Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter McNeil, Distinguished Professor of Design History, UTS, University of Technology Sydney

Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has ignited both controversy and celebration after wearing a gown to the Met Gala emblazoned in red graffiti text with the statement “Tax the Rich”.

Appearing as a guest of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the annual fund raiser, (for which tickets cost tens of thousand dollars), the left-wing politician wore a custom gown by fashion brand Brother Vellies, bringing with her the label’s founder, the young Black designer and activist Aurora James.

Using fashion as a tool to address wider social concerns has, in fact, long been a strategy for people seeking to make change — including wearing these clothes in spaces of influence.

From 19th century Suffragettes who pounded the streets in heels, ultra-feminine dress and large “picture” hats to refute claims that they were unwomanly, to patriot textiles in the second world war, to Indigenous Australian street clothes and accessories by a brand such as Dizzy Couture today, dress has historically conveyed political messages, creating “looks” for generations of change agents.

Here are 5 clothing acts as provocations that changed history.

1. George Washington’s suit

The founders of the American Revolution wished to break with the old codes of European aristocracy. Much of the world still had “sumptuary laws”: legal edicts that regulated the types, materials and amounts of cloth, colours, jewellery and accessories permitted to various social groups.

In North America, the formal clothing codes of the old regime were actively resisted: men were not expected to wear the expensive and colourful embroidered silks typically worn to European courts. Their imported fabrics were considered bad for local economies, and their elite air at odds with the idea that all men might now be (relatively) equal.

President elect George Washington was sculpted by Houdon in the late 18th century with a button missing from his waistcoat. This was a deliberate gesture to show his actions were more important than his appearance. He also wore plain, home-spun American woollen cloth for his inauguration instead of the expected silk or velvet. This was a firm demonstration of North American independence and perhaps the first American “business casual”.

2. The Abolitionist handbag

Since the late 18th century, a range of objects from jewellery to printed dishes were produced to critique the Slave Trade.

British Quakers had advocated for Abolition in 1783. The Female Society for Birmingham (originally the Ladies Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves, the first such group) mobilised their anti-slavery followers with handbags printed with images and slogans designed to gain support for the Abolitionist movement.

The silk drawstring bags, made by women in sewing circles, were presented to prominent figures such as George IV and Princess Victoria. The bags contained newspaper articles and tracts supportive of Abolition.

The Slavery Abolition Act, which provided for the immediate abolition of slavery in most of the British Empire was passed ten years later, in 1833. A similar Act was ratified in the USA only in 1865.

3. No feather hats

The ostrich and exotic bird industry was massive in the 19th century: as well as plumes, women wore whole bodies of birds as accessories, such as hummingbird earrings.

The ostrich plume “double fluff” industry was centred on South Africa, where the feathers were worth more than gold. They were exported to rooms in London and New York where exhausted young girls finished and dyed them for retail.

In 1914 a massive “feather crash” saw the raw material become close to worthless. Young women interested in the growing national park and conservation movements objected to the trade on ecological grounds. They simply stopped wearing the fashion, starting a global “anti-plumage” movement.

The women involved with the Massachusetts Audubon Society were so successful that their lobbying led to the first US federal conservation legislation, The Lacey Act (1900). Taxidermied birds, feather boas and birds as earrings became largely unfashionable and were rarely seen again in women’s fashion.

4. The ACT UP T-shirt

The AIDS crisis of the 1980s-90s saw the mobilisation of a unique blend of activism born from the women’s, Hispanic, Black power and 1970s gay movements. ACT UP New York determined that only anger and civil disobedience would focus the attention of government and big pharma on the plight of mainly gay men’s health.

A series of extraordinary “zaps” or site-specific protests, often theatrical, was engineered. ACT UP’s membership included skilled figures from advertising and design who created unified and stylish T-shirts, posters and banners. The designs were clean, slick and looked just like good advertising.

As Sarah Schulman recently demonstrated in her 20 year history of ACT UP, the bold T-shirt designs both created optimum impact for ACT UP’s protests on the TV news and a new pro-gay identity. Worn with Doc Marten shoes, leather jackets, clean and tight jeans or denim shorts, ACT UP established the look of gay urban men for a generation.

Government bodies and large drug companies were shamed by the public protests into adopting better and more rational health messaging, conducting better funded and more equitable drug trials and selling cheaper retrovirals.

5. When Katharine met Maggie

In 1984, designer Katharine Hamnett wore a t-shirt that read, “58% DONT WANT PERSHING” (a reference to nuclear missiles) to a high profile fashion evening attended by conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Hamnett made her T-shirt the night before, recognising the opportunity she had, and hid it under her coat upon entry. Its graphic format owes a debt to both 1970s Punk and ACT UP. She later recalled of the widely photographed encounter with Thatcher:

She looked down and said, “You seem to be wearing a rather strong message on your T-shirt”, then she bent down to read it and let out a squawk, like a chicken.

Social change needs its visual forms. Fashion is one of them. Fashion is a brilliant communicator of new ideas. That we are reading about AOC’s clothing “controversy” shows she fully understands fashion’s power.

Peter McNeil 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 AOC’s ‘Tax the Rich’ dress: 5 acts of fashion provocation that changed history – https://theconversation.com/beyond-aocs-tax-the-rich-dress-5-acts-of-fashion-provocation-that-changed-history-167974

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mahmoud Elkhodr, Lecturer in Information and Communication Technologies, CQUniversity Australia

As Australia prepares to lift the ban on international travel, the federal government has awarded Irish-based IT multinational Accenture a A$75 million contract to develop a Digital Passenger Declaration (DPD) system.

These new digital passes, announced this week, will replace two current documents: the physical incoming passenger cards filled in by all international arrivals to Australia, and the online COVID-19 Australian Travel Declaration, which details travellers’ COVID vaccination status.

With international travel restrictions set to be lifted for vaccinated Australians once the nation reaches 80% vaccination, it is not yet clear whether unvaccinated foreign travellers will be allowed into Australia once the international border opens, or whether unvaccinated Australians will be allowed to travel overseas and return.

It is also not yet clear how the new system will interact with the COVID “vaccine passports” the government has pledged to make available to Australians from next month, allowing them to prove their vaccination status using either a digital or printed document.

The federal government says the new DPD system will also be able to share details of international travellers’ health and vaccination status with state and territory health authorities.

And Stuart Robert, the federal minister responsible for digital data policy, said the program could be extended in future to cover visas, import permits, licences, registrations and other government-issued documents.

While many of the details remain to be confirmed, the announcement prompts a range of questions about how the new digital passenger declarations will work in practice.

Is the new document a ‘vaccine passport’?

Not really — it’s more than that, because it also replaces the yellow arrival cards that will be familiar to anyone who has travelled to Australia on an international flight in recent years.

Besides this, the system will also allow passengers to digitally upload their COVID vaccination certificate. It’s not yet clear whether this will be the same document as the “vaccine passports” set to be issued by the federal government from next month.

The vaccine passports can be shown to immigration officials in other countries, whereas the information in the DPD is purely for collection by Australian officials. It’s also not clear what documents foreign arrivals will be able to use to declare their COVID vaccination status to Australian authorities via the DPD system.

Read more:
Vaccine passports are coming to Australia. How will they work and what will you need them for?

How will privacy and security concerns be addressed?

Arriving travellers completing an incoming passenger card disclose lots of personal information, such as their full name, passport number, intended address in Australia, and declarations relating to customs and quarantine.

The new proposed DPD system will capture all these details, as well as the traveller’s COVID vaccination status. This raises several questions about how these data will be collected, transmitted, stored, accessed and shared.

A digital-based system comes with increased cybersecurity risks, and cyber criminals will doubtless be on the lookout for any vulnerability. There will also need to be clear policies detailing which federal, state and territory agencies are granted access to the data.

Will it be mandatory for overseas arrivals to declare their vaccination status, and will they be refused entry if they can’t prove they have been vaccinated? We don’t know yet.

Will authorities determine who needs to quarantine based on their vaccination status? Will Australia implement a traffic-light system, similar to other nations such as the United Kingdom, to identify which countries pose their biggest risk from unvaccinated travellers?

It is also unclear whether the system will be offered in languages besides English, and whether alternatives will be provided to those with accessibility needs or who lack access to a digital device.

How will travellers’ vaccination status be verified?

Recently, federal trade minister Dan Tehan told ABC radio the government is working with the International Civil Aviation Organisation on a QR-based system that would allow Australian vaccine certificates to be internationally recognised.

However, it is unclear at this stage whether the new DPD system will use the same system to verify the vaccination status of Australians returning home, and whether it will be able to verify foreign travellers’ vaccination status without further checks.

At the same time, Qantas is investigating ways to integrate yet another system, the IATA Travel Pass, into its own app. This system, developed by the International Air Transport Association and already used by airlines in several countries, allows passengers to securely store and present their COVID vaccination certificate, and to find information on testing and vaccine requirements for their journey.

Why isn’t there a globally unified approach?

European Union residents can already use the EU Digital COVID Certificate app to travel freely between member nations, and to other participating countries such as Norway. The app uses a QR code signed with a digital signature to ensure authenticity without needing to collect extra personal details from the holder.

New York state, meanwhile, has adopted a blockchain-based app called Excelsior Pass, which provides digital proof of COVID vaccination or negative test results. It works by searching the state’s health department records, using special cryptographic signatures to ensure COVID certificates and health data are genuine.

For the time being at least, international passengers will likely need to use several different apps to prove their vaccination status in various parts of the world. There are obvious issues with this beyond simple inconvenience, such as data and privacy protection.

Will the system discriminate unfairly?

My research shows that the absence of a unified approach to COVID-19 contact-tracing apps was the main driver behind their failures worldwide. Similar problems are now arising with the rapid proliferation of national and international COVID certificates, travel passes and vaccine passports.

One issue is compatibility. The Excelsior Pass app, for instance, only works on devices running Apple iOS version 13 or later, or Android version 7 or later.

But more importantly, people should have the right to prove their vaccination status without needing to carry a smart phone. Even in a rich country like Australia, only about 80% of the population owns a smart phone, and the rate is lower in developing nations. A system that relies solely on apps would disproportionately deny freedom of movement to poorer people.

Other issues go beyond the choice of technology involved. Legislation will be needed to ensure people with a valid reason for not having been vaccinated do not face discrimination as Australia and the world gradually open up their borders.

Mahmoud Elkhodr 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. Australia’s yellow international arrival cards are getting a COVID-era digital makeover. Here are 5 key questions – https://theconversation.com/australias-yellow-international-arrival-cards-are-getting-a-covid-era-digital-makeover-here-are-5-key-questions-167898

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chris Wallace, Associate Professor, 50/50 By 2030 Foundation, Faculty of Business Government & Law, University of Canberra

Close elections have been common and landslides rare in the 20 federal elections held in Australia over the past 50 years. Some political parties are acting as though the reverse is true and the outcome of the next election is a foregone conclusion. This week, there have been two unequivocal gifts to Prime Minister Scott Morrison from his opponents.

Known for a literal belief in God-given luck, Morrison likely felt blessed by naked in-fighting in opposition ranks over preselection for the south-western Sydney seat of Fowler. This was followed by the Greens openly touting “shadow ministers” as part of their narrative that Labor will have to rely on them to form government after the next poll.

The ugliness and ill-discipline of the Fowler struggle suggest a dire complacency in Labor about its election prospects. If Labor thought it worthwhile to move one of its hard hitters, Senator Kristina Keneally, to the lower house after being displaced from a winnable spot on the NSW senate ticket, this could and should have been organised with less damaging optics. And that’s leaving aside the extraordinary situation where, so close to the poll, a candidate was not already preselected and running.

Read more:
View from The Hill: Kristina Keneally’s house switch stops one row, starts another

Similarly, the Greens’ cheekiness can only be based on an assumption that Labor is going to win. The alternative explanation is that the Greens don’t mind hurting Labor among Greens-averse blue-collar workers in rural and regional seats in Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania, for whom a Labor-Greens coalition would be anathema.

And that can’t be right, can it? The Greens’ anti-Adani caravan through regional Queensland is one of the reasons Morrison was re-elected with a wafer-thin majority. Surely this has not already been forgotten.

The latest Newspoll showing Labor leading the Morrison government 54-46%, after the distribution of preferences, is the likely reason for these damaging breakouts so close to an election.

Yet that election is far from a foregone conclusion. Opinion poll ratings are merely progress scores in a match that has many more minutes of play left. Further, opinion polls across the board were proven wrong at the last election. It won’t be known until after the next election whether the corrections made have delivered more accurate polling or not.

Labor and the Greens would do well to turn away from the opinion polls, look back on those previous 20 elections and sober up. In one-third of those elections, the government elected won with a single-digit majority of seats or was in minority government.

There were only three unequivocal landslides: the Fraser government in 1975 (55-seat majority) and 1977 (48-seat majority), and the Howard government in 1996 (40-seat majority). The three times Labor wrested power from a Liberal and National coalition government, the majorities ranged from modest to solid: Whitlam in 1972 (9 seats), Hawke in 1983 (25 seats) and Rudd in 2007 (16 seats).

