous diaries of his wife, writer Kristin Williamson, and subscribes to the belief that memory is not selective.
The irony of memoir is that it’s relational rather than solely reflective on the self, and this is where Williamson claims ownership of the genre. Home Truths is an Australian cultural and political history of which Williamson has had a backstage view. He recounts staging his breakthrough plays at the alternative theatres La Mama and the Pram Factory in Melbourne, and Nimrod in Sydney. His ensuing success is set against a backdrop of Gough Whitlam’s social reforms and sacking, and the rise of the right.
The continual vacuum of arts funding; cultural cringe, and identity politics weave throughout the book. He bristles that many of his plays are critiqued as middle class, first world problems, and that his satire is anti-feminist.
Williamson pointedly describes Family Values as, “a cry of rage at our inhuman refugee detention policies, packaged as a family drama”. The comment reads like one last clap back to his lifetime of critics.
Within this history is a study of characters whom Williamson has been inspired by, loved, admired, fought, collaborated with, betrayed or – in the character of his wife – all of these things.
Williamson begins with his mother Elvie. Apart from insecurity about his height and his miserable choice to study engineering at university, it’s Elvie, “a seething cauldron of hostility”, who’s the focus of these early chapters.
Elvie inspired “Irene” in his play What If You Died Tomorrow? — does that make Williamson a “Bad Art Son”? In Elvie’s eyes, no. Elvie saw the play’s 1973 production in which Irene was played by Ruth Cracknell, and Williamson recounts:
“[Mum] saw the plain-speaking Irene as the heroine of the piece, missing the satirical edge entirely.”
Less happy were friends who after seeing Don’s Party, recognised themselves and their conversations from an actual election night party at Williamson’s suburban Melbourne home. One was aggrieved at the play’s discussion about the size of his penis from the party, that Williamson recalls, “had become a national issue when the play went on to become a smash hit and toured all states”.
Williamson acknowledges a home truth:
There’s a certain ruthlessness in making art, and at least in the early plays, I wasn’t immune from it.
Kristen Williamson and their turbulent marriage as a constant inspiration is Williamson’s most personal disclosure of his ruthlessness. During rehearsals for Emerald City (1987), Williamson recalls that Robyn Nevin told Kristen, “‘Looks like I’m playing you again’. Robyn had hit a raw nerve”.
Kristen later wrote a biography of Williamson in 2009.
Williamson is now a reformed “Bad Art Friend” and “Bad Art Husband” who learnt to show those who inspire him drafts before they see themselves as art. His candour includes acknowledging the pain that he has sometimes caused off stage.
Of all the characters in Home Truth’s mash up of autobiography and memoir, as much as Williamson casts himself as the “plunderer” of others’ lives, it is still the narrator whom you learn about most.
Kerrie Davies does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane McAdam AO, Scientia Professor and Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW
Melizabeth Uhi, a school principal, stands in front of her destroyed home in Vanuatu, a week after Cyclone Pam tore through the South Pacific archipelago in 2015.Nick Perry/AP
As world leaders prepare for the COP26 climate talks next month, it’s worth recalling a sobering line from the royal commission’s report into the 2019-20 Australian bushfires: “what was unprecedented is now our future”.
The bushfires saw the largest peacetime evacuation of Australians from their homes, with at least 65,000 people displaced. As climate change amplifies the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, evacuations are likely to become increasingly common – and costly – in human and economic terms.
Numbers of displaced people on the rise
Globally, the displacement of people due to the impacts of disasters and climate change is now at a record high.
In 2020, nearly 31 million people were displaced within their own countries because of disasters, at least a third of which resulted from government-led evacuations. And people in poorer countries are six times more likely to be evacuated than those in wealthier countries, according to some estimates.
Already, close to 90% of the world’s refugees come from countries that are the most affected by climate change – and the least able to adapt.
Evacuations are an important life-saving emergency response – a temporary measure to move people to safety in the face of imminent harm. Under human rights law, states are obligated to protect people from threats to life, including the adverse effects of disasters and climate change.
At times, this may include an obligation to evacuate people at risk.
However, without careful planning and oversight, evacuations can also constitute arbitrary displacement. They can uproot “significant numbers” of people for prolonged periods of time. And they can expose people to other types of risks and vulnerabilities, and erode human rights.
For example, in 2020, wildfires and flooding exacerbated the existing humanitarian crisis in Syria, prompting the evacuation of thousands of already internally displaced persons who were forced to move yet again.
Too little support after disasters
Unfortunately, the “rescue” paradigm that characterises the way we typically think about evacuations means such risks are too often overlooked. As a result, national responses may fail to appreciate the scale of internal displacement triggered by evacuations, or to identify it at all.
In practice, this may mean there is insufficient support for those who are displaced, and little accountability by the relevant government authorities. Moving people out of harm’s way during a disaster may be one element of an effective government response. Ensuring people can return, safely and with dignity, however, is crucial to economic and social recovery.
This is particularly prescient given that evacuations can create significant economic and social disruption.
For instance, the cost of a year’s temporary housing for Australia’s 2019–20 bushfire evacuees amounted to A$60–72 million. Each day of lost work cost A$705 per person.
Small island states are particularly affected by disasters and the impacts of climate change. For instance, large proportions of Vanuatu’s population were displaced by Cyclone Pam in 2015 and by Cyclone Harold just five years later.
According to a UN forecast, such countries could face average annual disaster-related losses equivalent to nearly 4% of their GDPs. The impact on the long-term prosperity, stability and security of individuals and communities cannot be overstated.
The point is that with greater investment in disaster risk reduction and planning, many of these outcomes could be avoided.
Currently, the amount of money allocated in development assistance to prepare for disaster risks is “miniscule” compared to aid funding for post-disaster responses.
This is clearly is the wrong way around – especially when the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction estimates each dollar spent on preparation could have a 60-fold return.
What leaders at COP26 need to do
The ABC television’s miniseries Fires shows that people’s decisions about whether to stay or go in an emergency are not simple. People are influenced not only by their perceptions of the risk of harm, but also by the desire to protect relatives, property and animals, or a belief that they can withstand the disaster.
Well-planned, evidence-based strategies are important when an emergency requires rapid decision-making, often in changing conditions and with limited resources to hand. If lines of authority are unclear, or there is insufficient attention to detail during the planning process, evacuation efforts may be hampered further, putting lives and property at greater risk.
It is essential for policymakers to recognise that a government’s “life-saving” response to a disaster, such as an evacuation, can itself generate significant human and financial costs. Governments need to incorporate principles from human rights law into their response plans to help protect people from foreseeable risks and to enhance their rights, well-being and recovery.
Climate change is only going to exacerbate increasingly extreme weather events that force people from their homes. At next month’s climate talks, leaders must agree on climate change mitigation targets and adaptation policies that avert the need to evacuate people in the first place.
However, achieving change on the ground will require a far more linked-up and integrated approach to climate change, disaster risk reduction, sustainable development and mobility. This includes systematically implementing the recommendations not only of the Paris Agreement, but other international agreementsfocused on these goals.
The Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at UNSW is holding a conference this week bringing together experts to share evidence, experiences and solutions for people at risk of displacement in due to climate change and disasters. A schedule of events and more information can be found here.
Jane McAdam AO receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
These charts give an insight into the actual impact – and progression – of Covid19 in South and Central America. As for the previously posted charts showing Russia, and showing the Middle East, these countries are included because they report their overall mortality monthly rather than weekly.
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Brazil
Brazil received more publicity than most countries, because of its large population, and because its political leader President Jair Bolsonaro was a politically divisive man who received much attention from the international media.
Brazil’s overall death rate is comparable with those of Poland, Iran and South Africa. It is better than Mexico, and worse than the United States. With one excess death per 327 people, Brazil has done much better than Russia, which – according to the most available data – has one excess death per 192 people in its population.
Brazil, getting its critical exposures to Covid19 at about the same time at the United States, had its first significant mortality peak in May 2020. After that, and while public health measures were taken – indicated by negative deaths ‘not attributed to Covid19’ in the middle of 2020 – Covid19 was at no stage suppressed; excess mortality continued at around 20% of normal (counterfactual) deaths. Covid19 accelerated for the winter Christmas months, and then really took off at the time of the emergence of the Brazilian (gamma) variant of the virus.
Overall, excess deaths closely match official Covid19 deaths, so the death registration process is reliable. Further, Brazil is now over its worst, has vaccination rates comparable with the United States, and, with high immunity to Covid19, will probably not suffer any more severe outbreaks.
If the timing of Covid had been slightly different, I would have been in Brazil in April 2020; probably stranded at Foz do Iguaçu.
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Bolivia
A landlocked country of two parts – one high altitude altiplano, one forested and ranch lands that form part of the Amazon basin. I enjoyed a few days there in 2017; in Copacabana on Lake Titicaca, La Paz, and the main high-altitude highway to the Chilean border. It was in high-altitude Copacabana that a local, on discovering I was from New Zealand, greeted me ‘Kia Ora’. I feel for Bolivia.
Covid19 hit Bolivia early and hard, despite taking some precautions in April 2020. But ‘Bertie Covid’ got away, and exploded through Bolivia in July. Conditions in Bolivia were both like those in Peru – the worst-affected country in the world, and like those in the covid-afflicted Brazilian Amazon. The high altitude conditions – always a challenge for those with breathing difficulties – may have substantially aggravated this respiratory disease. Bolivia’s hospitals were clearly overwhelmed, with only a small portion of covid deaths diagnosed as such.
In subsequent Covid waves, greater proportions of Covid19 deaths were registered as such. But it was a struggle. Conditions in Bolivia were especially problematic in 2020, following a ‘right-wing’ political coup in 2019. Late in 2020, the previous ‘left-wing’ administration was restored. The election campaign, in October 2020, does not appear to have been a super-spreader event.
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Argentina
Argentina is shown on the same scale as Brazil. It’s official death statistics are clearly reliable, just slow to become available. Argentina fought hard to keep covid out – including closing its border with Brazil – but covid breeched Argentina’s defences in July 2020.
Covid quiesced in the summer, but reappeared with a vengeance – and the new gamma strain – in the early winter of 2021. The data for that super-outbreak is almost certainly demographically accurate. Hopefully Argentines are substantially immune to Covid now, though the long period of lockdown in Buenos Aires suggests there may be an immunity debt – to other viruses if not to the Covid19 virus – still to be paid.
