Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Klugman, Research Fellow, Institute for Health & Sport, member of the Community, Identity and Displacement Research Network, and Co-convenor of the Olympic Research Network, Victoria University

On the last Saturday of September every year many of the inhabitants of Melbourne, and indeed of the whole of Australia and even in foreign lands, are stricken with a strange infirmity.

So wrote the Australian historian Manning Clark in 1981. He was speaking of the Grand Final of the Victorian Football League (men’s) competition. Of the way around 100,000 people would journey to a place

mistakenly known as the Melbourne Cricket Ground [MCG]. There for two and a half hours they lose the appearance of human beings and become like beasts of the field. They growl, they roar, they bellow, they yell and they howl.

Forty years later, the grand final of the (now) Australian Football League Men’s competition (AFLM) continues to provoke fervent anticipation in the millions who hold a passionate interest in the sport.

Once again, it is being held on the last Saturday of September. Once again “a strange infirmity” grips supporters of the two teams left to battle for the premiership – the Melbourne Demons and the Western Bulldogs. If Melbourne wins, some of their barrackers will inevitably note that they can now die happy – which testifies to the absurdly profound meaning the game still holds for many.

Yet for the second year running, the location of the AFLM Grand Final will not be in Melbourne at the cricket ground that remains a spiritual home of footy.

Part of the grief over the displacement of the AFLM Grand Final from the MCG is that COVID has made it impossible for so many lifelong barrackers of the Demons and Dogs to cheer, bellow, and roar from the stands as the game unfolds amid a babel of sound. However another part seems to be the dismay over the loss of what was once “normal”.

But should we be craving a return to normality, or striving for something better?

Football and place

Place is central to the stories that AFL tells. It is the only major spectator sport to be so intertwined with the emergence – and growth – of a city. The game was first codified in 1859 at a time when Melbourne was in its early years as a rapidly developing city fuelled by Victoria’s gold rush. The riches of gold lead to bountiful parks and gardens where football could be played.

The activism of Melbourne’s Stonemasons in 1856 – and the ensuing eight-hour work day – meant that many men, and soon women, had the leisure time to watch games of football.

The game quickly became not only popular, but a site of communal passion. It was supposed to produce good, strong white men. Yet by the 1880s, Melbourne was already more famous for its raucous, seemingly mad football spectators, or “barrackers” as they became known. In 1890 “JEB” wrote in a suburban Melbourne newspaper:

For an Englishman to visit Australia, and go home without having seen an Australian football match, with its attendant multitude of ardent barrackers, would be as unintelligible as for a Colonial to see London and omit the tower […]

For what an experience it is to be at one of the big
matches! What a babel of sound! What a magnificent uproar! What a glorious cloud-shattering eruption of profanity!

By 1900, Melbourne was already home to two major men’s Australian Rules football competitions: The Victorian Football League and the Victorian Football Association. The expectation was that everyone who lived in the city barracked for a team.

Migrants like the novelist Peter Temple quickly realised that “footy talk” was the city’s “lingua franca – it transcended class, transcended gender, you could talk about football to anyone”. By 1967 some Melbourne residents so abhorred the incessant “footy talk” that a rival Anti-Football League was created.

Read more:
The AFL sells an inclusive image of itself. But when it comes to race and gender, it still has a way to go

However, place in Australia is complex, layered, and inescapably leads back to questions of sovereignty and justice. Melbourne was built on a place called Naarm that has never been ceded by its original inhabitants. The form of football that grew with the city has been shaped by acts of invasion, migration, and the displacement, survival, and resistance of First Nations Peoples.

Tom Wills, one of the four white men who wrote the first laws of Australian Rules football, spent much of his childhood among the Djab-wurrung people in the western districts of Victoria, speaking their language and playing their games. How much Wills was influenced by one of these games – the football game of Marn Grook – is a contentious question. While some have dismissed any possible links, they rely on sources drawn solely from the archive that reflect an exclusively colonial memory.

As Barry Judd has noted,

It is a colonial past that history is able to reconstruct, a past that says little or nothing about Indigenous experience or Indigenous remembrance of that same past carried into the present from the other side of the colonial frontier.

Wills has been a celebrated figure in the folklore of Australian Rules football. He is memorialised in a statue outside the MCG. This past week, the football world has been rocked by the revelation of an account detailing Wills’ involvement in the horrific reprisals that followed the killing of his father and other pastoralists in Queensland in 1861 (which itself was a response to the murder of Gayiri men by a neighbour of Wills).

Yet even before this news, it was known Wills supported the massacres of Gayiri and other First Nations Peoples. Indeed Wills asked his cousin and co-author of the first laws of Australian Rules – H.C.A. Harrison – to send “good resolute men that will shoot every black they see.”

Wills was made an inaugural member of the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 1996. The brilliant Yorta Yorta player, administrator and activist (amongst many other things), Sir Doug Nicholls, is still yet to be inducted into that Hall of Fame, despite having an AFLM round named after him. There is a statue of Sir Doug (and Lady Gladys Nicholls) outside the Victorian Parliament, but none outside the MCG or other football grounds.

Read more:
The land we play on: equality doesn’t mean justice

Those attending this Saturday’s AFLM Grand Final, however, will walk past a statue of St Kilda legend Nicky Winmar. When the statue was announced, many people in the football world argued it should be in Melbourne, where in 1993 Winmar responded to racial abuse from opposing fans and players by raising his jumper, pointing to his skin and stating over and over that he was “Black and proud”.

But Winmar is a Noongar man, and he wanted the statue commemorating his call for justice to be on Noongar land.

And then came COVID …

If anything, the pandemic has intensified Australia’s fascination with the football game that was first known as Melbourne Rules. Like the Olympics, it has provided a spar of meaning, joy, angst, relief, and at least momentary escape. The game has provided great comfort in a time of communal distress.

But the non-COVID happenings of the past football year – the continued racial abuse of Eddie Betts, the systemic racism found at Collingwood in its treatment of Héritier Lumumba, Taylor Walker’s racist vilification of Robbie Young, and the retirement of AFLW players because they are not being paid a living wage by Australia’s richest sporting body – reveals the need for the AFL to grapple more critically with its colonial past and present.

Reflecting more deeply on the game’s relationship to land and justice would be a good place to start.

Matthew Klugman has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. On the eve of an AFLM grand final like no other, can the shadow of the pandemic make us strive for something better? – https://theconversation.com/on-the-eve-of-an-aflm-grand-final-like-no-other-can-the-shadow-of-the-pandemic-make-us-strive-for-something-better-167792

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jess Coyle, Lecturer, Sports Management, Western Sydney University

This article discusses colonial violence against First Nations peoples. There is reference to people who are now deceased.

There has been a new revelation by researcher Gary Fearon that cricketer and founding father of Australian (Rules) Football Tom Wills was an active participant in the mass murder of Aboriginal people. The research confirms that Wills was involved in an attack on Gayiri people in Queensland, in response to the murder of his father.

The new evidence uncovered by Fearon reflects the complex politics of settler-Aboriginal relations at the time. Through his relationship with Aboriginal people, Tom Wills was essentially existing on the boundary between settler and Indigenous peoples.

The discovery challenges popular understandings of Tom Wills as a peaceful friend of all Aboriginal people. It will be interesting to see how the Australian Football League (AFL) and Cricket Australia respond now this information has finally been made public.

Tom Wills as a cultured man

There is a common misconception that Aboriginal people exist as a single collective. However, there is an immense diversity that exists within Aboriginal communities in Australia; a fact that is visualised in the AIATSIS map of the continent.
This is why Wills treated Gayiri people as hostile outsiders despite having relationships with Djab Wurrung people.

It is also important to remember the cultural values and attitudes of the 1860s are not the same as those of the 2020s. Men and masculinity was something vastly different then and violent retribution was central to it. 19th century Australia was a violent place. However, this in no way justifies the atrocities against First Nations people.

Tom Wills spent his early childhood with Djab Wurrung people in western Victoria, and spoke in language. Following the murder of his father by the Gayiri people, Wills returned to Victoria and worked with Aboriginal cricketers who were Jardwadjali, Gunditjmara and Wotjobaluk peoples of Western Victoria.

The contemporary celebration of Tom Wills as the father of Australian football and as a pillar of settler-Aboriginal relations is one-dimensional, which demonstrates our inability to grapple with the messiness of Australia’s colonial history. That Wills took part in colonial violence demonstrates the extent to which violence featured on the frontier, a fact highlighted in this massacre map.

Most of the killings that followed the Gayiri attack where Wills’ father died were carried out by government-funded Indigenous and non-Indigenous Queensland Native Police. A part of history that has caused much pain to Aboriginal people in Australia.

This is an example of a colonial truth that is often difficult to discuss. Like Wills’ involvement in the retributions for his fathers murder, it is far easier to understand the frontier as representing a line between good and bad or right and wrong. That Wills, like the native police, straddled this line is often difficult to consider.

An 1895 Chicago Tribute article suggests Wills was more than just involved in the killing of 40 Gayari people in response to the Cullin-la-ringo massacres (of which his father was a victim), but that he might have orchestrated the attack, with Wills stating:

I turned to the drovers, who were crying like children, and ordered them to gallop to the neighbouring “runs” to spread the news.

The Cullin-la-ringo massacre where 19 people were killed, is known as the largest massacre of Europeans by Aboriginal people in Australia’s history. The total death toll of Aboriginal people as a result of retribution for the Cullin-la-ringo massacre is estimated to be between 370-1,000.

In my research, I have found that Australia’s denial and systemic forgetting of colonial violence and Aboriginal peoples’ forced assimilation is an indicator of white belonging. White belonging is the need to forget and deny the past to be able to claim Australia as home in the present.

Fearon’s discovery therefore marks an important moment for the AFL. Will the AFL use this as an opportunity to engage in an honest discussion of its history and culture or turn a blind eye, deny and distance itself?

Opportunity for truth telling and reconciliation

Australian (Rules) Football has played a role in shaping contemporary Australia and is celebrated as a pillar of contemporary race relations in Australia. For example, Joe Johnson is celebrated as the first Indigenous VFL player. However, he was never actually able to reveal his Aboriginality at the time, as it would have ended his football career, a fact ignored today.

The AFL must move beyond enlightened racism and symbolic reconciliation to finally acknowledge Marngrook as the Aboriginal precursor of Australian (Rules) football, and the significance Aboriginal cultural knowledge and practice holds in Australian (Rules) Football.

The AFL needs to understand racism like the instances reported in 2019 documentaries “The Australian Dream” and “The Final Quarter” as symptomatic of a colonial culture of exclusion, denial and hyper masculinity. Both documentaries contextualised Adam Goodes’ experiences as an Aboriginal man within an organisational structure that does not understand the nuances of race and racism.

If the AFL truly wants to be a leader in the fight against racism, it must first acknowledge the messiness, the uncomfortable realities of exclusion and the legacy of frontier violence. More must be done beyond overdue apologies.

Rather than whitewash this discussion, listen to Aboriginal people, sit with the history as well as the contemporary truths. Despite the introduction of the AFL’s racial vilification rules and yearly education seminars, these issues are not going away.

Indigenous players continue to experience racism and are unable to embrace their culture within a sport that traces its origins to Wills’ interactions with the Djab Wurrung people.

Although the AFL has development programs for Indigenous players, the AFL remains an unsafe place for Indigenous people. The AFL needs to address the white privilege allowing them to lean on Aboriginal people to do all the educating, reconciliation and truth telling.

To paraphrase AFL footballer Eddie Betts, it’s not on Aboriginal people to make change. That change starts with honest conversation and recognition of the ugly truth of our shared history. Truth telling is fundamental to any process of reconciliation and highlights strategies the AFL can use to move forward in a culturally respectful and appropriate way.

If Wills is to be a figure of truth and reconciliation through his meaningful Aboriginal-settler relations, the reality of that relationship needs to be acknowledged. It is truth that makes reconciliation possible. If a history must be rewritten let it be one that draws on Aboriginal perspectives, centres Aboriginal voices and makes racism the responsibility of non-Indigenous people. For far too long First Nations peoples have had to carry the burden of our complacency.

Rather than removing tributes or altering the record on Tom Wills as the celebrated father of Australian (Rules) Football, let this be an opportunity for change, to grapple with our shared difficult history. We need to learn to live with the shame and discomfort of our history and try to understand what Aboriginal people experience in this country.
We cannot do this if Tom Wills is wiped from public memory.

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

– ref. Tom Wills’ story is the AFL’s opportunity for truth telling about its ugly history – https://theconversation.com/tom-wills-story-is-the-afls-opportunity-for-truth-telling-about-its-ugly-history-168381

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mathew Doidge, Senior Research Fellow, University of Canterbury

From a distance, the big news about Germany’s coming election on September 26 is the end of Angela Merkel’s reign after 16 years of leadership in Germany and Europe. Closer up, with no clear front-runner to take Merkel’s place, the picture is far more complex.

Seemingly on track for a clear victory until February, the prospects of Merkel’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) have waned, as first the Greens and then the Social Democrats (SPD) narrowly topped the surprisingly volatile polls.

Merkel’s successor will be determined by the politics of coalition formation in an arrangement familiar to New Zealanders — Germany having provided the model for our own MMP system.

With another CDU/CSU-SPD grand coalition ruled out, the most likely outcome will see one of those parties leading a government comprising the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) in a so-called “Jamaica” or “traffic light” coalition (named for the party colours).

A large undecided vote

But nothing is clear cut. In an unpredictable campaign dominated by missteps rather than policies, the fortunes of those battling for the chancellery – the CDU/CSU’s Armin Laschet, the SPD’s Olaf Scholz and the Greens’ Annalena Baerbock – have ebbed and flowed.

Caught guffawing during the German president’s remarks to victims of the July floods, alongside accusations of plagiarism (a problem to which the German political establishment seems particularly prone), Laschet has seen his party’s support plummet to the lowest-ever polled.

Read more:
Angela Merkel: gentle persuasion in an age of populism

Meanwhile, Baerbock’s aggressive response to her own charges of plagiarism, combined with a failure to declare income, have raised concerns about her personal credibility and seen her party slump from their surprise lead in April.

In contrast stands Scholz. The only candidate with federal executive experience, including currently as minister of finance and vice-chancellor in the CDU/CSU-SPD grand coalition, Scholz was initially welcomed with little fanfare.

However, his leadership during the pandemic (dispensing billions of euros in support), coupled with the absence of gaffes, has seen his personal popularity rise. In preferred chancellor polls, Scholz now leads on 40%, with Laschet on 19% and Baerbock on 13%. Somewhat soberingly this close to the election, 28% of respondents still “don’t know”.

Business as usual?

In an election devoid of real policy debate, it is difficult to say how the result will change Germany.

The answer may be “probably not much” if Laschet or Scholz gain the chancellery, with both in various ways casting themselves as continuity candidates (Scholz even going so far as to adopt Merkel’s patented rhombus hand gesture). But a strengthened Greens voice in any coalition – likely on current polling – will have an impact.

From a New Zealand perspective, there are three areas of interest: European integration, foreign policy and climate change. One way or another, each will affect the world beyond Germany’s borders.

Read more:
From ‘Mädchen’ to ‘Mutti’: as Angela Merkel departs, she leaves a great legacy of leadership

European integration

Germany is at the heart of the European project, and Merkel’s time as chancellor has been important to the union.

Taking office during the disarray following the collapse of the EU’s constitutional project, Merkel’s approach to integration was shorn of grand ambition. Instead, she has focused on stability and incremental reform in the face of subsequent crises (the Eurozone debt crisis, the European refugee crisis).

But the EU requires more than ad hoc incrementalism. It is increasingly difficult to reconcile the union’s significant economic footprint with its lack of foreign policy clout. In times of great power competition, the two are irrevocably interconnected. The role of the new chancellor in shaping European integration cannot be underestimated.

Read more:
Auf Wiedersehen, ‘Mutti’: How Angela Merkel’s centrist politics shaped Germany and Europe

Aside from the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), all parties standing are pro-European and all envision reforms to strengthen integration. For New Zealand, with US-China tensions threatening to spill over in unpredictable ways, a strong EU is essential to maintaining a stable and rules-based international order.

This is particularly significant for a small trading power, dependent on the predictability and enforceability of global rules. Any moves to make the EU more consistent, understandable and responsive will benefit New Zealand.

Climate change

The climate crisis will be at the core of policy, regardless of which coalition comes to power. All parties have been forced to address the issue, a priority driven home by the July floods.

Carbon neutrality is central to the platforms of the main parties, though differences exist on how to achieve this.

Germany’s approach will cause ripples beyond its borders, playing as it does a key role in defining EU policy, including the union’s expectations of trading partners such as New Zealand.

Read more:
How Germany’s Green party took on the far right to become a major political force

Foreign policy

There is also significant pressure for Germany to play a stronger global role to match its economic weight. This includes a more robust approach to powers such as China, something Merkel avoided.

Trade relations under Merkel were a priority. Separated from more contentious issues, it was an approach that pleased her Chinese counterparts. But complications darken the horizon: the EU has defined China as a “systemic rival”, and there have been calls for Germany to more actively confront Chinese assertiveness.

Developments in the Indo-Pacific are critical to New Zealand, which this week was surprised by the announcement of the formation of the AUKUS alliance between Australia, the US and UK. A more engaged Germany would be welcomed.

Read more:
State of the EU: tech and defence challenges cloud COVID success

A CDU-CSU victory is unlikely to see significant change, however. The party continues to prioritise trade in its international relationships, and Laschet has made some dubious foreign policy statements, raising questions as to what he would bring to the global stage.

The SPD also holds a conservative view of international engagement, aiming to avoid foreign conflicts. An emphasis on economic and trade policy is important for New Zealand, as negotiations for a free trade agreement with the EU near their end.

With only a few days until Germans cast their votes, the election remains anyone’s to win. Regardless of the outcome, New Zealand should continue to count Germany as an important friend in the EU. With Britain’s withdrawal in 2020, the relationship with Germany is more valuable than ever.

Mathew Doidge receives funding from the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.

Serena Kelly receives funding from the Erasmus+ Programme of the European Union. She is affiliated with the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs and the European Studies Association of Australia and New Zealand.

– ref. German election: the race to replace Angela Merkel and why it matters to New Zealand – https://theconversation.com/german-election-the-race-to-replace-angela-merkel-and-why-it-matters-to-new-zealand-168379

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hamish McCallum, Director, Centre for Planetary Health and Food Security, Griffith University

The origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has caused the COVID-19 pandemic, has been hotly debated.

This debate has caused substantial difficulties in the Australia-China relationship, with a call by Foreign Minister Marise Payne for another inquiry into its origin being considered by China as a hostile act.

What’s not in doubt is the closest relatives of the virus are found in bats. How, where and when the virus spilled over into humans is the contentious issue.

One widely supported hypothesis is the spillover occurred in the “wet markets” of Wuhan, where many species of wildlife from across China are held in crowded conditions.

However, there’s no evidence the species of bats in which the closest relatives of SARS-CoV-2 are found were sold through the Wuhan wet markets at any time in the two years before the pandemic. This hypothesis requires the existence of a “bridge host”, another species that becomes infected via spillover from the original bat hosts, and then passes the virus onto humans.

Bridge hosts are well-known in many emerging human diseases. For example, Hendra virus, which my group studies, has flying foxes as its reservoir. Hendra spills over to horses with some frequency. Horses then amplify the virus as a bridge host and can infect humans.

Fortunately, this is extremely rare, with only seven known cases. Tragically, four of those people died. Hendra has never been known to spread directly from flying foxes to humans.

À lire aussi :
I was the Australian doctor on the WHO’s COVID-19 mission to China. Here’s what we found about the origins of the coronavirus

More evidence a lab leak is very unlikely

A second, much more contentious hypothesis is the origin of the pandemic was the result of a “lab leak”.

Wuhan has one of the most sophisticated virological laboratories in China, and the laboratory does work on bat viruses. The suggestion is the virus may have inadvertently been released into the general community via one of the workers. No direct evidence supports this hypothesis.

A new pre-print study, released online this month, provides strong evidence to support the “natural spillover” hypothesis, with results that are hard to reconcile with the “lab leak” hypothesis.

The study is yet to be peer reviewed. But it’s based on a detailed examination of the genetic sequences of two early lineages obtained from people infected in late 2019 and early 2020.

For convenience, these two lineages are called A and B. The two lineages differ by just two nucleotides (letters in the genetic code) at two different key sites in the genetic sequence.

If there was a single lab escape event, the separation into lineages A and B must have happened after the lab escape. We would therefore expect to see a substantial number of intermediate lineages, with the lineage A nucleotide at one site, and the lineage B nucleotide at the other site.

However, if almost all of the genetic sequences obtained from humans are “pure” lineage A or pure lineage B, this suggests there were at least two different spillover events, either directly from bats or via bridge hosts.

And the evolution of the two lineages occurred before humans were infected.

The researchers downloaded all complete genetic sequences for SARS-CoV-2 that had been lodged in a widely used genomic database. Of these sequences, 369 were lineage A, 1,297 were lineage B and just 38 were intermediates.