Winning government is hard. Labor has governed nationally for just six of the past 25 years. Current political atmospherics are worryingly similar to those leading up to Labor’s shock 2019 federal election loss, when then-Labor leader Bill Shorten was figuratively measuring up the drapes for The Lodge, and the Greens’ tactics ensured Labor’s failure to get that last seat or two in Queensland that would have seen the Morrison government fall.

Read more:
Albanese’s small-target strategy may give Labor a remarkable victory — or yet more heartbreak

Those who see Morrison as an expired political franchise fail to recall how much he can do with very little in the theatre of a five-week political campaign, even without gifts like those Labor and the Greens gave the government this week.

They also fail to reckon with the historical and recent ruthlessness of the Liberal Party in dispatching leaders they come to believe can’t win. The Coalition has gone to the past three elections with a different prime minister, each having trounced a colleague in bloody circumstances to get there, and has won every time. So while Morrison will likely lead the LNP into the next campaign, Labor shouldn’t assume Albanese will be squaring off Stephen Bradbury-style against an enfeebled prime minister.

The Greens would do well to consider the consequences of destructive rather than constructive competition against Labor. If tactics like its “shadow minister” announcement help re-elect the Morrison government at the coming poll, climate policy will remain stuck for another three years.

It’s unlikely that’s the outcome Greens voters really want.

Chris Wallace has received funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Labor and the Greens need to sober up. The next election is far from in the bag – https://theconversation.com/labor-and-the-greens-need-to-sober-up-the-next-election-is-far-from-in-the-bag-167972

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Koplin, Resarch Fellow in Biomedical Ethics, Melbourne Law School and Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, The University of Melbourne

US startup Colossal Biosciences has announced plans to bring woolly mammoths, or animals like them, back from extinction and into the frosty landscape of the Siberian tundra.

Colossal has received US$15 million in initial funds to support research conducted by Harvard geneticist George Church, among other work. The proposed project is exciting, with laudable ambitions — but whether it is a practical strategy for conservation remains unclear.

Colossal proposes to use CRISPR gene editing technology to modify Asian elephant embryos (the mammoth’s closest living relative) so their genomes resemble those of woolly mammoths.

Read more:
What is CRISPR, the gene editing technology that won the Chemistry Nobel prize?

These embryos could then theoretically develop into elephant-mammoth hybrids (mammophants), with the appearance and behaviour of extinct mammoths. According to Colossal, the ultimate aim is to release herds of these mammophants into the Arctic, where they will fill the ecological niche mammoths once occupied.

When mammoths disappeared from the Arctic some 4,000 years ago, shrubs overtook what was previously grassland. Mammoth-like creatures could help restore this ecosystem by trampling shrubs, knocking over trees, and fertilising grasses with their faeces.

Theoretically, this could help reduce climate change. If the current Siberian permafrost melts, it will release potent greenhouse gases. Compared to tundra, grassland might reflect more light and keep the ground cooler, which Colossal hopes will prevent the permafrost from melting.

While the prospect of reviving extinct species has long been discussed by groups such as Revive and Restore, advances in genome editing have now brought such dreams close to reality. But just because we have the tools to resurrect mammoth-like creatures, does this mean we should?

A cause worth considering

De-extinction is a controversial field. Critics have referred to such practices as “playing god” and accused scientists in favour of de-extinction of hubris.

A common worry is that bringing back extinct species, whose ecological niches may no longer exist, will upset existing ecosystems. But when it comes to mammophants, this critique lacks bite.

Colossal says it aims to recreate the steppe ecosystem (a large, flat grassland) that flourished in Siberia until about 12,000 years ago. It has been estimated the total mass of plants and animals in Siberia’s tundra is now 100-fold less than when it was a steppe.

Simply, this ecosystem is already compromised, and it’s hard to see how reintroducing mammophants would lead to further damage.

Reintroducing species can transform ecosystems for the better. A well-known example is the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in the 1990s, which started a cascade of positive changes for local flora and fauna. Mammophants may do the same.

Furthermore, climate change is one of the great moral challenges of our time. The melting of the Siberian permafrost is expected to accelerate climate change and exacerbate ecological disaster.

This is such a serious problem that even ambitious projects with a low probability of success can be ethically justified. Often our moral intuitions are clouded when considering new technologies and interventions.

But technologies which originally seemed scary and unnatural can slowly become accepted and valued. One tool that is sometimes used to overcome these tendencies is called the reversal test, which was originally developed by Oxford philosophers Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord as a way to tackle status quo bias.

This test involves assuming the new thing already exists, and the novel proposal is to take it away. Imagine an endangered population of mammophants currently inhabits Siberia, where it plays an important role in maintaining the ecosystem and protecting the permafrost.

Few would argue attempts to save these mammophants are “unethical”. So if we would welcome efforts to save them in this hypothetical scenario, we should also welcome efforts to introduce them in real life.

So according to the reversal test, the key ethical objections to Colossal’s project should not relate to its aims, but rather to its means.

The main ethical concerns

Let’s look at two ethical concerns related to de-extinction. The first is that de-extinction could distract from more cost-effective efforts to protect biodiversity or mitigate climate change. The second relates to the possible moral hazards that may arise if people start believing extinction is not forever.

1. Opportunity costs

Some critics of de-extinction projects hold that while de-extinction may be an admirable goal, in practice it constitutes a waste of resources. Even if newly engineered mammophants contain mammoth DNA, there is no guarantee these hybrids will adopt the behaviours of ancient mammoths.

For instance, we inherit more than just DNA sequences from our parents. We inherit epigenetic changes, wherein the environment around us can affect how those genes are regulated. We also inherit our parents’ microbiome (colonies of gut bacteria), which plays an important role in our behaviours.

Also important are the behaviours animals learn from observing other members of their species. The first mammophants will have no such counterparts to learn from.

And even if de-extinction programs are successful, they will likely cost more than saving existing species from extinction. The programs might be a poor use of resources, especially if they attract funding that could have otherwise gone to more promising projects.

The opportunity costs of de-extinction should be carefully scrutinised. As exciting as it may be to see herds of wild mammophants, we shouldn’t let this vision distract us from more cost-effective projects.

That said, we also shouldn’t rule out de-extinction technologies altogether. The costs will eventually come down. In the meantime, some highly expensive projects might be worth considering.

2. Broader implications for conservation

The second concern is more subtle. Some environmentalists argue once de-extinction becomes possible, the need to protect species from extinction will seem less urgent. Would we still worry about preventing extinctions if we can just reverse them at a later date?

Personally, however, we are not convinced by these concerns. Extinction is currently irreversible, yet humans continue to drive an era of mass extinction that shows no sign of slowing. In other words, moving towards increasing extinctions is the status quo, and this status quo is not worth preserving.

Also, de-extinction is not the only conservation strategy that seeks to undo otherwise irreversible losses. For example, “rewilding” involves reintroducing locally-extinct species into an ecosystem it once inhabited. If we welcome these efforts — and we should — then we should also welcome novel strategies to restore lost species and damaged ecosystems.

Read more:
WHO guidelines on human genome editing: why countries need to follow them

Julian Koplin, via his affiliation with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, received funding from the Victorian State Government via the Operational Infrastructure Support program.

Christopher Gyngell, via his affiliation with the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, received funding from the Victorian State Government via the Operational Infrastructure Support Program

– ref. Bringing woolly mammoths back from extinction might not be such a bad idea — ethicists explain – https://theconversation.com/bringing-woolly-mammoths-back-from-extinction-might-not-be-such-a-bad-idea-ethicists-explain-167892

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sheranne Fairley, Associate professor, The University of Queensland

Queensland’s love of rugby league, and the fact the state isn’t in lockdown, has won it the right to host the 2021 NRL finals series.

But it was economic gains as much as love of the game that Premier Annastacia Pałaszczuk spruiked when announcing Queensland would host all eight finals games plus the grand final at Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium. Six of those games are being played outside Brisbane — two in Townsville, two in Mackay, and one apiece in Rockhampton and Sunshine Coast.

“It’s a tremendous gesture from the NRL and will provide an economic boost spread over our regional cities,” Pałaszczuk said in a statement. Her minister for sport, Stirling Hinchliffe, was even more effusive. “It will invest millions of dollars into local economies and boost intra-state tourism into regional Queensland cities,” he said.

But will it?

Uncertain gains

Research shows that hosting sport and other events rarely delivers the economic and tourism benefits commonly claimed. In fact, studies around large-scale events often fail to show any positive economic impact at all.

The financial hangover from hosting events such as the Olympics is well-documented. It took Montreal 30 years to pay off the debt incurred from hosting the 1976 Olympic Games. The 2004 Athens and 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games also failed spectacularly to deliver on their promises of economic benefit.

The Olympics, though, is in a league of its own, due to the scale of competition, sheer number of venues required and being a one-off.

Hosting a seasonal sporting event using existing infrastructure should be of greater economic value. The outlays aren’t anywhere near as much, and local hotels, restaurants and other businesses get a boost from the influx of sport tourists.

The problem is that this year’s NRL finals won’t see thousands of footy fans flying from interstate and injecting money into local economies through transport, accommodation, dining and other touristy activities.

So Townsville, Mackay, Rockhampton and Sunshine Coast may benefit from intrastate visitors, but perhaps not to the extent of the promised millions.

Rockhampton Regional Council, for example, has estimated the economic value of the September 12 elimination final between Parramatta Eels and the Newcastle Knights to be $680,000, with about a quarter of the 5,000 spectators from outside the region. That estimate depends on assumptions about those visitors spending money on accommodation, and all spectators spending money on local retail and in hospitality businesses.

Event leveraging

So how does an economic return occur from hosting smaller-scale events like the NRL finals?

The answer is “event leveraging”. It is not enough just to hold an event; organisers must implement strategies to achieve the benefits touted — encouraging visitors to spend more, and using the occasion to promote the host area as a tourism destination.

For example, French towns and regions that attract Tour de France fans use event-themed activities to keep visitors around longer.

Spreading the NRL finals games between Brisbane and four regional centres can also be seen as a leveraging strategy — spreading any economic benefits more evenly throughout the state — particularly to areas hit hard by the loss of international and interstate tourism.

Read more:
Footy crowds: what the AFL and NRL need to turn sport into show business

Media exposure

This also helps what is, given closed borders, the even more important component for Queensland to leverage the NRL finals: media attention that showcases the host region as a future place to visit.

During the Sydney 2000 Olympics, for example, a program encouraged media organisations to cover tourism destinations such as the Blue Mountains and Uluru, by providing visiting journalists with video and other resources

Even with the more modest NRL, media attention isn’t just confined to the hours before, during and after the actual games. There is an intensive industry generating content in the days leading up to game, and in the wash-up.

This occurs through general media coverage and the well-developed communications channels of the NRL and its respective clubs. Now players also cultivate their own audiences through social media. Melbourne Storm star Cameron Munster, for example, has 158,000 followers on Instagram.

The biggest audiences, though, come from game broadcasts. These typically are replete with aerial shots of the ground and other imagery showcasing the host city.

Queensland’s premier and minister for sport must therefore be relieved the NRL has rescheduled the preliminary final (at Suncorp Stadium in Brisbane), originally set to coincide with the AFL grand final on September 25. One of the teams in that preliminary final is Melbourne Storm. The broadcast would have denied the NRL, and Queensland, thousands of television viewers.

Read more:
The NRL’s unrivalled equality means back-to-back premierships are very rare

So the NRL finals should provide some immediate economic benefit to the host cities and towns, though perhaps not as much as the Queensland government would like to think. They also provide a great opportunity to promote regional Queensland as a tourist destination to interstate audiences.

But without the time to implement strategies to really leverage these events, the extent of economic benefits that will flow to Queensland in the longer term is hard to estimate.

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. Can Queensland cash in on the NRL finals? It’s all about ‘event leveraging’ – https://theconversation.com/can-queensland-cash-in-on-the-nrl-finals-its-all-about-event-leveraging-167879

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anthony Jorm, Professor emeritus, The University of Melbourne

Yesterday, Victorian Minister for Mental Health James Merlino announced additional funding of $22 million for mental health support in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The centrepiece of this announcement was $13.3 million for 20 “pop-up community mental health services” with “around 90 dedicated clinicians providing 93,000 additional hours of well-being checks and counselling”.

This announcement is a small step towards overcoming some of the deficiencies in mental health service provision which were identified by the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System. So it’s not surprising the new funding has been welcomed by mental health advocates.

However, is it likely to make a difference to the effects the pandemic is having on mental health?

Victoria’s mental health has worsened during the pandemic

Early in the pandemic, mental health experts warned there was likely to be a worsening of mental health and perhaps even an increase in suicide.

They called for increased resources for treatment and prevention of mental health problems to reduce this impact. The predictions of worse mental health have proved to be correct.

Fortunately, however, there has been no increase in suicide.

Recent compilations of data by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the Australian Bureau of Statistics have shown depression and anxiety symptoms increased in Australia early in the pandemic, but then decreased back towards pre-pandemic levels.

However, in Victoria, which has been the state most affected by lockdowns, the prevalence of a high level of psychological distress remains much greater than in the rest of Australia (27% versus 18%).

Demand for services is also up

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data also show demand for mental health services has increased substantially.