Many New Zealanders are familiar with Argentina, and will be quite disappointed that, in future, it will be much harder to get to.
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Uruguay
Whereas it was common in the twentieth century for economic historians to compare Argentina and Australia, the equivalent comparative study for New Zealand was with Uruguay. Uruguay was – along with New Zealand, Australia and South Africa – a principal of the International Wool Secretariat (which I worked for in London in the 1970s). Along with Argentina and ahead of New Zealand, Uruguay was a co-founder of the Welfare State in the 1920s.
Like New Zealand, Uruguay was the first host – and first winner – of the World Cup for its national sport; Uruguay in 1930, New Zealand in 1987.
Also like New Zealand, Uruguay made a heroic effort to keep Covid19 out; especially difficult given its border with Brazil. The breech, when it came, took place in December 2020; a not uncommon date for covid to strike.
Uruguay’s negative excess deaths show that Uruguay’s public health response was very quick, and very hard. Nevertheless, the elimination strategy could not be sustained. Uruguay’s immune-naïve population suffered – and suffered hard – from March 2021. It took months for the (mainly gamma) outbreak to resolve; for some of that time, Uruguay had the highest official Covid19 death toll in the world.
So far, the delta-strain seems to have left Uruguay alone; in particular because immunity levels re covid are high. Uruguay’s vaccination rate is substantially higher than New Zealand’s; while that should protect Uruguay as well from other coronaviruses, Uruguay may have become highly vulnerable to a future influenza outbreak.
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Paraguay
Paraguay is a much poorer – though more populous – landlocked country with a somewhat quirky history. While few New Zealanders will have been there, New Zealand did play Paraguay in the 2010 Football World Cup.
Paraguay’s experience of Covid19 in 2020 reflected that of Argentina; indeed the overall pattern of deaths suggests that similar public health measures were taken. Covid19 really exploded though in early 2021; the country was indeed overwhelmed by covid, much as Bolivia was in 2020. Hopefully, Paraguay is now ‘out of the woods’, the woods of Paraguay were no place for a picnic earlier this year.
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Panama
Now it’s the Pandora Papers; previously it was the Panama Papers. Panama City has been a boom financial centre ever since Panama formally acquired the Panama Canal. We know that, in February and March 2020, the little financial centres of the world were Covid leaders, and almost certainly contributed to the initial spread of the pandemic.
The first wave of Covid19 hit Panama early, and unexpectedly. It’s peak in July 2020 was one of the world’s largest national peaks. Covid came back to Panama with a vengeance in November 2020, and the Panamanian authorities responded swiftly this time, as revealed by the big fall in deaths from other causes in December.
I visited Panama City in April 1974 – long before it was the city it is today – and sailed through the canal in the Northern Star. A very humid tropical city, which today will be one of the world’s most intensive users of air-conditioning.
Covid19 still appears to be a problem in Panama, though relatively contained.
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Costa Rica
Costa Rica is a country in the region widely known for its high levels of social capital, and for its ecotourism. It has traditionally hosted many western ‘travellers’; the people who don’t like to be called ‘tourists’, but are OK with the label ‘backpackers’.
Costa Rica clearly did its best to ‘eliminate’ covid, but succumbed at about the same time as Argentina, in the third quarter of 2020. Since then, Costa Rica has had its ups and its downs. As part of the Caribbean region, it seems to have been highly vulnerable to new incursions of western travellers, and, as for the region as a whole, its economic dependence on tourism will have made it especially hard to mount a fortress defence against ‘Bertie Covid’.
Costa Rica’s statistics are clearly reliable.
Chart by Keith Rankin.
Finally, Cuba.
Cuba seems to have got an early touch of Covid19, probably from Europe. It’s subsequent low excess deaths indicate that Cuba did mount a substantial defence. However, Cuba seems to not have done much testing, so its authorities were completely unprepared for the outbreak that did come at the end of 2020, most likely as western visitors visited during the early northern winter months.
Cuba seems to have been reluctant to acknowledge that it had a Covid problem in 2021, but eventually – mid-2021 – did start testing, and the rest of the world came to know that Cuba was not immune from the Caribbean covid tragedy. We should eventually know just how bad Covid19 has been in Cuba.
———–
Generally, Latin America has high levels of social capital; it’s statistics can be relied upon, and it did its very best to manage the Covid19 pandemic, despite its economically constrained circumstances.
When I chart excess deaths in these other countries – Chile, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico – we will get a fuller picture. These countries report deaths on a weekly basis, so I will batch them together at a later date. South America is proud, contradictory, and wonderful. It will recover.
Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. You can sign up to NZ Politics Daily as well as New Zealand Political Roundup columns for free here.
The Australian government’s recent warning to Facebook over misinformation is just the latest salvo in the seemingly constant battle to hold the social media giant to account for the content posted on its platform.
It came in the same week as the US Senate heard whistleblowing testimony in which former Facebook executive Frances Haugen alleged the company knew of harmful consequences for its users but chose not to act.
Governments all over the world have been pushing for years to make social media giants more accountable, both in terms of the quality of information they host, and their use of users’ data as part of their business models.
The Australian government’s Online Safety Act will come into effect in January 2022, giving the eSafety Commissioner unprecedented powers to crack down on abusive or violent content, or sexual images posted without consent.
But even if successful, this legislation will only deal with a small proportion of the issues that require regulation. On many such issues, social media platforms have attempted to regulate themselves rather than submit to legislation. But whether we are talking about legislation or self-regulation, past experiences do not engender much confidence that tech platforms can be successfully regulated and regulation put in action easily.
Our research has examined previous attempts to regulate tech giants in Australia. We analysed 269 media articles and 282 policy documents and industry reports published from 2015 to 2021. Let’s discuss a couple of relevant case studies.
1. Ads and news
In 2019, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) inquiry into digital platforms described Facebook’s algorithms, particularly those that determine the positioning of advertising on Facebook pages, as “opaque”. It concluded media companies needed more assurance about the use of their content.
Facebook initially welcomed the inquiry, but then publicly opposed it (along with Google) when the government argued the problems related to Facebook’s substantial market power in display advertising, and Facebook and Google’s dominance of news content generated by media companies, were too important to be left to the companies themselves.
The revised and amended News Media Bargaining Code was passed by the parliament in February. Both the government and Facebook declared victory, the former having managed to pass its legislation, and the latter ending up striking its own bargains with news publishers without having to be held legally to the code.
2. Hate speech and terrorism
In 2015, to deal with violent extremism on social media the Australian government initially worked with the tech giant to develop joint AI solutions to improve the technical processes of content identification to deal with countering violent extremism.
This voluntary solution worked brilliantly, until it did not. In March 2019, mass shootings at mosques in Christchurch were live-streamed on Facebook by an Australian-born white supremacist terrorist, and the recordings subsequently circulated on the internet.
The Australian government responded in 2019 by amending the Criminal Code to require social media platforms to remove abhorrent or violent material “in reasonable time” and, where relevant, refer it to the Australian Federal Police.
What have we learned?
These two examples, while strikingly different, both unfolded in a similar way: an initial dialogue in which Facebook proposes an in-house solution involving its own algorithms, before a subsequent shift towards mandatory government regulation, which is met with resistance or bargaining (or both) from Facebook, and the final upshot which is piecemeal legislation that is either watered down or only covers a subset of specific types of harm.
There are several obvious problems with this. The first is that only the tech giants themselves know how their algorithms work, so it is difficult for regulators to oversee them properly.
Then there’s the fact that legislation typically applies at a national level, yet Facebook is a global company with billions of users across the world and a platform that is incorporated into our daily lives in all sorts of ways.
How do we resolve the impasse? One option is for regulations to be drawn up by independent bodies appointed by governments and tech giants to drive the co-regulation agenda globally. But relying on regulation alone to guide tech giants’ behaviour against potential abuses might not be sufficient. There is also the need for self-discipline and appropriate corporate governance – potentially enforced by these independent bodies.
Olga Kokshagina is affiliated with the French Digital Council (CNNUM): https://cnnumerique.fr/
Stan Karanasios does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
The formation of Australia’s federation in 1901 was both practical and sentimental. Pressing policy matters in the areas of immigration, trade and defence required the coordination of a federal government. As important was the growing nationalist feeling that the people in the different colonies were defined by the challenges and opportunities of the great south land. They were Australians, as well as Tasmanians, Queenslanders, Victorians and so on.
Nationalism is a modernising project, building identities and moral communities which transcend regional and parochial identifications. Compared with the regional identities of the old world, the colonial identities of Australia’s 19th century European settlers were weak, but they existed nonetheless.
The enthusiastic young men of the Australian Natives’ Association, which pushed hard for federation in the late 19th century, may have thought of themselves first and foremost as Australians, but colonial identities persisted after federation, due to their roots in the different histories, economies and social worlds of the six colonies. Time and again during the first decade of the new Commonwealth, Alfred Deakin, the country’s second prime minister, would conjure up the map of Australia and tell people they needed to think of themselves as Australians first and to approach political problems from a national perspective.
Alfred Deakin, one of the founding fathers of federation. Wikimedia Commons
An intriguing historical question is when people’s identities as Australians transcended their state-based identities. I have always thought it was during the second world war. Prior to the war, the decisions and policies of state governments had greater effect on people’s day-to-day lives than those of the federal government. Health, education, transport, law and order, land management, local government, roads, sewerage, water and power were all state responsibilities. As yet, Commonwealth welfare responsibilities were limited and there was no federal income tax.
When Australia was threatened by Japan, the federal government assumed primacy. In addition to responsibility for defence, the Commonwealth assumed the power to re-allocate resources, including labour, to support the war effort, as well as taxing people’s incomes.
The different experiences of the states and territories with the COVID pandemic and the closure of state borders raise the question of whether state-based identities are stronger now than they were, say, 20 years ago. I’d suggest three reasons this might be the case, based on historical observations, rather than hard quantitative data.
The first is that much of the colonies’ individual differences in political culture survived federation. Separatist sentiments have survived in Western Australia. Queensland, which is less dominated by its capital city than the other states, still has a strong strain of rural populism.
Sydney and Melbourne have also maintained their inherent political differences. In The Sydney Melbourne Book, political scientist James Jupp contrasts the reformist, Protestant, middle-class political culture of Melbourne with the hard-nosed materialism of Sydney. Melbourne was patrician, idealistic and internationalist; Sydney proletarian, masculinist and cynical.