À lire aussi :
Why it will soon be too late to find out where the COVID-19 virus originated

Genetic sequencing isn’t perfect. Close examination of the 38 intermediates strongly suggested they were more likely to be sequencing errors of pure lineage A or lineage B than to be true intermediates.

The genetic evidence, therefore, suggests very strongly there have been at least two separate spillover events into human populations, one being from lineage A and another being from lineage B.

Did a human bring SARS-CoV-2 to the wet markets?

The data don’t tell us there have been only two spillover events — there may have been more. Nor do they tell us whether these spillovers happened directly from bats, or whether some or all happened via an intermediate bridge host.

A Nature news article suggests this evidence points to the spillover having happened via the wildlife trade, but I think this is taking it a step too far.

While some of the wildlife species sold through the Wuhan wet market can indeed become infected with SARS-CoV-2 (for example raccoon dogs and mink), there’s no evidence any sold through the market were infected.

Many of the earliest human viral sequences (all lineage B) were recovered from the Wuhan seafood market, but wet markets and abattoirs are well-known to be places where the SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads very well from human to human.

So, it may have been a human who brought the virus to the Wuhan seafood market, rather than a species of wildlife.

One thing we do know is this pandemic originated through a human coming in contact with another species infected with the virus.

It’s unknown whether this was a bat or a bridge host, and whether this contact occurred in a wildlife market, or in a bat cave, or somewhere else entirely different.

Nevertheless, as humans encroach more and more on the habitats of wild animals and as wild animals are brought more frequently into close contact with humans, we can expect further spillovers and pandemics to occur.

À lire aussi :
How do viruses mutate and jump species? And why are ‘spillovers’ becoming more common?

Hamish McCallum receives funding from the Australian Reserch Council and from the US agencies NSF, NIH and DARPA

– ref. New preliminary evidence suggests coronavirus jumped from animals to humans multiple times – https://theconversation.com/new-preliminary-evidence-suggests-coronavirus-jumped-from-animals-to-humans-multiple-times-168473

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy N. W. Jackson, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Australian Venom Research Unit, The University of Melbourne

It’s early spring in southern Australia and the sun is, gloriously, out. You decide to head to your local patch of greenery – by the creek, lake, or foreshore – with the sun on your face, the breeze in your hair, and your dog’s tongue blissfully lolling.

Suddenly you see it. Paused on the path just a few meters in front of your feet, soaking up those same springtime rays — a snake.

Love them or loathe them, snakes have been co-existing with, and haunting us, since well before our ancestors called themselves “human”. From the subtle tempter of Genesis to the feathered serpent deities of Mesoamerica, snakes have always been potent symbols of otherness.

Today, to encounter a snake is to brush up against the wild and mysterious heart of the natural world. Snakes are important members of every terrestrial ecosystem across Australia. Even in the most populous parts of the country, snakes inhabit the remnant bushland dispersed throughout our major cities.

But what exactly influences human–snake interactions? Whether you’re hoping to maximise your chances of seeing one of these shy, fascinating critters or wanting to avoid them at all costs, this article is for you.

Snakes in southern springtime

In southern Australia, a flurry of animal activity occurs in spring. As resources start becoming plentiful after the relatively lean months of winter, spring is the reproductive season for many plants and animals.

One such resource is heat — a particularly crucial resource for organisms such as reptiles, which don’t make their own body heat (unlike mammals). It’s a common misconception, however, that snakes want as much heat as they can get. Like Goldilocks, snakes want the temperature to be just right.

Southern springs are the right temperature for snakes to bask during the times of day we humans are also out and about. In summer, snakes, including venomous species such as tiger snakes and brown snakes, are typically more active very early in the morning, late in the evening, or during the night when temperatures are not too high for them.

After a slow winter, snakes are both hungry (they may have been fasting for months!) and on the lookout for eligible members of the opposite sex. Basking, hunting, and searching for a mate brings snakes out into the open in spring a bit more than at other times of year, so we’re most likely to encounter them during this time.

Snake activity in northern Australia

Like all things, snake activity is a little different in the north. Spare a thought for those poor northern Australians who will never know the joys of a snake-filled springtime.

Still, the north has far more snake species than the south, including many species of non-venomous python — the farther south you go, the more our snake fauna is dominated by venomous species (check out Australian Reptile Online Database for distribution maps).

Because of the unforgiving year-round heat across northern Australia, temperature doesn’t drive snake activity as it does in the south. You will rarely see a basking snake in Australia’s Top End, they’re too busy avoiding the heat.

Instead, snake activity is driven by another important resource – rain. In the Top End, this means snakes are most often encountered following the wet season (April–June) when prey and water abound.

In other, more arid “boom and bust” systems, large rainfall events may only happen every five to ten years. When they do, they can trigger huge flurries of snake activity as the serpents emerge to take advantage of fleetingly available prey.

Snakes indicate ecosystem health

From the moment of birth, all species of snake are predatory, although some, like shovel-nosed snakes, prey only upon eggs.

In some terrestrial Australian ecosystems, snakes are near the top of the food chain. After reaching a certain size, they have few predators of their own. A two-metre coastal taipan in the cane fields of northern Queensland, for example, has more to fear from harvesters than it does from any natural predator.

For large snakes to persist in an environment, they need an abundance of their prey (mice, frogs and lizards), as well as all the species their prey feed upon (invertebrates, even smaller animals, or plants).

Snakes often also have specific habitat requirements. In general, they need shelter and protection from bigger predators, which might include birds of prey, predatory mammals such as native marsupials or introduced cats and foxes, or other snakes. They also need opportunities for safely regulating their body temperature.

This means a snake will only call a place home if it has both a functioning food-web and the necessary habitat complexity. So remember, if you see snakes in your backyard or local park, it’s a sign the ecosystem is doing pretty well.

Snakes don’t want to bite you

Snakes are awesome predators, but no Australian snake is interested in eating a human. In fact, they want as little to do with us giant hairless apes as possible.

Why? Because snakes are actually quite vulnerable animals. Compared to many other species, they are small, have no sharp claws or strong limbs, and limited energy to put up a fight — they are basically limbless lizards with different teeth.

For those that possess it, venom is a last resort and only a minority of species —such as taipans, brown snakes, tiger snakes, and death adders — can deliver a life-threatening bite to a person. But snakes would much rather use their venom to subdue prey (that’s what they have it for) than to defend themselves.

When snakes bite humans in Australia, it’s a defensive reaction to a large animal they view as a potential predator. Remember, they can’t understand your intentions, even if those intentions are good.

If you’re lucky enough to see a wild snake, and if you respect its boundaries and give it personal space, it’s sure to do the same for you. Keep dogs on the lead in snakey areas and educate your kids to be snake-smart from as young as possible.

Even though snakes don’t want to bite, snakebite envenoming can be a life-threatening emergency. Learn first aid, and when you go for a walk in one of those sanctuaries of greenery that snakes like as much as we do, carry a compression bandage (or three).

It’s almost certain you will never need it, but it could just save a life.

Read more:
Does Australia really have the deadliest snakes? We debunk 6 common myths

Timothy N. W. Jackson receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Chris J Jolly receives funding from National Environmental Science Program (Threatened Species Hub).

Damian Lettoof receives funding from HWRE.

– ref. The sun’s shining and snakes are emerging, but they’re not out to get you. Here’s what they’re really up to – https://theconversation.com/the-suns-shining-and-snakes-are-emerging-but-theyre-not-out-to-get-you-heres-what-theyre-really-up-to-168089

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

World leaders and about 30,000 others from assorted interest groups will converge on Glasgow in November for the United Nations’ 26th annual climate summit, COP26 (“Conference of the Parties”).

It will be five years (allowing for a one-year Tokyo 2020-style pandemic hiatus) since the Paris Agreement adopted at COP21 in 2015.

There has been plenty of cynicism about that agreement, its structure and non-binding nature. Important emitters like China were effectively exempt from making meaningful carbon-reduction commitments.

Some OECD countries (such as Canada) have paid lip service to the agreement but done little. Still others (such as Australia) have made some progress reducing emissions but have no long-term plan, relying instead on bumper-sticker slogans about “technology not taxes” and, until recently, hiding behind dodgy accounting tricks.

That aside, it’s hard to see how the world solves what amounts to — as economists put it — a “coordination problem” without global agreements.

For roughly half a century economists have been unanimous about what those agreements must involve — a price on carbon. The 2018 economics Nobel prize awarded to William Nordhaus was belated recognition of this fact.

A price on carbon — in the form of a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme — is a way to use the power of the market’s price mechanism to balance the good that comes from emitting carbon (economic development) with the bad (climate change).

Set the price of carbon at the true social cost of carbon (taking into account all the ills that come from climate change) and the invisible hand of the market will balance the pros and cons. Think of it as Friedrich von Hayek meets Greta Thunberg.

But there is another, less dramatic way to harness market forces to reduce carbon emissions: disclosure.

Read more:
Vital Signs: a global carbon price could soon be a reality – Australia should prepare

Public disclosure works

The idea starts with this: plenty of consumers want to reduce their carbon footprint and are willing to pay for it. That’s why people recycle, use green energy even when it’s more expensive, buy low-carbon clothing, and drive electric cars. A bunch of folks are willing to pay to be green.

The success of companies such as eco-friendly sneaker company Allbirds and electic vehicle maker Tesla exist is evidence of the market catering to these consumer preferences. But can we make it easier for consumers to express their environmental preferences? Can we turbocharge the market for greener products?

A working paper published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests the answer is “yes”.

Authored by Carnegie Mellon University economists Lavender Yang, Nicholas Muller and Pierre Jinghong Liang, the paper looks at the US Environmental Protectino Agency’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. In effect from 2010, this has required big carbon emitters (including all power plants that produce more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year) to publicly disclose how much they emit.

The authors look at the effect of this disclosure program on the electric power industry, which accounts for 27% of all US emissions.

The results are striking. Plants subject to greater scrutiny reduced their carbon emissions by 7%. Plants owned by publicly listed companies reduced their emissions by 10%. Large public companies, such as those in the S&P500 stock index, cut emissions even more (11%).

Accountability increases environmental performance

Responding to investor concerns

The reason appears to be responsiveness to investors wanting companies to be more environmentally responsible. This explains why emissions went down more for public companies, and even more for large public companies, whose shares are more likely to be held by funds with an ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) mandate.

Some of these investors have pro-social preferences and want to invest their money in more sustainable companies. Others might not care about the environment per se, but know that lots of folks do. Businesses that cater to these consumer preferences have an advantage.

Read more:
Vital Signs: a 3-point plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2050

The dark side to this is that the decline in emissions by major plants was partially offset by an increase in emissions by plants under the 25,000-tonne threshold not subject to disclosure.

In other words, companies responded to the incentives provided by disclosure requirements. Those who could “hide” their emissions did not.

The lesson is that disclosure requirements work. They force companies to own up to their customers and investors, and face the reality of their emissions behaviour. But we need to apply it to all companies, not just big ones.

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

– ref. Vital Signs: a simple way to cut carbon emissions — don’t let polluters hide – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-a-simple-way-to-cut-carbon-emissions-dont-let-polluters-hide-168560

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Bishop, Postdoctoral Fellow, Macquarie University

Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander readers are advised this story contains images of people who have died.

“We have fared well out of native hands”, wrote missionary Annie Lock from Oodnadatta in South Australia in 1924. Four years later, having moved to Harding Soak north of Alice Springs, she declared the government should “give the natives food in place of their country”.

Lock’s recognition that white Australians had taken Aboriginal land and owed them compensation was ahead of her time, even if her idea of appropriate compensation was inadequate.

Born in 1876 into a Methodist sharefarming family of 14 children in South Australia’s Gilbert Valley, Lock was a practical woman with a very basic education. A dressmaker by trade, in 1903 she joined what would become the United Aborigines Mission.

It operated on faith lines: missionaries were unpaid and could not actively solicit donations, relying on prayer to answer all needs. Lock, like her colleagues, developed a nice line in inviting supporters to “join her in prayer” for very specific needs, such as “a nice staunch horse for £12”, hoping for a “practical” show of sympathy.

Read more:
Hidden women of history: Mary Jane Cain, land rights activist, matriarch and community builder

From 1903 to 1937, she lived in 10 mission camps across four states and territories. Renowned for being the “Big Boss”, she usually worked alone establishing “new work” — partly because her colleagues found her intensely uncollegial.

She wasn’t only out of step with many of her contemporaries in her belief Aboriginal Australians deserved compensation: she also believed Aboriginal people had a future and they could be “useful citizens” of Australia.

Once again, however, her view of their place in broader Australian society was narrow. She did not imagine Indigenous doctors, lawyers or politicians, but labourers, stockmen and domestic servants.

I first encountered Annie Lock through some of her letters in the South Australian archives. She berated government officials, demanding action and funding for (what she saw as) Aboriginal people’s interests. She was bolshie and outspoken.

At the time I was a young graduate student and naively thought I had uncovered a feminist heroine. I was quickly disabused: for all her intrepid and gutsy behaviour, Lock held intensely socially conservative views in line with her religious conviction.

Read more:
Hidden women of history: Isabel Flick, the tenacious campaigner who fought segregation in Australia

A grand adventure

Lock’s life was like a “girls’ own” adventure story – albeit a teetotal and highly moralistic one.

She made epic horse and buggy journeys across the desert, camped in the middle of nowhere with few resources and was shipwrecked in a pearling lugger. She railed against white men’s abuse of Aboriginal women, and she “rode rough-shod over rules and regulations, always managing to come out on top”, in the words of her obituary from her longsuffering mission society.

Many white Australians felt she went too far. She cuddled Aboriginal children, nursed the sick, and shared her campfire – even “drinking tea out of the same cup”.

After the 1928 Coniston Massacre, in which a police party killed over 100 Aboriginal men, women and children in Central Australia, the Board of Enquiry, widely considered as a whitewash at the time, blamed the unrest leading to the events partly on “a woman missionary living among naked blacks, lowering their respect for whites”.

It was no coincidence that Lock was also one of the people who had publicised the massacre, forcing an enquiry in the first place, after Aboriginal people sought refuge in her camp and told her their horrifying tale.

In fact, rather than “lowering their respect” as a white woman living with Aboriginal people, Lock maintained her camp was an area of mutual respect and negotiation:

They told me their laws; […] I made my rules; they kept them; I kept theirs; we had no trouble.

At certain moments when researching her life, I found Lock seemed impressively broadminded. However, given the uneven distribution of power, the reality was not so idyllic.

Read more:
Hidden women of history: Wauba Debar, an Indigenous swimmer from Tasmania who saved her captors

A troublesome woman

Lock was an integral part of the colonial machine, with all its patronising ethnocentricity. As a white woman, Lock was never troubled by any sense that Aboriginal people were her equals.

She could be dictatorial and bloody-minded, with a highly developed sense of what she saw as right and wrong, approving harsh punishment for transgressors. At the Coniston enquiry itself she was critical of those Aboriginal men who killed cattle, suggesting “a good flogging” was called for.

In Western Australia, she actively took children from their families and she was instrumental in establishing Carrolup Native Settlement in 1915 — a forerunner of notorious Moore River Settlement — to which Aboriginal people were removed.

Read more:
Friday essay: ‘I am anxious to have my children home’: recovering letters of love written for Noongar children

In South Australia in 1924, she started what became Colebrook Home, in which Aboriginal children of mixed descent were institutionalised.

At Ooldea, when Lock was 58, the overworked and tired missionary let her guard slip. An Aboriginal man hit her after she punished his daughter. The daughter should be sent to Colebrook, she suggested, “to punish” him — deviating from the usual missionary script of “in the child’s best interests”.

But history is complicated. One elderly Aboriginal woman smiled when she told an interviewer her memories of Lock, “a real fat one”, playing rounders at Ooldea. The image of a stout middle-aged missionary hitching up her skirts and charging around the sandhills with a bunch of Aboriginal kids is hard to beat.

In Central Australia, some remembered her as a caring for children “on country”, saving them from being sent away.

Lock was consistently vocal about Aboriginal girls’ rights to be protected from white men (although she condoned Aboriginal men’s violent “punishment” of their wives). And while she was irrepressibly evangelistic, she eventually learned Christianity could work with some aspects of Aboriginal culture. Sometimes, she wrote, Aboriginal people could “teach white people a lesson”. They were “real socialist”, sharing the clothes that she gave them. She waxed lyrical about their “corroboree songs” and appreciated the authority of elder generations over the younger.

In 1937, aged 60 and after 35 years in the mission field, Lock suddenly retired. Certainly she had been finding her “pioneering” missionary work more of a strain, and her health had suffered, but also, she told her supporters, God was giving her a “quieter work”. Much to everyone’s amazement, this independent woman had found herself a husband.

She married a retired bank manager and spent the last six years of her life evangelising in a caravan around Eyre Peninsula.

Contradictions

In uncovering the life of Annie Lock, I found a woman who was both fascinating and discomfiting. We can try and judge her motivations and actions as an individual of her time, but we cannot ignore her impact.

She saved people’s lives by providing food and healthcare, and a refuge from more hostile forces. She also destroyed families by removing children. She introduced Christianity, which some found a welcome way of navigating the changing world. She was one of an army of “do-gooders” whose haphazard attempts to improve the lives of Aboriginal people did not always have the result that anyone would have desired.

Her personal impact could be positive – some remember her as “lovely” and “motherly”. But her impact as an active participant in “protectionist” government policies, which limited Aboriginal people’s lives and movement and tore families apart, was traumatic and has endured.

Catherine Bishop is the author of Too Much Cabbage and Jesus Christ: Australia’s “Mission Girl” Annie Lock, out now with Wakefield Press

Catherine Bishop receives funding from the Australian Research Council as a DECRA Research Fellow at Macquarie University. This project benefited from an Australian Religious History Fellowship at the State Library of NSW and an Australian Research Theology Inc travel grant.

– ref. Hidden women of history: Annie Lock was a bolshie, outspoken Australian missionary, full of contradictions – https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-annie-lock-was-a-bolshie-outspoken-australian-missionary-full-of-contradictions-167781

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

One is tempted to think Scott Morrison’s hero must be Harry Houdini, the great escape artist. Put our prime minister in a corner, and he will talk his way out, or try to.

After President Biden rang President Macron this week to soothe hurt French feelings about AUKUS, a joint statement was issued.

It said in part, “The two leaders agreed that the situation would have benefited from open consultations among allies on matters of strategic interest to France and our European partners.”

Morrison refused to take this as any reflection on Australia’s diplomatic blundering in the way it handled the cancellation of its French submarines contract.

“They were dealing with different issues to Australia,” he argued. “The United States and France are NATO countries. And there are certain expectations amongst NATO partners about how they’re engaged with each other on national security issues.”

On any “trust” metric, Morrison has received a battering since the AUKUS announcement. An angry Macron is not yet willing even to accept his call.

But the Prime Minister probably won’t be too worried in domestic political terms. He’ll think the main takeout by his “quiet Australians” will be not that the French are accusatory, but that a big new deal is delivering nuclear-powered subs and other weaponry to protect against the Chinese, about whom polling shows people are increasingly worried.

Morrison might have been more disappointed that with AUKUS he didn’t manage to immediately wedge Labor. In other times, the Labor left would have been screaming about nuclear boats. But Anthony Albanese, determined to stay a small target, acted with lightning speed to have the opposition back in the agreement.

Albanese, however, will have to be watchful. As Labor frontbenchers started to ask about detail and proposed a Senate inquiry, Morrison quickly said, “If the Labor Party wants to have an each way bet on national security, the Australian people need to know that”. It was a campaign line.

It’s perfectly reasonable to pursue information about an agreement for which we have bones but no flesh, but Morrison will be ruthless in exploiting legitimate opposition probing.

Morrison’s behaviour towards the French, and his refusal to admit the government deceived them, invites broader questions about trust. It’s always an issue but domestically there are some checks. Put bluntly, while dudding foreigners might be reprehensible, doing it to voters can be downright dangerous, as various politicians have learned the hard way.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Morrison and Macron need to talk

When Morrison arrives back from the US, his attention will turn to executing a policy shuffle that’s important for him both internationally and electorally.

The Glasgow climate conference is only weeks away and for it Morrison needs, at the least, to firmly embrace the 2050 net zero target and present a pathway that has credible medium term markers.

Biden and British PM Boris Johnson, who’ve delivered AUKUS to Morrison, have been twisting his arm very hard to improve Australia’s climate ambition, and he needs to deliver.

The Nationals will be paid off, and Barnaby Joyce will have to cope with whatever dissent there is within his ranks. When, as acting PM, Joyce appeared on 7.30 on Thursday, he sounded like he knew he had to lock in with Morrison but wished he didn’t.

In a speech to be delivered on Friday Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is preparing the way for the shift from the present government line of reaching net zero emissions “preferably” by 2050 to the firm commitment.

Frydenberg warns if Australia is seen as a laggard on climate policy, the inflow of the capital – its cost and availability – will be hit, with consequences for everything from home interest rates to infrastructure projects.