Victorians have received a much higher rate of mental health services funded under Medicare since the start of the pandemic. Some of this increase was facilitated by the introduction of telehealth services, which weren’t previously available.

There have also been increased calls by Victorians to support services provided by Lifeline (up 37% from 2019 to 2020), Kids Helpline (up 27%) and Beyond Blue (up 65%).

Read more:
Lockdowns don’t get easier the more we have them. Melbourne, here are 6 tips to help you cope

Will the additional services make a difference?

Given Victorians’ increasing demand for mental health support, the additional services will be welcomed by people who are on waiting lists and by hard-pressed clinicians.

However, it’s unlikely they will make an impact on the worsening of mental health seen during the pandemic. The reason for expecting no reduction in prevalence is that in recent decades Australia has had substantial increases in the provision of mental health services, but this has had no measurable impact on people’s mental health.

Rather, prevalence remained stable for the two decades leading up to the pandemic.

Australia isn’t unique in this regard. In other high-income countries where the mental health of the population has been monitored over many years, no reduction in prevalence has been found with increases in treatment.

Why are more services unlikely to have an impact?

One of the reasons increasing services has had no measurable impact is they’re often of poor quality.

In Australia, most people with depression or anxiety disorders who seek help do not receive minimally adequate treatment. In many cases, the treatment isn’t evidence-based and the number of sessions received is too few to be effective.

Providing more funding for services has increased the number of people with milder problems receiving help. But the people with severe and recurring mental illnesses who are most in need are still not getting adequate help.

Another reason services are unlikely to have a measurable impact is they don’t generally deal with the risk factors that underlie the worsening of mental health during the pandemic.

Important risk factors are loneliness due to social isolation, financial stress, and juggling the demands of childcare and homeschooling while working from home.

I have argued previously that income and employment support are more important in addressing the mental health impact of the pandemic than mental health services.

Read more:
The government will spend $48 million to safeguard mental health. Extending JobKeeper would safeguard it even more

While governments can take action to ameliorate these risk factors, the major impact is likely to come with the easing of lockdowns and consequent resumption of social contact, schooling and work.

These benefits require greater vaccination coverage and provide an important motivation for achieving this goal.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Anthony Jorm receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council. He is a Chief Investigator on the Centre for Research Excellence on Childhood Adversity and Mental Health. He is Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of Prevention United, Member of the Board of Mental Health First Aid International, a member of the Alliance for Prevention of Mental Disorders and a member of the Association for Psychological Science.

– ref. Victoria has announced extra funds for counselling, but it’s unlikely to improve our mental health – https://theconversation.com/victoria-has-announced-extra-funds-for-counselling-but-its-unlikely-to-improve-our-mental-health-167889

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Carroll, Senior Research Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne

Review: SOUL Fury at Bendigo Gallery

From love, bitter becomes sweet … From love, fire becomes light … From love, fury becomes mercy.

So wrote the Sufi poet Rumi 700 years ago. Curator Nur Shkembi has used Rumi’s evocative words to frame her selection of art by 16 women artists who have cultural backgrounds in Islam as SOUL Fury, an exhibition running at Bendigo Art Gallery until October.

It is a telling title. It slips between the transformative power of these works with a reckoning if not of the soul, at least towards a sense of wonder, and the reality of the experience of artists. They live in a world oft-times “resistant”, as artist Cigdem Aydemir says, to their culture.

Read more:
Friday essay: why traditional Persian music should be known to the world

Heart and spirit

The entry to the exhibition is magical: golden circles, made by Shireen Taweel, are perforated with perfectly tuned patterns making arcs of light on the floor. A call to prayer recorded in the Australian outback resonates. Then the room finishes with a poem by Eugenia Flynn, a First Nations (Tiwi Larrakia) Muslim woman, half lit on the wall behind.

The combination does what experiencing art in galleries alone can do: it brings down your heartbeat and raises your spirit at the same time. The clever staging of the whole show reminds us, even subliminally, of the easy slippage between static artworks, video, music, poetry and indeed the space of Islamic sensibility.

Islamic art, put simply, aspires to bring us closer to God. It transcends the trivia of our daily lives, in a process that encourages us to a purer state of mind. You don’t have to be a believer in an Islamic God to understand the power of much of the culture originally from the Middle East, or to appreciate its beauty or be swayed by its rhythms.

Think of Persian miniatures and the Taj Mahal, ghazals spoken and sung as well as the flourishes of calligraphic books, the turquoise and blue tiles of Isfahan and the wondrous spaces of the Haggia Sophia in Istanbul. It’s in the colours floating in the air in the Newport Mosque in Melbourne.

Many of the works in SOUL Fury reflect these traditions. Nusra Latif Qureshi’s precise and luminescent “miniatures” come from that traditional style and technique, but hidden within them is the sting of colonial and present day (often gendered) politics.

Shahzia Sikander’s hypnotic rhythms in her video Singing Suns, of exploding golden orbs, easily transcend our terrestrial humdrum. Bombshell, a video by Cigdem Aydemir, takes its name from the Marilyn Monroe footage of her dress swirling over an air vent. Here equally rhythmically billowing clothing surrounds the figure of an ethereally floating young woman, though her clothing is the heavy veiling frequently seen by those in the West to equate with oppression and restriction.

Read more:
Ancient rhythms: Shirin Neshat and the dream space that contemporary Persian art can unlock

Power and exclusion

SOUL Fury is about the culture that flows around this religion, as it is experienced by women today. Gallery director Jessica Bridgfoot says this exhibition is a “disruption of entrenched powers in public cultural spaces”. The placement of this exhibition in Bendigo, with its recent fragile history of Islamic relations around the building of a new mosque is understandable.

However, the success here is that while the visitor arrives aware of the issues, the overall result is to be inspired by the work and its stories. It’s about facing adversity head-on, if not with defiance but with strength, humour, and a refined sensibility of a greater humanity.

The filigree delicacy accorded Mehwish Iqbal’s personal accoutrements of refugees is an example. Another is the serious humour of Hoda Afshar’s unlikely photography: women in heavy veils sporting a blonde pigtail, or smoking a cigarette and very cool sunglasses. In the end people win, artists win, women win.

Read more:
Iran’s cultural heritage reflects the grandeur and beauty of the golden age of the Persian empire

The height of their powers

Half of the 16 women represented live in Australia, half of those born here. While artists from or living in Bangladesh, Somalia and Cambodia are included as well as those with a Lebanese background, the majority are from the Persian arc of influence: Iran and its cultural partner of Pakistan. Almost all respond to the immensely entrancing traditions of art coming from there, in technique (including miniature painting and intricate carving), style, content — or all three.

The image of women of Pakistan particularly in Western minds is one of subjugation and violence. But the work by many of the Pakistani artists here, including Shahzia Sikander and Nusra Latif Qureshi, comes from institutions in Lahore and more recently in Karachi run by women. Formidable artists-teachers-writers Salima Hashmi and Durriya Kazi have nurtured students there who have since gained enormous international reputations.

Most of the artists are in their 30s and 40s, at the height of their powers and making themselves and their views very clear. These are not artists on the margins of the art world.

Some of them, like Sikander, Qureshi, Hadieh Shafie, Shadi Ghadirian, Naiza Khan and Anida Yoeu Ali, have been included in the major exhibitions and institutions of our time, from the Venice Biennale to the British Museum, to the Queensland Art Gallery’s Asia Pacific Triennial.

Contrary to the stereotype of neglect, these artists are doing very well in the centres of art world power.

This important exhibition is a unique chance to experience webs of sympathetic communication weaving between great works in a specific cultural context. A tour-de-force experience, it really should be seen around the country.

SOUL Fury is at Bendigo Art Gallery until October 24.

Alison Carroll 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. Women at the height of their artistic powers present a powerful reckoning in SOUL Fury – https://theconversation.com/women-at-the-height-of-their-artistic-powers-present-a-powerful-reckoning-in-soul-fury-165315

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Senior Editor

Many Sydneysiders have been heading to beaches in their local areas as the weather warms, leading authorities in certain spots to restrict access last weekend and prompting furious debate online.

The current NSW public health orders allow people to leave home “to undertake exercise or outdoor recreation” under certain strict conditions (which may be different depending on what local government area you live in).

In Victoria, stay at home restrictions allow people in most areas to leave home for exercise, also under certain strict conditions.

So, if it’s allowed under the public health orders for your area, is it OK to go to the beach? We asked five experts.

– ref. During COVID lockdown, is it OK to go to the beach? We asked 5 experts – https://theconversation.com/during-covid-lockdown-is-it-ok-to-go-to-the-beach-we-asked-5-experts-167788

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Wayland, Senior Lecturer Social Work, University of New England

During the pandemic, lots of us, myself included, are struggling to live in the “now”. That “now”, with all its uncertainty, doesn’t look like the life we used to live or the life we imagine we will return to.

That experience has a name — liminality.

Understanding liminality and its origins can provide ways to better understand the foggy, ambiguous space we currently inhabit.

Read more:
Not all doom and gloom: even in a pandemic, mixed emotions are more common than negative ones

What is liminality?

European anthropologist Arnold van Gennep pioneered the study of liminality in the early 20th century. His work on liminal spaces focused on the rites of passage we transition through in life.

Since then, the term liminality has been used to describe the paths we navigate when faced with life events. These are the times when we are in a metaphorical waiting room between one life stage and another.

I’ve been studying liminality throughout my career working with families of missing people.

These families, waiting for missing people to come home, can also experience a sense of liminality. They can be stuck between certainty and uncertainty about knowing what happened to their loved ones and learning to live without answers.

What families of missing people taught me is what helps us survive uncertainty is reflecting on our own capacity to tolerate “not knowing”.

An everyday example might be sitting an exam and waiting for the outcome. You might be unable to plan ahead, and are balancing thoughts of passing or failing, all at the same time.

Read more:
Languishing, burnout and stigma are all among the possible psychological impacts as Delta lingers in the community

What’s this to do with COVID?

During COVID, how we believe our lives “should” work ceases to exist. And we’re left with uncertainty.

We ask ourselves, others or Google “how long will the pandemic last?”, “when will lockdown end” or “when can we safely travel?”.

Liminality shows up in other ways, with the:

• lost life-stage rituals such as the sudden end of the school year, but without the formals or graduation ceremonies

• newfound uncertainty about daily tasks we once took for granted. “I just need to pop to the shops” is now an exercise in decisions and questions about masks, social distancing and what’s essential

• grandparents who haven’t cuddled their first grandchild and made that transition to a new stage of their life. They may live between saying “well at least we are healthy” while quietly lamenting those missed opportunities.

Read more:
Learning to cope with uncertainty during COVID-19

There are real health impacts

The space between the life we had and the life we potentially will be able to live can cause us distress. And no amount of Zoom trivia, Uber Eats delivery or walking around the block can satisfy us.

Liminality during COVID has also impacting our health and well-being in other ways.

People with eating disorders have noted an increase in behaviours, as a coping tool, when faced with uncertainty. Diabetes educators have noted increased isolation and disconnection from usual routines can impact how diabetes is managed.

But the liminal space can also provide breathing room to learn to live with uncertainty and overcome what scares us.

Read more:
It’s OK if you have a little cry in lockdown. You’re grieving

How to cope with uncertainty

To manage uncertainty, individually and collectively, we need to reflect on how we receive information.

A US study found one place we go to for information, for certainty in a pandemic, is science. However, given science changes as research progresses, public health messaging can also change. So this repetitive looking for certainty, in an uncertain world, makes it difficult to learn to live with COVID.

We know long periods of uncertainty can have impacts on our capacity to cope. Without the strong foundation of certainty or “knowns” in our life, the reshaping of the world, from the pandemic, can and will be unsettling.

Read more:
Life is full of uncertainty, we’ve just got to learn to live with it

I’m not suggesting abandoning science, far from it. But those not at the forefront of designing vaccines, studying epidemiological trends or treating COVID patients might like to rethink our relationship with certainty.

Learning to “go with” all the twists and turns that come with rapidly changing science and the resultant uncertainty is what we need. We might enhance our lives by accepting liminality in how we navigate each day, to learn to tolerate ambiguity.

It is not simple to accept the unknown. However in this pandemic, learning to accept public health advice (and the science that underpins it) might change is part of living through a worldwide event.

Not knowing what next week will look like and finding ways to “tolerate ambiguity” is where we’re at right now. We can help ourselves by finding daily routines within our control, small moments of the day where we connect with a person, nature, or an activity that reminds us where we are and who we are.

Read more:
Coronavirus: tiny moments of pleasure really can help us through this stressful time

We also need space to safely grieve the small and big losses COVID has created. We need to accept that, globally, we are in the liminal space between here and there.

Hopefully, “there” is when life returns to somewhat normal and when popping down to the shops means just that.

Sarah Wayland 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. The shifting sands of COVID and our uncertain future has a name — liminality – https://theconversation.com/the-shifting-sands-of-covid-and-our-uncertain-future-has-a-name-liminality-166903

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Power, Senior Research Fellow, Geography and Urban Studies, Western Sydney University

New South Wales recently became the latest state to end blanket bans on pets in apartments, joining Queensland and the ACT.