For much of the 20th century, this made Victoria the natural home of the Liberal Party, until the early 1970s when Gough Whitlam lured a section of the moral middle class over to a social democratic Labor Party.
Victoria’s political culture is still more progressive than that of New South Wales, but this now tilts it towards Labor and the Greens rather than the Liberals. The Liberals’ centre of gravity, meanwhile, has shifted to the more proletarian and anti-intellectual culture of Sydney.
The second reason state-based identities might be strengthening is the differing impact of neoliberalism on our two levels of government. After the second world war, Australia had three decades of confident, government-led nation-building: the postwar immigration and Snowy Mountains schemes, the development of manufacturing, and the expansion of the nation’s universities and scientific capacities. The effort culminated in the cultural nationalism of the Whitlam government.
This nation-building momentum was stalled by the onset of stagflation in the mid-1970s, and it gradually petered out as governments turned to neoliberal remedies to restore economic growth.
A major casualty of neoliberalism has been the capacity of the federal government to deliver services, as it privatised and outsourced many of its responsibilities. Steering not rowing was the mantra. Government would pay the bills for the private sector to do the work.
In the September issue of The Monthly, John Quiggin ponders how the Commonwealth government of 50 years ago would have handled the pandemic. Back then, it operated quarantine facilities, had a Department of Works that was able to expand them as needed, owned an airline that could have flown Australians home, ran a network of repatriation hospitals and owned the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories.
Above all, mid-century federal governments had the confidence and capacity to lead. They were, writes Quiggin, far better equipped to deal with the pandemic and would have seen themselves as having the obvious responsibility to do so. Quarantine management would not have been handballed to the states, and the vaccine rollout would have been less shambolic.
Pretty well the entire political class subscribed to the neoliberalism of the 1970s and ‘80s, but state governments have been far less successful than the federal government in offloading their core responsibilities, such as health, education, policing and emergency services. Hence, state governments have retained more capacity. As they have become more effective in these regards, and the federal government less so, people have been drawn back into their orbit. Differences between the states in people’s political experiences have been enhanced, along with people’s sense of the distinctiveness of their state.
The third reason Australians’ state-based identifications may have strengthened is the development of the two-speed economy since the 1980s. The reduction of tariffs since the 1980s damaged the economies of the manufacturing states, especially Victoria and South Australia, which turned to services such as education and tourism. At the same time, mining boomed in Queensland, Western Australia and parts of NSW. People in the different states have experienced very different economies. Horizontal fiscal equalisation, the transfer of resources between jurisdictions, softened the impact of this on the service delivery capacities of the states, but we were not all in the same economic boat.
The political impact of this has played out most obviously and destructively in the inability of our federal governments since 2000 to develop a coherent response to climate change. Coal has been weaponised, with effective policy held to ransom by mining electorates, especially in Queensland.
At the 2019 election, the number of Australians voting for Labor and the Greens was marginally higher than the number voting for the Coalition, although this did not translate into a majority of seats. In Queensland, for example, the Coalition won 23 of the 30 seats. In the winner-takes-all commentary, election victories are interpreted as telling us something about all Australians, the country at large. But they don’t.
Perhaps I am speaking as a Victorian here, but for the past decade or so I have been feeling more strongly identified with Victoria and its progressive politics, as Labor loses federal elections in Queensland and Western Australia. COVID has simply strengthened a pre-existing feeling.
The author will be appearing on a panel to discuss federalism in the time of COVID on Friday, October 22, as part of Australian Catholic University’s Friday Forum series. Please email IHSS@acu.edu.au for more information.
Judith Brett does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Margie Danchin, Paediatrician at the Royal Childrens Hospital and Associate Professor and Clinician Scientist, University of Melbourne and MCRI, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute
Vaccination rates across Australia continue to rise. Teenagers aged 12 to 15 have only had access to the vaccine since early September and, for now, there is no vaccine available for children under 12. This means many children and young people under 16 remain vulnerable to COVID infection, with cases likely to grow in coming weeks as schools reopen. There is a chance your child might know someone diagnosed with COVID or become infected themselves.
As we transition into the next phase of the pandemic, we encourage parents to talk with their children about what this means. Help children understand the important roles that COVID testing and vaccination play in returning to school and friends. Give them space to ask questions, and reassure them there is no shame in being diagnosed with COVID.
Here are some suggestions for how to navigate this challenging time:
Support kids through the testing process
Testing plays an important role in protection against COVID and children may need multiple tests over time. Supporting your child to have a calm testing experience can keep them from developing negative associations with testing or other medical procedures in the future.
To prepare your child for their test, explain what will happen, using language they understand. Practise some distraction or coping strategies, such as closing their eyes and focusing on their breath, cuddling a parent, counting or listening to music. You may want to show them a short video demonstrating the test. Or you can get tested first and model how you cope with it. Good preparation can help ease any anxiety your child may feel about the test and the possibility of having COVID and give them some control over the process.
Isla tells kids what to expect. She says the test felt a bit tingly and made her eyes water a little.
Receiving a positive diagnosis
For most parents, the news their child has tested positive for COVID is distressing. But it’s important to remember the majority of children infected with COVID have mild or asymptomatic illness.
It is estimated around 1% of children who test positive with COVID and have symptoms may get admitted to hospital. Some of these children might be managed through Hospital in the Home or be admitted solely because their parents are in hospital with COVID, rather than because they are very unwell.
Children who are admitted may only need one to two nights in hospital for some fluid or perhaps some oxygen. Very few children need admission to ICU. It can be helpful to explain this to children if they are worried about becoming seriously unwell.
When you receive your child’s positive diagnosis, take down the details of who you’re speaking with and who to call if you have concerns. Absorbing all the information you receive can be hard, especially if you’re upset, stressed or trying to comfort a child.
Have a look at resources for families online and start a list of questions for your health care team. Knowing how to access information and support can provide you with comfort and control over what is happening. It’s also a good idea to let your child’s local doctor know so they can provide your family with additional support.
If your child is old enough to understand, you may wish to tell them about their diagnosis. Create a safe space for them to share their worries. Acknowledge your child’s fears about getting sick, answer their questions, reassure them it’s normal to feel anxious and be honest. You could say things like: “It’s OK to feel worried that you have COVID, but most kids don’t get very sick. It’s just like having a regular cold.”
Following a positive diagnosis, all or some of your family members will need to isolate. Your child will also need additional tests to come out of isolation, possibly done at home. This period can be challenging, especially if several people in your family are unwell. In addition to caring for your child’s symptoms, check in with your child regularly and encourage them to share how they are feeling. If you are worried your child is distressed, reach out to your local doctor.
Explain COVID testing and diagnosis in language kids can understand. RCH
Many parents in our study were very open about their experiences, but some said they felt guilt or shame about their child’s positive COVID diagnosis. They were reluctant to tell other people what was happening.
This fear of stigma was particularly apparent if their child may have been responsible for the closure of a school. Focus on surrounding your family with people who care about you and support you, both emotionally and practically.
Reassure your child this is not their fault and they should not feel ashamed of their diagnosis.
If your child does not want to share their diagnosis with others, it’s important to respect their need for privacy. If your child would like to talk about their experience, assist them to communicate this sensitively and safely. Equipping them with standard responses to reply to questions from peers can also be helpful.
Closely monitor their online chat groups, social media posts and their mood and behaviour during this time. Some children who test positive might be teased or bullied. For example, some children have received unkind or hurtful messages, photos or emojis about having COVID.
For some children, transitioning back to school following illness can be smooth, but for others the psychological effects can linger. Some children may have trouble sleeping, complain of abdominal pain, lose their appetite or be a bit more withdrawn, or show other signs of anxiety about returning to school. They may be worried that other children might whisper, point at or tease them because they tested positive.
Working with your child’s school during this time is crucial to your child’s health and recovery. So too is early access to psychological support if you or your child’s teachers are worried, either through a school counsellor or a psychologist via a referral from your GP.
The children and families who participated in our research demonstrated great courage in sharing their stories. Their experiences reinforce the importance of preparing all children and young people for the testing process and the potential impacts of a positive diagnosis, particularly raising awareness about potential stigma.
Encourage your children to be brave and kind as they transition back to school and friends. Help them to act with compassion, empathy and respect for privacy, should someone they know or care about be diagnosed with COVID.
Margie Danchin receives funding from the NHMRC, WHO, DFAT and the Victorian and Commonwealth Departments of Health. She is Chair, Collaboration on Social Science and Immunisation (COSSI).
Jessica Kaufman receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Foundation and the Victorian Department of Health.
Tria Williams works for the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute.
The need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is widely discussed, but the other side of climate action is less often talked about: adapting to impacts already locked in. Even if we drastically reduce emissions, the cost of natural disasters in Australia will reach an estimated A$73 billion per year by 2060.
Intense heatwaves are Australia’s deadliest natural hazards. In the summer of 2019-2020, unprecedented bushfires devastated Australia’s southeast, and changes in seasonal conditions over the past two decades has seen average farm profits fall by 23%.
The strategy must ensure Australia does better to manage climate damage already happening, as well as prepare for future disasters. Australia once led the world in climate adaptation, but efforts have fallen by the wayside over the past decade or so. The longer we fail to act, the greater the costs and difficulty we will face.
Climate change threatens Australia in myriad ways. UNSW WATER RESEARCH LABORATORY
Australia was once a global leader
According to the United Nations, adaptation refers to any change to processes, practices and structures in response to the climate change threat.
It can include anything from building flood defences, setting up early warning systems for cyclones and switching to drought-resistant crops, to redesigning communication systems, business operations and government policies.
In 2007, the newly elected Rudd government recognised the need for Australia to adapt to the climate changes ahead. For example, it established a federal Department of Climate Change and Water inside the Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio, to coordinate emissions reduction, climate adaptation and international efforts.
But the growing politicisation of climate action over subsequent years meant funding waned at the federal level, and Australia’s national adaptation efforts slowly deteriorated.
The Abbott government dissolved the Department of Climate Change in 2013. Today, responsibility for emissions reduction, adaptation and climate diplomacy is split across various government departments.
Historically, Australia has chronically underinvested in disaster prevention. In 2014, the Productivity Commission examined the federal government’s initiative to provide disaster relief and recovery payments and found only 3 cents in every dollar are spent on mitigating risks, while 97 cents are spent on clean-up and recovery.
The absence of an overarching adaptation plan can lead to ad hoc, counter-productive policies. For example, the federal government recently announced a A$10 billion insurance guarantee in Northern Australia to protect residents from cyclone and flood damage. But this risks backing in residents to remain in disaster-prone areas.