“Australia has a lot at stake. We cannot run the risk that markets falsely assume we are not transitioning in line with the rest of the world,” Frydenberg says.

He also says the transition must be broad based with “investment in emissions reduction strategies across all sectors, be it agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and others”.

Moreover he directly takes on hardliners within the Nationals by declaring “it is wrong to assume that traditional sectors, like resources and agriculture, will face decline over the course of the transition. To the contrary, many businesses in these sectors are at the cutting-edge of innovation and technological change.”

The government is now walking quite fast rhetorically. Precisely how far it will go in policy remains to be seen.

Read more:
View from The Hill: For Morrison AUKUS is all about the deal, never mind the niceties

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The position for Glasgow will become the government’s policy for the election, and Albanese won’t credibly be able to hold off much longer in producing Labor’s alternative. It will be a fine judgement for the opposition leader where that policy should be pitched. He will want it some distance from the government’s, but not far enough to dangerously increase Labor’s exposure.

Meanwhile the nation and its leaders, federal and state, are bracing for another sort of transition, which could be hellish. NSW and Victoria are preparing to open (at varying rates), and this is expected to send COVID cases soaring.

There’ll be severe pressures on hospitals in those states, and an increase in deaths. Morrison and NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian hope people will be so glad to be out of lockdown they’ll pay less attention to whatever health disasters might unfold.

The sniping between leaders won’t let up, as Western Australia and Queensland continue to attempt to keep COVID from invading, and their critics rail against border shut outs.

We could be headed into some of the most uncertain and difficult days of the pandemic, with fresh tests of community cohesion and resilience.

This week, in Melbourne’s serial protests, we saw how COVID can bring out the toxic underbelly of our society. Construction workers angry about compulsory vaccinations for the industry and then its shutdown, anti-vaxxers, and thugs from the extreme right came together in a menacing mob.

The recent growth of the extreme right (which ASIO has warned about) is particularly disturbing, because these people can exploit troubled times. Nevertheless, appalling as the protests have been, they should be kept in perspective. We’ve seen thuggery before (remember the 2006 violence in Melbourne against a G20 finance ministers meeting) although it is more dangerous when it comes in a crisis.

With rising vaccination rates and the planned openings, the new year holds promise. On the other hand, with the unpredictability of COVID, no one can be sure. Certainly not Morrison, as he works on his election strategy.

Read more:
Politics with Michelle Grattan: British High Commissioner Vicki Treadell on AUKUS and climate change

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

– ref. Grattan on Friday: After the deal on security, Scott Morrison turns to the shift on climate – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-after-the-deal-on-security-scott-morrison-turns-to-the-shift-on-climate-168606

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

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will prepare the way for Scott Morrison to take a target of net zero emissions by 2050 to Glasgow, when he warns on Friday capital inflow will be at risk if Australia is seen as a climate laggard.

“Australia has a lot at stake. We cannot run the risk that markets falsely assume we are not transitioning in line with the rest of the world,” Frydenberg says in a speech to the Australian Industry Group released ahead of delivery.

“Were we to find ourselves in that position, it would increase the cost of capital and reduce its availability, be it debt or equity”.

Frydenberg says there must be investment in emissions reduction in all sectors, including agriculture, mining, and manufacturing.

He firmly rejects the claim – advanced by some critics especially in the Nationals – that the resources and agriculture sectors will face decline in the transition.

“To the contrary, many businesses in these sectors are at the cutting-edge of innovation and technological change,” he says.

The government is set to finalise its revised climate policy after the Prime Minister returns from the United States.

Morrison, who has been pressed hard on climate by President Joe Biden and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson while in the US this week, wants an unequivocal stand on the 2050 target for the November Glasgow climate conference.

The government’s present formulation is that it is committed to net zero “preferably” by 2050.

Morrison has been negotiating with Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce on a deal which will contain a major pay-off for the minor Coalition partner.

Frydenberg says in his speech that in a long term shift “markets are moving as governments, regulators, central banks and investors are preparing for a lower emissions future”. He points out 129 countries have committed to net zero by 2050.

“Markets are responding as participants make their own judgements as to what this new dynamic means for their existing portfolios and their future investment decisions.

“In particular, they are increasingly focusing on the physical risks to their investments of climate-related events and the transition risk to their investments as consumer preferences, technological and regulatory settings change.

“As a result, trillions of dollars are being mobilised globally in support of the transition.”

One of Australia’s major banks in the last year has coordinated more than 50 transactions worth $100 billion in climate finance related activities.

“Increasingly, institutional investors are themselves committing to the net zero goal, like BlackRock, Fidelity and Vanguard, three of the biggest fund managers in the world. For them, there is an alignment between the commercial opportunities and the environmental outcomes.”

Frydenberg emphasises the importance of Australian markets operating effectively, with investors able to make informed, timely decisions, and capital available at the lowest cost.

He says historically, Australia has relied heavily on imported capital, whether foreign investment or wholesale funding of the banking system. Foreign investors hold close to half the Commonwealth government bonds.

Reduced access to these capital markets would raise borrowing costs, affecting everything from the interest rates on housing and small business loans to the financial viability of big infrastructure projects, he says.

Frydenberg says Australia is addressing the challenges on two fronts.

Regulators have focused on the disclosure of material financial risks relating to climate change and promoted a best practice financial framework. And Australia is making progress in meeting its emissions reduction targets.

“To go the next step and achieve net zero will require more investment across the economy,” Frydenberg says.

“An economy-wide transition is needed, as in the words of the former Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney this ‘isn’t about funding only deep green activities, or blacklisting dark brown ones’”.

Frydenberg says “opportunities will abound and it will be those businesses that recognise these trends and put plans in place to adapt that will have the most promising futures”.

He says the message to Australian banks, super funds and insurers is “if you support the objective of net zero, do not walk away from the very sectors of our economy that will need investment to successfully transition.

“Climate change and its impacts are not going away.

“It represents a structural and systemic shift in our financial system, which will only gain pace over time.

“For Australia, this presents risks we must manage and opportunities we must seize.”

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.

– ref. Josh Frydenberg prepares ground for Scott Morrison to commit to 2050 climate target – https://theconversation.com/josh-frydenberg-prepares-ground-for-scott-morrison-to-commit-to-2050-climate-target-168610

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pablo Negret, Postdoctoral research fellow, The University of Queensland

Figures released this week suggest Australia’s koala populations have plummeted by 30% in three years, and fewer than 58,000 now remain in the wild.

The statement from the Australian Koala Foundation has not been verified on the ground, giving it a high degree of uncertainty. But the claim aligns with a number of studies showing some koala populations are rapidly declining, particularly in Queensland and New South Whales.

Fire is an increasing threat to koalas; the 2019-20 megafires are estimated to have affected more than 60,000 koalas and reduced population numbers at multiple sites, including several areas of New South Wales. As bushfire risk increases under climate change, eucalyptus forest where koalas live are expected to suffer further impacts in the next 50-100 years.

So what’s the best way to protect these iconic animals from fires? Our new report for the National Environmental Science Program (NESP) sought to answer this question. We identified actions to reduce the risk of koalas being harmed by fires, and found gaps in scientific knowledge where more research is urgently needed.

A few big unknowns

Our research found scientific understanding of the interaction between fire management and koala conservation is lacking in three areas.

First, more research is needed on koala movements and their activity patterns before, during and after fires. For example, do koalas move during fire or stay in the same trees?

Evidence shows koalas rapidly move to and use recently burnt habitat. But it’s not known whether koalas found in recently burnt areas are new to that part of the forest or inhabited it before the fire.

After bushfires and prescribed burns, koalas can be injured by smouldering bark or burning embers when moving between trees. They can also become dehydrated. But how this affects koala movement and survival is barely understood.

Second, we need better understanding of how prescribed burning affects koala populations, in both the short and long term. Prescribed burning may benefit koalas if it reduces the severity of bushfires, but it can also kill or injure individual koalas. Better understanding the positives and negatives is crucial.

This might be achieved through long-term GPS radio-tracking of individual koalas, or compiling information about injured or dead koalas after prescribed burns and reporting it to conservation authorities.

Third, we need to know more about links between habitat connectivity, bushfire characteristics and koala population dynamics.

For example, fire can cause koala habitat to fragment. This makes habitat drier, which in turn may increase fire frequency and severity. But increased fragmentation can also limit the spread of fire and make it easier to control, which ultimately benefits koalas. More research into these trade-offs is required.

Read more:
Stopping koala extinction is agonisingly simple. But here’s why I’m not optimistic

Fires and koalas: a roadmap

Koalas can be protected from fires in various ways, including managing fire risk or, when fires do occur, managing koala populations and habitat to increase the chance of recovery.

But to date, there’s been little guidance about how effective various management actions are, and how best to allocate resources.

Our framework, one of the first of its kind, sought to address these questions. It can be used by land managers, scientists, koala rehabilitation groups, the media and the general public.

The work involved reviewing existing literature on fire ecology and management, as well as koala ecology and conservation. We also gathered expert advice through individual discussions and workshops in Queensland and New South Wales.

We identified several goals that, if achieved, will help maintain koala populations in fire prone landscapes. They include:

• improving or maintaining koala habitat and koala populations before and after fires. This might involve replanting, weed management, reforestation and pest control, long-term monitoring of koala populations and their habitat or minimising other threats, such as vehicle collisions, dog attacks, habitat loss and climate change

• maintaining or restoring fire patterns suited to an ecosystem – for example, by conducting prescribed burning to make an area less flammable in the case of altered fire frequency, or so-called “mosaic” burning to create patches of burnt and unburnt areas

• actions during bushfires, such as creating a low-intensity backburn that travels down a slope away from koala areas

• exchanging knowledge between koala conservation organisations and Traditional Owners, Indigenous communities of the area and the various fire management authorities

• effective post-fire management, such as quickly rescuing injured koalas for rehabilitation, and restoring key koala habitat.

Read more:
Scientists find burnt, starving koalas weeks after the bushfires

Looking ahead

Our proposed strategies and actions should also take into account other priorities, such as human safety, property protection and cultural values of Indigenous people and others.

Our framework requires further development. But it’s a first step in bringing together information previously scattered across different sources and branches of knowledge.

The report gives those working to protect koalas, and other tree-dwelling species such as greater glider, a set of guidelines to manage fire and ensure koala conservation strategies are effective. Our research methods can also be used to identify fire management strategies for other species around the world.

Pablo Negret has previously been funded by the National Environmental Science Program’s Threatened Species Recovery Hub.

Daniel Lunney receives support from the Commonwealth and NSW State governments, and the University of Sydney.

– ref. When fire hits, do koalas flee or stick to their tree? Answering these and other questions is vital – https://theconversation.com/when-fire-hits-do-koalas-flee-or-stick-to-their-tree-answering-these-and-other-questions-is-vital-168261

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Maund, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Newcastle

Southeastern Australia was yesterday rocked by a magnitude-5.8 earthquake with its epicentre near Mansfield in Victoria’s northeast.

The quake, which was followed by two smaller tremors, was powerful enough to damage buildings 130 kilometres away in Melbourne, and the shaking was felt as far away as Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and Launceston.

One Victorian acquaintance said they felt the ground shake so much that “I could see things outside shaking and was wondering if I should dive under the desk”, while Melburnians told of the terrifying swaying of apartment blocks. The damage to buildings confirmed the impact a large quake can have on our built environment.

The earthquake even prompted building evacuations in Newcastle, NSW, the scene of Australia’s most damaging earthquake on record in 1989. That quake, which had a magnitude of 5.6 and an epicentre roughly 15km southwest of the Newcastle CBD, killed 13 people and hospitalised 160, and left 1,000 people homeless.

Yet in the three decades since, many large buildings have been constructed in the Newcastle CBD, including a 22-storey residential tower. The result is that many more people now live near the site of Australia’s deadliest-ever earthquake.

This does not mean we should immediately abandon these popular areas. But we do need a consistent planning approach, to decide where we build and what level of risk we should accept. Natural hazards should be a central focus of planning, and communities should be told explicitly about the risks of living in a particular area.

Earthquakes are far from unknown in Australia. Yet our planning system does not explicitly consider which areas are at unacceptable risk from earthquakes. We continue to build in earthquake-prone areas across Australia, relying solely on building design to manage these risks.

This isn’t good enough. We urgently need a national planning policy that takes account of earthquake risk, to strengthen and support building standards. Building standards alone are not sufficient. We also need to consider the number of people in an area, their ability to relocate during a disaster, and their access to emergency accommodation and recovery support.

Broader planning issues such as secondary roads for evacuation and long-term evacuation centres for those displaced must form part of the design of our cities and towns.

What do the current standards say?

Australia’s national construction code ranks buildings primarily from 1 (minor structures that are unlikely to endanger human life if they fail) to 4 (such as buildings or structures that are essential to post-disaster recovery including medical and emergency services and emergency shelters), based on relevant building standards for earthquake risk. A higher category indicates more stringent construction requirements for all buildings in that category to withstand an earthquake.

The standards also provide a “hazard design factor” that indicates requirements for buildings to withstand an earthquake in different parts of Australia. These design factors consider places such as Meckering and Dowerin in Western Australia to be highly hazardous with regard to earthquakes, whereas places like Newcastle are designated as lower-risk, despite having experienced an earthquake. Shepparton in Victoria, which is near the epicentre of yesterday’s earthquake, has an even lower rating.

While these construction standards provide some useful guidance to architects and planners, they arguably miss a key point. Earthquakes, generally speaking, are very rare but potentially very damaging. So we need to adapt our planning strategies to take account of this, rather than just relying on building standards.

À lire aussi :
We may never be able to predict earthquakes – but we can already know enough to be prepared

We need a national planning policy

Australia doesn’t have a national planning agency, although such an agency would be vital to provide a consistent approach to planning issues such as natural hazards. At the very least, we urgently need a national planning policy that addresses the risk of natural hazards such as earthquakes. This policy needs to consider the legacy of historical planning decisions, and avoid future development in high-risk areas.

Similar to areas affected by floods or bushfires, we must think before we rebuild, and consider whether to rebuild in the same area at all. With specific regard to earthquakes, we need to consider whether a particular location allows us to construct buildings that will be safe, provide safe access and escape via road and public transport, and allow for adequate evacuation centres.

In earthquake-prone locations, we should consider the risk before approving tall buildings, those with large numbers of occupants, or those that cater for lots of people who are likely to need extra assistance in an emergency, such as hospitals, childcare and aged-care centres.

À lire aussi :
Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do. And those lovely decorative bits are the first to fall

With Australia’s population set to exceed 49 million by 2066, bringing ever-taller buildings and more urban sprawl, earthquakes may have a growing impact on our lives. We need a strong, consistent and nationwide approach to considering natural hazards in planning as part of meeting our housing, employment and environmental needs.

Without this, we will continue to rely heavily on building standards, continue to develop in hazard-prone areas, and continue to experience damaging disasters. A national policy, in contrast, will help us build communities that are more resilient and safer.

Mark works as an environmental planning consultant.

Kim Maund et Thayaparan Gajendran ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur poste universitaire.

– ref. Australia is no stranger to earthquakes, yet our planning polices have not adapted – https://theconversation.com/australia-is-no-stranger-to-earthquakes-yet-our-planning-polices-have-not-adapted-168470

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Clode, Associate Professor (adjunct) in Creative Writing, Flinders University

Bushfires are incredibly difficult to imagine, but once experienced are impossible to forget. They are events that most people would prefer not to think about — at least not in too much detail.

Just prior to Black Saturday, I was employed by the Victorian Country Fire Authority to research bushfire simulators, similar to earthquake or cyclone simulators, to help people prepare for the realities of a bushfire.

It sounds like a great idea, but it proved difficult to achieve. How do you expose someone to plus 40 degree heat, gale force winds, choking smoke and zero visibility? Never mind ask them to remember complex bushfire defence tasks while wearing fire-proof clothing, gloves, boots and goggles.

How do you simulate the approach of a 15 metre wall of flames that roars like a jet aircraft taking off? How do you simulate someone’s response to that experience without scaring them half to death? Dramatised stories are one approach, simultaneously acknowledging the experiences for those who were involved in the bushfires, and also sharing that experience with those who were not.

The new ABC TV drama Fires is a six-part series of interlinked stories inspired by the 2019-2020 Black Summer fire season. The series loosely follows two young volunteer firefighters from Queensland as they travel south on strike teams to help fight fires in New South Wales and Victoria.

Each episode tells a story of the decisions, experiences and responses of different communities and individuals on the way. This clever story structure showcases a wide diversity of circumstances and situations: from the generational losses of farming families to the disrupted holidays of tourists and shattered dreams of tree-change commuters.

The series explores the way in which people make decisions around fire preparation, defence and evacuation: when to protect property and animals and when to save yourself.

Read more:
Friday essay: living with fire and facing our fears

Responses to emergency, and its aftermath

The first episode introduces the linking characters of Tash (Eliza Scanlen) and Mott (Hunter Page-Lochard), highlighting the risks and sacrifices volunteer fire fighters and their families make in helping protect their communities. Tash has been a volunteer for five years, since she was 16, while Mott is a new recruit.

This episode may generate some heated technical discussions among Australia’s nearly 150,000 volunteer fire fighters around safety procedures, equipment and protocols (which are generally much better than depicted here) but hopefully the show will recruit new and younger members for fire brigades, which are currently at a 10-year low.

Accurately depicting psychological responses to an emergency is probably difficult because few of us experience the hyper-charged adrenalin mode created by the imminent threat of death. It’s not the same as being stressed or worried.

Despite our expectations, people rarely panic or throw their hands in the air in an emergency, rather they develop tunnel vision and become highly focused on the tasks for which they have trained.

The everyday personal tensions that drive the plot of most TV dramas are utterly irrelevant in a fire emergency and quite literally displaced by well-practised drills and procedures. I can’t imagine firefighters failing to prioritise a colleague’s injuries or dithering with anxiety during a truck burn-over. Hyper-focus, not lack of focus, is a more common response.

The second episode more successfully depicts the traumatic aftermath of fires and the messy complexity of grief, anger and loss. Dairy farmers Kath (Miranda Otto) and Duncan (Richard Roxburgh) return to their property to discover their home destroyed and many of their cattle dead or needing to be put down. Otto and Roxburgh skillfully layer the pragmatic stoicism of rural life with the emotional detachment often generated by trauma.

This episode moves swiftly and lightly across the processes of bonding and fracturing that so often occur in fire-impacted communities, the cycles of blame and anger that scorch families and friendships and the pressures put upon relationships by the insistent demands of the media and even by those trying hardest to help.

Read more:
Frequent extreme bushfires are our new reality. We need to learn how to live with smoke-filled air

A harsh reality

These early episodes feel somewhat sparsely populated in characters as they focus on just a handful of individuals at a time, rather than the broader community they live in, but I imagine the later episodes will layer these characters and themes and deepen some of the discussions as the show progresses towards its finale.

The Black Summer bushfires, occurring as they did over a long season and large area of our most populated seaboard, exposed many more people than usual to the realities of fire. Our changing climate promises to make such fires an even more frequent and severe event.

No matter how much we don’t want to think about it, thorough and ongoing bushfire preparation and planning is the only way that people who live, visit or holiday outside urban areas can keep themselves safe from fires. TV shows like Fires play an important role in spreading that message and hopefully making more people take their own fire safety seriously.

Fires airs Sunday 26th September, on the ABC.

Danielle Clode worked for the Victorian Country Fire Authority as a research consultant on psychological preparedness for bushfires in 2009 and assisted with an Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth funded project on children’s bushfire recovery. She is currently assisting the Adelaide Hills Council with their community resilience and readiness strategy.

– ref. Fires review: new ABC drama helps teach important lessons about the realities of bushfires in Australia – https://theconversation.com/fires-review-new-abc-drama-helps-teach-important-lessons-about-the-realities-of-bushfires-in-australia-168191

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne

A New South Wales state Resolve poll for The Sydney Morning Herald gave the Coalition 41% of the primary vote (down two since July), Labor 30% (up two), the Greens 11% (down one), the Shooters 2% (up one) and independents 10% (steady).

Resolve does not provide two party estimates, but analyst Kevin Bonham estimated 53-47 to the Coalition, a two-point gain for Labor since July. I previously covered issues with the independent vote in Resolve and the lack of two party estimates.

Read more:
Coalition gains in federal Resolve poll, but Labor increases lead in Victoria

Incumbent Liberal Gladys Berejiklian led Labor’s Chris Minns by 48-21 as preferred premier (55-16 in July). This poll would have been conducted concurrently with the August and September federal polls from a sample of about 1,100. The federal Resolve polls in those months have had a strong lean to the Coalition compared with other polls (see below).

By 65-17, voters supported “the plan to ease restrictions in mid-October with 70% vaccination rates”. The SMH article implies the Coalition’s position was stronger in September than August, as vaccination uptake makes reopening soon realistic.