Other housing regulations on pets are also shifting nationally, with Victoria last year following the ACT with reforms that prevent landlords from unreasonably restricting pets, and the Northern Territory following suit this year.

But while some laws are changing, there is still too much uncertainty across the housing system. As a result, pets are often the victims when people need to relocate and can’t take their dogs or cats with them.

With close to 2.5 million Australians now living in apartments and a third of Australian households renting their homes — and rising — there is an urgent need for consistent, equitable and pet-supportive housing policies across the country.

Read more:
Can I have a pet and be housed, too? It all depends…

Pets are ‘part of the family’

Australia is a nation of pet owners, with over 60% of households including a pet. In most of those households, pets are part of the family.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, our pets have become even more important. They have helped us adjust to the stresses of lockdown and been vital companions when we cannot get out and see friends and other family.

The benefits of pets within communities are well established. Dogs, in particular, act as ice breakers, helping neighbours to get to know one another and building a sense of community.

Dogs have also been shown to increase average rates of daily exercise across all age groups.

Despite this, pet bans in apartment buildings and the rental sector have been widespread in Australia until recently. As a result, around half of households that live with pets believe their future housing options are limited, and renters who have pets have reported feeling insecure about their housing.

Read more:
Australians love their pets, so why don’t more public places welcome them?

Are the new laws fair?

NSW’s reforms relate to strata title — a form of housing in Australia that enables owners to buy an apartment “lot” in a larger complex (or rent from owners). Until recently, many strata titles included a blanket pet ban.

Compared with other states and territories, NSW has traditionally had the most comprehensive, yet complex, regulations regarding pets and strata title. The new reforms provide insights that can help other states and territories follow suit with their own laws. But do the reforms go far enough?

Broadly speaking, the new rules are bringing strata living in line with community expectations. They give apartment owners greater power to make decisions about what they do in their own homes.

With these rights, however, come responsibilities. The NSW government has said owners corporations can still refuse an apartment owner to keep an animal if there is

repeated damage of the common property, menacing behaviour, persistent noise and odour.

Owners corporations will also have the right to set conditions about how pets are kept, such as requiring they are supervised on common property or while entering and exiting an entrance or lift.

The government says these conditions must be “reasonable”, but there are yet to be guidelines on what this might mean.

In the past, apartment by-laws in Australia have been highly variable. While most banned pets outright, others had perverse rules requiring they be carried through common areas regardless of size, or limiting the size of dogs.

The latter restriction sounds sensible, but in reality, such a rule makes it difficult for apartment residents to have larger dogs, many of whom are quiet and well-suited to apartment life.

A report prepared as part of the NSW legislation review suggests these types of requirements would be unreasonable. However, this is not specified in the law that was passed.

Read more:
Speaking with: Emma Power and Jennifer Kent about why Australian cities and homes aren’t built for pets

Renters — and their pets — are left out

One group is left out of the newly introduced NSW rules. Renters will still require landlord permission to keep pets in strata title apartments — and that can be hard to come by.

These restrictions are exacerbating an animal welfare problem. In our research, we found an unacceptably high number of animals are taken to welfare agencies across Australia every year. And we found that just over half of the households that had to give up pets were renters.

The RSPCA alone reported receiving 112,530 animal relinquishments in 2019–20.

The organisation estimates between 15% and 30% of animal surrenders nationally are from pet owners who could not keep their pets when moving into a new rental property.

A brighter, pet-inclusive future

New strata laws in NSW, Queensland and the ACT show the way toward housing policies that respect the right of households to make their own decisions about how they live – and who they live with.

Yet, these laws are only effective when they are consistent for owners and renters, and across all housing types and every state and territory.

Inconsistent policies are making it difficult for households that include pets to move from one rental home to another or from public housing into the private rental sector. They also make it difficult for households to move between housing types – for instance, from a detached house into an apartment.

Times are changing in Australia. Many people would like to keep pets, but find themselves unable to due to onerous restrictions and out-of-date laws. It is time housing regulations across the country catch up and recognise the benefits and joys that pets can bring to people’s lives.

Emma Power currently receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and has previously received funding for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI).

Wendy Stone receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) and Homes Victoria (HV).

– ref. Australia’s housing laws are changing, but do they go far enough to prevent pet abandonment? – https://theconversation.com/australias-housing-laws-are-changing-but-do-they-go-far-enough-to-prevent-pet-abandonment-167047

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Ball, Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow, Menzies Health Institute, Griffith University

This year my partner and my brother both left academia. They are part of a nation-wide changing of the guard at most universities in Australia and many overseas.

Over 17,000 Australian university jobs disappeared in 2020, Universities Australia estimated. It predicted more to come. By May this year an estimated one in five positions in higher education had been lost, according to an Australia Institute analysis.

Universities have lost billions in revenue during the COVID-19 pandemic. They saw no alternative to reducing the biggest expense on their books: staff salaries.

Read more:
Universities lost 6% of their revenue in 2020 — and the next 2 years are looking worse

Some academics have left with a smile on their face. They are the ones who were able to take advantage of early retirement, voluntary redundancy or voluntary separation schemes backed by enterprise agreements. Universities such as ANU, Monash, UQ, Griffith, USC, UNSW, Macquarie, Canberra and others offered generous payments to entice staff to exit, reducing their total headcount.

Other departures weren’t so voluntary. Several universities, including Melbourne, UWA, La Trobe, QUT, CQU and others, have made staff redundant in specific areas, sometimes through multiple rounds.

Read more: Australia badly needs earth science skills, but universities are cutting the supply

Read more: In a time of COVID and climate change, social sciences are vital, but they’re on university chopping blocks

To minimise disruption, professional staff who hold service or support roles have been prioritised for cuts. This is a tough sell, especially when their expertise is so valuable with the rapid shift to online learning, increases in students’ peripheral support needs, and new processes brought about by organisational restructures.

Other elephants in the room are now looming large, including unmanageable workloads, increasing administrative burdens, deteriorating working conditions, unhealthy work practices during lockdown (and arguably outside lockdown too). It is no wonder many academics are contemplating whether they still want their jobs.

Read more:
Our uni teachers were already among the world’s most stressed. COVID and student feedback have just made things worse

If you’re considering whether you are better off outside academia, the grass may not be greener on the other side. First ask yourself three key questions.

1. Is your role secure?

Alarmingly, up to three-quarters of staff in several universities are on casual or fixed-term contracts. Even before COVID-19, the higher education sector was criticised for mass casualisation of its workforce. In defence, this trend is being seen across Australia as employers increasingly look to manage overheads in pursuit of economic efficiencies.

Unfortunately, casual academics have also been the hardest hit by COVID-related impacts on universities. This includes their unrecognised (and therefore unpaid) hours of work required to set up online courses and support business continuity.

Read more:
Wage theft and casual work are built into university business models

There is hope: there are calls to transfer casual staff to fixed term or continuing positions. Anecdotally, executive staff are hearing these calls. Some universities are investigating their options to recognise the work casuals do through flexible but more secure employment arrangements.

Academics in continuing positions may feel lucky, and let’s not forget their employer-provided superannuation is nearly twice as generous as in most other industries. When considering jobs in other sectors, be aware they may not offer the generous leave provisions for academics. This includes longer-than-typical sick leave, parental leave, recreational leave and long-service leave.

2. Is the flexibility worth the workload?

Ask any academic whether they have enough time to complete the work their role requires of them; the answer will be a firm “No”. Unmanageable workloads pose a serious risk to mental health. However, “success” in an academic career typically requires individuals to defy the odds when it comes to producing high-volume, high-quality work.

Early-career academics usually feel overwhelmed by such an expectation. It can drive them to leave the industry. In response to this challenge, academic workload models now exist in many universities, despite concerns raised overseas about their value in improving working conditions.

Read more:
Early and mid-career scientists face a bleak future in the wake of the pandemic

Flexible working conditions are a great benefit of academic work. COVID-19 has resulted in other industries realising the value of supporting staff to “work from anywhere”. It has meant many academics have continued to earn while in lockdown, a privilege not afforded to all Australians.

But, as with all adults who are increasingly working from home, juggling the load along with housework and schooling from home challenges us all – arguably even more so women.

Read more:
How COVID is widening the academic gender divide

3. Can you still pursue your intellectual passions?

A deep commitment to scholarship draws people to academia. A genuine passion for a discipline, field or topic also lays the foundation for a career dedicated to pursuing new knowledge and having an impact. These rewarding aspects of academia can seem hidden at present, especially when academics need to focus their efforts on other urgent, reactive tasks.

Some academics have opportunistically pivoted into COVID-19 related research. The pandemic has sparked a new-found intellectual pursuit, backed by several COVID-targeted funding opportunities, including from the Medical Research Future Fund.

Universities undeniably benefit a society at its core, particularly their endeavours to address societal challenges and foster positive change. However, they are not without their professional criticisms.

The coming years will bring further changes to the way education is delivered to communities, but must also bring innovative improvements that support and nurture academics to succeed in their work.

Lauren Ball receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, RACGP Foundation, VicHealth and Queensland Health.

– ref. Should I stay or should I go? Academics facing this dilemma should ask themselves 3 questions – https://theconversation.com/should-i-stay-or-should-i-go-academics-facing-this-dilemma-should-ask-themselves-3-questions-166750

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Haskell-Dowland, Associate Dean (Computing and Security), Edith Cowan University

What is my IP? It’s an odd question in most people’s minds, yet it’s one of the top ten most-searched questions on Google.

Those who know what an IP address is will already know most of these searches are coming from people who understand what they’re searching for. But for the rest of us a more relevant question might be: what is an IP address?

Across the globe there are billions of computing devices that connect to the internet. To communicate, each device needs an address, just like our homes.

Our home address is typically structured along the lines of “number, street, city, postcode, country”. And our entire postal delivery network is based on this system.

Our digital world is similar, and has an address system that allows network traffic to move around the internet. So, an IP (internet protocol) address — which also has its own implicit structure — is fundamentally a numeric address for an endpoint on the internet.

An online content delivery system

Akin to postal addresses, IP addresses are assigned to each recipient in a worldwide infrastructure. The recipient could be a single device such as a laptop, phone, tablet or even your air-conditioner controller — but could also be a network entry point to a large organisation.

Since its inception, IP was designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind. That’s why it has remained effective at handling internet traffic, starting on a network with four nodes in the late 1960s, to billions of devices today.

An IP address is a number in binary format, which means it has 32 digits (or bits) comprising 1s and 0s. The address is typically grouped as four 8-bit numbers, so each number is eight digits that are either a 1 or 0.

But we usually view IP addresses in a decimal format, wherein the value between 00000000-11111111 becomes a number between 0 and 255. So the complete IP address space ranges from 0.0.0.0 through to 255.255.255.255.

See an example below, using the IP address of one of the servers that hosts theconversation.com.

IP addresses are centrally managed by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which delegates to one of five regional registries: Africa, America, Asia-Pacific, Latin America and Europe-West/Central Asia.

Not all addresses are available for use by anyone. Many are reserved for specific purposes. For example, three ranges of addresses (10.0.0.0—10.255.255.255, 192.168.0.0—192.168.255.255 and 172.16.0.0—172.31.255.255) are reserved for private networks such as your home.

Other large blocks of addresses are assigned to specific organisations. The US Department of Defense “owns” the “6” prefix (6.x.y.z), as well as 11 others.

IPv6: a new frontier

IPv4 (version 4) is the most widely used version of IP in the world right now. Dating back to the 1980s, it has a capacity of more than four billion unique addresses — which was considered enough back then.

But a combination of wasteful use (such as organisations being allocated larger IP address spaces than they need), and the exponential increase of users, is causing this space to run out.

For now, IPv4 is still here. But its demise has long been predicted and it will eventually no longer be fit for purpose. There are technical solutions, however.

The most useful ones are Network Address Translation (more on this later) and a newer version of IP: version 6. Although IPv6 is newer than IPv4, it isn’t really “new”. It was originally proposed some 25 years ago.

Read more:
Here’s why the internet will always have enough space for all our devices

The shift to IPv6 brings a range of benefits, even if they are basically transparent as far as consumers are concerned. The most significant change with IPv6 is the increase in the size of IP addresses from 32 bits to 128 bits.

Version 6 also boosts the total number of unique IP addresses on offer, up to some 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. Even with the rapid rise in device usage, this address pool should last us a long time.

Making efficient use of addresses

As mentioned above, private addresses can be used for individual devices inside an organisation (or home). But private addresses can’t be used on the internet, so these devices “hide” behind one public/external IP address.

This public address is capable of supporting up to hundreds of thousands of devices for a large organisation. But a router is needed to connect the network to the internet. The router translates the many internal private addresses which are hiding behind the public IP address (or several of them).

When data is delivered to a private organisation or home network, the router forwards the traffic to a specific internal computer using that computer’s private IP address.

The process of routing many devices through a single IP address is called “nesting” networks. And the technique it uses is referred to as Network Address Translation (NAT).

IP and download speeds

You probably won’t be using IP addresses in your daily life. But in order to access a website our computers need to “look up” the IP address for that site. This all happens in the background.

Once our computer has retrieved the website’s IP address, our browser will connect to the address, request the website data from the server and load the page.