Australia has also never conducted a national climate risk assessment. This leads to confusion at the local government level, especially around sea level rise. For example, in 2019 Shoalhaven city council in New South Wales reportedly voted to plan for unrealistically optimistic sea level rise projections that cannot be reached under current emissions scenarios.
Looking ahead to COP26
This fragmented approach to climate policy has seen Australia fall behind other nations on climate action and resilience.
Under the Paris Agreement, each nation should have a National Adaptation Plan to sufficiently prepare for and manage climate change impacts. While at least 106 other countries have such policies and plans for adaptation, Australia does not.
Instead, we have the National Climate Resilience and Adaptation Strategy. Unlike National Adaptation Plans abroad, this strategy lacks enforceable targets or policies. As such, it was ranked last out of 54 comparable strategies in a 2019 study.
An updated strategy will be released prior to or at the Glasgow summit. The government says it will support governments, communities and businesses to better adapt to the physical impacts of climate change.
Australia needs a long-term and proactive approach to climate resilience, and the updated national strategy should commit to spending as much on prevention as it does on recovery. Important proactive measures include:
greater funding for First Nations cool burning programs to prevent catastrophic bushfires
more green spaces in urban centres to mitigate urban heat
partnerships with insurance providers to evaluate projected costs of climate risks and adaptation for all new infrastructure decisions.
The recent 2019-2020 bushfires were a brutal reminder of the need to adapt to climate change. In response to a recommendation by the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements, the Morrison government established the National Recovery and Resilience Agency in May this year.
It includes A$600 million toward communities to help them prepare for future disasters. But as other experts have noted, the investment pales in comparison to the billions of dollars lost through disasters, and must become core funding.
Others have also questioned how the new agency will coordinate with the Emergency Management Australia and state recovery agencies, and how the agency’s success will be measured.
On top of business-as-usual management, climate change adaptation requires understanding how the disasters and other impacts will worsen in future, and how we can start preparing.
Preventative measures give you the most bang for your buck. Some studies estimate every dollar spent on disaster prevention saves as much as A$15 in recovery efforts.
Traditional burning is one way to help mitigate catastrophic bushfires. Shutterstock
It’s not too late
The window of opportunity is still open to urgently reduce global emissions and help communities respond to the unfolding climate crisis.
The federal government must reinvest in climate adaptation science, carry out risk assessments and roll out policies that protect us from floods, fires, drought and increasing temperatures.
The Glasgow summit is shaping as a strong catalyst for more action on adaptation. For the first time, countries will submit “Adaptation Communications” that outline their progress, and these will be updated and assessed by the United Nations every five years.
Collectively, they’ll help track global progress on adaptation measures and investments, to ensure no country gets left behind.
Johanna Nalau receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Hannah Melville-Rea is an Anne Kantor Fellow at the Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
The person taking notes during our meeting, we later learn, is averaging a high distinction in their studies for a bachelor degree. If this level of performance is maintained this student is heading for a university medal – an award recognising exceptional academic achievement. Clearly this is a highly motivated student.
Our PhD candidate was happy he could concentrate on our conversation and didn’t need to worry about keeping notes. Besides studying for a PhD, the candidate is training five prison inmates in a specialised professional 3D design and manufacturing software package typically used in the design industry.
Sounds very busy and under pressure to perform. Yet, in his first months as a PhD student, his paper was accepted at an international sustainable design conference.
Where did we find such high-achieving students? Inside a maximum security prison in New South Wales! It seems it is possible to excel at university studies in jail.
Furthermore, the US and UK experience suggests inmates who undertake higher education re-offend at dramatically lower rates than others following their release from prison.
When prison inmates join the ranks of university graduates their rate of re-offending after release falls dramatically. UNSW, Author provided
“The inmates have been judged in a court by a judge, so we don’t need to do it again.”
His statement reflects the spirit of this institution. Its focus is on genuine rehabilitation through being respectful, building skills and encouraging further education. It also has a strict anti-violence policy.
The jail that enables these endeavours is not the sort we’re used to seeing in popular movies. Features of the Macquarie Correctional Centre include private bathrooms, and beds are in private cubicles in a dorm with a kitchenette. The inmate are afforded privacy and dignity.
These are features based on desistance theory of how criminal offenders stop their offending behaviour.
At Macquarie Correctional Centre, inmates have greater access to education and programs to rehabilitate them and reduce re-offending.
After passing through security and being escorted to our meeting, my colleague was a bit uneasy as we passed inmates in the long corridors. After all we were inside a maximum security prison. The inmates were there for offences that warranted maximum security incarceration.
However, the people we encountered were polite and greeted us in a friendly manner.
This environment was familiar to me because I’ve been to jail a few times myself – not as an inmate, but as a facilitator and participant in Alternative to Violence Project (AVP) workshops.
What are the challenges of studying ‘inside’?
When studying “inside”, there is no internet access. Emails are printed out or relayed. If information needs to be viewed online it is under supervision of an authorised officer. To quickly check a fact or find a reference from the online library is not possible.
All these study activities need to be planned and approved and timed. Procedures and processes need to be learned, understood, applied and adhered to. My colleague struggled at first to come to grips with this, and so did the university’s postgraduate school.
To even get enrolled into a PhD was no easy feat, despite a well-developed research proposal. The inmate had previously applied unsuccessfully to another university. Today, less than a handful of inmates have completed a PhD while incarcerated in NSW.
UNSW’s 2025 Strategy has a strong commitment to improving quality of life, sustainable development and to equity, diversity and inclusion. Therefore the Graduate Research School could approve this rare request.
There were many more problems to overcome. While it is possible to watch online tutorials without a full name being disclosed or face shown (to stop being identified as inmates for legal reasons), it is not possible to actively participate while maintaining complete confidentiality. Also how to access the ubiquitous online learning platform, submit online assignments and meet supervisors?
Working from home and online learning are now commonplace. Yet at first in this case it was not thought possible. However, support from the prison administration made it possible.
The student proposed, designed and made a special computer desk to enable participation in supervisory meetings. This solution was driven by the prison education officer. We can now see and talk to our student and vice versa.
It isn’t just the inmates who benefit
Besides these issues, what good will university study do?
UK data on re-offending highlight the difference university education can make. In the UK, 46% of all prisoners will re-offend within a year of release – this rises to 59% for short-sentence prisoners. Among prisoners who undertake university courses less than 5% of parolees re-offend.
Currently, prison food is centrally prepared and delivered over long distances. These “food miles” have significant economic, health and environmental impacts. Producing food on site also helps reduce opportunities to smuggle in contraband, increasing inmate safety.
Growing fresh produce “inside” would increase sustainability, improve nutrition and reduce economic and mental health impacts. The result could be a commercially viable food-production system, franchised to other NSW, Australian and international prison facilities. Education is one of Australia’s biggest industries, and this is an opportunity to expand it further.
Maximum security prisons have the potential to become centres of academic excellence. It would surely be a win for correctional facilities, inmate food quality, health and wellness, society and the environment.
Christian Tietz has previously received funding from the Federal Government Department of Industry, Innovation and Science. He has also been a facilitator of Alternative to Violence Project (AVP) workshops.
Aomawa Baker as Andromache in a production of The Trojan Woman in Los Angeles.Wikimedia Commons
The story of the long struggle for the life of the city of Troy might be thought of as the pre-eminent Greek myth. Extensive narratives of the war are told in the oral traditions of myth and literature, and they also appear very significantly in the material evidence of Greek art and architecture.
The Trojan Women, a play by the great Athenian dramatist Euripides (485-406 BC), was produced at Athens in the early spring of 415 BC. It is set immediately after the fall of Troy and the killing of the Trojan men when the fates of the royal women and children of the city are being decided by the victorious Greeks.
The grim subject-matter and mood of the play in its Trojan setting have a parallel in the Peloponnesian war, which was being fought at the time between Athens and Sparta (431 to 404 BC). The Trojan Women speaks both to the renowned war at Troy, described most famously by Homer in the Iliad, and to the great military struggle taking place in Euripides’ own lifetime.
Bust of Euripides. Marble, Roman copy after a Greek original from circa 330 BC. Wikimedia Commons
If there was a historical Trojan war it was probably fought in the late Bronze Age, perhaps in the 12th century BC at Hisarlik in north-west Turkey. Accounts of the war seem to have been passed on orally culminating in epic poems that probably date to the end of 8th century BC and after. The Iliad (c. 700BC) and the Odyssey (dated perhaps to a generation or two after the Iliad) are our two surviving early Greek epic poems on the Troy theme.
But we also know of a series of poems, now lost, called the “Epic Cycle”, six of which are focused on the Troy saga. All of these offered accounts of different parts of the Trojan war (which in the Greek tradition lasted for 10 years).
Early Greek epics made no attempt to document the historicity of the conflict in a modern sense, not the least because history hadn’t been invented when they were composed. History (a Greek word meaning “research” or “enquiry”) is a product of later (ie 6th and 5th century BC) rationalism and literacy.
One of four themed plays
As a late 5th century BC Athenian dramatist, Euripides is an heir both to the traditions of oral poetry and mythmaking, and to the rational enquiry of philosophy, rhetoric and history in a broad sense. Whilst Homer was greatly admired by the literati in 5th century Athens, he does represent a world long gone. (Homer’s Iliad may date up to 300 years before Euripides’ Trojan Women – as distant a period as the early 18th century is for us.)
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Euripides himself (485-406BC) was still writing into old age, not unlike his contemporary, the tragedian Sophocles (497/6-406BC), who was still producing plays at Athens into his early nineties! Euripides wrote about 90 plays, of which 18 survive, whereas the evergreen Sophocles wrote more than 120 plays, only 7 of which survive. They often competed at the dramatic festivals, with Sophocles easily the more successful.
Euripides wrote four plays for performance on that day in the early spring of 415BC, although only The Trojan Women has survived. We know, not the least from fragmentary evidence, that the first three plays were on the Trojan war theme, but they were not a tightly inter-connected trilogy of plays, as is Aeschylus’ Oresteia.
First was the play Alexander, which focused on the earlier life of the Trojan archer-figure Paris, or Alexander, as he is often known. In the myth of Troy it is he who judges the divine beauty contest (the Judgement of Paris), that precipitates the war between Greeks and Trojans.