The same situation applies to the federal government. Once lockdowns are over, the economy is likely to rebound quickly, and this will assist the Coalition in an election in the first half of next year.

Newspoll: Andrews has best approval out of Vic, Qld and NSW premiers

The Poll Bludger reported that Newspoll asked for premiers’ ratings in last weekend’s poll from a larger than usual national sample of 2,144.

The states considered were NSW, Victoria and Queensland. Victorian Labor premier Daniel Andrews had a 64-35 satisfied rating (net +29). Queensland Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk had a 57-38 satisfied rating (net +19). Berejiklian had a 56-40 satisfied rating (net +16).

On handling COVID, Palaszczuk scored far better than her overall rating at 67-31 good, while Andrews and Berejiklian scored nearly the same (63-35 good for Andrews, 56-41 good for Berejiklian).

Nationally, Scott Morrison had a -4 net approval in Newspoll; he was at +15 in Queensland, -3 in NSW and -16 in Victoria.

Nationally, Morrison had a 49-48 poor rating for his handling of COVID, unchanged from six weeks ago. By 53-42, voters expressed more concern with relaxing restrictions too fast than too slowly (62-34 in January).

WA upper house electoral reform: group ticket voting and malapportionment to be scrapped

The massive WA Labor landslide at the March state election gave them large majorities in both chambers of the WA parliament – the first ever Labor majority in the upper house.

Read more:
Coalition and Morrison gain in Newspoll, and the new Resolve poll

Labor set up a committee to look at reforming the upper house’s electoral system. There are two current major problems: malapportionment and group ticket voting (GTV). The Mining & Pastoral region and Agricultural region elect one-third of the upper house on just 10% of the state’s population. GTV allowed Daylight Saving to win a seat in March on just 98 primary votes.

Labor will adopt the committee’s proposals to change to a statewide election of 37 members, up from the current 36. GTV will be replaced by optional above-the-line voting, in which a single “1” above the line will stay within the party it is cast for. Voters can number “2”, “3”, etc, above the line to continue directing preferences after their original party is excluded.

This system is the same as is currently used in elections for the NSW and SA upper houses. However, these states elect half their upper house at each election (21 seats up each election in NSW and 11 in SA). The WA proposal is for all 37 seats to be elected at once, so the quota will be just 2.63%.

With optional preferential voting, parties will be able to win seats from much lower vote shares than 2.63%. It’s likely to lead to cluttered ballot papers at the next election.

ABC election analyst Antony Green has much more on the WA reforms. I hope the Victorian government scraps GTV before the 2022 state election – Victoria is now the last Australian jurisdiction with GTV.

Other state developments: NT, Victoria and Tasmania

The Labor Northern Territory government gained Daly at a September 11 byelection by a 56.0-44.0 margin over the CLP, a 7.2% swing to Labor. Bonham said this is the first time a government gained from an opposition at a byelection anywhere in Australia since Benalla (Victoria state) in 2000.

Matthew Guy ousted Michael O’Brien as Victorian Liberal leader at a leadership spill on September 7. Guy led the Liberals to a landslide defeat at the November 2018 state election.

A Tasmanian EMRS poll, conducted August 7-9 from a sample of 1,000, gave the Liberals 49% (steady since the May election), Labor 28% (steady) and the Greens 13% (up one). Incumbent Peter Gutwein led Labor’s Rebecca White as preferred premier by 59-29 (61-26 in EMRS’ last state poll in February).

Coalition leads on estimated preference flows in federal Resolve poll

A federal Resolve poll for Nine newapapers, conducted September 15-19 from a sample of 1,606, gave the Coalition 39% of the primary vote (down one since August), Labor 31% (down one), the Greens 10% (down two), One Nation 4% (up two), Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party 3% and independents 9% (down one).

No two-party estimate was given, but Bonham estimated 51-49 to the Coalition, a one-point gain for the Coalition.

There’s divergence in voting intentions between Resolve and Newspoll, which was 53-47 to Labor. But there’s been movement in all recent polls to the Coalition, which was up one in Newspoll and up two in Morgan to a 52.5-47.5 Labor lead.

49% gave Morrison a good rating for his performance in recent weeks, and 45% a poor rating, for a net +4 rating, up five since August. Albanese’s net approval was up three to -16. Morrison led as preferred PM by 45-26 (46-23 in August).

The Liberals and Morrison led Labor and Albanese by 42-24 on economic management (44-19 in August). On COVID, the Liberals led by 37-24 (37-22 last time).

Canadian election called two years early gives nearly status quo result

I live blogged the results of the Canadian election that PM Justin Trudeau called two years early for The Poll Bludger. At the 2019 election, Trudeau’s centre-left Liberals won 157 of the 338 seats and the Conservatives 121, despite a 1.2% lead for the Conservatives in vote shares. In 2021, the results are nearly the same.

The German election will be held Sunday, with polls closing at 2am Monday AEST. Parties need to either win at least 5% nationally or three of the 299 single-member seats to qualify for a proportional seat allocation. The Guardian’s poll aggregate
suggests the overall left parties have a narrow lead over the overall right. I will be live blogging for The Poll Bludger.

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

– ref. Coalition still well ahead in NSW poll, Newspoll premiers’ ratings, and WA upper house electoral reforms – https://theconversation.com/coalition-still-well-ahead-in-nsw-poll-newspoll-premiers-ratings-and-wa-upper-house-electoral-reforms-168259

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dilani Gedera, Teaching and Learning Manager, Auckland University of Technology

As any university student, lecturer or tutor can attest, the pandemic has turned learning and teaching upside down. So it’s important we understand what happens for students when their learning shifts online with little to no warning.

Since 2020, there’s been a growing body of important research into the impact of online learning for educators. But the student voice, which is essential to informing good design and facilitation of online learning, has been largely unexamined.

Our Student Online Learning Experiences (SOLE) research project aims to rectify this and give voice to those who are, arguably, at the heart of the COVID-19 education crisis.

The study uses data from nearly 1000 survey responses from students across all eight New Zealand universities. Through a combination of online questionnaires, individual and focus group interviews, we explored their experiences of online learning during the pandemic in 2020.

Challenges and benefits

Students are not a homogeneous group and online learning is not the same for everyone.

Our research shows that, even in so-called normal times, students face multiple challenges, such as access to technology and online resources, financial hardship, family responsibilities and challenging study environments. The pandemic has exacerbated these challenges.

A lot of my family members got [made] redundant, and they lost their house. There were 11 people staying in my house. I couldn’t study. I was also working at the same time. I had to pick up more shifts to help. Working more hours and trying to study on top of that was hard […] My house was always loud […] it was just hard for me.

Read more:
Delayed graduations, no formals — the class of 2021 has had a hell of a year. They need mental health support, and quickly

Among the challenges, however, there were some benefits. More than half the students acknowledged not having to travel and having the flexibility to learn at their own pace and place was positive.

Being able to cut out travel time has given me pretty much three hours of extra study time in a day. The flexibility has enabled me to fit [study] around my daily life. It reduced stress and anxiety. I feel more in control of the work that I do. I definitely work better when I feel like I have to take charge of my own learning.

They also appreciated “being able to access learning materials at any time and the ability to pause and continue” at their own pace. Students also reported they were able to “balance the children, household and study much more effectively”.

Support and communication key

Though many students felt less motivated and less focused, they became more used to online learning. They discovered they could leverage the good aspects of remote learning when they had the right support or knew where to get help, such as financial assistance, extensions, and disability support.

Some students found online learning took them a lot longer to process and engage with.

When it comes to posting something online, I like to make it perfect. Check my grammar, check my punctuation, and see if it makes sense. It’s like [a] mini assignment […] And then a tiny post might take forever for me to write, whereas in class we just have to say it.

However, most students also said regular updates and clear communication were key to helping them learn online by reducing the sense of isolation and distance.

It was good to see students/lecturers talking about their daily life before the online live lecture starts. This gave a sense of “interaction” rather than being talked at in campus lectures where I usually felt a bit of distance from lecturers.

Open-book versus closed-book

Our study also highlighted the need to rethink university assessment practices.
In the face of ongoing demands of family, work and lockdown life, many students found it challenging to sit an exam at a specified time.

They preferred time-based assessments (in which students complete an open-book exam or another type of assessment task within a specified time frame), rather than online exams at a fixed time.

Read more:
Digital learning is real-world learning. That’s why blended on-campus and online study is best

One respondent questioned whether universities were “assessing students in a way that’s actually effective and beneficial for their learning”.

Asked what they would like to see continued in future course design and teaching, a majority preferred open-book exams “that assess the application of knowledge as opposed to a stressful closed-book memory test”.

Such an approach might also help minimise problems with cheating and academic integrity in the online environment.

What do students say we should do?

Fundamentally, we need to get to know and consult with the students we work with and understand their needs and circumstances. We need to provide choice and negotiate learning possibilities, including such things as:

• design more flexible and inclusive learning experiences (for example, allow students to choose from a selection of times to complete assessments)

• develop student skills and competency online, provide video tutorials, allow time to experiment and have fun, give feedback and encouragement along the way

• establish opportunities for students to give and receive self, peer and teacher feedback

• foster social learning and social presence online by nurturing relationships and creating opportunities for group interaction

• provide opportunities to participate in class or online workshops (post-pandemic), maximising the benefits of blended learning

• inform students about the full range of support available and clearly communicate priorities for learning.

Read more:
How online mindfulness training can help students thrive during the pandemic

Better design, better learning

As pandemic conditions become the new normal, educators need to move beyond Zoom, Teams and video lectures to create inclusive learning environments. Using the Universal Design for Learning framework would be a good place to start.

Equity and diversity should be front of mind when we transition to blended, flexible or online modes of study. As one of our respondents aptly put it, we must

[…] recognise inequities and students who may have all kinds of difficulties accessing online learning, who may have physical disabilities that make online learning difficult, who may be having to take care of people.

Above all, we must listen more closely to those whose lives and learning are most affected by these changes — students.

You can read the full SOLE report here.

Dilani Gedera works for and receives funding from Auckland University of Technology (AUT).

Cheryl Brown receives funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation & Employment.

Dianne Forbes works for, and has received research funding from, the University of Waikato. She is a Governance Group member for the Virtual Learning Network Community in Aotearoa, New Zealand.

Maggie Hartnett works for and receives funding from Massey University. She has previously received funding from InternetNZ. She is a member of the Digital Equity Coalition Aotearoa (DECA).

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

– ref. Beyond Zoom, Teams and video lectures — what do university students really want from online learning? – https://theconversation.com/beyond-zoom-teams-and-video-lectures-what-do-university-students-really-want-from-online-learning-167705

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexey D Muraviev, Associate Professor of National Security and Strategic Studies, Curtin University

The global opinions on the new AUKUS security pact between Australia, the US and the UK have been decidedly mixed. China and France immediately blasted the deal, while others, such as Japan and the Philippines, were more welcoming.

Russia, one of the other few nations armed with nuclear-powered submarines, was more low-key and cautious in its initial reaction.

The Kremlin limited its official commentary to a carefully crafted statement that said,

Before forming a position, we must understand the goals, objectives, means. These questions need to be answered first. There is little information so far.

Some Russian diplomatic officials joined their Chinese counterparts in expressing their concerns that Australia’s development of nuclear-powered submarines (with American and British help) would undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and “speed up an arms race” in the region.

They suggested the construction of the nuclear submarine fleet would need to be overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency — a proposition unlikely to be acceptable to Canberra.

À lire aussi :
Why nuclear submarines are a smart military move for Australia — and could deter China further

‘Prototype of an Asian NATO’

As more became known about the new security pact, the rhetoric of Kremlin officials began to shift.

For instance, former Australian ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, boldly declared AUKUS was intended to counter not only China’s power in the Indo-Pacific region, but Russia’s, too.

Soon after, the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, was calling the pact a “prototype of an Asian NATO”. He added,

Washington will try to involve other countries in this organisation, chiefly in order to pursue anti-China and anti-Russia policies

This change of rhetoric should not come as a surprise to Canberra. Russia has long considered any change to regional security — the creation of new alliances, for instance, or the deployment of new weapons systems — a military risk that would require a response.

Marketing its own nuclear submarines

So, what possible options could Russia entertain as part of its response?

Since Moscow’s view of AUKUS is more of a political and military risk, but not yet a threat, its immediate responses are likely to be limited to political manoeuvring and opportunity grabbing.

À lire aussi :
Russia not so much a (re)rising superpower as a skilled strategic spoiler

Perhaps most notably, Russia may see the AUKUS submarine deal as setting a precedent, allowing it to promote its own nuclear-submarine technology to interested parties in the region. This is not merely hypothetical — it has been suggested by defence experts with close links to Russia’s Ministry of Defence.

Historically, Russia has held back from sharing its nuclear submarine technology, which is considered among the best in the world, certainly superior to China’s nascent capabilities.

Thus far, Moscow has only entered into leasing arrangements with India, allowing its navy to operate Soviet- and Russian-made nuclear-powered attack submarines since 1987. But this has not entailed the transfer of technology to India.

Should Russia decide to market its nuclear-powered submarines to other nations, it would have no shortage of interested buyers. As one military expert suggested, Vietnam or Algeria are potential markets — but there could be others. As he put it,

Literally before our eyes, a new market for nuclear powered submarines is being created. […] Now we can safely offer a number of our strategic partners.

Expanding its submarine force in the Pacific

In the longer run, Russia will also not disregard the obvious: the new pact unites two nuclear-armed nations (the US and UK) and a soon-to-be-nuclear-capable Australia.

The expanded endurance and range of Australia’s future submarines could see them operating in the western and northwestern Pacific, areas of regular activity for Russia’s naval force.

Should the strike systems on board these submarines have the Russian far east or parts of Siberia within their range, it would be a game-changer for Moscow.

As a nuclear superpower, Russia will need to factor this into its strategic planning. And this means Australia must keep a close watch on Russia’s military activities in the Pacific in the coming years.

Over the next 12 months, for instance, the Russian Pacific Fleet is expected to receive at least three nuclear-powered submarines.

Two of these fourth-generation submarines (the Yasen-M class) are technologically superior to similar vessels currently being built by the Chinese and are believed to be almost comparable to the American nuclear submarines being considered an option for Australia.

The third is a 30,000-tonne, modified Oscar II class Belgorod submarine converted to carry several nuclear super-torpedos capable of destroying major naval bases.

By 2028, I estimate Russia’s navy will have a force of at least 14 nuclear-powered submarines and six conventional attack submarines in the Pacific.

Should Russia start considering AUKUS a military threat, we could expect more to arrive. Their area of operations could also be expanded to the South China Sea, and beyond.

Deepening naval ties with China

In the most dramatic scenario, Russia and China could form a loose maritime coalition to counter the combined military power of the AUKUS pact.

Given the deepening state of Russia-China defence relations, particularly in the naval sphere, this does not seem unrealistic.

À lire aussi :
Australia’s strategic blind spot: China’s newfound intimacy with once-rival Russia

This possible coalition is unlikely to become an actual maritime alliance, let alone the basis for larger bloc involving other countries. Still, if Russia and China were to coordinate their naval activities, that would be bad news for the AUKUS.

Should tensions escalate, Moscow and Beijing could see Australia as the weakest link of the pact. In its typical bombastic language, China’s Global Times newspaper has already referred to Australia as a “potential target for a nuclear strike”.

This might be a far-fetched scenario, but by entering the nuclear submarine race in the Indo-Pacific, Australia would become part of an elite club, some of whom would be adversaries. And there is the potential for this to lead to a naval Cold War of sorts in the Indo-Pacific.

Sceptics may say Moscow is likely to be all talk but no action and the risks posed by Russia to Australia are minimal. Let’s hope this is correct.

Alexey D Muraviev ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

– ref. After AUKUS, Russia sees a potential threat — and an opportunity to market its own submarines – https://theconversation.com/after-aukus-russia-sees-a-potential-threat-and-an-opportunity-to-market-its-own-submarines-168374

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Quain, Lecturer, University of Sydney

Within minutes of Melbourne being rattled by yesterday’s earthquake, my Victorian friends reported changes in the behaviour of their animals.

One friend wrote on social media that her dog Harvey stood in the hallway howling for five full minutes before the earth moved. A colleague reported his television reception went fuzzy, but when he walked outside to check the aerial, he noted an “unusual and striking absence of birdsong” before he felt the quake.

My friend’s cat Henry inexplicably disappeared before the quake, but returned home safe after a few hours. Conversely, her rough collie Angie — who is terrified of storms — was reportedly “totally chilled” before, during and after the seismic event.

À lire aussi :
Melbourne earthquake: what exactly happened, and what’s the best way to stay safe from aftershocks?

Earthquakes are unsettling, terrifying and potentially fatal. The 1989 Newcastle earthquake killed 13 people and injured 160. If our animal companions can give us a heads-up when an event like this is about to happen, it could be truly lifesaving. But can they really? Let’s have a look at the evidence.

The scholarly literature provides dozens of anecdotal reports of companion animals, livestock, wildlife and even insects behaving strangely before earthquakes.

But a review of 180 publications reporting 700 records of abnormal or unusual animal behaviours prior to 160 earthquakes found the evidence correlating these behaviours with subsequent earthquakes was weak.

The majority of reports were anecdotal, and were made after the earthquake, making them vulnerable to “recall bias”. Put simply, people may be more likely to interpret their animal’s behaviour as strange in the light of a particularly memorable or traumatic event.

To establish that unusual animal behaviours can predict earthquakes, scientists would need to observe animals under controlled environmental conditions for extended periods of time — long enough to be able to observe their behaviour before, during and after earthquakes. To be confident animals do indeed behave strangely before an earthquake, we would need to also see them not behaving strangely when there isn’t an impending quake.

Sadly, the evidence doesn’t come close to satisfying this. But the authors of the review did find the supposed “predictive” behaviour in animals occurred around the same time as “foreshocks” — smaller earthquakes that precede the main seismic event.

If this is the case, then what people interpret as animals’ ability to “predict” earthquakes may in fact be reactions to the vibrations or sounds from earthquakes that are too faint for us humans to detect.

This wouldn’t be surprising, given that animals often outperform us when it comes to sensory perception, such as smell. And it makes sense, given almost 60% of unusual animal behaviours associated with earthquakes occurred in the five minutes preceding the quake.

Fright and flight

Fear, anxiety or distress triggered by foreshocks might explain why animals display behaviours such as vocalising (like Harvey the howling dog) or fleeing to somewhere they feel safer (like Henry the disappearing cat).

But of course it’s possible Harvey and Henry behaved like this for purely non-earthquake-related reasons and the timing was sheer coincidence. There are many reasons a dog may howl (a courier opens the front gate) or a cat may go missing (your cat may hear a loud noise and hide under the bed), but we tend to make the connection only when we’re aware of the same stimuli.

À lire aussi :
Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do. And those lovely decorative bits are the first to fall

What we do know is that animals can be seriously affected by earthquakes, whether through injury, displacement or compromised access to food and water. Thousands of animals, along with 185 people, died in the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, and many more animals were left homeless by property damage.

Yesterday’s quake is also an important reminder for people with companion animals to include them in emergency planning. Dogs and cats should be identified with a collar and be tagged and microchipped. And don’t forget to update the contact details if you move house or change your phone number — that way you’ll more easily be reunited.

Anne Quain ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.

– ref. Can animals sense when an earthquake is about to happen? – https://theconversation.com/can-animals-sense-when-an-earthquake-is-about-to-happen-168483

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica Lake, Research Fellow, Australian Catholic University

A new app can turn anyone into a porn star against their will. All you need is a photo and deep fake artificial intelligence technology will swap the person’s face into an adult video.

According to the MIT Technology Review the app breaches “an ethical line no other service has crossed before”.

Deep fake websites have existed since 2017 and research estimates 90-95% of videos produced are non-consensual porn or image-based abuse. The vast majority of victims are women.

However, while deep fake technology might be new, the problem certainly is not. Since the beginning of photography, men have been taking and sexually exploiting women’s images without their consent.

The method and tools might change, but the inclination to sexually abuse women by manipulating images has not. Addressing this problem — through law, technology or culture — means acknowledging its long and tenacious history.

‘Undraped Women’

The invention of photography in the 1830s radically altered the nature of portraiture. Images of individuals became more lifelike. They could also be captured, reproduced, manipulated and disseminated more easily.

In 1888, one of New York’s professional photographers, 30-year-old Le Grange Brown, was accused of showing and selling photographs of “undraped women” in local saloons. Brown had taken portraits of hundreds of young high society ladies during various social events and then cut and pasted their heads to images of naked women.

Sound familiar?

Due to this and other high-profile incidents, such as the unauthorised use of US first lady Francis Cleveland’s photograph on pharmaceuticals and tobacco, debate began about the problem of women’s images being taken and used without their consent.

As a result, in 1888, a bill to “protect ladies” was introduced to the US House of Representatives to prohibit the use of the portraits of “females” for advertising and trade purposes, without their consent in writing. It was vehemently opposed by groups of professional photographers and did not pass.