In the image above, you’ll notice four different addresses. This allows the servers delivering the content to distribute the workload between four servers. Some websites go further and use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs).

Read more:
Fastly global internet outage: why did so many sites go down — and what is a CDN, anyway?

CDNs host copies of web content in servers around the globe. This means the content requested can be delivered from a location that is geographically closer to the user trying to access it. This reduces the time it takes to load the page.

The future of IP

IPv6 may be slowly rolling out in ISP networks and large organisations, but home users and smaller companies will still be using IPv4 for the foreseeable future.

The increased number of devices connected to the internet will certainly test our home routers – with predictions of 25 billion devices expected globally within the next decade. Fortunately, even with this predicted explosion, IPv4 at home will be able to cope.

In the meantime, if you want to know your public IP address, simply search “what is my IP address” and Google (as well as several other search engines) will deliver your public IP address. If you want to check your private IP address, this will take a little more effort.

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. ‘What is my IP address?’ Explaining one of the world’s most Googled questions – https://theconversation.com/what-is-my-ip-address-explaining-one-of-the-worlds-most-googled-questions-167316

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cheryl Saunders, Laureate Professor, Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne

Earlier this month, the Morrison government introduced a bill to parliament that would amend the Freedom of Information Act to allow meetings of the National Cabinet to receive the same exemptions from releasing information to the public as the federal cabinet.

The protection would be considerable. The bill would expand the definition of “cabinet” in the act to include the National Cabinet or one of its committees, and would redefine “minister” to include state ministers.

The exemption would also cover not only National Cabinet meetings themselves, but a host of other bodies associated with it under the convoluted architecture for intergovernmental relations in Australia. This chart shows just how confusing it gets.

The bill has been referred to a Senate committee, which is due to report on October 14. There is a lot at stake. The bill certainly should not pass in its present form.

Read more:
The national cabinet’s in and COAG’s out. It’s a fresh chance to put health issues on the agenda, but there are risks

What’s this all about?

The bill is a response to the decision of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) in a case brought by Senator Rex Patrick to force the government to release certain National Cabinet records.

In that decision, the AAT rejected the government’s claim that National Cabinet documents were exempt from release under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act. The tribunal did so on the basis that a forum in which heads of Australian governments meet is a completely different kind of body to a cabinet.

Read more:
Nowhere to hide: the significance of national cabinet not being a cabinet

A cabinet comprises ministers in the same government, who are elected to the same parliament, to which they are accountable and collectively responsible.

By contrast, a meeting of National Cabinet comprises the leaders of nine separate jurisdictions, with cabinets, parliaments and lines of accountability of their own.

The government decided not to appeal the AAT decision, but has moved to amend the FOI Act instead.

There have been meetings of heads of Australian governments since before federation. For around 100 years, these were known as the premiers’ conference. In 1992, the name was changed to the Council of Australian Governments, or COAG.

COAG today has ceased to exist — National Cabinet has replaced it. It is, however, essentially the same body with a new name and some altered procedures to respond to the pandemic.

What the current bill would do

None of these bodies was set up by legislation. Over the almost 30 years of its existence, however, COAG came to be mentioned in passing in a lot of legislation dealing with federal, state and territory government relations.

This explains the title of the current bill: the COAG Legislation Amendment Bill.

Interestingly, the first two sections of the bill (“schedule one” and “schedule two”) amend a host of acts referring to the old name, COAG. None of the amendments, however, uses “National Cabinet” as a substitute. Instead, for example, the COAG Reform Fund would become the Federation Reform Fund and references to COAG alone would become First Ministers’ Council.

Against this background, the amendments in schedule three to the FOI Act — and many other acts — seem even more peculiar.

Here, National Cabinet is referred to by name, and the amendments define the federal cabinet to include “the committee known as the National Cabinet”. This begs the question: known by whom? If the answer lies in the terminology used by the prime minister, what other bodies might this bill ultimately cover?

How confidential should National Cabinet be?

The bill raises an important question of the extent to which decisions of National Cabinet should be available to parliaments, the media and the public.

The need for transparency and accessibility is pressing. Over the course of the pandemic, the National Cabinet has made a host of significant decisions about how public power will be exercised, when and by whom. Its decisions have dramatically affected the lives of all Australians for almost two years.

In many ways, the National Cabinet’s effectiveness relies on public cooperation and trust. The only publicly available information about its decisions, however, comes through bland press releases, discursive remarks at Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s press conferences, and the occasional leak to selected journalists.

The lack of public knowledge about what goes on in National Cabinet cuts across all the principles and practices of representative democracy — at the Commonwealth level and in each of the states and territories.

There may well be a case for keeping some aspects of what goes on in National Cabinet confidential. The decisions are difficult and negotiations may be tense. Outcomes are sometimes unpredictable and public opinion can be febrile. It’s also in the public interest to encourage frank exchanges between political leaders and innovative thinking about solutions.

These considerations suggest there may be a case for the confidentiality of some aspects of the National Cabinet and preliminary working documents.

There is no comparable rationale, however, for withholding information about the decisions that have been made, any finalised documents on which they are based and understandings about the action expected to be taken.

These matters would be exempt under the bill. They should be in the public domain.

Compounding the confusion

By enshrining the words “National Cabinet” in legislation, the bill also entrenches the foolish and inappropriate name that was adopted without apparent deliberation as the pandemic began to unfold.

Perpetuating this way of describing the a forum of heads of government puts at least two of our most basic principles of government at risk.

Read more:
Will national cabinet change federal-state dynamics?

One is federalism. It is bizarre to describe the meeting of heads of Australian government as a subcommittee of the cabinet of one of its members (the federal government).

This could be destructive to healthy relations between federal, state and territory governments in the future.

The second risk is to the idea of a “cabinet” itself — and, by extension, responsible government.

The concept of a cabinet is hard enough for people to understand. It depends almost entirely on constitutional convention, reinforced by the logic of the relationship between government and parliament.

No doubt the frequency with which the term is used gives observers some general understanding of what a cabinet does. But if the understanding is muddled by applying the term “cabinet” to a body of an entirely different kind, the potential for confusion is magnified.

This comes with considerable loss to our democracy, and no gain.

Cheryl Saunders has in the past received funding from the Australian Research Council

– ref. The government is determined to keep National Cabinet’s work a secret. This should worry us all – https://theconversation.com/the-government-is-determined-to-keep-national-cabinets-work-a-secret-this-should-worry-us-all-167540

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erin Smith, Associate Professor in Disaster and Emergency Response, School of Medical and Health Sciences, Edith Cowan University

Many of us will be exposed to a disaster in our lifetime. In the past two years alone, Australians have lived through bushfires, floods, cyclones, and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

It’s normal to experience a range of reactions following disaster, such as sadness, anxiety, depression, hyperactivity, irritability or even anger.

The good news is, research tells us most people will recover without the need for professional help. Only a small number of people who experience a disaster will go on to develop long-term mental health problems.

But exposure to more than one disaster can take a unique toll.

Cumulative exposure to disaster

We are now beginning to understand the effects of being exposed to multiple disasters. In the United States, people who experienced both Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 had significantly increased anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than those who experienced only one of the disasters.

Mental health issues were a significant concern after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill; greater levels of disruption to people’s lives, work, family, and social engagement were associated with increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress.

People who had also experienced losses from Hurricane Katrina were highly associated with negative mental health outcomes. Those who experienced both disasters were also more likely to report respiratory illness, heart problems, fatigue, headaches and migraines.

Women who were exposed to both the hurricane and the oil spill and experienced illness or injury because of the hurricane disaster were more likely to have poorer mental health compared to the general population.

Read more:
Distress, depression and drug use: young people fear for their future after the bushfires

Meanwhile, New York residents exposed to both the 9/11 attacks and the American Airlines Flight 587 crash that occurred in New York two months later had poorer mental and general health if exposed to both disasters compared to one. This held true for people who experienced direct (including working on the rescue or survivors) or indirect exposure.

What causes this cumulative effect?

One possibility is that experiencing multiple disasters influences our feelings of safety, security, and even our hope for the future, and this increases the negative impact on mental health.

Other research suggests persistent social and economic stress associated with cumulative disaster exposure goes some way to explaining this.

Potential biological mechanisms should also be explored.

Mental health symptoms resulting from exposure to one disaster could also increase vulnerability and erode resilience, making us more susceptible to the effects of subsequent disasters.

Read more:
Fire, tsunami, pandemic: how to ensure societies learn lessons from disaster – podcast

Will one more disaster ‘push us over the edge?’

Is there a limit to resilience? Is there a point at which one more disaster will push us over the edge?

According to George Bonanno, a professor of clinical psychology at Columbia University in New York, there’s very little evidence on this.

And capacity for resilience likely depends on a variety of factors unique to each person and their experience.

Bonanno does, however, make a distinction between one-off traumatic events and chronic stress events. He argues chronic stress events, like the COVID-19 pandemic, wear us out. Over time, our capacity to adapt begins to break down.

Cumulative disaster exposure and inequality

While published research on the effects of cumulative disaster exposure on people from disadvantaged backgrounds is lacking, we do know people who are poorer are more likely live in areas which are more vulnerable to natural disasters, as well as housing types which are less protective against disaster risks.

They also generally have poorer physical and mental health to begin with.

So the burden of cumulative disaster exposure, and its effects on resilience, could be worse for people who are disadvantaged.

Read more:
You can’t talk about disaster risk reduction without talking about inequality

What can we do?

We can help build resilience to the impact of cumulative disasters by improving emotional and material supportive strategies.

Emotional supportive strategies focus on reducing stress and transforming maladaptive behaviours to help reduce emotional, social, and health problems.

Material supportive strategies can include policies providing survivors of disaster with easy and timely access to appropriate resources. We also need mental health policies, plans, and legislation that ensure the care and support of the most vulnerable and marginalised.

This story is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the stories here.

Erin Smith 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. From bushfires, to floods, to COVID-19: how cumulative disasters can harm our health and erode our resilience – https://theconversation.com/from-bushfires-to-floods-to-covid-19-how-cumulative-disasters-can-harm-our-health-and-erode-our-resilience-160534

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Linda J. Graham, Professor and Director of the Centre for Inclusive Education, Queensland University of Technology

Increasing numbers of students are being excluded from Australian schools. This is done both temporarily, through informal and formal suspensions, and permanently, through expelling them and cancelling their enrolments.

We know from publicly available data in New South Wales, South Australia and Queensland that these exclusions begin in the first year of school when children can be as young as four years old.

Informal exclusions are more common at this stage and usually occur in the form of a phone call requesting parents “take home” their child.

But because exclusionary discipline does not address the issues underlying childrens’ behaviour — and can reinforce it — short informal exclusions quickly progress to longer, formal suspensions. And because suspension still doesn’t solve the problem, one suspension can become many.

This progression was clearly laid out in analyses conducted during last year’s Inquiry into Suspension, Exclusion and Expulsion processes in South Australian Government Schools.

4 in 5 suspended students have disability

One analysis retrospectively tracked the average number of take-homes, suspensions and exclusions for 24 students who were in year 9 in 2019. It illustrates the graduation from shorter and less severe, to longer and more severe, exclusions over time.

A small number of take-homes progressed to more take-homes, then to suspensions, more suspensions and eventually to exclusions, which are longer-term suspensions. In South Australia, these are four to ten weeks in length (exclusions in other states are the same as expulsions).

How small exclusions become bigger over time

Another analysis conducted as part of the inquiry showed while the majority of students suspended (56.8%) accounted for just over one quarter of suspensions (28.7%), the majority of suspensions (71.3%) went to students suspended two or more times.

The red box in the graph below shows the percentage of students receiving one suspension in 2019.

Most suspensions in 2019 went to students suspended two or more times

What this means is that 42.8% of students suspended in 2019 received more than one suspension in that year, with 42 students receiving ten or more. Four in five of these 42 students had a disability.

The blue box in the above graph highlights the percentage of suspended students (7.8%) who received five or more suspensions in 2019. Together, these 804 students accounted for almost as many suspensions (24.7%) as students in the much larger (red) group who were only suspended once.

As with the students suspended ten or more times, four in five students suspended more than five times had a disability.

Indigenous students overrepresented

Along with students with a disability, Indigenous students and those living in out-of-home care are also massively overrepresented in suspension and exclusion statistics. These are not distinct groups. It is possible to be Indigenous, have a disability and be living in care.

Analysis of South Australian data separated by group shows close to one in five suspensions in 2019 (17%) went to students in two or more of these groups.

Most suspensions in 2019 went to very vulnerable students

Further analysis showed two out of three of these suspensions went to Indigenous students with a disability, followed by children with a disability living in care. Just over one in ten of these suspensions were given to Indigenous children with a disability living in care.

New research to be presented at QUT Centre for Inclusive Education’s forum on reducing school exclusion this week shows in 2019 in Queensland, there were 350.8 suspension incidents per 1,000 Indigenous students compared to 110.9 for non-Indigenous students.

Read more:
NSW wants to change rules on suspending and expelling students. How does it compare to other states?

Put another way, an Indigenous student in Queensland may have a one-in-three chance of being suspended, although it is likely a substantial proportion are receiving multiple (repeat) suspensions.