The second play was the Palamedes, about a clever but rather obscure Greek prince at Troy. The Trojan Women was the third play presented on that day, and was followed in turn by a more light-hearted “satyr play” called the Sisyphus.
We learn from an ancient source that Euripides’ plays came second in the dramatic competition of 415.
Cold calculation
The Trojan Women focuses on a small group of women of the royal house of Troy who await their fate in Greece – Hecuba, the widow of king Priam; Cassandra, the prophetess daughter of Priam and Hecuba; Andromache, widow of Hector and mother of the boy Astyanax; and Helen of Sparta, who has to plead for her life from Menelaus, her former husband. The chorus of the play are captive Trojan women.
The only Greek prince to feature as a character is Menelaus himself whose task is to decide on Helen’s fate now that she has been captured. The cruel decisions of the departing Greek forces occur with Odysseus as a key player, but these are enunciated to the women by Talthybius, a Greek herald.
The women are dispersed as slaves to particular princes throughout the Greek world who have led contingents within the Greek army. The obvious cruelty of this process is added to by the cold calculation as to who will go where.
Thus, the girl Polyxena, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, was supposed to go to Achilles after the war; but seeing Achilles is now dead, she is sacrificed at his tomb.
Hector’s wife Andromache goes to Achilles’ son Neoptolemus because Hector and Achilles were rivals and had a major single combat in battle (told in Book 22 of the Iliad). Hecuba herself is to go to Odysseus – a terrible fate, upon which she laments her ill-fortune: “it is my lot to be slave to a vile and treacherous man”.
Cassandra will go as a sex slave to the lascivious and repulsive figure of Agamemnon, whilst Helen – the face that launched a thousand ships – is given back to Menelaus.
Attic plate depicting Ajax and Cassandra, circa 440-430 BCE. Wikimedia Commons
Cassandra is murdered with Agamemnon upon their return to Mycenae, whereas Helen is a remarkable survivor upon her return to Greece. We encounter Helen again most especially in Homer’s Odyssey Book 4, where she has a kind of “normal” life and marriage with her former husband Menelaus in Sparta.
It is important to remember that the extended story of the Trojan war is a genocide narrative, and that this comes through very emphatically within the play itself (as it does in other Greek literature).
The Greeks did not shrink from describing Greek atrocities perpetrated on the defeated Trojans. Indeed it is a feature of their narratives to focus on Greek cruelty. In the Iliad, for instance, Agamemnon urges his brother Menelaus on the battlefield to kill all Trojans, “even the boy that is carried in a mother’s womb”.
Hector’s last visit to his family before his duel with Achilles: Astyanax is on Andromache’s knees. Apulian red-figure column-crater, ca. 370–360 BC. Wikimedia Commons
The horrific culmination of the cruelty in the Trojan Women is the killing of the boy Astyanax, the very young son of Hector and Andromache. This occurs within the course of the play itself (off stage, of course). Odysseus comes up with the idea of throwing him from the battlements of the city, and the Greeks even threaten to refuse the burial of his body if the Trojan women don’t co-operate with the decision to execute the boy.
Astyanax is a silent character in Homer and in Euripides, but his fate in the aftermath of the war speaks to us about infanticide, much as the fates of the Trojan women do with regard to rape and murder and the enslavement of women in war.
Women’s suffering
It does seem to be significant too that the only compassion for the women coming from Greek male characters in the play belongs to Talthybius, the (non-aristocratic) herald of the Greeks.
The Athenian audience in 415 BC knew very well the main mythical narratives of the aftermath of the Trojan war and the return home. They would know all about the death of Astyanax and about the return of Helen to Sparta to live again with her husband. They would also know, not the least from the prologue of Euripides’ play itself, that the Greek fleet will be hit by storms on the journey home on account of the rape of Cassandra by Locrian Ajax at the altar of Athena – an unpunished act which occurred prior to the opening of the play.
So the Trojan Women deals with the sharp end of Greek brutality in the war for Troy – the enslavement of women, human sacrifice, rape and infanticide.
The graphic violence dealt with in the play speaks to us about the absence of heroism in the narrative of Troy, despite what Homer and the epic poets provided in their earlier accounts.
The focus on women’s suffering in the war is in keeping with other works by Euripides, many of whose plays focused on female lives and female suffering in relentlessly male dominated environments.
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Inevitably, Euripides’ play has inspired many later treatments of the Trojan women theme. Two modern conscious responses to the Greek poets are novels by English author Pat Barker, who was moved to write The Silence of the Girls, based around the Iliad, and (most recently) The Women of Troy: A Novel, to hear the voices of the women themselves from Euripides’ play.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s review of The Women of Troy in the Guardian reiterates the violence of the language in Barker’s version: “clearly and simply told, with no obscurities of vocabulary or allusion, this novel reads sometimes like a retelling for children of the legend of Troy, but its conclusions are for adults – merciless, stripped of consoling, impressively bleak”.
Chris Mackie 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.
Last week’s formal recognition by the United Nations Human Rights Council that the right to a healthy environment is an essential human right has been heralded as a historic victory for environmental protection and an important step forward for the world’s most vulnerable people.
It’s also significant for coming on the eve of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in Glasgow next month, billed as the last best chance to pledge emissions reductions large enough to head off the worst consequences of global heating and associated ecological harm.
On the other hand, UN recognition doesn’t make the right to a healthy environment legally binding. No New Zealander can now claim a remedy from the courts because our environment doesn’t meet the standard of being clean, healthy and sustainable.
So, what does a human right to a healthy environment really mean? Is it largely rhetorical, or will its adoption have tangible consequences both internationally and in Aotearoa New Zealand?
Better global standards
Despite its limitations, this new human right is certainly not useless. It’s the first time a right to a healthy environment has been explicitly recognised at the global level.
The right obliges states to protect against environmental harm, to provide equal access to environmental benefits and to ensure a minimum standard of environmental quality for everyone to enjoy.
Arguably, this paves the way for better global standards, bolder climate litigation, and even for more equitable sharing of the burdens and benefits of climate change.
It also creates a Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Climate Change, focused on tackling the effects of climate change on people’s enjoyment of their human rights.
And it’s likely other global and regional bodies, including the UN General Assembly and the Council of Europe, will soon acknowledge the right to a healthy environment.
Developments like this would make the right more credible and more visible, transforming it into an effective tool for challenging states and corporations to do more on environmental protection.
Enshrining the right in law
Overall, the right to a healthy environment reflects a new urgency to push environmental issues back up the international agenda. For example, plans to adopt a “Global Pact for the Environment” next year are gaining momentum.
Proponents are describing the pact as the most comprehensive international text ever on environmental rights, essential for protecting everyone and everything from the “triple planetary emergency” of climate change, pollution and nature loss.
Already, in places where a right to a healthy environment is part of domestic law, court decisions are resulting in stronger climate action.
The Colombian Supreme Court, for example, recently decided that deforestation of the Amazon violated a right to a healthy environment for present and future generations, and required the government to put protections in place.
Meanwhile, the Nepalese Supreme Court has held that the government must take action on climate change as part of its citizens’ constitutional right to a clean environment.
From these and many more national examples, we can be confident that recognising a right to a healthy environment will help improve the implementation of environmental laws, help fill gaps in legislation and support respect for human rights generally.
Rising emissions: New Zealand’s dairy industry contributes significantly to methane and nitrous oxide levels. Shutterstock
Implications for New Zealand
New Zealand’s courts and policymakers look to international human rights for guidance and standards. As recognition of the right to a healthy environment grows internationally, we can expect to see greater reliance on it here.
But there is one specific area where I anticipate this right may provide a new approach: climate-change mitigation.
When it comes to greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and New Zealand, the elephant in the room – or the cow in the field – is the dairy industry. Between 1990 and 2018 New Zealand’s GHG emissions rose by 24%. The increase was driven largely by methane from livestock and nitrous oxide from fertilisers.
Both of these GHGs are many times more potent than carbon dioxide. Continuing to operate with this level of GHG emissions will make it extremely difficult for New Zealand to do its fair share of climate change mitigation or meet its international climate change obligations.
The right to a healthy environment, then, could become a new lever for achieving big changes in a small window of time.
A rights-based approach to the environment will encourage a conversation around what a healthy environment means and who should enjoy it. It may even provide a fresh vocabulary for discussing broader issues, such as land use, transport and power.
As we battle COVID-19 at home, it’s tempting to take our eye off the grave environmental challenges ahead. To do that would be a mistake.
The full potential of a human right to a healthy environment remains to be seen. What is certain, however, is that a healthy environment is essential for human health and well-being – and that protecting people and protecting nature are always interconnected.
Nathan Cooper 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.
Although the link between natural health beliefs and vaccine hesitancy gets a lot of public attention, there’s actually little evidence on the topic.
I led a 2016 review which found opposition to vaccination was a minority opinion among natural health practitioners and users. Opposition was more likely related to an individual’s personal beliefs than a default philosophical position associated with natural medicine.
Some have suggested natural health practitioners could even help support vaccination activities. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. There are growing communities of natural medicine practitioners highlighting the alignment between vaccination and natural approaches to health.
One thing people often overlook is the adaptive immune response caused by vaccination is natural. Vaccination prepares the body’s immune system in the same way “natural” exposure to infection does. It just does it in a safer, controlled way with a much lower dose.
Given there’s no underlying reason why natural health and vaccination cannot coexist, why does this perception exist, and why does it persist?
Opposition to vaccines wasn’t always a given
One main reason for historical opposition to vaccination in natural health communities wasn’t due to the vaccine. It was because they rejected “germ theory” itself – the concept that unseen external pathogens like bacteria and viruses led to disease.
Early naturopathic pioneer Henry Lindlahr rejected vaccination in the early 1900s because “germs, bacteria and parasites are products of disease rather than its cause”. He argued “germs themselves cannot create disease – if they could, humanity would soon be extinct”. Also in the early 1900s, chiropractic founder Daniel Palmer rejected the notion there was any cause of disease beyond misalignment of the spine.
It’s important to view this historic opposition in context, given germ theory had only become mainstream in conventional medicine in the recent decades before these statements. Views of these natural health professions have similarly evolved.
Vaccines support your own immune system to fight COVID. Shutterstock
Natural health communities sometimes raised “toxins” in vaccines as a concern. It’s important to remember, however, that vaccines up until the mid-1900s weren’t like the vaccines of today. First generation smallpox vaccines, for example, were crudely produced from calf lymph in a process considered cruel by animal rights groups, which were often closely linked with natural health movements.