An article from the Ladies Home Journal in 1890 subsequently warned:

While the great majority of professional photographers are men of honour and responsibility […] women should always know the standing of the man to whom they entrust their negatives […] The negative once in his possession (if he is so disposed), he had the means of causing them great mortification by using it for base purposes.

‘Pretty girls’ and a ‘delightful pastime’

The capture and use of women’s photographs without consent intensified with the release of New York entrepreneur George Eastman’s Kodak camera in the 1880s.

Small, simple to use and cheap, the Kodak camera transformed photography into a “delightful pastime” for the ordinary man. Styled as a “detective camera”, due to its ability to be easily hidden from sight, it also led to a boom in surreptitious photography.

Newspaper articles and marketing materials employed hunting and shooting metaphors, framing amateur photograph as an aggressive, masculine hobby. “There are no game laws for those who hunt with a Kodak,” declared one advertisement.

More often than not, it was men capturing the images of unwilling or unsuspecting women. An 1889 New York Times article described amateur photographers as “young knights of the camera” and “pretty girls” as their “natural prey”:

If the young lady refuses he will perhaps strive to get her picture when she is not on guard just out of spite.

‘Common property, circulated from hand to hand …’

In 1890, comic opera star Marion Manola had her photograph surreptitiously snapped by a theatre manager and professional photographer while performing on Broadway.

She wore an (at the time) revealing costume of tights, and the image was turned into an erotic postcard. Manola took the men to court. She did not want to be depicted as a sexual object, to become, in her words:

common property, circulated from hand to hand, and treasured by every fellow who can raise the price demanded.

Manola’s case was used as an example by jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis when they argued for a new legal “right to privacy” in their landmark Harvard Law Review article that same year.

In 1903, as a result of another case involving the unauthorised use of a woman’s photograph, the New York Legislature enacted the first right to privacy in the US and across the common law world, including Australia and the United Kingdom.

A mutating problem

The sexual exploitation of women’s images by men is not just something that emerged with the internet, apps and smart phones. It is a persistent cultural problem.

Laws – such as privacy rights and those criminalising image-based abuse – can provide victims with redress and justice.

However, until men’s sense of entitlement to use and abuse women’s bodies for the purposes of vengeance, spite, gratification or profit is tackled, this problem will simply evolve or mutate with each new technology.

Read more:
AI can now create fake porn, making revenge porn even more complicated

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

– ref. In the 19th century, a man was busted for pasting photos of women’s heads on naked bodies … sound familiar? – https://theconversation.com/in-the-19th-century-a-man-was-busted-for-pasting-photos-of-womens-heads-on-naked-bodies-sound-familiar-168081

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Magdalena Plebanski, Professor of Immunology, RMIT University

SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, can sometimes cause the immune system to mistakenly attack the person’s own body. This process, known as “autoimmunity”, can damage a number of different organs.

After COVID-19, a small number of patients have developed a range of different autoimmune diseases. This includes Guillain-Barré syndrome, a disorder in which the immune system attacks nerves, often resulting in tingling and weakness in arms and legs.

There are also reports of autoimmune responses that don’t clearly correspond to any known autoimmune disease. This suggests COVID-19 disease may trigger new autoimmune illnesses.

The science on how and how often this occurs is still emerging. But here’s what we know so far.

Read more:
Explainer: what are autoimmune diseases?

First, a quick recap on the immune system

The immune system is tightly regulated. Within it, immune cells known as B and T lymphocytes – the soldiers of the immune system – are normally able to distinguish between itself versus external targets.

When the system becomes confused, B and T cells may start to target our own bodies, which we call autoimmunity.

Viral infection can sometimes trigger this confusion, resulting in autoimmune diseases.

How do viruses trigger autoimmunity?

Two of the key mechanisms are “molecular mimicry” and “bystander activation”.

Molecular mimicry occurs when the part of the virus the B or T cells recognise looks similar to a normal protein in our body.

The B or T cell then sees both the viral and the self-protein as something to attack and eliminate.

Read more:
Explainer: what is the immune system?

Viral infections can also cause organ damage and cell death directly. When our cells die and burst, they release self-proteins. These would normally stay hidden and wouldn’t trigger an immune reaction.

Bystander activation occurs when B and T cells accidentally get in contact with self-proteins, confusing the immune system, which otherwise is trained to ignore self-proteins.

What autoimmune conditions can COVID-19 trigger?

There are multiple reports of antibodies which recognise self-proteins, also known as autoantibodies, emerging in people with severe COVID-19.

Some of these autoantibodies that emerge in people with severe COVID recognise autoantibodies associated with well-known autoimmune diseases, including:

• systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), which affects joints, skin, blood cells as well as organs such as the brain, lungs and kidneys

• rheumatoid arthritis, affecting the joints

• Guillain-Barré syndrome, mentioned above

• immune thrombocytopenia, which attacks blood platelets, resulting in excessive bruising and bleeding

• autoimmune haemolytic anaemia, which attacks red blood cells which can result in breathlessness, tiredness, headaches and chest pain.

In the reports that describe the onset of these diseases after COVID-19, the autoimmune symptoms start during or after the respiratory symptoms.

It’s unclear whether the patients were already predisposed to these diseases, or the infection unmasked an autoimmune process that had already begun. Or perhaps the infection triggered completely new autoimmunity. The triggers may even vary for different people.

COVID-19 may also trigger new autoimmune responses and, potentially, new autoimmune diseases. This has already occurred with a condition called multi-system inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C).

Originally described as a Kawasaki-like disease associated with COVID-19, MISC-C causes additional symptoms in children and adolescents with the condition. This includes rashes, shock, excessive bleeding, heart problems, and severe gastrointestinal symptoms.

Read more:
MIS-C is a rare but dangerous illness striking children weeks after they get COVID-19 – here’s what we know about it

Autoantibodies measured in children diagnosed with MIS-C have a large variety of targets. Many have no association to known autoimmune diseases, and instead are associated with the heart and surrounding tissue, as well as the gastrointestinal tract.

This indicates a potential mechanism for new autoimmune conditions that affect these organs.

What’s causing the damage?

Using computer-based prediction programs we recently identified regions of SARS-CoV-2 proteins that antibodies are likely to recognise and bind to.

We then compared them to all human proteins in the body, to identify potential similarities.

In doing so we were able to map the potential for SARS-CoV-2 infection to trigger autoantibody formation and existing or new autoimmune diseases, affecting different parts of the body.

Many of the human proteins we identified were associated with other diseases, including multiple sclerosis, SLE and rheumatoid arthritis.

Other human proteins we identified were associated with diseases of the heart and vascular system, airways, as well as epilepsy, all of which have been reported in COVID-19 patients.

Currently much of our work is driven by computer-based predictive work; future laboratory research is needed to confirm the results.

Ultimately, understanding the mechanisms, the immune system targets, and those who are at risk, may offer targeted treatments for autoimmune illnesses after COVID-19.

Could vaccination help?

It’s unclear if getting vaccinated reduces your likelihood of getting these autoimmune conditions.

Autoantibodies have mainly been found after severe disease – and vaccination decreases disease severity.

So vaccination could reduce the risk of autoimmune symptoms after COVID-19, but at this stage it’s just speculative.

What’s next for research in this area?

Most reports of autoimmune disease after COVID-19 studied small patient numbers or are case reports. Large studies reviewing the evidence are needed, especially covering multiple autoimmune diseases.

In one study, for example, five cases of Guillain-Barré Syndrome were reported out of 1,000-1,200 cases of COVID-19 admitted to the hospital. Although this indicates a small incidence in the autoimmune disease after COVID, it doesn’t tell us what is occurring worldwide.

Read more:
An autoimmune-like antibody response is linked with severe COVID-19

Reports of the percentage of people positive for autoantibodies to specific targets range from 5% to a massive 50% in COVID-19 positive cases.

But although autoantibodies are frequently found in severe COVID cases, the precise role they play in illness after COVID remains unknown, with further studies required.

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

– ref. COVID-19 increases the chance of getting an autoimmune condition. Here’s what the science says so far – https://theconversation.com/covid-19-increases-the-chance-of-getting-an-autoimmune-condition-heres-what-the-science-says-so-far-166819

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hadi Ghasemi, Senior Seismologist, Geoscience Australia

Yesterday’s earthquake in eastern Victoria shook the ground for hundreds of kilometres around and damaged buildings as far away as Melbourne – and took many people by surprise.

While Australia doesn’t compare with seismic hotspots like New Zealand and Japan, relatively small quakes are expected, with Geoscience Australia’s quake tracker listing more than a dozen in the past week alone.

Read more:
Melbourne earthquake: what exactly happened, and what’s the best way to stay safe from aftershocks?

Even though earthquakes happen all the time, we still can’t predict when the next one will strike, or where, or how big it will be. Unfortunately, we may never be able to make that kind of prediction.

But we can estimate the likelihood of future quakes – and often, that’s enough to make sure our cities are prepared to cope with them.

Why we can’t predict earthquakes

Earthquakes are caused by sudden slips or ruptures in the rock beneath our feet, driven by the movement of the enormous tectonic plates that make up the Earth’s crust.

The exact timing and location of one of these slips are impossible for us to know in advance. Nobody has ever found a reliable and repeatable indicator that a quake is about to happen. We would need a highly detailed model of all the rock everywhere inside the Earth and an understanding of how it responds to tectonic stress to even stand a chance of predicting an earthquake.

However, suppose we understand the large forces driving the tectonic plates and the current level of earthquake activity, and we also study where faults have ruptured in the past. In that case, we can estimate the likelihood that different types of earthquakes might occur in the future.

What we can predict

To calculate the probability of future earthquakes, we look at the seismic activity measured since the development of seismometers about 100 years ago and knowledge of earlier earthquakes from the historical record, and combine these with information about the faults in the Earth’s crust where quakes can occur.

Australia has relatively little seismic activity, but we know there are hundreds of small faults beneath the Australian landmass. These are places where pressure created by the movement of tectonic plates can cause fault rupture or “slip”, which we experience as earthquakes that generate seismic waves and ground shaking.

When we discover a fault, from studying earthquakes or looking at aerial imagery, we often send out teams of geologists to dig trenches across the fault to find traces of past, often prehistoric, earthquake rupture. Depending on the type of signature past earthquakes have left in the soil profile, we can estimate the age and extent of fault movement and develop a history of earthquake activity extending hundreds or often thousands of years into the past.

Identifying prehistoric events is important because the time between large earthquakes on major faults may be longer than the instrumental or even historical record. Without knowledge of prehistoric events, we would have to rely exclusively on the relatively short history of instrumentally recorded earthquakes.

This may cause us to miss the big earthquakes that happen very rarely. We know that longer faults, for example, can usually produce bigger quakes – so if even if we haven’t seen a big quake at a long fault, we know it may be possible in future.

Read more:
The earthquake that rattled Melbourne was among Australia’s biggest in half a century, but rock records reveal far mightier ones

By combining knowledge of the large earthquake history of nearby faults, and the level of activity of random, smaller earthquakes that may not rupture major faults but occur often enough to be estimated from the instrumental record, we can make a computer model of the likelihood of earthquake occurrence.

For this earthquake occurrence model to be helpful in estimating hazard, we also need to calculate the strength of ground motion generated by each earthquake. This depends strongly on the depth, location, and size of each earthquake.

The ground motion also depends on the properties of rock in the Earth’s crust through which the seismic waves pass, with some rocks absorbing more energy than others. It also depends on the local geology and soil profile near the site of interest, with softer soil leading to stronger ground motion.

Mapping hazards

At Geoscience Australia, we have mapped some of these probabilities in the National Seismic Hazard Assessment. For everywhere in Australia, this map shows the ground motions that may be exceeded over the next 50 years, at certain levels of probability.

This ground motion, usually expressed in terms of a fraction of the acceleration of gravity at the Earth’s surface, is what we call the seismic hazard. Its potential to damage things we value – buildings, for example, or human lives, is what we call “risk”.

From the “risk” point of view, we may not necessarily care if the hazard is high in a place where there are no people, for example, but we may be very concerned if the hazard is high in a big city.

Yesterday’s earthquake is a good example of this: a magnitude 5.9 earthquake in country Victoria is an exciting novelty for most, but the same earthquake occurring in Melbourne would cause huge problems.

Building codes use hazard maps like this to specify how much shaking buildings in an area need to withstand to keep the risk at an acceptable level. Engineers then make sure their buildings are constructed so they won’t fall when they experience the level of ground shaking forecast in the hazard map.

Read more:
Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do. And those lovely decorative bits are the first to fall

However, until the 1989 Newcastle earthquake, no one realised the Australian building code needed to account for earthquake hazard. Many buildings built before this may be vulnerable even to the level of ground shaking forecast by the hazard map.

An earthquake of magnitude 5.9, if it occurs as far from Melbourne as yesterday’s earthquake did, shouldn’t cause significant damage to buildings that follow the current building code. The fact that it did likely means some buildings are built to a lower standard, and indeed we can see from news photos that many of the damaged buildings look like they were built before 1989.

Insurance companies also use hazard maps to determine the likelihood of damaging earthquakes and set their premiums accordingly.

So, while we can’t tell you where the next earthquake will strike or how big it will be, we can quantify the likelihood of ground motion intensity at the location of interest to make sure we’re all ready for it.

Phil R. Cummins has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

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

– ref. We may never be able to predict earthquakes – but we can already know enough to be prepared – https://theconversation.com/we-may-never-be-able-to-predict-earthquakes-but-we-can-already-know-enough-to-be-prepared-168480

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gemma Sharp, NHMRC Early Career Senior Research Fellow, Monash University

Last week Facebook’s internal research revealed Instagram’s toxic effects on some young people’s body image — particularly girls.

One study by Facebook of teen Instagram users in the US and UK found more than 40% of those who reported feeling “unattractive” said the feelings started when using Instagram.

Boys are also affected, with 14% reportedly saying Instagram made them feel worse about themselves.

As far as we are aware, there have been no reports from Facebook of the impacts on young people who identify as gender diverse. This group is at a particularly high risk of developing body image concerns.

The new information about Instagram’s effects on young people can be concerning for parents and may prompt some to want to ban their kids from using social media. But this is likely to cause significant friction between parents and young people.

Plus, young people often find ways to work around any such bans, making them self-defeating.

We suggest this is an excellent opportunity for parents to start an honest conversation with their children about their online lives. Parents can also encourage their kids to make their online experiences more positive.

What we know about social media and body image

The reports from Facebook are not a great surprise to researchers in the field of body image. A review published five years ago on the impacts of social networking sites found their use, among adults and young people, was related to body image concerns and disordered eating.

The review also showed it is not necessarily the amount of time spent on social media, but rather specific activities, such as viewing, editing and posting idealised photos, that are particularly problematic.

Read more:
Social media shots affect body image because we only show our best side

The photos or “selfies” posted by celebrities, influencers and even friends on social media may be highly staged and filtered to present the most attractive versions of themselves. Many of these photos are not a realistic portrayal of a person’s true appearance and serve to promote unattainable appearance ideals.

People commonly make comparisons between their own appearance and these edited and unrealistic photos and tend to judge themselves to be less attractive.

These types of comparisons can negatively impact body image and overall mood and can also promote increases in harmful dieting and exercise behaviours. Notably, the impacts of social media comparisons are worse than comparisons made in person. This is because people perceive others on social media to be much more attractive than themselves but only slightly more attractive in person.

But it’s not all negative

Other research highlights the many positive aspects of social media. For people with eating disorders, social media and older internet spaces such as chat rooms and forums, are often crucial spaces to share experiences and seek support. This adds a further layer of complexity to ongoing debates around social media and body image.

Social media is a core component of young people’s social lives which allows them to maintain and make new friendships. This form of communication has been vital during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.

Social media activities are likely to form an important part of young people’s identity. So, wherever possible parents could try to keep an open mind and resist the urge to criticise.

Read more:
Yes, your child will be exposed to online porn. But don’t panic — here’s what to do instead

If parents are not sure how to use social media, they could ask their young person to show them around the platform(s) so they can understand more about the content they are consuming.

Such a conversation paves the way for increasing social media literacy in both parents and young people. Social media literacy involves the development of skills to critically analyse and evaluate media messaging and images.

Research has shown social media literacy has positive impacts on young people’s body image. Together with children, parents can discuss the use of filtering and retouching images and videos, and how what is shown online is not always the reality.

What else can parents do?

Parents can also role model eliminating appearance or weight-based conversations from their own vocabulary, in person and on social media. This includes conversations focused on our own bodies such as comments about a desire to lose weight.

Research has shown parents are a powerful influence on how young people view and speak about their bodies. Parents can be kind in the way they speak about their own and other bodies and praise their children for qualities other than their looks.

Parents can be key players in helping young people make their time on social media more positive and empowering.

Ask young people to check in on how they are feeling when using social media. If following particular accounts makes them feel negative about themselves, ask them to unfollow or mute that person. Instead, encourage them to follow accounts which inspire them in non-appearance based ways and foster a broad range of interests such as sport, travel, art and comedy.

Research has also shown seeking out and seeing positive body image content on social media can improve our sense of body image and overall mood.

To name just a few, we recommend accounts such @theselfloveproject, @naturally_alice and @thenutritiontea on Instagram and @iweigh, @bodyposipanda and @beautyisonlyphotoshopdeep on Facebook.

Parents can also help their children develop a range of coping skills to help them counteract negative thoughts they might have about themselves while using social and in face-to-face.

One such skill is employing self-compassion towards our bodies. Research shows this has positive effects. For example, the compassionate friend exercise involves asking young people: “How would you talk to your best friend if they said they were struggling with how they looked? Now talk to yourself in the same kind way.”

Read more:
Women can build positive body image by controlling what they view on social media

Some social media platforms, including Instagram, allow users to create multiple accounts. This can be helpful if a young person is seeing too much content that makes them unhappy. Research shows the positive value of having multiple, perhaps even pseudonymised, social media accounts. Young people can express different facets of their personality and interests through different accounts.

If you are looking for more information and tips for parents and young people, you can chat 24/7 with “KIT” the positive body image chatbot who lives on the Butterfly Foundation website and in Facebook Messenger.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone
you know, visit the Butterfly Foundation, or call our national helpline on 1800 33 4673.

Gemma Sharp receives funding from an NHMRC Early Career Research Fellowship (Health Professional Category).

Jasmine Fardouly receives funding from an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award.

Marilyn Bromberg has not previously received funding that is relevant to this grant.

Tama Leaver receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) as a chief investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

Ysabel Gerrard has not previously received funding that is relevant to this article. Ysabel is also an un-contracted, unpaid, independent member of Facebook/Instagram’s Suicide and Self-Injury Advisory Board. Her role is to advise the company as an independent academic. She has not signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) or contract that prevents her from writing about the company’s policies, and there are no conflicts of interest or similar here.

– ref. Instagram can make teens feel bad about their body, but parents can help. Here’s how – https://theconversation.com/instagram-can-make-teens-feel-bad-about-their-body-but-parents-can-help-heres-how-168093

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Hall, Deputy Director (Research), Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University

On Friday, the leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the US will meet in Washington for the first in-person Quad summit.

Hosted by US President Joe Biden, the attendees are slated to discuss a series of big issues, from COVID-19 to cybersecurity, but China will dominate the conversation.

So, what exactly is the Quad and what is it aiming to do?

A difficult start

The Quad first came together in May 2007, when diplomats from the four countries convened on the sidelines of an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting in the Philippines for an exploratory discussion.

The idea was to see if the participants could build on work they were already doing in other forums — notably the Trilateral Security Dialogue involving Australia, Japan, and the US.

Their aim was to improve cooperation between the democracies in the Indo-Pacific region to manage China’s growing power and ambition.

This initial discussion did not get far. Beijing reacted angrily and lodged formal diplomatic protests. Questions were asked in all four capitals about the wisdom of the project.

Then, changes of government in both Canberra and Tokyo put paid to any further meetings for a decade.

Quad 2.0

When the Quad re-emerged in November 2017, it did so in the same place — in Manila, on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit.

But this time around, the participants were determined to keep the group together and develop it into something more substantive.

Since then, the Quad has evolved in leaps and bounds. For the first two years, officials from the four countries met regularly. In September 2019, they added a foreign ministers’ meeting into the calendar, holding the first discussion at the United Nations in New York.

In March 2020, they branched out, convening a “Quad plus” phone conference to discuss responses to COVID-19 with three other countries: New Zealand, South Korea, and Vietnam (the then-chair of ASEAN).

A year later, a newly inaugurated Biden convened a virtual Quad leaders’ meeting, paving the way for the first in-person summit this week.

Networked, not allied

Sometimes labelled an “Asian NATO”, the Quad is actually something very different.

For a start, it is not an alliance underpinned by a treaty. It does not commit its members to collective security – they are not bound to defend each other in a conflict. The Quad does not engage in joint military planning, nor does it have a dedicated military staff (as NATO does at its sprawling new headquarters in Brussels).

Instead, the Quad is a diplomatic forum for the members to share their concerns about regional issues and discuss ways to cooperate between them or with others outside the group.