Worryingly, longitudinal trends show a significant increase in suspension incidents over the seven years between 2013 and 2019. And the rate of increase for Indigenous students is significantly faster than non-Indigenous students.

Suspension rates for Indigenous students growing much faster than for non-Indigenous students

These are our most vulnerable children. They need wrap-around support and a timely, educative response, not suspension or exclusion from school.

The ‘school-to-prison pipeline’

Research from the United States has identified a similar racial bias in the use of exclusionary school discipline to Australia. African American students are up to four times as likely as their White peers to be referred to a school’s office for “problem behaviour”. The research also states:

[…] students from African American and Latino families are more likely than their White peers to receive expulsion or out of school suspension as consequences for the same or similar problem behavior.

Multiple suspensions means spending a lot of time out of school. This is time that may be unsupervised, which can lead to injury and even death, gang affiliation, drug use, crime, increased police contact and entry to the criminal justice system.

Exclusionary school discipline is described as contributing to a phenomenon known as the “school-to-prison pipeline”. The majority of research on this topic has been conducted in the US.

Read more:
Why suspending or expelling students often does more harm than good

To date, limited availability of data has prevented Australian researchers from investigating the local contours of this problem. Not only does this lack of data prevent public scrutiny and problem identification but it also leads to gaps in public policy.

For instance, the most recent analysis of progress against 17 agreed Closing the Gap targets found there has been no improvement in the school attendance rate of Indigenous students in the last ten years. Interestingly, the report does not mention the use of exclusionary school discipline. Nor does the 2020 Agreement on Closing the Gap include targets to reduce its use.

This appears a missed opportunity, given that two of 17 Closing the Gap targets are to reduce Indigenous overrepresentation in the criminal justice system.

Our research makes the case that we must, as a matter of urgency:

1. identify overrepresentation in school suspension and exclusion, and any patterns related to it

2. challenge implicit bias, racism, and discrimination wherever they may exist

3. develop culturally appropriate evidence-based prevention and intervention frameworks, as well as implement them on a system-wide basis.

Linda J. Graham receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC). In 2020, she was Chair of the Inquiry into Suspension, Exclusion and Expulsion processes in South Australian government schools, and gave evidence at the Royal Commission on Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability on the use of exclusionary school discipline.

In 2020, Callula Killingly was involved in the Inquiry into Suspension, Exclusion and Expulsion processes in South Australian government schools, as a member of the research team.

Kristin R. Laurens receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia, and the Medical Research Future Fund.

Naomi Sweller receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Suspensions and expulsions could set our most vulnerable kids on a path to school drop-out, drug use and crime – https://theconversation.com/suspensions-and-expulsions-could-set-our-most-vulnerable-kids-on-a-path-to-school-drop-out-drug-use-and-crime-166827

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

Last year COVID-19 seemed simple. It was horrific, but the arguments about what to do were fairly straightforward.

On one side were people rightly horrified by its rapid spread who wanted us to stay at home and stay away from school and work and socialising in order to save lives.

On the other side were people concerned about the costs of those measures — to jobs, to education, to freedom, to mental health, and to other lives (because if we used too much of our health system fighting COVID-19, other lives might fall through the cracks).

And through it all came a kind of consensus.

The concern about non-COVID deaths turned out to be overblown. Last year Australia recorded fewer than normal doctor-certified deaths, in part because the COVID restrictions stopped deaths from influenza, and in part because they snuffed out COVID-19 early, ensuring hospitals weren’t overwhelmed.

Last year, we didn’t have to choose

Concern about jobs also turned out to be overblown. By locking down hard and early, and paying employers to keep on staff (through JobKeeper) we ensured the lockdowns would be short-lived, with light at the end of the tunnel.

In none of the states for which there is data was there an increase in suicides.

The insurance company ClearView told a parliamentary committee this June its research found things were better than expected in part because of the universal nature of the pandemic. Everyone knew “everyone was in this together”.

Another reason was telehealth. It was easier to get help than before.

Read more:
7 lessons for Australia’s health system from the coronavirus upheaval

And students returned to school sooner than they would have had the lockdowns had been weaker or started later, leaving much of their education intact.

The consensus was that by locking down hard and early we got the best of both worlds — near-elimination of COVID-19 and a quick return to normal life. Anyone who remembers Christmas last year remembers how normal it felt.

Economics is called the dismal science in part because it is about hard choices — situations where we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Last year it seemed as if COVID wasn’t one of them. Starving the virus early gave us both one of the world’s lowest death tolls and one of its shortest recessions.

Hard choices are back in sight

And then came Delta.

Far more contagious than the original, and with fewer immediate symptoms (making it harder to trace) the Delta variant became almost impossible to get on top of in the two big states where it took hold.

And without very high vaccination rates — in the view of the Grattan Institute significantly higher than either the NSW, Victorian or Commonwealth governments are targeting — it became all but impossible to reopen without condemning Australians to COVID deaths.

The new reality is plunging us back toward the territory economists call their own — the world of hard choices.

If the lockdowns don’t end (and there is no sign they can end any time soon without costing lives) education and mental health and jobs will indeed suffer.

There’s only so long businesses can hang on without pulling the pin.

We are getting closer to having to trade off lives against freedoms; getting closer to having to decide how many COVID deaths and how much COVID illness we are prepared to live with in order to return to something more like normal living.

Last week’s NSW “roadmap to freedom” implicitly made those tradeoffs.

Calculations prepared by the Treasury and the Grattan Institute make them more explicit.

There are few important things to note. One is that we might yet be able to get the best of both worlds.

We might yet be able to effectively eliminate the delta strand, restoring both health and freedoms (as we did with the earlier strand).

It won’t happen if we ease restrictions before transmission has stopped, as some states are planning to.

Lockdowns without end are unsustainable

Another is that unending lockdowns are untenable. While last year’s lockdowns didn’t do the psychological and health and educational damage that was feared, lockdowns without end would.

One type of damage clearly evident in the comprehensive report on last year’s lockdowns from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is family and domestic violence. The longer lockdowns continue, the longer elevated violence is likely to continue.

And another thing to note is that in a world where we have to make tradeoffs there are no particularly good options. Allowing the disease to spread in order to restore freedom of movement would itself curtail freedom of movement.

Read more:
Economists back social distancing 34-9 in new poll

An analysis across US states suggests 90% of last year’s collapse in face-to-face shopping was due to fear of COVID rather than formal COVID restrictions. That fear will grow if we lift restrictions and COVID spreads.

The Grattan Institute would lift lockdowns only when 80% of the entire population has been double vaccinated (not 70-80% of people aged 16+ as the NSW and national plans envisage, which amounts to 56-64% of the population).

Grattan believes its plan would cost 2,000-3,000 lives per year; a cost it believes the public would accept because it is similar to the normal toll from flu.

The NSW and national plans (Victoria’s isn’t spelled out) would cost much more.

No option is particularly good

The Commonwealth Treasury finds, perhaps counter-intuitively, that an aggressive lockdown strategy that saved more lives would impose lower economic costs (about A$1 billion per week lower) in part because it would end up producing fewer lockdowns.

They are the sort of calculations we hoped never to have to make.

There’s still a chance we might not. With a Herculean effort NSW and Victoria could yet join Taiwan, New Zealand and every other Australian state in being effectively COVID-free. But they are running out of time.

Read more:
NSW risks a second larger COVID peak by Christmas if it eases restrictions too quickly

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

– ref. Delta is tempting us to trade lives for freedoms — a choice it had looked like we wouldn’t have to make – https://theconversation.com/delta-is-tempting-us-to-trade-lives-for-freedoms-a-choice-it-had-looked-like-we-wouldnt-have-to-make-167762

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Droogan, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University

Despite cliched talk of a “graveyard of empires”, what we now call Afghanistan has for thousands of years been an important part of many sophisticated cultures.

Situated along the Silk Road — a tangle of Eurasian trade routes stretching back to the days of the Roman Empire — Afghanistan and its people have long served as a place of connection between Mediterranean, Persian, Indian and Chinese civilisations.

It has been home to Hellenistic cities populated by the successors of Alexander the Great, glittering Buddhist monasteries that served to transmit early Buddhism from India to far away China and Japan, and a series of Medieval Islamic kingdoms at the forefront of the literature and science of their day.

This dazzlingly diverse heritage is preserved in over 2,600 archaeological sites scattered across its rugged terrain, numerous regional museums and galleries, and, most famously, the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. Refurbished in 2007, the museum holds a collection of over 80,000 artefacts from throughout the region.

All of this is now under renewed threat by Taliban forces, whose fanatical interpretation of Islam forbids representative imagery, and is particularly dismissive of anything it considers to be non-Islamic.

While remaining focused on the plight of the Afghan people, countries such as the US, UK, and Australia need to also start planning how they can reduce the coming assault on Afghanistan’s art, history and material culture.

A history of destruction

Afghanistan’s archaeological sites were previously systematically looted and destroyed during the period of Soviet occupation and warlordism that followed.

In the 1980s, whole ancient sites were illegally excavated with artifacts sold off under cover of war. The Hellenistic Greek city of Ai-Khanoum, dating from the 4th century BCE to the mid-2nd century CE and discovered in the 1830s, was destroyed, including its Greek theatre, gymnasium and temple to Zeus.

During Afghanistan’s civil war in the early 1990s, items from the 12th century palace of Mas’ud III were looted and distributed through international black markets.

The National Museum in Kabul, established in 1919, was extensively damaged and looted in the period immediately following the end of communist rule in 1992.

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asytreewwqqqaafgir — from as early as the 2nd century —

From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban outlawed almost all forms of art while systematically looting and destroying libraries and museums, and persecuting anyone considered to be an expert or academic.

The Taliban were ruthless in their destruction, but also strategic. They saw Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic art and culture as a resource to be used and abused where possible to aid their international objectives.

Most infamously, during their final year in power they glorified in the demolition of the 6th century Bamiyan Buddhas while also decimating the already weakened collections of the National Museum.

Just two years earlier, in 1999, the Taliban Minister of Culture had assured the international community Afghanistan’s Buddhist heritage would be safe under his custodianship. In 2001, they what the Bayiman Buddhas? were held hostage — and ultimately destroyed — while the Taliban demanded international recognition.

Read more:
Should Australia recognise a Taliban government?

What does this mean for Afghanistan today?

The Taliban are again claiming Afghanistan’s heritage will be safe under their rule.

Statements have been released instructing fighters to protect and preserve historical sites, halt the plundering of archaeological digs, and forbid the selling of antiquities on the black market. Guards have been posted at the National Museum to prevent looting.

However, this initial charm offensive could just be the opening move in a longer strategy in which Afghanistan’s history and heritage will be once again held hostage. Priceless cultural treasures may be threatened with destruction.

Archaeologists and curators responsible for preserving Afghanistan’s national heritage were caught off-guard by the Taliban’s rapid advance. Many are now seeking to flee the country or are going into hiding.

Read more:
The situation in Afghanistan is beyond horrifying: this is what you can do to help

The loss of these experts and custodians of Afghanistan’s rich heritage will mean there is nobody to protect its material past from neglect or looting. Nor will future generations of young Afghans be able to learn about their past from fellow citizens who have dedicated their lives to preserving it.

Australia’s part to play in stopping illegal trade

Looted antiquities make up a lucrative international black market. There is a proven connection between these back markets and international terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.

As has been seen in Iraq and Syria, the looting and sale of the archaeological heritage of Afghanistan could be used to fund international terrorism.

Markets for illegally looted artefacts only exist while international collectors — including museums and galleries — continue to acquire stolen antiquities.

Read more:
Illegal trade in antiquities: a scourge that has gone on for millennia too long

Afghanistan remains, first and foremost, a humanitarian tragedy and we must do what we can to assist the Afghan people.

But now is also the time for Australia and other liberal democracies to put in place stronger legal safeguards to prevent the trafficking of antiquities, in particular much stronger border security and customs measures for the detection and ending of this illicit trade.

Malcolm Choat receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Julian Droogan 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. The Taliban’s rule threatens what’s left of Afghanistan’s dazzlingly diverse cultural history – https://theconversation.com/the-talibans-rule-threatens-whats-left-of-afghanistans-dazzlingly-diverse-cultural-history-167780

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Dare, Professor of Philosophy, University of Auckland

With COVID-19 causing extraordinarily intrusive and expensive lockdowns, vaccine “passports” or certificates are increasingly seen as key to getting out of them. Decision-makers and gatekeepers – from border guards to maître d’s – will have a means of knowing who can safely engage with others.

To that end, the New Zealand government aims to have one in place by year’s end. But vaccine passports have also prompted riots and protests overseas, and there are as yet unanswered questions about their use domestically.

A central concern is that they will cause or exacerbate inequality because access to a passport relies on access to vaccines, and access to vaccines has been unequal.

Internationally, citizens of some countries are more likely to have access to vaccines – and so to vaccine passports – than citizens of other countries. And within countries, some individuals and groups are more likely to have access to vaccines than others.

Furthermore, these inequalities track familiar and ethically troubling fault lines: New Zealand has struggled to lift Māori vaccination rates to match those of European New Zealanders, though Māori are more at risk.

And vaccine passports could compound existing inequalities, as those with them return to work and other activities while those without remain trapped.