Also, the natural health community didn’t reserve judgement for vaccines and pharmaceutical medicines. Natural health adherents saw other “drug systems”, such as herbal medicine and homeopathy, as equally invasive and unnatural. Although few would see these therapies as incompatible with natural health today, their adoption by naturopathic practitioners caused significanttensions in the budding “drugless” profession.
Just as vaccine hesitancy can be a proxy for deeper concerns about medicine and the state, conflict between the natural health community and medicine also came to influence vaccine views.
Opposition wasn’t always a given. One of Australia’s earliest Australian naturopathic journals blamed medicine for stealing vaccination from natural healers without credit.
Towards the second half of the 20th century, anti-vaccination statements increasingly began to target those vaccinating (usually medical doctors) as much as the vaccine. Eventually the oppositional stance of “alternative” health subsumed parts of the natural health community.
Due to their marginalisation by the medical community, parts of the natural health community started taking on positions that were more about opposing conventional medical practice than about aligning with natural health philosophies.
These underlying factors are similar to why so many people opposing COVID vaccines as unnatural put their faith in equally unnatural alternatives such as ivermectin today.
Linking homeopathy and vaccination isn’t surprising. Both emerged during the same period in the 1790s and both focused on infectious diseases (vaccination for prevention of smallpox, homeopathy to address symptoms of malaria).
Homeopathy’s founder Samuel Hahnemann viewed vaccination not only as effective and powerful, but also as an extension of and validation of his own theories.
It might not surprise you homeopathic vaccination alternatives aren’t supported by the scientific community. But it may surprise you to know they’re not supported by the homeopathic community, either.
Homeopathic vaccines are neither homeopathic nor are they vaccines.
What about just increasing immunity ‘naturally’?
Some natural health practitioners have claimed their therapies can offer similar immunity as vaccines. However, these views are usually fringe and roundly rejected by their natural health practice and research peers.
What’s more, boosting for a bigger immune response isn’t necessarily better. Boost the wrong parts in favour of others, and a hyperactive immune system can make things worse in the short term, as well as the long term. Autoimmune disease (where an overactive immune system starts attacking the body) is thought to be one of the causes of “long COVID”.
In natural health we talk about the therapeutic hierarchy. This recommends using low level interventions which encourage self-healing processes to avoid more intrusive and invasive therapies where possible.
Vaccines – once properly tested and assessed for safety and efficacy – clearly fit this bill. They’re a minimal dose, preventive intervention that support and develop the body’s own healing resources to fight disease.
And they offer the opportunity to avoid the alternative of aggressive treatment and management of infection and associated symptoms later on.
Ultimately vaccination, like the use of natural therapies, is a matter of personal choice. But as someone passionate about both natural health and public health, it’s one I would highly recommend people take up.
If you’re hesitating to get vaccinated because you’re concerned it may not align with your preferences for a natural approach to health, there’s no need to be. Vaccines may have more in common with natural health approaches than differences.
Jon Wardle received funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council for part of this work. He is Maurice Blackmore Chair of Naturopathic Medicine and Foundation Director of the National Centre for Naturopathic Medicine, which was established with a gift from the Blackmore Foundation. He is also co-convenor of the complementary medicine special interest group of the Public Health Association of Australia.
As well as Michelle Grattan’s usual interviews with experts and politicians about the news of the day, Politics with Michelle Grattan now includes “Word from The Hill”, where all things political will be discussed with members of The Conversations’s politics team.
In this week’s episode, politics + society editor Amanda Dunn and Michelle discuss the tortuous negotiations with the Nationals over the 2050 net zero target the PM intends to take to Glasgow. The Nationals claim they’re not holding the government to ransom, but they’re playing hardball in extracting protections for the regions.
They also canvass Anthony Albanese’s reference of Labor MP Anthony Byrne – who gave sensational evidence to IBAC last week about branch stacking – to the Finance Department to determine whether he breached rules by employing taxpayer-funded staff who didn’t even turn up at the office.
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.
Few of us who have survived the last year aren’t grateful for technology.
Zoom, email, connected workplaces and solid internet connections at home have made it possible to work, shop, study and carry on our lives in a way that wouldn’t have been possible had the pandemic hit, say, 20 years earlier.
But parts of big tech — the parts that track us and drive us to think dangerous and antisocial things just so we keep clicking — are doing us enormous damage.
Although it might seem like we can’t have the best of both worlds — the connectivity without the damage — I reckon we can. But we are going to have to change the way we think about big tech.
The first thing is to recognise that big tech is intrinsically weak. Yes, weak. The second is that it has only become strong each time we have let it.
By “big tech” I mean Facebook and Google and related companies such as Instagram and YouTube (owned by Facebook and Google respectively).
The firms that came before them were indeed weak in the sense that they didn’t have a guaranteed future. Think back to Netscape, Myspace, MSN and all those other montholiths we were told at the time would become natural monopolies.
Terrified of losing its edge
Much of the behaviour revealed by Facebook whistle-blower Frances Haugen this past month is that of a market leader terrified it is losing its edge.
It switched what it showed away from news towards posts that inflamed and enraged people in 2018, with “unhealthy side effects on important slices of public content” in part because users had begun to interact less with it.
Facebook knew that “we make body image issues worse,” in the words of one of its memos, but did little to change the way Instagram worked. In part this was because teens spent 50% more time on Instagram than Facebook. Instagram looked like the future.
When engagement on Instagram started flagging, Facebook developed plans for Instagram Kids, seeing pre-teens as “a valuable but untapped audience”.
These don’t sound like the actions of a company confident of staying on top.
Facebook bought Instagram to stay on top. PixieMe/Shutterstock
And nor does its initial purchase of Instagram in 2012 when it could have started its own photo-sharing service on mobiles, leveraging all that it had.
Facebook also bought WhatsApp in 2014 because its own messaging platform, Messenger, was losing ground.
It couldn’t grow anything like as big by itself, because when firms grow beyond a certain size they turn sluggish, bureaucratic.
Google got bigger by buying DoubleClick (the platform it uses to sell the advertisements that drive its income) and all manner of emerging platforms including Android, YouTube, Waze and Quickoffice.
They are the actions of a hungry company, but not one supremely confident of staying at the top.
Australian academic Stephen King, a former member of Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission and a current commissioner with its Productivity Commission, says we need to apply special tougher rules to takeovers by companies such as Google and Facebook.
Big tech grows bigger by takeovers
Usually we only block takeovers where the target is big. Instagram and WhatsApp were small. Instagram reportedly had 13 full-time employees at the time of its takeover, WhatsApp reportedly had 55. Yet Facebook paid billions for them.
In the US and the UK both takeovers were waived through.
Big tech companies can do things with tiny takeover targets others can’t. Takeovers can give them access to vast networks of existing users and their data.
As King puts it, Instagram is big because it was acquired by Facebook, not because Instagram was necessarily the best target.
In Europe the authorities were on to this possibility and approved the takeover of WhatsApp only after Facebook informed them it would be “unable to establish reliable automated matching between Facebook users’ accounts and WhatsApp users’ accounts”.
This statement was incorrect, Facebook has done it, and paid the European Commission €110 million for providing incorrect or misleading information.
Had Australia been tougher, had the US, the UK and the European Commission been tougher, Facebook and Google would be nothing like the behemoths they have become today. They might have peaked and be losing market share.
We are able to say no
Their future is largely in our hands. For big tech companies able to use the weight of their networks (and only for those companies) we could “just say no” to takeovers. It’s hard to think of a reason for one to proceed.
If needed, we could change the law to make “no” the default.
This wouldn’t shrink the companies in a hurry. Most of the users of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the like are locked in, because that’s where their friends are.
But where the friends are changes every generation.
Facebook and Google know this, which is why they are so keen to take over upstart competitors and emerging platforms in fields they haven’t thought of.
If we stopped them, we wouldn’t stop them growing straight away, but we would make it hard for them to fight the natural order in which the new and fashionable displace the old and predictable. It’s their deepest fear.
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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.
When Emma Watkins took over as “The Yellow Wiggle” in 2012 there were huge headlines. Her casting was a seismic shift for those who grew up loving her male predecessors (Greg Page, and then briefly Sam Moran), but also a challenge to the status quo. As Forbes proclaimed: “the Wiggles are dead. Long live the Wiggles.”
For over 20 years, The Wiggles was headlined by four men. With the first female Wiggle, “the girl with the bow in her hair” and “Emma Ballerina”, the cult of Emma Wiggle became a huge part of Australian (and international) playrooms: 50% of current Wiggles merchandise sales are attributed to her alone.
In her nine years as the Yellow Wiggle, Emma became an obvious favourite and point of difference in the band. As she hangs up the yellow skivvy, it is worth reflecting on just how important her casting was at the time – and what her legacy means for the band going forward.
Early childhood role models
When The Wiggles started in 1991, it was a massive statement to have four men lead as early childhood role models, musicians, artists and teachers.
The original Wiggles proved Australian men could exist without needing to be in close proximity to a crocodile or sporting field – they could dance, play, and invite their audiences to come along just for the pure joy of it all.
That’s not to say the going was always easy. According to Blue Wiggle Murray Cook, the group’s iconic “Wiggle fingers” move was actually a deliberate decision made to show where their hands were at all times while working with children.
For years, the battle for top of the entertainers’ ‘rich list’ has been between The Wiggles and AC/DC. The Wiggles
In the early 2000s, The Wiggles won the hearts of America too via The Disney Channel, selling out 12 consecutive shows at Madison Square Garden. They were so well known (and loved) that Tina Fey’s 30 Rock made a hilarious (but not safe for kids!) parody of them, “The Waggles”.
When most of the original line up retired and Emma, Lachly and Simon came on board in 2012, it was proof the skivvies and songs could live on.
The first ‘girl’ Wiggle
Emma has always made the Yellow Wiggle position her own: bringing something new to the role. From the start, her performances with the otherwise male-dominated group were highly accomplished. A skilled dancer, her focus was often on movement first and sound second – this allowed different ways for audiences to engage.
While all the group dressed up, her flowing skirt and huge bows were clear points of difference. But it was never just the girls doing ballet: the whole extended cast joined in a range of styles and genres from Irish dancing to hip hop. All audiences were invited to participate in these extended styles of movement.
When “purple wiggle” (and former husband) Lachy Gillespie appeared on Instagram wearing an Emma bow he proudly declared “Boys can be Emma”.