As a result, it has a very broad agenda, running far beyond just defence cooperation.

Widening concerns

Back in late 2017, the Quad focused on four issues related to sustaining a regional “rules-based order”.

The first was maritime security, fuelled by a shared concern about China’s militarisation of the artificial islands it had built in the South China Sea and the prospect Beijing may try to control air and sea traffic in that area.

The second was “connectivity” — code for China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to build infrastructure and boost influence around the world. The final two issues were counter-terrorism and North Korea’s nuclear weapons.

Since that initial meeting, several other topics have been added into the mix. Cyber issues found their way onto the agenda in 2018, reflecting mutual anxiety about espionage, disinformation and the security of digital infrastructure.

Read more:
Quad group makes vaccine deal as a wary China watches on

Economic growth and development followed a year later, as well as cooperation with regional organisations like ASEAN.

COVID-19 became a core concern in 2020, along with supply chains, so-called critical minerals and the resilience of critical infrastructure.

At the virtual leaders’ meeting in March 2021, working groups were established on COVID vaccines, technology and climate change.

Where to next?

The Quad has been criticised for many things, notably for being exclusive, failing to deliver tangible outcomes, and feeding China’s strategic paranoia.

Read more:
Why pushing for an economic ‘alliance’ with the US to counter Chinese coercion would be a mistake

There is unease in southeast Asia in particular about its potential impact on regional stability.

One task of the Washington meeting will be to address some of these concerns and better explain what the Quad is, what it is not, and how it works. This won’t be easy.

Fundamentally, the Quad is still driven by mutual concerns about China.
Its purpose is to find ways to work together to prevent Beijing from creating an Indo-Pacific region in which it

• sets prices and standards for goods and services

• controls trade and investment, as well as access to scarce raw materials and sensitive technologies

• strengthens authoritarian client states and undermines democracies

• and seizes what it wants, like the South China Sea or Taiwan, with impunity.

But, of course, this can’t be said openly, in so many words.

Ian Hall receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the Department of Defence, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

– ref. Explainer: what exactly is the Quad and what’s on the agenda for their Washington summit? – https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-exactly-is-the-quad-and-whats-on-the-agenda-for-their-washington-summit-167988

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jack Heinemann, Professor of Molecular Biology and Genetics, University of Canterbury

Legislators around the world are being asked to reconsider how to regulate the latest developments in gene technology, genome editing and gene silencing.

Both the European Court of Justice and the New Zealand High Court have ruled that genome editing techniques should remain under the regulations specific to genetically modified organisms.

But a few other countries, including Australia, have exempted some uses of these techniques from their regulations, based on similarities to what occurs in nature. The main argument is that the biochemical processes of editing are like the processes that cause natural mutations.

The “equivalent to nature” narrative blurs the boundary between natural processes and technology.

Unfortunately, the risks from technology don’t disappear by calling it natural. The risk of harm from gene technology accumulates over time and scale of production. In our new research, we propose a framework that regulates technologies depending on their scale of use.

Proponents of deregulation of gene technology use the naturalness argument to make their case. But we argue this is not a good basis for deciding whether a technology should be regulated.

Read more:
Human gene editing: who decides the rules?

Risk of harm grows with increased use

The notion of naturalness has been criticised as unscientific in the past, but now some scientists are using it to say that gene editing should be exempt from regulations.

Geneticists have long used the term “spontaneous” to refer to events that are outside of human control. Mutations can be either spontaneous or caused by people using gene technology. Differences in DNA sequences produced by either might give rise to a new trait.

In nature, if a new trait brings an advantage to the organism, it is amplified through reproductive fitness. When humans amplify a trait through selective breeding, we substitute our hands for the invisible hands of natural selection. We therefore create additional potential for harm through our interventions.

Some uses and outcomes of gene technology can be made to appear natural, but this is a diversion from how and why gene technology should be regulated. Instead we should recognise that gene technologies allow more people to produce and amplify modified organisms more quickly and in more environments.

Any potential harmful outcomes of the use of gene technology increase as it is used more. What makes gene technology useful is also what makes it risky.

Complex risk

Nobel laureate Sydney Brenner described gene technology as a biological Archimedian lever for doing what could occur spontaneously in a faster, more concentrated and very different manner.

We now have the tools to speed up biological change and if this is carried out on a large enough scale, then we can say that if anything can happen it certainly will.

Safety increases with the use of some technologies, such as car brakes. The more cars with brakes, the safer our roads. No tool of gene technology, including gene silencing and genome editing, becomes safer the more it is used.

Gene technologies can be improved incrementally, but that isn’t making them safer when used more. Any potential risks multiply as more people use them more frequently and on more species. Regulation is our least imperfect tool to manage this risk.

Read more:
COVID-19 and gene editing: ethical and legal considerations

Imagine if other technologies with the capacity to harm were governed by resemblance to nature. Should we deregulate nuclear bombs because the natural decay chain of uranium-238 also produces heat, gamma radiation and alpha and beta particles?

We inherently recognise the fallacy of this logic. The technology risk equation is more complicated than a supercilious “it’s just like nature” argument.

Critical control points

We proposed the use of critical control points in a governance framework to regulate technology consistently with its risk to cause harm.

One such critical control point is between the introduction of mutations and the release of the organism. Another is the decision to make genome editing and gene silencing reagents available for sale to nearly anyone.

Deregulation and tiered regulatory frameworks release important critical control points from oversight. That is a problem even for what might be considered low-risk uses of genome editing and gene silencing because if they are used more without regulatory oversight, the likelihood of harm increases.

Critical control points tether governance to risk rather than downplay risk using metaphors that sound like science but are not. “No foreign DNA” or “just like nature” are slippery semantics — they are not measurable but make risk assessments sound quantitative and precise.

This approach raises misunderstanding of the underlying causes of harm from technology, inviting Brenner’s future where “if anything can happen it certainly will”.

Whether it is by sweeping or creeping deregulation, carefully chosen metaphors descale the risk of any kind of genetic engineering. By sleight of speech any technology can be made to sound like an extension of nature.

Critical control points instead inform both risk assessment and risk mitigation with precision. Regulated gene technologies can produce safe and possibly socially acceptable products, but we don’t get to them faster by taking short cuts.

Jack Heinemann has served as an expert witness for local government councils on GMO zoning regulations, the High Court of New Zealand, and has in the past received funding from institutions that are active on biotechnology issues, including NGOs, CRIs, government and international agencies. He is affiliated with the European Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Sustainability and a member of the American Society for Microbiology and the New Zealand Microbiological Society and a board member of the Institute of Health and Environmental Research. He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article.

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

– ref. Calling the latest gene technologies ‘natural’ is a semantic distraction — they must still be regulated – https://theconversation.com/calling-the-latest-gene-technologies-natural-is-a-semantic-distraction-they-must-still-be-regulated-166352

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Baell, Research Professor in Medicinal Chemistry and Drug Discovery, Monash Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Monash University

Many hopes have been pinned on repurposing existing drugs, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, to treat COVID-19. However, we shouldn’t be too surprised these drugs haven’t yet lived up to the hype.

Our study, published today in Science Translational Medicine, shows it’s notoriously difficult to repurpose existing drugs for new diseases or for new uses.

Here’s what we need to consider for this pandemic — and the next.

Read more:
A major ivermectin study has been withdrawn, so what now for the controversial drug?

Repurposing old drugs may sound great

Repurposing existing drugs may sound attractive, during a pandemic or not. Doctors are used to prescribing them, we know a lot about how safe they are for existing conditions and patients generally tolerate them well.

There are also well-publicised success stories of repurposed drugs that skew our perception of how hard this is to actually pull off. For instance, thalidomide was released in the 1950s as a sedative and repurposed to be used against cancer 50 years later.

But we show this example is the rare exception rather than the rule.

Read more:
Thalidomide: the drug with a dark side but an enigmatic future

Oh, but it’s great in the test tube

Let’s say an antidepressant drug kills a virus in a test tube. But this antiviral activity, picked up in a laboratory assay (or test), will likely be misleading.

Many drugs may well kill the virus in such an assay but this is only at concentrations much higher than those used to treat the condition for which the drug was initially developed. Humans often cannot tolerate these higher concentrations.

At these high concentrations, drugs also display all sorts of biological activities that may appear useful but are just noise and destined for repurposing failure.

Yet these sneaky drugs, including those that sound promising for COVID-19, can end up in peer-reviewed publications.

Or let’s say you find an anticancer drug that kills a virus in a test-tube assay. Do not assume it is immediately useful and safe to treat viral infections in humans.

Drugs are only approved for specific uses after analysing the relationship between how the body treats the drug (pharmacokinetics) and how the drug treats the body (pharmacodynamics). Experts call this PK-PD.

The same drug can give very different PK-PD profiles depending on the dose, how often it is given, and whether the drug is administered by mouth, intravenously, or under the skin.

Drug concentrations safe and effective for one disease may not immediately translate to another. Higher, more frequent doses may be required, with increased risk of unintended toxicity or even death.

So drugs intended for repurposing still need to be thoroughly studied in animals and clinical trials to make sure a new dosing regime is safe and effective. Repurposing may not be the short cut you think it is.

Read more:
The fascinating history of clinical trials

Oh, I forgot about the intellectual property

It’s not just the virus that kills: intellectual property barriers could also stop repurposing dead in its tracks.

The ultimate test that a drug is safe and effective is a phase 3 clinical trial. This costs a median of around US$19 million.

Assuming the new antiviral activity you discovered for the anticancer drug is both potent and “real”, there may be no way to proceed with essential and costly clinical trials without a patent.

Read more:
Three simple things Australia should do to secure access to treatments, vaccines, tests and devices during the coronavirus crisis

That’s because pharmaceutical companies and investors are businesses. They need to legally possess the rights to the drug so they can make a return on their investment into high-risk clinical trials essential for marketing approval.

If you don’t have patent rights to the drug but want to commercialise your antiviral discovery, you will need to negotiate some complex agreements with the patent owner with no guarantee of success.

If the anticancer drug you hope to repurpose has been on the market for more than 20 years, the patent may have expired so you don’t need to negotiate — there is no patent owner.

That’s great, but finding investment to fund well-designed clinical trials will be difficult because investors, keen on a financial return, won’t go ahead without patent protection in place.

Read more:
When Trump pushed hydroxychloroquine to treat COVID-19, hundreds of thousands of prescriptions followed despite little evidence that it worked

A little tweak here and another tweak there

This is where “molecular engineering” or medicinal chemistry comes into its own. This is when existing drugs are tweaked — a new atom here, a new bond there.

This allows researchers to find improved, novel and patentable versions of the initial drug.

This is no longer repurposing, but more useful.

That said, a pandemic is a special case where even an old, out-of-patent drug could attract governmental and philanthropic funding for clinical trials, if it truly has promise.

Don’t always believe what you see

If you test large numbers of drugs and find antiviral activity, you should assume this activity is misleading until proven otherwise. These signals are likely “false positives”, especially at higher testing concentrations.

Any chemical compound, including herbal supplements, can also generate false positive results.

In the US alone, supplements such as curcumin (found in turmeric) have attracted more than US$150 million of federal funding and studied in more than 120 clinical trials. Not surprisingly there’s no tangible evidence curcumin can be used to treat any human affliction.

Read more:
Have Australian researchers developed an effective COVID-19 treatment? Potentially, but we need to wait for human trials

Don’t always believe what you read

The explosion of research in the race to be the first to discover new drugs for COVID-19 has led to some poor-quality studies published in peer reviewed journals.

Now with social media amplifying those results, misinformation has become extreme.

So it’s easy for non-experts to latch onto preliminary or unsubstantiated research about repurposed drugs and give this more prominence than it deserves.

Read more:
Why is it so hard to stop COVID-19 misinformation spreading on social media?

There are other ways

We know of successful and well-practised ways of developing new drugs. This includes screening many compounds at once (known as high-throughput screening), then intensive optimisation (tweaking) using medicinal chemistry.

Yet many labs around the world daily are testing known drugs with the hope of repurposing, perhaps under perceived pressure by funding providers.
Seldom anything eventuates except flawed publications.

With the right approach, drug repurposing can work and provide new medicines for unmet needs and there are actually some good examples of this, beyond thalidomide. For example the veterinary antiparasitic drug moxidectin was repurposed to treat river blindness.

But for repurposing to work, there needs a considered and specialised scientific and commercial approach, specific to each drug and problem being solved.

It is too easy to focus on the relatively few repurposing successes to jump to the conclusion drug repurposing is a panacea for all ills.

Jonathan Baell receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council, MS Research Australia, Therapeutic Innovation Australia, Tour de Cure, Cyclotek Pty Ltd. Funding has previously also been received from US Department of Defense, Australia-India Strategic Research Fund, Australian Research Council, National Institutes of Health (USA), Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, Cure for MND,

Michael Jennings receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council, the National Institutes of Health, USA, the US Department of Defense, theBiomedical Translation Bridge (BTB) Program, The Bourne Foundation, Tour de Cure, BioProperties Australia, Bard 1. Michael Jennings has previously received funding from GSK, Queensland State Government Smart State Schemes, Mizutani Foundation, World Health Organisation.

Michael Parker receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Australian Research Council, the National Foundation for Medical Research and Innovation, MS Research Australia, SPARK Melbourne, and the Victorian Government. Michael Parker has previously received funding from CSL, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, the Australian Cancer Research Foundation, Cancer Council Victoria, the Yulgilbar Foundation, and the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation.

– ref. Ivermectin shows us how hard it is to use old drugs for COVID. Here’s how to do better next time – https://theconversation.com/ivermectin-shows-us-how-hard-it-is-to-use-old-drugs-for-covid-heres-how-to-do-better-next-time-168192

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles, Executive Dean, Faculty of Education, Southern Cross University

The number of preschools pursuing learning through nature play is growing fast worldwide. However, the effectiveness and impacts of this approach is largely untested, and we recently completed the first large-scale study in the world to explicitly research nature play in early childhood education.

By mapping the learning of scientific concepts in nature play in a range of early childhood settings, we demonstrated how young children engage with science long before they get to school classrooms and labs.

Our research shows nature play is a highly effective way of embedding STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — in early childhood education. These areas share connections and practices, and research increasingly shows that “regardless of ability, young children are ready, willing, and able to engage in STEM activities”.

What exactly is nature play?

Nature play is a popular way to respond to parent and teacher concerns about children’s limited time in nature and potentially too much screen time. It’s generally seen as unstructured play in natural settings, involving child-led interactions with nature.

Inspiration for nature play is often attributed to Scandinavian “forest school” models. However, its origins run far deeper. Indigenous practices, for instance, notably understandings of Country and self as entangled, rather than separate, support many of the key features of nature play.

Early childhood education in some countries such as Germany, Finland and Denmark has a long tradition of nature play. For instance, “kindergarten” means “children and garden” in German, showing kindergarten’s roots in nature-based learning.

What was the research project?

Our research project in urban and regional early childhood settings in Queensland uncovered a vast number of key concepts explored through nature play. Many were connected with Indigenous ways of knowing about the planet. Others were more aligned with environmental science or STEM concepts.

With funding from the Queensland government’s Education Horizon scheme, our team worked with 20 early childhood education centres. There were ten sites in South-East Queensland, nine in Central Queensland and one in far north-western Queensland.

The project design involved both children and early childhood educators as researchers — 31 educators and 152 children (aged four to five) in all. The children and the educators collected data to research their own nature play experiences and practices.

Read more:
Don’t worry, your child’s early learning doesn’t stop just because they’re not in childcare

We explored children’s activities, ideas and beliefs about nature, and their relationships with/as nature. Understandings were diverse and ranged from seeing humans as separate from nature, to humans being part of nature — humans as nature.

The recently published Research Handbook of Childhoodnature found centring childhood in nature, as childhoodnature — with humans being understood as part of nature — is a vital foundation for nature play. As one four year old said:

“When I’m outside I learn about nature. Nature is what we’re in now. The trees are nature. The sky is nature. The creek is nature. The ants are nature. We are nature too, because we look after nature – and not break it.”

We found educators’ lack of confidence or understanding of science concepts need not limit exploration of STEM in early childhood education. Instead, participating educators reframed any limits to their knowledge as “an opportunity rather than an embarrassment”.

The educators became active co-learners alongside children, rejecting the traditional perception of teachers as the source of all knowledge. To make the most of STEM opportunities in nature play, educators must understand their role as curious “scientists in action”. They problem-solve, investigate and discover alongside children.

Read more:
Let them play! Kids need freedom from play restrictions to develop

Our research identified environmental science concepts as the area of scientific learning participants most often engaged with through nature play. This means environmental science, as a discipline of teaching and learning within STEM, has an important contribution to make to children’s scientific learning.

Like all STEM disciplines, environmental science emerges in the early years and will build in complexity throughout a child’s life. The educators in this study embraced nine distinct nature play practices and lessons:

1. place/Country-responsive play — such as bushwalks and other excursions on Country and learning from and with local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders
2. non-human play — deep observation of plants, clouds, natural objects and other species
3. slow play — giving children the time and freedom for sustained, unhurried, uninterrupted play, including child-directed free play and artmaking
4. sensorial play — stimulating children’s senses and an awareness of the body through noticing, paying attention, foraging, smelling, feeling, touching and deepening connection
5. risky play — climbing trees, hanging upside down, balancing, rope swings, navigating creeks, building campfires, using tools, wrestling and exploring without adult supervision
6. imaginative play — also known as make-believe play, fantasy play, symbolic play, pretend play and dramatic play. Children often role-play as a way of exploring and making sense of the world
7. construction/creative play — whittling, sawing wood, building tunnels and bridges, painting, drawing, dancing, singing, drumming, nature journaling, nature collage, weaving, felting, sculpting, and clay work
8. discovery play — using a digital microscope, experimenting with natural resources, exploring shadows and light, floating and sinking, and watching insect and animal behaviour, as a way to think deeply about the world and learn how it works
9. death play — observing dead animals decomposing over time, role-playing death/dying and learning about life cycles to explore death, dying or grief.

The project uncovered a vast number of key scientific concepts and terms explored through nature play. These were organised under the key areas of earth, ecologies, relations, materials, bodies, time and weathering.

This is not a prescriptive list, nor are these the only scientific concepts nature play enables. Rather, they are starting points to activate discussion and help children learn. When STEM concepts are inspired by the children’s interests, curiosities and questions, learning is more powerful, engaging and enduring.

Read more:
Should I let my kid climb trees? We asked five experts

Amy Cutter-Mackenzie-Knowles receives funding from the Queensland Government Department of Education Horizon funding scheme.

Alexandra Lasczik receives funding from the Queensland Government Department of Education Horizon funding scheme.

Karen Malone receives funding from Queensland Government under their HORIZON funding scheme.

Linda Knight receives funding from Queensland Government Department of Education Horizon Scheme

Maia Osborn receives funding from receives funding from the Queensland Government Department of Education Horizon funding scheme.

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

– ref. Children learn science in nature play long before they get to school classrooms and labs – https://theconversation.com/children-learn-science-in-nature-play-long-before-they-get-to-school-classrooms-and-labs-166106

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kevin Davis, Emeritus Professor of Finance, The University of Melbourne

Much has been written about the taxpayer-funded windfalls to some companies provided by the A$90 billion JobKeeper scheme. Their gains have come from grants given to them to offset projected COVID-19 losses — with no obligation to pay that money back when the losses didn’t eventuate.

Australia banks may have reaped a similar (albeit much smaller) windfall via the Reserve Bank’s Term Funding Facility (TFF).

This loan scheme handed banks A$188 billion at extraordinarily cheap interest rates to help them “support their customers and help the economy through a difficult period”.

But it appears this cheap money may have given the three biggest banks — Commonwealth Bank, National Australia Bank and ANZ Bank — the opportunity to enrich their shareholders through funding share buybacks rather than repaying the cheap loans.

There would be nothing wrong with the share buybacks if the effective subsidy built into Reserve Bank’s cheap loans, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has been passed through to the intended recipients — borrowers, particularly business borrowers. But this is far from clear.

Let me explain.

How the Term Funding Facility worked

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) introduced the Term Funding Facility in March 2020. It offered to lend each bank, at a cheap interest rate, an initial amount (a “general allowance”) equal to 3% of the bank’s loans outstanding at that date.

An “additional allowance” was available if a bank grew its lending to businesses, particularly small businesses (where an extra A$5 was available for each A$1 loan growth).

The banks borrowed A$84 billion by September 2020. The RBA then put another A$57 billion of general allowances on the table. By the time it wound up the scheme in June 2021, the RBA had lent the banks A$188 billion. Of this, A$40-50 billion were “additional allowances” for expanded business lending.

The RBA initially offered these loans at a fixed three-year rate of 0.25%, equal to its overnight cash rate target. In November 2020 it cut the interest rate on new advances to 0.1%, in line with the cut in its cash and three-year-bond rate target.