Inequality and discrimination

But there are reasons to think these legitimate concerns don’t automatically mean vaccine passports are unethical.

Firstly, the need to contain COVID-19 justifies the significant restrictions of important liberties in lockdowns. But to the extent that vaccines work, that justification doesn’t apply to someone who has been vaccinated. The justification for curtailing liberties has gone (or at least, given the possibility of breakthrough cases, been considerably weakened), so for the vaccinated the curtailment should go too.

Secondly, distinguishing between people on the basis of their COVID immunity may be discrimination, but it’s not obvious it is unjustified discrimination.

Read more:
Vaccine passports are coming to Australia. How will they work and what will you need them for?

Whether someone is vaccinated or not is arguably legitimate grounds for discrimination. The unvaccinated (for whatever reason) pose a greater risk to others than the vaccinated. They are also more likely to suffer severe symptoms if they get COVID-19.

Thirdly, one reason to tolerate inequality is that sometimes it improves the position of the disadvantaged. We might tolerate doctors’ high incomes, for example, if the promise of a higher income led people to study medicine and we believed a good supply of doctors benefited the worst-off members of our community.

Vaccine passports might work the same way. They help get the economy going, so the government can support those still locked down. They’re also an incentive to vaccinate, and high vaccination rates are good for everyone — perhaps especially the unvaccinated.

An offer you can’t refuse

But the use of vaccine passports as incentives poses some real issues. How they are used is crucial. Under some proposals, vaccination passports are (like conventional passports) essentially another international travel document.

Increasingly, however, countries (including New Zealand potentially) are proposing their use to control access to a significant range of domestic activities, such as returning to work in person, dining out or going to concerts and sports events.

Read more:
Do vaccination passports take away freedoms? It depends on how you frame the question

In this context, it’s clear some incentives can be coercive: they might be an offer you can’t refuse.

There are some people desperate to travel overseas, perhaps for good family reasons. But most of us can still decide whether the incentive of the IATA Travel Pass is enough to motivate us to travel.

Justified coercion?

Many people, though, will simply not be in a position to refuse the incentive of a domestic vaccine passport. Getting back to work and a pre-COVID life will not be a discretionary matter. For them, domestic vaccination passports are likely to be coercive.

For now at least, the government insists vaccination will not be mandatory. But effectively it will be for those who have no choice but to get a vaccine passport to work or have access to non-discretionary domestic activities.

And that coercion will not apply equally. There will be much greater pressure on those who are already socially disadvantaged and less able to make a genuine choice.

Coercion is sometimes justified, and perhaps the threat posed by COVID-19 warrants it. However, we should be wary of accepting kinds of coercion that are discriminatory and inegalitarian.

Read more:
Why we need to seriously reconsider COVID-19 vaccination passports

Governments need to be clear

So what should we do about vaccine passports and vaccine incentives?

We could restrict them to more discretionary activities, such as international travel, concerts and restaurants. That would be an offer anyone could refuse, especially the already disadvantaged.

But this use of passports might be insufficient incentive — too many people might refuse to get one. That’s a problem if we think trying to increase vaccination rates is justified.

So we think governments have a choice: they should address concerns about vaccine passports by avoiding uses that are coercive, discriminatory and inegalitarian. Alternatively, they should acknowledge their position that COVID-19 justifies coercion, and make vaccination mandatory.

The second option would be less discriminatory, and seems less likely to threaten trust and co-operation than the surreptitious and uneven compulsion provided by wide-ranging requirements for domestic vaccine passports.

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. Why a domestic NZ COVID ‘passport’ raises hard questions about discrimination, inequality and coercion – https://theconversation.com/why-a-domestic-nz-covid-passport-raises-hard-questions-about-discrimination-inequality-and-coercion-167703

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

Multiple doctors’ organisations, led by the Australian Medical Association, and a major farm lobby have called on the federal government to boost Australia’s climate change ambition, as pressure mounts on Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce to finalise a deal ahead of the Glasgow conference.

In an open letter to the Prime Minister, the AMA, Doctors for the Environment Australia and many of the country’s medical colleges say: “Medical leaders across the country are calling on your government to urgently take much greater action to avert a further deterioration of the current climate crisis”.

Meanwhile, a report from economic consultants Ernst & Young commissioned by Farmers for Climate Action, which says it has more than 6000 farming supporters, lays out a pathway to zero emissions by 2040 without shrinking Australia’s agriculture, the cattle herd or the sheep flock.

The calls come as Morrison prepares to visit Washington next week for the meeting of the QUAD – leaders of the US, Japan, India and Australia – which will focus on security issues.

While there, Morrison will have a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden at which climate change and the Glasgow conference would be expected to figure prominently.

Australia is under strong pressure from the US to embrace a net-zero by 2050 target, and to improve its short term ambition.

Morrison and Joyce are in negotiations about what Australia can put forward for Glasgow. But these are not expected to reach an outcome before Morrison leaves for Washington, according to sources.

The doctors’ letter says that with the conference weeks away, “Australia must significantly lift its commitment to the global effort to bring climate change under control in order to save lives and protect health”.

The letter is pointed in saying: “Australia must talk less about aspiration, and focus on firm and binding commitments that are aligned with the science”. The AMA and other medical groups are mapping a path towards emissions reductions in their sector.

“As doctors, we understand the imminent health threats posed by climate change and have seen them already emerge in Australia,” the letter says, referencing the 2019-20 bushfires, saying “that climate disaster” took more than 30 lives as a direct result of the fires.

The doctors’ organisations called on the government to:

• commit to an ambitious national plan to protect health by cutting emissions this decade, including “significantly increasing Australia’s Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement … in line with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

• develop a national climate change and health strategy to facilitate planning for future climate change health impacts

• establish a national Sustainable Healthcare Unit to support environmentally sustainable practice in healthcare and reduce the sector’s own significant emissions.

Medical colleges signing the letter were: The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, The Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, The College of Intensive Care Medicine of Australia and New Zealand, The Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators, The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, The Royal Australasian College of Physicians, The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists, and the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine.

The Farmers for Climate Action group says in a statement that “farming families do not want to miss the opportunities good climate policy presents for them”.

The consultants’ report includes methods of reducing net emissions such as improved pasture management, selective breeding, feed supplements which reduce stock’s methane output, and “carbon and biodiversity” crops.

“Much of what needs to be happening – planting trees and ground cover on non-productive land and within productive systems, adopting best practice grazing management – is already underway. We just need to scale it up,” the group says.

A case study in the Queensland region of Maranoa (where deputy Nationals leader and agriculture minister David Littleproud has his seat) found an extra 14,000-17,000 jobs and $2 billion to $2.4 billion could be added to the local economy over the next decade while agriculture reduced its net emissions.

Farmers for Climate Action is urging:

• expanding payments to farmers for biodiversity work into a nationwide program

• funding research and development for methane emissions reduction technologies

• strong emissions cuts across energy and transport this decade, to allow all the abatement pathways to achieve their full potential.

Australia has about 83.000 farm businesses.

The group notes research by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) showing climate change is already costing the average Australian farming family nearly $30,000 a year.

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. Doctors and farmers turn up heat on Morrison ahead of Glasgow – https://theconversation.com/doctors-and-farmers-turn-up-heat-on-morrison-ahead-of-glasgow-167891

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

As well as her interviews with politicians and experts, Politics with Michelle Grattan now includes “Word from The Hill”, where she discusses the news with members of The Conversation politics team.

In this episode, politics + society editor Amanda Dunn and Michelle discuss Christian Porter’s extraordinary “blind trust” – where generous benefactors (assuming there’s more than one) are helping out with his legal bills in his now discontinued ABC defamation case. Porter, it seems, doesn’t know who he should be thanking because the donors are anonymous.

Amanda and Michelle also canvass Gladys Berejiklian’s on-again-off-again media appearances, and Scott Morrison’s trip to the US next week, which is likely to include some interesting exchanges with President Biden on climate policy.

Additional audio

Gaena, Blue Dot Sessions, 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. Podcast with Michelle Grattan: Christian Porter’s anonymous money pot – https://theconversation.com/podcast-with-michelle-grattan-christian-porters-anonymous-money-pot-167907

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Novitz, Lecturer, Writing, School of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology

Email newsletters might be associated with the ghost towns of old personal email addresses for many: relentlessly accumulating unopened updates from organisations, stores and services signed up to and forgotten in the distant past. But over the last few years they have experienced a revival, with an increasing number of writers supplementing their income with paid newsletter subscriptions.

Most recently, Salman Rushdie’s decision to use the newsletter subscription service Substack to circulate his latest book has sparked conversation around this platform and its impact on the world of publishing.

What is Substack?

Launched in 2017, Substack allows writers to create newsletters and set up paid subscription tiers for them, offering readers a mixture of free and paywalled content in each edition.

Substack has thus encroached on the traditional territories of newspapers, magazines, the blogosphere – and now trade publishing. Though it is worth noting that until now it has been most enthusiastically adopted by journalists rather than authors.

Rather than monetising the service via advertising, Substack’s profits come from a percentage of paid subscriptions. Substack’s founders see the platform as a way of breaking from the ‘attention economy’ promoted by social media, allowing a space for more thoughtful and substantial writing that is funded directly by readers.

Read more:
Substack isn’t a new model for journalism – it’s a very old one

Not a radical disruption

Rushdie’s decision to publish via Substack signals a surprising inroad into one of the areas associated with trade publishing – literary fiction – and certainly makes for a good news story. He is the first significant literary novelist to publish a substantial work of fiction via the platform and Rushdie himself talks jokingly about helping to kill off the print book with this move.

However, the novella that Rushdie is intending to serialise will almost certainly be available in a more conventional format at some point in the future, given all Substack writers retain full rights to their intellectual property.

Other experiments with digital self-publication by prominent fiction authors, such as Stephen King’s novella Riding the Bullet (first published independently as an eBook), and the fiction first generated on Twitter by writers like David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman, have made their way to traditional publishers.

While this movement provides excellent publicity for Rushdie and the Substack service, it’s perhaps better understood as a limited term platform exclusivity deal than as a radical disruption of the literary publishing ecosystem.

Potentially more interesting is what the “acquisition” of Rushdie by Substack illustrates about their operation as a digital service. Throughout its history, Substack has offered advances to promising writers to support them while they cultivate a subscriber base.

This practice has now been formalised as Substack Pro, where selected writers, like Rushdie himself, are paid a substantial upfront fee to produce content, which Substack recoups by taking a higher percentage of their subscription fees for their first year of writing.

The exact sums paid vary between writers, but it is not dissimilar to a traditional advance on royalties. When coupled with some of the other services that are available to writers with paid subscriptions – like a legal fund and financial support for the editing, design, and production of newsletters – Substack can be seen as operating in a grey area between publisher and platform.

They pursue promising and high-profile writers, generate income, and provide services in ways that parallel the operations of trade publishers, but do not claim rights or responsibilities in relation to the content that is produced.

Although Substack do not see themselves as commissioning writers it could be argued they do play an editorial role in curating content on their platform through not terribly transparent Substack Pro deals and incentives.

The evolution of Substack

Recently Jude Doyle, a trans critic and novelist, has abandoned the platform. They note the irony of how profits generated by the often marginalised or subcultural writers who built paid subscriber bases in the early days of Substack are now being used to fund the much more lucrative deals offered to high-profile right-wing writers, who have in some cases exploited Substack’s weak moderation policy to spread anti-trans rhetoric and encourage harassment.

It could be argued Substack Pro is evolving into an inversion of the traditional (if somewhat idealised) publishing model, where a small number of profitable authors would subsidise the emergence of new writers. Instead, on Substack, profits generated from the work of large numbers of side-hustling writers are used to draw more established voices to the platform.

The founders of Substack have been unapologetic about their policies, considering the “unsubscribe” button to be the ultimate moderation tool for their users. They do, however, acknowledge Substack’s free-market approach may not appeal to all and anticipate competition from alternatives.

Ghost already exists as a non-profit newsletter platform with a more active approach to moderation, and Facebook’s Bulletin provides a carefully curated newsletter service from commissioned writers.

At this stage, the use of newsletters for literary fiction is an experiment, and it remains to be seen if it will be sustainable. As Rushdie puts it: “It will either turn out to be something wonderful and enjoyable, or it won’t.”

Julian Novitz 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. Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the death of the novel? – https://theconversation.com/is-salman-rushdies-decision-to-publish-on-substack-the-death-of-the-novel-167530

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Schmulow, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Wollongong

The implosion of Australia’s corporate watchdog, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, under the federal government’s new directions, has gone from tragedy to farce.

ASIC was described as “weak, hesitant and timid” in a 2014 Senate review of its performance. To be fair, that was before ASIC’s current leadership. Now any assessment could add “dazed and confused”.

Last week we got a dose of that in the doublespeak of ASIC’s new chair Joseph Longo and deputy chair Sarah Court in their “first significant media interview” — with the Australian Financial Review.

The pair were asked about ASIC’s commitment to the “why not litigate?” approach recommended in 2019 by the Hayne royal commission into misconduct in the financial services industry.