More important than her costumes was Watkins’ advocacy for Auslan and other inclusive practices. Anyone who has ever seen the show, or her self-titled spin off, can at least sign “E, M, M, A” in Auslan.
Innovations
The Wiggles have entertained generations of Australian children and their families. They are not just “children’s music”: The Wiggles belong to everyone. This is perhaps most true in the other news from today, that the original line up, the “OG Wiggles”, will be performing again in another series of 18+ shows.
The band is now a truly cross-generational line up: with founder Anthony Field still writing and performing in his late 50s; Lachy and Simon each very new parents; and Watkins’ replacement 16-year-old Tsehay Hawkins, a wonderful dancer and performer who has already appeared with the group as part of their earlier broadening this year into an eight-piece main cast for “Fruit Salad TV”.
The new Yellow Wiggle is 16-year-old Tsehay Hawkins. The Wiggles
The cast of eight also reflects a changing and increasingly culturally diverse Australia. While politician Matt Canavan criticised the expansion as The Wiggles “going woke”, for many it was proof that representation matters not just for children, but for the adults (and artists) they become.
As a parent, I can’t wait to see how The Wiggles continue to grow, as the next Wiggle girls appear on screen wearing pants, riding skateboards and leading the songs.
So, Emma Wiggle: thanks for everything. Thanks for literally being up with us while everyone else is asleep (either with a baby who is up very late or a toddler very early). And thanks not just for the little kids – but for the comfort you and the other Wiggles continue to give to us bigger kids too.
Liz Giuffre 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.
Have you heard of OnlyFans? It’s a social media platform – like YouTube or Instagram.
Access isn’t open to everyone, however. Only subscribers (“fans”) can see the photos and videos posted by OnlyFans content creators. Most subscriptions cost around US$10 (A$13.50) a month, with tips as optional extras.
Visiting the OnlyFans homepage, you’re invited to “sign up to support your favourite creators”. The platform describes itself as a place where “creators can monetise their content and interact with their fanbase”.
So, if you’re new to OnlyFans, it may surprise you to learn it is overwhelmingly understood as a site for adult content. The phrase “to start an OnlyFans” is commonly understood to mean someone is selling access to erotic, or sexually explicit, photos and videos of themselves.
Why is there this disconnect? And why is this a problem?
Studying OnlyFans
In a new article for journal Porn Studies I analysed 100 news articles (from February to December 2020), 100 OnlyFans memes (gathered January 2021), as well as 100 posts to the official OnlyFans blog (from mid-2018 to early 2021).
These sources represent different perspectives. News articles reflect mainstream understandings. Internet memes – remixed snippets of popular culture – reveal our shared norms and values. Meanwhile, official blog posts can tell us about the image Only Fans is attempting to cultivate.
My study drew on the work of social media scholars Karin van Es and Thomas Poell, who argue, what people think a platform is for matters – they call this the “platform imaginary”. It impacts how people use it: their expectations and experiences. Importantly, it also impacts who thinks the platform is for them.
A ‘celebrity porn app’?
My analysis discovered very different ideas about what OnlyFans is for, or a contested “platform imaginary”.
In a similar vein, memes about OnlyFans implied the platform was for adult content, with jokes about how easy it is for women to make money by showing off their bodies.
Other memes include a man taking a photo of his behind, with the tagline, “when you find out how much money they make on OnlyFans”. Another is a picture of a serious-looking young man on the phone, captioned, “Me calling customer support when her OnlyFans is just pictures of her in a bikini”.
The memes were especially telling – they didn’t just joke about OnlyFans being a platform for adult content, they also slut-shamed the creators by inferring that selling adult content was degrading.
Or a place for makeup and workout tips?
By contrast, 87% of posts to the OnlyFans blog don’t mention adult content at all.
Instead, the blog showcases fitness instructors, beauty experts, photographers, artists, and musicians. One (rare) post to do this claims the platform will support, and never censor, pole dancers.
This ties in with its official (vague) line that OnlyFans contains “content creators from all genres”. This emphasis is misleading, given OnlyFans CEO Tim Stokely created the platform in 2016 to capitalise on the rising demand for customised porn.
OnlyFans has thrived during COVID lockdowns. From November 2019 to November 2020, it posted revenues of US$400 million (A$541 million), up 540% over the previous year. Although there is an argument the company needs to “rebrand” to stay profitable. As Axios recently reported, while sexual content makes the site popular, “it also scares off venture capitalists”.
Profiting from, then banning, explicit content
In August, OnlyFans announced it was going to ban sexually explicit content, explaining it must “evolve our content guidelines”,
In order to ensure the long-term sustainability of the platform, and to continue to host an inclusive community of creators and fans.
There was an immediate backlash. Not only was it ridiculed as nonsensical (a site for adult content that doesn’t allow adult content?), sex workers, porn performers, and adult content creators were outraged about being banned from a site they had helped make famous and profitable.
The company reversed the decision just a week later, after resolving a undisclosed issue with its payment providers. But anger and distrust remains, as now the door is open to OnlyFans banning explicit content in the future.
Deplatforming sex
There is also a bigger issue here about maintaining spaces where sex workers are safe and able to do their jobs.
Often debates around “deplatforming” (removing someone’s access to a web site) centre around free speech and whether people like Donald Trump should be allowed a Twitter. But deplatforming is also a serious threat to sex workers and porn producers as part of a “gentrification” of the internet.
Banning sex from a particular platform means sexually marginalised people lose somewhere safe to interact. As queer studies scholar Stephen Molldrem wrote when microblogging site Tumblr banned porn in 2018:
many queers, kinksters, people who engage in various kinds of sexual commerce, and transfolk who use the platform […] are going to get shafted by the decision (and not in a good way).
It also cuts off important avenues for sexual experimentation, and education. And destroys the livelihoods of those in the adult industry.
Further adding to the uncertainty is the issue of chargebacks – payment providers see sex and porn as high-risk industries because of the high rate people denying they paid and getting a refund.
What OnlyFans should do now
My research shows the split identity of OnlyFans. This is something it will need to resolve going forward (both for itself and its creators). But there’s an opportunity here for OnlyFans to declare its support for sex workers and porn performers.
Openly stating adult content creators are welcome, including them prominently on the OnlyFans blog, and proactively working with payment companies to ensure they can profit from their work would set an example. As an aside, Fortune notes, going G-rated might help OnlyFans secure investors in the short term, but could cost the business over the long term.
Meanwhile, for those in a stigmatised, precarious industry, a place that cultivates a sense of belonging for adult content creators is a platform worth imagining.
Emily van der Nagel 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.
University of Auckland Department of Conservation, Author provided
The world’s rarest marine dolphin, Māui, is found only along the west coast of the North Island of Aotearoa New Zealand.
Based on our surveys over the last two summers, during which we collected small tissue samples for DNA analysis, we estimate there are currently only 54 Māui dolphins over one year of age.
These estimates are similar to previous surveys carried out over the past decade, since the establishment of the West Coast North Island Marine Mammal Sanctuary in 2008, which restricts or regulates the use of setnets, trawling and drift nets within 12 nautical miles of most of the west coast.
The prevailing narrative remains that fisheries pose by far the most significant threat, but we argue it is time to act on other causes of death, including the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis, a disease that starts in cats.
Māui dolphins are a genetically distinct subspecies, separated by about 15,000 years from the closely related Hector’s dolphin. They look identical but Māui dolphins are found only along the west coast of the North Island and are critically endangered, while Hector’s are mainly found around the South Island.
Historically, there were several hundred Māui dolphins, but numbers declined rapidly from the 1970s, largely because they were being caught in fishing nets. Despite warnings during the 1980s and 1990s about the unsustainable number of deaths, there was initially a lack of urgency to address this threat.
We now risk repeating history by ignoring other known threats.
We know toxoplasmosis kills Māui dolphins, but the greatest challenge in determining the exact cause of death is finding their bodies. Some wash ashore, but with so few dolphins spread over a sparsely inhabited, rugged coastline, only a small percentage are found. Many are too decomposed to determine their cause of death.
Post-mortems show they die from “natural” causes such as old age, disease and shark predation, but also from human-related factors, including toxoplasmosis.
Researchers found over half of the dead Māui and Hector’s dolphins examined were infected with the parasite that causes toxoplasmosis. Of the ten Māui dolphins found dead since 2006, two had died of toxoplasmosis.
This parasite completes its life cycle inside a cat, producing millions of eggs that enter the environment in cat poo. These eggs are extremely resistant. They can survive hot, cold, dry and wet conditions, including in seawater, for at least a year.
The eggs enter the sea in freshwater runoff, where they are eaten by fish, shellfish and crabs. Māui dolphins are most likely infected by eating fish that have consumed the parasite eggs. Once inside a dolphin, the parasite multiplies and can cause death.
Toxoplasmosis also kills native birds and can cause disease in humans.
The fact that cats can indirectly kill dolphins is difficult for many people to comprehend, leading some to discount this as a serious threat. While the overall impact of toxoplasmosis is currently unclear, ultimately this is a human-caused threat which should be openly discussed, as has happened for fisheries threats.
We believe the current focus on fisheries bycatch, to the exclusion of all other threats, puts Māui dolphins at risk of further decline.
Repeating history
There is considerable uncertainty around this threat, but we do know Māui dolphins die of toxoplasmosis and this disease causes population-level impacts on other species of marine mammals, including sea otters and Hawaiian monk seals.
In terms of action, we’ve been here before: lack of certainty around Māui dolphin bycatch deaths in the 1980s and 1990s meant that the threat from fisheries was largely ignored, with the loss of more dolphins.
We risk repeating history if we again ignore the known threat of toxoplasmosis because we are unable to have courageous conversations about managing the risk to the few remaining Māui dolphins.
We believe the fisheries risk, while not entirely eliminated, has largely been controlled. However, because of the exclusive focus on fisheries from some sectors, New Zealand is at the centre of a US lawsuit to ban our fish imports.
This lawsuit claims there is insufficient protection from bycatch. It is based on unsupported information about Māui dolphin distribution. If the lawsuit is successful, it could cost New Zealand up to NZ$200 million.
Considering the Māui dolphin’s status and the financial risk to New Zealand, the government seems slow to support open discussion, research and actions to manage poorly understood risks, including disease.
Millions of research dollars are spent on terrestrial species that have less urgent immediate conservation needs and less reputational risk to Aotearoa. The Māui dolphin is our most urgent conservation priority, and we face challenging decisions.