This was well below the banks’ cost of funds from other sources, so it amounted to subsidised funding from the RBA — and ultimately the taxpayer. For example, had the RBA instead bought bonds issued by the banks in the capital market, it would have earned a higher rate of return, increasing its profits. This in turn would have helped reduce the government budget deficit and the need for tax dollars to fund that deficit.

Read more:
More than a rate cut: behind the Reserve Bank’s three point plan

Did business borrowers benefit?

My ballpark estimate of the value of the interest rate subsidy, meant to flow through the banks to business borrowers via lower cost lending, amounts to A$500-A$600 million a year for three years. This estimate is based on comparing the cost of three-year debt financing by the banks from the capital market with the TFF rate.

The four big banks — ANZ, Commonwealth, NAB and Westpac — got about 70% of this.

If the banks fully passed this subsidy on to who it was intended to help — businesses needing cash to stay afloat or expand — there wouldn’t be anything to consider here. But the meagre publicly available evidence provides no confidence they did.

Interest rates charged to business borrowers have fallen since February 2020, but not by significantly more than would have been expected given the general fall in interest rates. With the introduction of the federal government’s loan guarantee scheme for small and medium-sized enterprises, a much greater fall in rates for those borrowers could have been expected.

Whether the cheap RBA funding has prompted more lending is also questionable. In aggregate, the statistics show business lending has been stagnant since early 2020, with virtually no growth in outstanding loans for either small, medium or large businesses.

But that doesn’t mean the TFF hasn’t had an effect. What sort of decline might have happened in the absence of support measures is anyone’s guess.

Read more:
Vital Signs: the RBA is not a law unto itself — an external review would be good for it

That said, it’s a fact the banks have taken the opportunity to grow their most profitable line of activity, lending for housing. The cheap TFF money wasn’t necessary for this to occur, as evidenced by the huge liquid asset holdings of the banks, but it could have helped.

In the meantime, bank profitability has bounced back from early 2020, when the banks had to make provisions for possible bad debts, which are now being reversed.

Share buybacks now are not a good look

All this means the banks have ended with surplus cash. What to do: use that money reduce borrowings (including TFF loans) or return funds to shareholders by buying shares back from them?

The major banks appear to opting for the latter, spending up to A$15 billion on share buybacks over the next year.

Share buybacks can be done in several ways, but all essentially involve repurchasing shares on issue, held by investors, in exchange for cash. They are the profit-maximising way to dispose of surplus funds, increasing the value of shares by reducing their number.

But if banks have the cash to do this, and retained some of the subsidy from cheap TFF funding, the more socially accountable thing to do would be to first repay the cheap money the RBA lent them to “help the economy”.

Read more:
Small businesses are fund-starved: here’s how to make their loans cheaper

There should be enough transparency about the effects of the TFF for the public to be confident the RBA has not effectively subsidised profits for shareholders. With no clear evidence, the big banks’ share buybacks are not a good look, and raise similar questions to those about JobKeeper “rorts”.

Kevin Davis has shares in the major (and other) banks that are undertaking buybacks, and would benefit from those buybacks — which he is arguing against.

– ref. Australia’s banks got $188 billion in cheap loans from the RBA. Now they’re funding share buybacks – https://theconversation.com/australias-banks-got-188-billion-in-cheap-loans-from-the-rba-now-theyre-funding-share-buybacks-167890

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

On October 5, an unusual crew will fly to the International Space Station. Director Klim Shipenko and actor Yulia Peresild will spend a week and a half on the station shooting scenes for the Russian movie Challenge. Peresild plays a surgeon who must conduct a heart operation on a sick cosmonaut.

This is an exciting — if controversial — development for the station, which orbits around 400 km above Earth. Commercial use of its facilities could be a funding avenue to keep it in orbit. A Japanese documentary and an American movie, starring Tom Cruise, are also in the works.

The station consists of 16 modules locked together in a cross configuration. There are six Russian modules in the Russian Orbital Segment, while the US Orbital Segment consists of 11 modules run by the US, Japan, and the European Space Agency. Spacecraft like the Soyuz and Dragon regularly dock with the station to bring crew and supplies, and return others to Earth.

Usually there are between three and six crew living on the station. The main work is scientific experiments, but as some parts of the station are over 20 years old, a lot of maintenance is also required.

Space stations in the movies are often very “space-agey” with futuristic minimalist interiors. By contrast, the International Space Station is a mess, more Red Dwarf than 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are cables everywhere, walls cluttered with equipment, tools, food packages and notes, and over 6,000 objects lost by the crew.

Challenge, being the first (professional) space movie to be filmed in space, raises a number of questions. Here are five on my mind.

How will the cosmonaut crew react to a female ‘space tourist’?

After Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space in 1963, only four other Russian women have ever left Earth.

Svetlana Savitskaya was the second female cosmonaut in 1982. Her crewmates on the Mir space station presented her with an apron when she arrived, joking that she’d work in the kitchen. I’ve even heard a cosmonaut trainer say “space is no place for a woman”.

However, in Russia, medicine is seen as a female profession. Given that veteran cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev was sacked for objecting to the movie plans (he was later reinstated), I’m wondering what Yulia Peresild’s reception will be like.

What about using the space toilets?

Personal hygiene is challenging in the microgravity environment of the space station. Crew must be taught how to use the complicated space toilets, which use vacuum pumps to suck everything away from the body and into tanks. Urine is recycled to augment the station’s water supply — as the joke goes, yesterday’s coffee becomes tomorrow’s coffee.

Then there’s the politics of space poo. In 2009, strained relationships between Moscow and Washington resulted in Russian and US crews being banned from using each other’s toilets. Crew complained that not being able to use the nearest toilet interrupted their work.

Peresild and Shipenko have been training since May in Russia’s Star City, and this presumably includes potty-training too. NASA only installed the first female-friendly toilet in 2020.

In the Russian segment where the filming will take place, there’s one old toilet designed for male anatomy. In female bodies there’s less separation between pee and poo, so NASA designed its new toilet to take this into account. Will Peresild use the NASA toilet by preference? She’ll be the first Russian woman to compare space toilet technology.

How realistic will the surgery scenes be?

In space, uncontained liquids form bubbles and float around. This presents some challenges for heart surgery, especially as blood tends to pool in the upper parts of the body. There have been limited surgical experiments already in microgravity, but they have been done on artificial bodies, or animals such as rats.

Technology under development for future space missions, particularly long duration flights like those to Mars, includes robotic surgery and capsules that enclose the patient, with the surgeon operating on them through arm portholes. It will be interesting to see what choices are made to portray this key part of the film.

Read more:
From floating guts to ‘sticky’ blood – here’s how to do surgery in space

Will the film crew leave anything behind in space?

As a space archaeologist, I’m interested in whether this unusual activity will contribute to the archaeological record of the station. While the film crew will have to bring all their equipment with them, scientific experiments are prioritised due to limited cargo space when sending things back to Earth. Later crew may find objects left behind by Peresild and Shipenko, stuck to Velcro patches on the walls, or lurking in storage areas.

In the Russian Zvezda module, cosmonauts have made part of a wall into an informal gallery or shrine. Analysis of how the pictures displayed change over time shows it almost always features images of the Soviet space heroes Yuri Gagarin, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Sergei Korolev, as well as Russian Orthodox icons.

Peresild’s father is a well-known icon painter, so perhaps she will bring one to contribute to this display.

What happens next?

After this flight, Peresild and Shipenko will officially be space travellers, as well as the first professional filmmakers in space. They’ll join the ranks of an elite group who’ve travelled into orbit.

Although the last year has seen numerous people who have just nudged into space on sub-orbital flights, including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and the “civilian” crew, it still means something to actually live in space.

At least 45 films about space travel have received Oscar nominations for Best Visual Effects, but in the case of Challenge, the visual effects will be real.

Perhaps this will be a turning point in how space habitats are depicted in films. Will audiences prefer the glamorous fantasy, or replace their visions of future space travel with the gritty reality of a working space station?

Alice Gorman receives funding from the Australian Research Council for the International Space Station Archaeological Project, on which she is a Principal Investigator with Associate Professor Justin Walsh from Chapman University, California. She is a member of the Advisory Council of the Space Industry Association of Australia.

– ref. From poo politics to rubbish disposal: 5 big questions about the International Space Station becoming a movie set – https://theconversation.com/from-poo-politics-to-rubbish-disposal-5-big-questions-about-the-international-space-station-becoming-a-movie-set-168282

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

The New AUKUS security agreement has bound Australia even more tightly to the United States and Britain. But it has brought blowback against all three countries from France – which was blindsided by the cancellation of its contract to supply submarines to Australia.

On another front, Australia is under intense pressure from its two “great and powerful friends”, the US and the UK, to improve its ambition on climate change in the run up to the Glasgow conference.

In the wake of AUKUS and on the cusp of Glasgow, we talk to Britain’s High Commissioner to Australia, Vicki Treadell, about security and climate.

Treadell says Britain is “deeply disappointed at the reaction from France” following the AUKUS announcement – which included the French cancelling defence talks with the United Kingdom.

“We would hope that they will see the bigger picture, that our partnership from a strategic defence and security point of view should not be diminished. The areas where we already work with them, and likewise America and Australia too. All those things remain for us to work together on.”

“Obviously, they are disappointed, but I don’t think they should regard it or interpret it as a loss of trust.”

She says the French should bear in mind “there is a far more important strategic dynamic to safeguard, to ensure stability and peace in the region”.

As for Britain’s part in AUKUS, the “gravity has shifted to this region in terms of geopolitics, economics, and therefore we need to be part of this region engaged with it”.

Looking to Glasgow, “We want to see high ambition from all the countries participating in COP 26. We see this as a really important economic agenda for the world, the economic transition that we need to make.”

“I know that Prime Minister Morrison is working hard towards this, but we do understand the politics of Australia and all we can do as good friends and partners is to encourage and to say that we will be there to work with Australia to realise that level of ambition.”

“Australia has a huge opportunity to become a global leader in […] key clean industries of the future. Australia has an almost unparalleled opportunity to create jobs and growth domestically and also to produce the key inputs needed for economies around the world to decarbonise inputs like clean hydrogen, green materials like steel and aluminium.”

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: British High Commissioner Vicki Treadell on AUKUS and climate change – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-british-high-commissioner-vicki-treadell-on-aukus-and-climate-change-168491

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ann L Brower, Associate Professor of Environmental Science, University of Canterbury

News of Melbourne’s earthquake today made my left leg hurt. That’s the leg I nearly lost.

On February 22 2011, there were nine of us on a red bus from Sumner to Canterbury University in Christchurch. At 12.51, the unreinforced brick facade of 605 Colombo Street crushed our bus and four pedestrians. I felt brick after brick land on my left hip, and wondered how long I would last.

I’m the only one left — the lucky thirteenth.

I was taken to hospital on the back of a stranger’s truck. I broke more bones than the surgeons were willing to count, spent two months in hospital, and six months off work. More than a decade later, I feel the earthquake in every step.

During that earthquake, 16 people were killed just on that one block of Christchurch’s main street. Melbourne and country Victoria are full of places just like it, with brick facades, parapets and gables.

It wasn’t the earthquake that killed everyone but me on that bus. It was the building, its lack of regulation, lack of structural support, and lack of a fence. It wasn’t just bad luck.

Changing New Zealand’s Building Act to prioritise “fally-offy bits” of buildings was not in my life plan. But extraordinary events can change ordinary life plans. So when I got out of hospital, I set my ordinary environmental work to the side, and took a couple years to brush up on seismology, earthquake engineering, and the seismic safety of buildings.

Five years later, the NZ Parliament ratified the “Brower amendment” to the Building Act to prioritise fixing unreinforced brick decorative bits of buildings. And now I’m asking Victoria to please learn from your Kiwi cousins.

Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do. And those lovely decorative bits of buildings are the first to fall, even in relatively mild earthquakes like the ones Victoria gets from time to time.

Read more:
The earthquake that rattled Melbourne was among Australia’s biggest in half a century, but rock records reveal far mightier ones

Building back better

After Christchurch, New Zealand learned our lesson and reformed our building legislation. Victoria can skip the truly painful part of the lesson — the deaths and injuries in the streets — and skip straight to the legislative reform.

The smart thing to do is create a separate category for non-structural unreinforced masonry: parapets (the small decorative extension at the top of a wall), gables and chimneys. This is a good idea because:

• they are the cheapest to fix
• they are the first to fall
• they are the deadliest when they do.

It makes sense to pick the low-hanging fruit first. It will greatly improve the safety of Victoria’s streets without costing an arm and a leg – literally or figuratively.

Here, the Canterbury Earthquakes Royal Commission recommended it. And GNS Science calls parapets, gables and chimneys “dangerous”, even in cities with low earthquake risk, such as Auckland, Dunedin and Melbourne.

Read more:
10 years since the Darfield earthquake rocked New Zealand: what have we learned?

The building that collapsed on our bus was expected to fall. Everyone knows unreinforced bricks fall. To me, the most predictable losses are the least acceptable. This is especially true when the methods of prevention are as known and straightforward as securing a parapet to the building’s structural core.

Fixing the parapets first has the highest ratio of safety gains to cost. There is no complicated inspection required. Parapets do not hold the building up.

Attaching them securely is less disruptive to the activity inside the building than replacing them entirely. That said, they could easily also be replaced with lighter, less deadly materials, as is often done in California.

Read more:
Melbourne earthquake: what exactly happened, and what’s the best way to stay safe from aftershocks?

The building that collapsed onto us was worth NZ$30,000 (A$29,000), according to its 2007 government valuation. The Royal Commission heard that attaching the front facade to the building would have cost NZ$200,000 (A$194,000).

By my calculations, saving my left leg cost taxpayers about half a million dollars.

Fixing parapets, gables and chimneys first is also equitable. Unreinforced masonry buildings pose a greater public danger to passers-by than other types of quake-prone buildings that risk collapsing inwards. Placarding the buildings will do nothing for those in the street and on the footpath.

Allowing the parapets to persist unattached benefits only the owner. The risks, meanwhile, are transferred to the public, and onto the public health system if an accident happens.

Fixing the most dangerous and least expensive bits first is also a cost-effective way to preserve heritage buildings. Fixing the fally-offiest bits might render unnecessary the full building strengthening, and might prompt owners to spend the money now rather than in several decades’ time when the entire building needs repairs.

I am not saying all buildings in Victoria or Melbourne should be whizz-bang “earthquake-proof” like those in Tokyo or San Francisco. I am recommending cheap, effective fixes to the bits of buildings that are easiest to fix, and deadliest if you don’t.

I treasure my left leg, scars and all. But please, Australia, learn from your Kiwi cousins.

This article is adapted, with permission, from a 2017 article that originally appeared in the journal Earthquake Spectra.

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

– ref. Earthquakes don’t kill people; buildings do. And those lovely decorative bits are the first to fall – https://theconversation.com/earthquakes-dont-kill-people-buildings-do-and-those-lovely-decorative-bits-are-the-first-to-fall-168476

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Quigley, Associate Professor of Earthquake Science, The University of Melbourne

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake has struck about 115 kilometres east of Melbourne in Victoria, causing damage to buildings and forcing residents to evacuate across the city. The quake, which started near Woods Point at a depth of 12km, was also felt in Sydney, Canberra, Adelaide and even as far as Launceston, Tasmania.

I and the co-author of this article, Dee Ninis, work as earthquake scientists at the Seismology Research Centre. Researching earthquakes is our life’s work. Here’s what you need to know to understand why today’s earthquake happened, and the geological conditions that triggered it.

Where was it exactly?

On-ground sensors distributed by the Seismology Research Centre have confirmed the earthquake was of a 5.8 magnitude, with an epicentre about 60km south-east of Mansfield in Victoria. The preliminary focal mechanism of this earthquake is strike-slip, meaning the rocks likely slid past each other laterally on what is probably an east-west oriented fault.

Australia experiences fewer earthquakes than plate boundary regions, such as New Zealand. Many of Australia’s suspected neotectonic faults (faults which have hosted earthquakes in recent geological times) have not been thoroughly investigated, commonly due to lack of funding and resources for earthquake research.

However, earthquakes basically happen for the same reason in Australia as they do in New Zealand: there is a buildup of elastic strain energy in the crust, which eventually needs to be released. And most of this energy release occurs due to the rupture of weak zones in the crust, called faults.

Geoscience Australia hosts a database of what we think might be active faults across Australia, but few of these faults have been studied on the ground.

Most of the neotectonic faults near today’s earthquake were identified from remote elevation data — and this alone doesn’t reveal information such as when, how big and how often previous earthquakes on these faults occurred.

What we look for here is displacement at Earth’s surface, formed by movement during previous quakes. Such displacement is only caused by moderate to large earthquakes relatively close to the surface.

If it’s deep enough, it’s entirely possible for a quake to happen at a fault that never ruptures the surface — so we can’t see evidence for it. At a magnitude of 5.8 and a depth of 12km, we don’t expect today’s event to have an associated surface rupture, although it is remotely possible.

Is this an unusual event?

While some early reports suggested today’s earthquake was the “largest on-land earthquake in Australia since 1997”, this isn’t the case. Australia has an earthquake of magnitude 6 or higher every six to ten years, on average. That’s based on an instrumental record going back about 150 years.

The 2016 Petermann Ranges earthquake in the Northern Territory was a magnitude 6.1 quake. And while Australia is not a tectonic plate boundary, it is still quite seismically active.

This morning’s earthquake was the largest onshore quake ever recorded in Victoria. Other recent earthquakes include two magnitude 5 quakes: one in 1996 near Mt Baw Baw, and one in 2012 near Moe.

But just because we haven’t seen such a high-magnitude earthquake in our time doesn’t mean they don’t happen. For instance, there is geological evidence for a possible magnitude 7 earthquake occurring sometime between 70,000 and 25,000 years ago, on the Cadell Fault near the Victorian town of Echuca.

Read more:
The earthquake that rattled Melbourne was among Australia’s biggest in half a century, but rock records reveal far mightier ones

Earthquakes are more intense and frequent in plate boundary regions. The Pacific plate boundary, which passes directly through New Zealand’s South Island, lies to Australia’s east.

But despite this — and although the tectonic deformation rates across Australia are lower than the deformation rates at plate boundary regions — Australia has seen earthquakes in places you wouldn’t expect (unless you’re an earthquake scientist).

For instance, the Tennant Creek earthquake sequence in 1988 saw three separate shocks erupt within 12 hours, with magnitudes of 6.2, 6.3 and 6.6 (the main shock).

What about aftershocks?

Several aftershocks followed the main event this morning, some occurring within the hour. In an earthquake sequence, an “aftershock” is defined as an earthquake that’s smaller than and which follows the main shock. The strongest aftershocks come soon after the main event and slowly taper off.

We do expect the region around today’s earthquake epicentre to remain active, and we will probably have more felt events in the next few days. In fact, we would expect aftershocks to continue up to decades afterwards, although through time most of these will become too small to be felt (the Tennant Creek earthquake sequence of 1988 is still ongoing).

If, under unfortunate circumstances, we experience an even larger earthquake soon — then that will become the main event, and the quake from this morning will be designated a “foreshock”.

So we all have to stay alert. Even if the aftershocks aren’t as intense in magnitude, smaller quakes can still be incredibly damaging depending on their depth and location. In the 2011 Christchurch disaster, it was an aftershock of magnitude 6.3 which wreaked the most havoc, and led to many people’s deaths.

How to prepare?

In terms of personal safety, the best thing to do during an earthquake is drop to the ground, take cover and hold on. If you’re inside a house or other building, try to crawl under something sturdy to protect yourself, such as a solid table. This will help save you from anything that might fall.

If you experience a quake while you’re outside, make sure you’re as far away from buildings and other structures as possible, as these too can fall on you. You need to be in an open area. Victoria’s State Emergency Service has more recommendations on what to do, including:

• staying away from glass, windows, outside doors and walls and anything that could fall such as lighting fixtures

• not using a doorway unless you know it is strongly supported and is close to you

• keeping in mind the electricity may go out, and sprinkler systems or fire alarms may turn on.

Finally, if you’re considering any activities that might put you at risk, such as roofing, gutter cleaning, and other activities that involve the use of ladders, it is prudent to reconsider whether these are essential in the short term.

Acknowledgment: this article was co-authored by Dee Ninis, who works as an earthquake geologist at ESS Earth Sciences’s Seismology Research Centre based in Richmond, Victoria.

Mark Quigley receives funding from The Australian Research Council. He is affiliated with the Seismology Research Centre in Richmond, Victoria, Australia.

– ref. Melbourne earthquake: what exactly happened, and what’s the best way to stay safe from aftershocks? – https://theconversation.com/melbourne-earthquake-what-exactly-happened-and-whats-the-best-way-to-stay-safe-from-aftershocks-168467

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Ryan, Associate Professor (Literature), Australian Catholic University

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised this story contains images of people who have died.

Review: The Brumby Wars by Anthony Sharwood (Hachette)

You know you are in for a wild ride when the least controversial element of a book is the suggestion “the man” in Banjo Paterson’s 1890 poem The Man from Snowy River is Indigenous.

Anthony Sharwood’s The Brumby Wars argues a compromise must be found, which recognises the sentimental attachment of many to wild horses, while acknowledging the damage they do to the environment. Much of this sentiment, he writes, comes from the enduring place of Paterson’s poem in our national consciousness. And so what if, as he suggests, the man turned out to be Indigenous?

To ask this question, Sharwood convincingly reexamines the poem in the light of Indigenous stockmen in the area at the time.

But this is just a minor question in his book. The real heat in it is between those who view the wild horses of the high country as national symbols and those who see them as destructive pests.

In 2018 John Barilaro, New South Wales state member for Monaro, shepherded the Kosciuszko Wild Horse Heritage Bill through parliament.

As Sharwood perceptively notes, Barilaro worked to broaden the appeal of the high country by citing its role in multiculturalism through the Snowy River scheme. Descendants of these immigrants, according to Barilaro, demonstrate the ability of the land to absorb “introduced species”.

If “the man” was a First Nations person, then Paterson’s poem could be reworked to “prove”, these nationalist myths have always represented “all of us” — despite the poem’s first appearance in an outlet (The Bulletin) with “Australia for the white man” as a banner.

Read more:
Passing the brumby bill is a backward step for environmental protection in Australia

The Indigenous stockmen

Those attached to the wild horses often cite their relationship to “Australian legend”, the lynchpin of which is Paterson’s poem.

Sharwood’s argument relies in part on the first lines of the poem’s final stanza:

And down by Kosciusko, where the pine-clad ridges raise
Their torn and rugged battlements on high…

These are not the rounded hills of Thredbo, but the more precipitous pine country of the Byadbo wilderness further south. In this region, the Ngarigo and Djiringanj groups produced significant numbers of Indigenous stockmen who, in joining the nascent mountain economy, protected their people at least to some degree.

Names remembered include Jack Hoskins and Bobby Mundy, who would catch wild horses and drive them to Tathra.

Read more:
Friday essay: the cultural meanings of wild horses

Sharwood is not the first to suggest “the man” may have been Indigenous. As he notes, it dates back at least as far as an article in the Canberra Times in 1988, where the State Historian of Victoria, Bernard Barrett, suggested Paterson may have been influenced by a story written by a high-country bushman C.W. Neville-Rolfe and published in Cassell’s Picturesque Australasia in 1887.

In Neville-Rolfe’s story it is Toby, a young Indigenous man, whose excellent riding and bush skills allow him to locate and capture wild horses.

A more sustained effort to find the true identity of “the man” was W.F. Refshauge’s 2013 book Searching for The Man from Snowy River. Refshauge’s most convincing candidate is Charlie McKeahnie, the subject of a very similar poem by Paterson’s friend Barcroft Boake, On the Range, published in The Bulletin in 1891.

In Boake’s poem, young Charlie Mac chases a wild horse known as “The Lord of the Hills”. Unlike Paterson’s poem, On the Range ends in tragedy. The Lord of the Hills refuses capture and servitude, instead dashing his body against a granite outcrop and dying.

National myth-making

Would it matter if definitive proof emerged that Paterson had a First Nations stockman in mind when he wrote the poem?

It would at least make visible the deeply buried assumption the man was white – so deeply buried, interpretations of the poem never mention it.

It would be interesting to consider how the 1982 movie would have been received if Tommy Lewis or David Gulpilil, rather than Tom Burlinson, had the lead role.

But readers of the 1890s might have been less surprised: Indigenous horse skills were widely acknowledged and admired in the form of buckjumping contexts and bush shows.

However, the suggestion “the man” was Indigenous would also open up an odd problem in nationalist mythology. Colonial logic advances the grand project as “taming” the country, but in Paterson’s poem the “wild” element is the horse — an introduced species.

That the horse is an introduced species can be elided in the service of national mythology, but if the “tamer” is Indigenous, any semblance of a fixed colonial logic breaks down.

The Brumby Wars shows how colonial myths of freedom and adventure in the high country are never fixed.

A difficult legend

The Brumby Wars explores the tension between those who value the environment of the high country millions of years in the making, and those who champion a myth less than 200 years old. Sharwood expresses deep sympathies with the first party, yet recognises there is no easy solution to this problem – politics aside, any method to rid the mountains of brumbies will be cruel.

The complexities of the issue are covered with enormous insight in The Brumby Wars, which is by turns anecdotal, philosophical and ecological in expression.

Paterson may well have had daring Indigenous riders in mind when he wrote The Man from Snowy River. If proof emerged this was the case, would it help Australia towards new myths of nation or would this fact be ingested smoothly by adaptable older myths?

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

– ref. If The Man from Snowy River is Indigenous, what does that mean for our national myth-making? – https://theconversation.com/if-the-man-from-snowy-river-is-indigenous-what-does-that-mean-for-our-national-myth-making-168372

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ana Estefanía Carballo, Research Fellow in Mining and Society, School of Geography, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, The University of Melbourne

Thousands of demonstrators rallied across the Serbian capital Belgrade this month, protesting the US$2.4 billion (A$3.3 billion) Jadar lithium mine proposed by global mining giant Rio Tinto. The project, Rio Tinto’s flagship renewable energy initiative, is set to become the largest lithium project in the European Union.

Lithium is a crucial component of energy storage, both for renewable energy technologies and electric vehicles. Forecast demand has prompted efforts by companies and governments worldwide to tap into this market – a scramble dubbed the “white gold rush”.

As lithium projects have multiplied across Australia, Europe, Latin America and the US in recent years, so too have concerns over their environmental and social impacts. Communities near proposed and existing lithium mines are some of the loudest opponents. In a town near the proposed mine in Serbia, a banner reads: “No mine, yes life”.

Lithium extraction serves legitimate global environmental needs. But the industry must not ignore local social and environmental risks, and community voices must be included in decision making. The harsh lessons of mining to date need not be learned again in new places.

Weighing the risks

According to the latest estimates, the world’s resources of lithium sit at 86 million tonnes, a number that continues to grow as new deposits are found every year. Australia is the main producer of lithium, where it’s mined from hard rock called “spodumene”. The largest deposits are found in South America, where lithium is extracted from brines underneath salt flats.

In many cases, lithium mines are relatively new operations, yet complex and adverse social and environmental impacts have already been observed. More research and better targeted policy are needed to help understand and manage the socio-environmental impacts.

In Chile, lithium has been mined since the 1980s. It has been shown to interfere with cultural practices of local Indigenous communities, alter traditional economic livelihoods and exacerbate the fragility of surrounding ecosystems.

Read more:
Afghanistan has vast mineral wealth but faces steep challenges to tap it

The Jadar lithium project is operated by Rio Sava, a subsidiary of Rio Tinto. It’s expected to become one of Serbia’s largest mines, occupying around 387 hectares, and contribute to at least 1% of Serbia’s GDP.

An environmental impact study commissioned by Rio Tinto, and obtained by Reuters, found the project would cause “irredeemable damage” to the environment, concluding the project should not go ahead. Environmental impacts are expected for any mine proposal. Yet some are manageable, so such a grave assessment in this case is not encouraging.

The extent to which a project shows best practice in mine management can depend on pressure from communities, investors and governments. Promises to adhere to all regulations are a common response from the industry.

But as we’re seeing in Chile, significant environmental damage and socio-environmental impacts can still occur within established regulations. Here, communities living on the salt flats are concerned about the effect of removing groundwater for lithium extraction on their livelihoods and surrounding ecosystems.

Communities near the Jadar Mine project hold similar concerns. They have gathered in formal organisation to reject the project and stage demonstrations. A petition against the project has gained over 130,000 signatures, and a report by the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences has protested the project’s approval.

The communities fear the potential risks of air and waterborne pollution from the lithium mine, destruction of biodiversity, and the loss of land to mine infrastructure. These risks could affect the livelihoods of local landholders, farmers and residents.

Of particular concern is that the proposed locations for mine waste (tailings) are in a valley prone to flash flooding and may lead to toxic waste spills. This previously occurred in the same region when the abandoned Stolice antimony mine flooded in 2014. Rio Tinto has said it will try to mitigate this risk by converting the liquid waste into so-called “dry cakes”.

In response to this article, a Rio Tinto spokesperson said it has been working through the project requirements for 20 years, with a team of over 100 domestic experts studying the possible cumulative impacts in accordance with Serbian law, adding:

The study will consider all potential environmental effects of proposed actions and define measures to eliminate or reduce them […] including water, noise, air quality, biodiversity and cultural heritage.

Can we decarbonise without sacrifice?

The Jadar Mine project is touted for its potential to bring significant profits to both Rio Tinto and the Serbian state, while helping usher in the era of decarbonisation.

Rio Tinto plans to begin construction by 2022, “subject to receiving all relevant approvals, permits and licences and ongoing engagement”, with first saleable production expected in 2026.

But relatively fast timelines like this can sometimes be a sign of regulatory governance instability, including weak regulatory frameworks. We have seen this in Guyana, Peru and Brazil.

Read more:
Rio Tinto just blasted away an ancient Aboriginal site. Here’s why that was allowed

In Australia, Rio Tinto’s recent destruction of the culturally invaluable Juukan Gorge — which, notably, occurred legally — also demonstrates regulatory governance risks.

Rio Tinto’s spokesperson said its Environmental Impact Assessment process includes a public consultation period including, for example, meetings with non-government organisations, adding:

We have established information centres in Loznica and Brezjak and, since 2019, have hosted over 20 public open day events in these centres focusing on aspects of the project including environment studies, cultural heritage and land acquisition.

Although the Serbian government indicated that it’s prepared to hold a referendum to find out the will of citizens about the Jadar mine project, the community protests suggest the project hasn’t obtained any social license to operate.

A “social license to operate” is, despite its corporatised name, increasingly key to sustainable or responsible mining projects. It centres on ongoing acceptance by stakeholders, the public, and local communities of a company’s standard business practices. Building such trust takes time, and a social license is only a minimum requirement.

Read more:
Renewable energy can save the natural world – but if we’re not careful, it will also hurt it

In Argentina, for example, Indigenous communities living near the lithium mines have developed their own protocol for giving their informed consent.

Similarly, processes of community-based impact assessment or self-government structures led by First Nations in Canada offer insight into potential collaborative relationships.

These processes cannot be rushed to ensure voices are heard, rights are respected, and environmental protection is possible.

A new frontier

Like many other communities negotiating proposed mine projects, local communities and residents in Serbia should not become another zone of sacrifice, shouldering the socio-environmental costs of supporting a renewable energy transition.

Lithium deposits are often seen as “new frontiers” in the places they’re discovered. Yet we must learn from historical lessons of frontier expansion, and remember that places imagined as “undiscovered” aren’t actually empty.

The people who live there must not bear the brunt of a so-called “green” future.

Read more:
‘Although we didn’t produce these problems, we suffer them’: 3 ways you can help in NAIDOC’s call to Heal Country

Ana Carballo receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Gillian Gregory has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Tim Werner has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. We need lithium for clean energy, but Rio Tinto’s planned Serbian mine reminds us it shouldn’t come at any cost – https://theconversation.com/we-need-lithium-for-clean-energy-but-rio-tintos-planned-serbian-mine-reminds-us-it-shouldnt-come-at-any-cost-167902

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Quigley, Associate Professor of Earthquake Science, The University of Melbourne

An earthquake that struck near Melbourne today is one of the largest in Australia since instrumental seismic records began. However, the geological record of ground-breaking fault ruptures tells us much larger earthquakes have occurred across the continent. Some of these earthquakes would have been witnessed by Australia’s Indigenous peoples.

Several quakes were felt near Melbourne today, the largest of which was recorded at a magnitude of 5.8. A magnitude 4.7 aftershock happened about 15 minutes after the main shock, which was at 9:15am local time. A typical aftershock sequence could go on for weeks to years. Aftershocks went on for about 40 days following the Thorpdale, Victoria earthquake of magnitude 5 in 2021.

In Australia we get magnitude 5.8-6.0 or greater earthquakes, on average, once every four to 20 years. The highest since instrumental records began in Australia was the magnitude 6.6 quake in the Western Australia town of Meckering in 1968.

Earthquakes are considered a low probability, high consequence hazard — the rate of earthquakes is low compared to our seismically active neighbours in New Zealand, PNG, and Indonesia, but we have vulnerable infrastructure such as unreinforced masonry buildings that present a risk.

Read more:
‘Like tearing a piece of cheese’: here’s why Darwin was rocked so hard by a distant quake

How this quake compares

There are some big quakes in our recent past.

There was a magnitude 5.3 quake in 2018 in Western Australia.

Near Uluru in 2016, there was the Petermann earthquake, which had a magnitude of 6.1.

The largest in the record since instrumental records began in Australia was in 1988; it was part of the Tennant Creek series of quakes in the Northern Territory, and that was magnitude 6.5.

Then there was the aforementioned one in 1968 in the WA town of Meckering; that was 6.6.

But the geological record tells us we have had earthquakes in Australia’s deeper past that were much, much larger — possibly up to magnitude 7.0 and beyond.

The energy released by a magnitude 7.0 quake is 32 times larger than the energy from a magnitude 6.0 quake.

For each one point up the scale, the amount of energy released is about 32 times greater.

Why are quakes of this strength not common in Australia?

Compared with places like New Zealand and Indonesia, large quakes are not common in Australia. That’s because Australia is in the middle of a tectonic plate so what we call the “strain rate” — the rate at which energy builds up due to plates pushing against each other — is slow.

Indonesia is on a plate boundary, so the strain rate — the rate at which the Earth is being deformed — is much higher. That energy is released mainly through earthquakes.

Even though Australia is in the middle of a plate, strain can nevertheless build up over time — and eventually needs to find release.

Australia is moving northwards as part of the Indo-Australian tectonic plate, which is colliding with the plate near PNG and Indonesia, and that is pushing back — building up strain. New Zealand is also imposing a force onto the Australian plate.

A quake like today’s would normally cause a lot of damage

A magnitude 5.8 earthquake is a big deal. If such a quake occurred directly under one of our major cities, we could expect billions of dollars of damage and fatalities.

In many parts of Australia, such as Melbourne, earthquakes are felt at greater distances than in countries like New Zealand, because our crust is stiffer. Seismic waves travel more efficiently through Australian crust.

In Melbourne, the soft sediment south of the CBD and in other areas likely caused the seismic waves to slow down but also amplify. The seismic waves get bigger and can cause more damage when they are in soft sediments.

The scenes of toppled brickwork reflect the seismic energy that has travelled quite effectively 130km from the source of the tremor (which is reported to be near Mansfield).

They have almost certainly been amplified by the soft sediments, and the direction of the waves may make certain buildings more vulnerable than others.

Crucially, Melbourne has many buildings that are highly vulnerable to quake shaking: buildings with big overhangs, buildings that are unreinforced, or those that have been weathering away for decades without repair.

The sort of shaking that wouldn’t cause damage in other locations is causing damage in places like Melbourne.

Read more:
10 years since the Darfield earthquake rocked New Zealand: what have we learned?

Mark Quigley receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Januka Attanayake receives funding from Anlec R&D.

– ref. The earthquake that rattled Melbourne was among Australia’s biggest in half a century, but rock records reveal far mightier ones – https://theconversation.com/the-earthquake-that-rattled-melbourne-was-among-australias-biggest-in-half-a-century-but-rock-records-reveal-far-mightier-ones-168471

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Holly Seale, Associate professor, UNSW

The New South Wales and Victorian governments have released detailed roadmaps outlining how they’ll ease restrictions across Sydney and Melbourne.

A feature of both roadmaps will be the requirement to be fully vaccinated to do certain things like gather with larger groups of friends or enter venues including hairdressers, hospitality, gyms and entertainment.

This raises several considerations, including whether staff have to be vaccinated, and how staff will check people’s COVID vaccination status, enforce the rules, and deal with abuse hurled at them by non-compliant customers.

How does it work overseas?

In three major US cities — San Francisco, New Orleans, and New York City — you must be vaccinated to visit indoor public spaces like restaurants, cinemas and gyms.

In New York City, non-compliant businesses can get significant fines if they let in unvaccinated people, up to US$5,000 (A$6,900).

In France, people must be fully vaccinated (or have a negative COVID test, or be able to prove they’ve recovered from infection) to attend restaurants, bars, museums, cinemas and large public gatherings. A similar pass has been introduced in Italy and Ireland.

In comparison, the requirement for venues to check COVID vaccine status (or a negative test) in the UK is still currently left to the discretion of the individual business.

While details are yet to be provided about the implementation of this requirement in Australia, penalties may be included for businesses that refuse to comply. NSW Customer Service Minister Victor Dominello recently indicated NSW pub owners who refuse to check the vaccination status of customers could face heavy fines.

Enforcing COVID rules comes with risk of abuse

It’s lawful for a business to refuse entry to people who don’t have a COVID certificate, in the same way they can refuse entry to an intoxicated person — to protect staff and the rest of the patrons.

Some people may feel aggrieved by the prospect of being excluded from businesses because they’re not vaccinated and assert this is “discriminatory”. However, they’re using the term in a colloquial rather than legal sense — vaccination status isn’t a protected attribute covered by discrimination law.

Read more:
If you don’t have a COVID vaccination certificate, could you be banned from restaurants, shops and theatres?

Legal considerations aside, the practical issue of enforcement falls to businesses.

Recently in New York City, a restaurant hostess was punched repeatedly after asking a group of patrons to show proof of vaccination.

In the UK, some businesses have faced horrible abuse via social media for requiring evidence of COVID vaccination status from patrons, including death threats.

A survey of US service workers conducted by One Fair Wage reported 80% had seen or experienced hostility including racism and sexual harassment from customers while enforcing public health rules during the pandemic.

Staff left on their own to figure out enforcement

In these situations, businesses have had to figure out how to enforce the requirements and how to respond to the angry customers who push back.

If they enforce the rules, they risk harassment and lost tips. But if they overlook unsafe customer behaviour, they risk further COVID transmission.

If these experiences are replicated in Australia, it will give rise to serious work health and safety issues for staff enforcing COVID mandates.

Read more:
Could a France-style vaccine mandate for public spaces work in Australia? Legally, yes, but it’s complicated

Employers will need to take reasonably practicable steps to minimise the risk to staff from such abuse. This could include hiring security guards, or implementing duress protocols or training in de-escalation techniques. What’s reasonably practicable will vary with the nature and size of the business. Employers should consult with staff on the implementation of such measures.

Some employees or unions might also argue enforcement of COVID mandates falls outside the scope of their role, and should be done by properly trained security professionals.

Employers may need to expand the set of duties on job descriptions to include COVID mandate enforcement.

Such a contractual variation can’t be imposed by the employer unilaterally. Industrial instruments under the Fair Work Act such as enterprise agreements, might also restrict the ability of an employer to allocate enforcement duties to employees.

Can staff be compelled to be vaccinated?

As part of New York City’s vaccine mandate, staff members must also provide proof of vaccination.

In Australia, COVID vaccination is mandatory in some settings including for health and aged-care workers, and construction workers in Victoria. Beyond mandated industries, it will be at the discretion of the workplace as to whether they mandate the vaccine for their staff.

Outside of mandates, there are very limited settings in which an employer can require proof of vaccination and enforce that requirement. Most commonly this would be where an employer can demonstrate it’s a reasonably necessary step as part of COVID risk mitigation plans in the workplace.

If state and territory public health orders are passed requiring your employer to collect your vaccination status information and reasons for non-vaccination, you may be required to provide your employer with your reasons or medical evidence exempting you from vaccination.

Supporting organisations

Before an organisation starts to check a person’s COVID status, it’s critical the government is clear and transparent about what they’re trying to achieve and how asking for the status will help achieve this outcome.

A requirement for an employee to show proof of vaccination won’t ultimately be enforceable without a proper justification. It must be lawful and reasonable.

To support businesses and their staff members, it’s critical to:

• ensure staff have a clear understanding of the requirements and have the tools to support their introduction, such as signage, FAQs, and a template for implementation

• develop a written implementation plan in collaboration with staff members, including how vaccination status will be checked. There must also be clear guidance about how to consider valid exemptions to the COVID vaccine requirement for people who are unable to have the vaccine for medical reasons

• train designated staff to be responsible for checking proof of vaccination

• have visible signage outlining the requirements to customers, available in multiple languages

• give guidance around identifying fake vaccines cards

• have a system in place for controlling crowding at your front door, such as a clearly delineated line, if patrons get backed up while waiting for proof of vaccination check.

The author would like to thank Michael Byrnes, partner at Swaab Attorneys, for his contributions to this article.

Holly Seale is an investigator on research studies funded by NHMRC and has previously received funding for investigator driven research from NSW Ministry of Health, as well as from Sanofi Pasteur and Seqirus. She is the Deputy Chair of the Collaboration on Social Science and Immunisation.

– ref. Soon you’ll need to be vaccinated to enjoy shops, cafes and events — but what about the staff there? – https://theconversation.com/soon-youll-need-to-be-vaccinated-to-enjoy-shops-cafes-and-events-but-what-about-the-staff-there-168266