If we are to learn anything from the lack of action to manage fisheries threats when they were first identified, it is that we should not let uncertainty stop us from acting to manage other threats to Māui dolphins.
Rochelle Constantine receives funding from the Department of Conservation – Te Papa Atawhai and Fisheries New Zealand – Tini a Tangaroa. She is affiliated with MAUI63.
Wendi Roe does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gabi Mocatta, Research Fellow in Climate Change Communication, Climate Futures Program, University of Tasmania, and Lecturer in Communication – Journalism, Deakin University
Our children are growing up in a volatile climate. It’s already damaging their health, wealth and well-being. Universities can be leaders in helping young people gain the knowledge they need to navigate this uncertain future. Curious Climate Schools, a project that connects young people directly with experts who can answer their climate questions, is a model for just this kind of leadership.
Universities across the globe come together this week to support climate action leadership in their communities as part of Global Climate Change Week. In Tasmania, our Curious Climate Schools project has connected over 1,000 school students, aged 10-18, with 57 climate researchers from diverse disciplines to answer students’ questions.
Climate change will increasingly affect our children’s lives, even if we take the profound action needed this decade to avert the worst of it. Young people will need to be climate-literate for the world they are inheriting. Although learning about climate change is established as vital in enhancing understanding and action, climate literacy education is not mandated in the Australian Curriculum.
Our aim is to empower children to develop essential climate knowledge through student-led enquiry. Our experts’ answers to questions from schools across the state will be made public on the Curious Climate Schools website on November 1. This will coincide with the COP26 climate summit, connecting local and global climate leadership.
Students have submitted questions to our project that range from the global to the local. Key themes in their questions included:
who is responsible?
how urgent is action?
how do we adapt and care for the planet and its future inhabitants?
why aren’t politicians listening?
The children had many queries about the science of climate change, but even more about our social and political responses. For example:
“I’m 13. What do you think climate change will alter about the world in my lifetime, and what can I do about it?”
“Does the climate crisis have the potential to unite humanity in response?”
“When it comes to future generations, how will they feel about what we have done?”
While children are interested in the physical science behind climate change, their questions show they are equally concerned with how we should act on climate as a society. This suggests that when climate change is taught in schools, it should be taught holistically. While understanding the drivers of climate change is important, teaching must also address the social challenges we face and the decision-making processes this wicked problem demands.
The current silence on climate in schools’ teaching is bad for children’s mental health. Research has established that speaking about climate change is an important first step in easing legitimate climate anxiety. Education that enables students’ agency through climate literacy could reduce the mental health burden on young people.
We need climate-literate young people. Empowering them to talk about climate change could both improve their mental health and help to build the engaged citizenry and leadership we need to face the climate crisis.
Acknowledging that children have a stake in climate action and decision-making is vital. Without this, they feel disempowered and frustrated. We saw this in some of the questions submitted to Curious Climate Schools.
“Do you believe that we as the future leaders are being heard enough? For example, Scott Morrison or the other politicians, are they listening?”
These students are our future leaders. They deserve to be heard.
A model for university climate leadership
Many universities are well equipped to address local climate challenges in partnership with their communities. Curious Climate Schools is an example of how universities can engage with the public to enhance climate knowledge and action.
Our project is harnessing the knowledge, care and enthusiasm of 57 experts. They work in a range of fields, including climate modelling, biodiversity conservation, pyrogeography, chemistry, law, social science, engineering, geology, oceanography, paleoclimatology, Indigenous knowledges and health.
The Curious Climate Schools website will equip students with holistic climate knowledge and help teachers to address a subject at the forefront of students’ minds – if not the Australian Curriculum.
With initiatives like Curious Climate Schools, universities can be leaders in climate action. In this decisive moment, it is crucial that we harness our collective talents in whatever ways we can to ensure a liveable world for our children.
Gabi Mocatta received funding from the University of Tasmania and from the Tasmanian Climate Change Office for the research and engagement reported in this article. She is vice-president of the Board of the International Environmental Communication Association and co-lead of the Climate Change Communication and Narratives Network, funded by Deakin University.
Chloe Lucas received funding from the University of Tasmania and from the Tasmanian Climate Change Office for the research and engagement reported in this article. She is also funded by the Australian Research Council. Chloe is a member of the Institute of Australian Geographers and the International Environment Communication Association, and is a member of the Editorial Board of Australian Geographer.
Anthony Albanese has referred Labor MP Anthony Bryne to the finance department to investigate his employment of taxpayer-funded staff who didn’t turn up to his office.
Albanese said he had first spoken to Byrne about whether he would refer himself to the department over the staff, who were taken on at the behest of a factional boss.
But Byrne said he had legal advice it was not appropriate, because of the undertakings he had give the Victorian Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission.
“Therefore I referred Mr Byrne,” Albanese said.
At IBAC last week the Labor MP, who has held the Victorian federal seat of Holt since 1999, admitted to engaging in branch stacking and to agreeing to engage two staffers at the request of then factional powerbroker Adem Somyurek. The men didn’t even appear in the office.
Byrne was a long time ally of Somyurek, but after they fell out he became a whistle blower.
The resulting exposure of the branch-stacking scandal has led to the fall of four Victorian government ministers including Somyurek, who is out of the part and sits on the crossbench.
IBAC is holding public hearings “into allegations of serious corrupt conduct involving Victorian public officers”, including MPs.
These are part of a coordinated investigation between IBAC and the Victorian Ombudsman, looking at matters including the allegations of branch stacking aired in the media last year, when footage was shot secretly in Byrne’s office.
Branch stacking is against ALP rules but not illegal. But the misuse of staff employed on taxpayer money can involve breaches of the law.
Last year federal minister Michael Sukkar and former minister Kevin Andrews were investigated by the finance department after allegations of the misuse of electorate officers to recruit Liberal party members to boost factional numbers.
They denied the allegations and were both cleared. The finance department said: “Further investigation of the matters within the scope of the review is not warranted as there is not a sufficient basis to form a view that there was serious misuses of Commonwealth resources”.
Albanese dodged questioning about whether Byrne will be Labor’s candidate at the election, but it seems increasingly unlikely he will be.
“We’ll deal with those matters at the appropriate time,” Albanese said. “IBAC at the moment is still having hearings.”
Byrne has resigned his membership of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee and the privileges committee.
Albanese has been under increasing pressure to take a firm stand against him, especially given how strongly he spoke out against Sukkar.
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.
Nature rarely recognises national borders. Many Australian birds, for example, are annual visitors, splitting their time between Southeast Asia, Russia, and Pacific Islands.
Yet, most efforts to protect ecological processes and habitats are designed and implemented by individual nations. Not only are these traditional approaches to conservation too geographically limited, they don’t address problems that seep across borders and drive ecosystem decline.
Our new research shows international collaboration and environmental management across national borders – a truly transboundary approach – is essential. We focused on an international environmental agreement that recently came into force across the Latin America and Caribbean region.
Known as the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean – or, more commonly, as the Escazú Agreement – it offers a hopeful example of new strategies to rise to this transboundary challenge.
What is the Escazú Agreement?
In 2018, 33 Latin American and Caribbean countries were invited to sign and ratify the landmark Escazú Agreement, the first legally binding environmental agreement to explicitly integrate human rights with environmental matters.
The agreement outlines an approach to enhance the protection of environmental defenders, increase public participation in environmental decision-making, and foster cooperation among countries for biodiversity conservation and human rights.
The Escazú Agreement and human rights
Countries from this region share transboundary species such as jaguars, as well as marine reserves containing immense biodiversity (including 1,577 endemic fish species).
But the Escazú Agreement isn’t just about flora and fauna. It also highlights the importance of human rights and public participation in environmental management – elements that are also vitally important for transboundary conservation.
Countries from the Latin America and the Caribbean region share transboundary species such as jaguars. Shutterstock
Latin America and the Caribbean have a history of disputed maritime claims and a mismatch between management of terrestrial and marine jurisdictions.
Environmental protections and jurisdiction complexities have, in the past, curtailed the rights of Indigenous people who traditionally fish in these areas.
This is where the Escazú Agreement could have contributed. It sets out guidelines for public engagement and may have helped Indigenous people have their voices heard.
But Colombia and many island states are yet to ratify the Escazú Agreement. Doing so would help with these issues in future.
Many biodiverse countries with high levels of human rights violations and sharing multiple ecosystems and species have not yet ratified the agreement.
Ocean borders are extra messy. Some 90% of marine species compared to 53% of terrestrial species have habitat and migration ranges that cross national borders. Countries with large numbers of transboundary marine species include the US, Australia and Japan.
Many of Australia’s iconic ocean species – such as great white sharks, sea turtles, and humpback whales – are international migrants found in over 100 countries.
Even species that don’t move at all, like plants or corals, are often widely distributed. Take the slimy sea lettuce (Ulva lactuca), which grows along the coasts of almost 200 countries.
Marine species essentially share one ocean, making transboundary management extra challenging. Not only can threats such as pollution rapidly spread large distances over ocean currents, our traditional concept of sovereignty and borders makes even less sense on the ocean than it does on land.
Many countries must cooperate to protect species ranges across vast tracts of ocean.
Many of Australia’s iconic ocean species such as great white sharks are international migrants found in over 100 countries. Shutterstock
Australia plays a key role
Australia must step up as a leader of domestic and transboundary management. After the US, it has the most transboundary marine species in its ocean territory.
Most species are shared with Indonesia, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the high seas. As a well-resourced country, it is imperative Australia is part of international efforts to preserve this biodiversity.
Our patchwork legislation leaves the door open for unsustainable and illegal shark finning.
Australian governments need to collaborate with other countries, industries, and socio-environmental NGOs, and local communities leading the way in best practice in environmental conservation.
The Escazú Agreement shows how this can be done.
A beacon of hope
There’s no doubt international collaboration adds challenges to environmental management.
Yet the recent Escazú Agreement offers a beacon of hope in forming just international environmental agreements that protect both the environment and human rights.
Signing agreements like these is just the first step. Then, we must work implement them consistently on land or sea, across countries and in a way that’s inclusive of local stakeholders.
The world’s nations have accepted the idea we must cooperate to combat climate change. We’ll also need international collaboration to protect the vast majority of Earth’s biodiversity and natural systems.
Rebecca K. Runting receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Sofía López-Cubillos is affiliated with the International Institute for Sustainability (Australia) and Fundación Manigua desde la Tierra (Colombia).
Leslie Roberson 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.