Following the litany of revelations where the corporate regulator had failed to take action against illegal behaviour, royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne made it clear that when ASIC saw a law broken, its obligation, in deciding on a response, was to first ask itself “why not litigate”?

“I love litigation,” Longo told the AFR. “It’s what I used to do and Sarah is an expert at it.”

But in the same interview Court — ASIC’s head of enforcement — said the why-not-litigate strategy “has had its day”.

Regulatory doublespeak

Confusion is to be expected when a regulator is told to both enforce and refrain from enforcing the law — which is effectively what the federal government did last month in the “statement of expectations” it handed ASIC.

The previous statement, issued in 2018, began with acknowledging “the independence of ASIC and its responsibility for market conduct regulation”.

The new statement begins by saying ASIC is expected to “identify and pursue opportunities to contribute to the Government’s economic goals”.

Read more:
Frydenberg’s directions to ASIC throw the banking royal commission under a bus

ASIC accepted the banking royal commission’s why-not-litigate recommendation in 2019. But the federal government’s view of this was underlined last Friday when Longo fronted the House of Representatives’ standing committee on economics.

The committee’s chair, Tim Wilson, slammed the “why not litigate” approach as binary, wrong-headed and farcical. He also disputed that ASIC was too close to regulated companies, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Return to enforceable undertakings

The answers Longo and Court gave the AFR also suggest ASIC is backing away from the Hayne royal commission’s recommendation on “enforceable undertakings” — by which transgressors negotiate a settlement without an admission of wrongdoing.

A regulator might think using enforceable undertakings was better than taking a company to court, Commissioner Hayne said in his final report.

But that view cannot be formed without having first given proper consideration to questions of deterrence, both general and specific. A regulatory response to a breach of law that does not deter, generally and specifically, will rarely be a more effective regulatory outcome.“

Court, however, told the AFR:

My own view is that an enforceable undertaking can be completely appropriate in the right circumstance. Infringement notices can be completely appropriate.

Royal commission’s fading influence

The impression gained is of an attempt to pay some lip service to the royal commission but also demonstrate fealty to the federal government.

The federal government repeatedly resisted the royal commission, then backed away from its commitment to act on all the recommendations. What has changed since the royal commission? Not much.

Read more:
Ideology triumphs over evidence: Morrison government drops the ball on banking reform

Last week the Federal Court fined Westpac A$10.5 million for deceptive behaviour towards members of the Westpac-owned BT Superannuation Fund – a ruling stemming from litigation initiated by ASIC in 2016. This is the same BT ordered two weeks ago by the Australia Prudential Regulatory Authority to advise about 500,000 members of its Retirement Wrap fund that they should leave the fund, so bad have their returns been.

In his judgement, Justice Michael O’Bryan criticised Westpac for failing to fix its compliance failures, tardiness in compensating customers and lack of apology: “Westpac has not expressed regret for the conduct, does not appear to have taken steps to remedy the compliance deficiencies and has been tardy in progressing a remediation plan.”

At least, though, ASIC litigated against Westpac — successfully pursuing an appeal when it lost its first case. What chance would there be of achieving a fair outcome for consumers from a “no-regrets Westpac” had it not gone to court? Not much.

Australia’s battered and bruised financial consumers have every right to say to the regulator, and the government: enforce the law, or get out of the way.

Andrew Schmulow is the founder & CEO, Clarity Prudential Regulatory Consulting, Pty Ltd, he is an Associate Partner, Senior Advisor & Thought-Leader on Financial Services to DB & Associates, a joint Australian-South African Consultancy, he is a member of the Independent Committee of Experts convened by the South African National Treasury for the drafting of the Conduct of Financial Institutions Bill, a Secretariat member for the All Party Parliamentary Group for Personal Banking and Fairer Financial Services, House of Commons House of Lords, a member of the European Banking Institute (EBI) research work-stream on EU financial supervisory architecture, and an independent consultant to Luis Silva Morais/Sérgio Gonçalves do Cabo – Law Firm, for the jurisdictions of Australia and South Africa. He has received funding from various universities, associations and think tanks, most notably CGAP (a division of the World Bank) and the Banking Association, South Africa. He is affiliated with ACAC and the Accountability Round Table. He serves on the Boards of two charities.

– ref. ASIC, now less a corporate watchdog, more a lapdog – https://theconversation.com/asic-now-less-a-corporate-watchdog-more-a-lapdog-167532

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW

New South Wales plans to relax restrictions when vaccination targets of 70% and 80% of those aged 16 years and over are met.

The national plan was based on the assumption there would be just 30 cases when restrictions were lifted. However, NSW may have cases in the hundreds or thousands when restrictions are relaxed.

The current discussion has been around “the peak” occurring during current restrictions.

But modelling from my team at UNSW shows if current restrictions are relaxed while a large proportion of the community is unvaccinated, a larger, second peak may occur that may overwhelms our hospitals – unless countermeasures are taken to prevent that.

Read more:
Flattening the COVID curve: 3 weeks of tougher lockdowns in Sydney’s hotspots halved expected case numbers

What would a second peak look like?

The 70-80% adult vaccination targets correspond to 56-64% of the whole population, leaving plenty of room for the virus to spread among increasingly mobile people.

If the first relaxation of restrictions occurs around October 18, our modelling predicts a second, larger peak will occur between December 24-29 2021.

If restrictions are only relaxed around November 6 when the 80% target is met, the peak occurs later, between January 6-12 2022 instead of around Christmas day.

The current strategy of mass vaccination is vital to our exit plan. But vaccination alone cannot control an epidemic that began when fully vaccinated rates were extremely low.

This is because the virus spreads much faster (days) than the time taken to benefit from vaccine immunity after two doses (two months, with a six week interval between doses and two weeks after the second dose to get maximal immunity).

Also current vaccines are not as effective against the Delta variant due to a combination of vaccine escape (meaning they’re not exactly matched to the Delta strain) and waning immunity.

Read more:
Is Delta defeating us? Here’s why the variant makes contact tracing so much harder

The restrictions used in NSW since the end of June have kept a lid on it, but case numbers have continued to grow. We estimated the 70% target may be met around October 18, and case numbers at that time may be in the thousands.

Depending on what steps accompany that relaxation, many different scenarios are possible. Modelling allows us to look at best and worst case scenarios and ensure the worst never occurs.

Weighing the harms

Controlling an epidemic is like balancing a set of old fashioned scales. Imagine the virus as a bunch of metal weights sitting on one side, and the public health measures on the other.

The Delta virus is very heavy, so we need many public health “weights” to keep it from winning. Vaccination alone is not enough, as we have seen in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel.

The public health “weights” include:

• vaccination
• testing (identifying infected people and isolating them)
• rapid contact tracing (within 24 hours of identifying an infected person)
• restricting mixing and movement of people
• masks
• ventilation (safe indoor air).

Modelling can help us work out the effect of changes on either side of the scale. What if the epidemic is bigger? What if we remove movement restrictions?

That will tip the scales in favour of the virus, so we need to add more into the public health bowl to compensate for that removal. Maybe we can add more contact tracing, mask use or testing.

It’s a constant dance in trying to outwit the virus, and modelling helps by allowing to forecast the impact of different approaches to relaxing restrictions.

Vaccination alone isn’t enough

We already know that to relax restrictions, we need high vaccination rates. But because the vaccine is not enough against Delta, at the 70-80% adult targets (which correspond to 56-65% of the whole population) there is still plenty of scope for the virus to spread.

COVID-19 will find under-vaccinated pockets and communities, whether it be disadvantaged urban communities or remote Aboriginal communities like Wilcannia, which had a 7% rate of full vaccination when the Sydney outbreak arrived there.

So, our modelling shows that if you remove restrictions on movement, you need to add more weights to the public health bowl to stop the scales tipping in favour of the virus. This is the vaccine-plus and ventilation strategy recommended by OzSAGE, a new independent expert network I’m part of, which outlines a safe pandemic exit strategy.

It means when we open schools, we need to open classroom windows too, ensure clean air in classrooms, ensure parents and teachers are vaccinated, and have kids wearing masks.

Read more:
From vaccination to ventilation: 5 ways to keep kids safe from COVID when schools reopen

We estimated the NSW capacity to rapidly trace contacts dropped off in mid-August.

So, in preparation of increasing mixing of people, we could massively scale up contact tracing capacity using digital methods. This would be adding more weight to the public health bowl.

We need to make sure testing capacity remains high and think about making rapid testing more widely available in schools, workplaces and homes.

We could also retain the outdoor mask mandate to ensure at least the protection of masks is not also reduced in the public health bowl (the current roadmap indicates outdoor mask mandates will be dropped).

How bad could it get?

We modelled six different scenarios and ways of adjusting the weights in the scales to ensure we do not overwhelm the health system.

We used the NSW definition of “code black” – when there are not enough ICU beds and alternative models of care are needed. We used this to forecast scenarios that could cause or avoid code black conditions.

The best case scenarios would only have a single relaxing of restrictions and retain high mask use, scale up contact tracing, and retain some reduction of mixing between people.

On the other hand, relaxing restrictions progressively between the 70% and 80% targets, or drastically increasing mixing, while reducing mask use at the same time, and not improving contact tracing, will be taking too many weights out of the public health bowl. This would allow the virus to overwhelm the health system.

In the worst case scenario, there may be five weeks of code black conditions. In the best case scenario, code black is avoided.

If ICU care cannot be provided, the death rate will increase because all people who need ICU cannot receive it. So it’s essential we avoid code black conditions.

Read more:
We’re two frontline COVID doctors. Here’s what we see as case numbers rise

There are an infinite number of scenarios we could model, but the general trade-off between both sides of the scales are demonstrated by the model.

All models have uncertainty in them. Models predict a range of possibilities under different conditions, and worst-case scenarios usually do not eventuate, because authorities use the models to inform the prevention of severe scenarios. They may also reinstate restrictions if the health system is under threat.

Models are a valuable tool to guide and provide transparency to decision-making. At the moment, the choices in NSW are between “not great” and “terrible”. But that will change.

In time, we will have better vaccines (matched to Delta), boosters and higher vaccination rates in all Australians including children. These will add more weight to the public health side of the scales, and hopefully prevent the virus from winning.

C Raina MacIntyre receives funding from NHMRC, MRFF and is a member of OzSAGE, which is a voluntary, unpaid role.

– ref. NSW risks a second larger COVID peak by Christmas if it eases restrictions too quickly – https://theconversation.com/nsw-risks-a-second-larger-covid-peak-by-christmas-if-it-eases-restrictions-too-quickly-167877

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert McLachlan, Professor in Applied Mathematics, Massey University

Climate explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

How are fossil fuels formed, why do they release carbon dioxide and how much of the world’s energy do they provide? And what are the renewable energy sources that could replace fossil fuels?

Fossil fuels were formed over millions of years from the remains of plants and animals trapped in sediments and then transformed by heat and pressure.

Most coal was formed in the Carboniferous Period (360–300 million years ago), an age of amphibians and vast swampy forests. Fossilisation of trees moved enormous amounts of carbon from the air to underground, leading to a decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels — enough to bring the Earth close to a completely frozen state.

This change in the climate, combined with the evolution of fungi that could digest dead wood and release its carbon back into the air, brought the coal-forming period to an end.

Oil and natural gas (methane, CH₄) were formed similarly, not from trees but from ocean plankton, and over a longer period. New Zealand’s Maui oil field is relatively young, dating from the Eocene, some 50 million years ago.

Read more:
Climate explained: why carbon dioxide has such outsized influence on Earth’s climate

Burning buried sunshine

When fossil fuels are burnt, their carbon reacts with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. The energy originally provided by the Sun, stored in chemical bonds for millions of years, is released and the carbon returns to the air. A simple example is the burning of natural gas: one molecule of methane and two of oxygen combine to produce carbon dioxide and water.

CH₄ + 2 O₂ → CO₂ + 2 H₂O

Burning a kilogram of natural gas releases 15kWh of energy in the form of infrared radiation (radiant heat). This is a sizeable amount.

To stop continuously worsening climate change, we need to stop burning fossil fuels for energy. That’s a tall order, because fossil fuels provide 84% of all the energy used by human civilisation. (New Zealand is less reliant on fossil fuels, at 65%.)

There are many possible sources of renewable or low-carbon energy: nuclear, hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass (burning plants for energy) and biofuel (making liquid or gaseous fuels out of plants). A handful of tidal power stations are in operation, and experiments are under way with wave and ocean current generation.

But, among these, the only two with the capacity to scale up to the staggering amount of energy we use are wind and solar. Despite impressive growth (doubling in less than five years), wind provides only 2.2% of all energy, and solar 1.1%.

The renewables transition

One saving grace, which suggests a complete transformation to renewable energy may be possible, is that a lot of the energy from fossil fuels is wasted.

First, extraction, refining and transport of fossil fuels accounts for 12% of all energy use. Second, fossil fuels are often burnt in very inefficient ways, for example in internal combustion engines in cars. A world based on renewable energy would need half as much energy in the first place.

The potential solar and wind resource is enormous, and costs have fallen rapidly. Some have argued we could transition to fully renewable energy, including transmission lines and energy storage as well as fully synthetic liquid fuels, by 2050.

One scenario sees New Zealand building 20GW of solar and 9GW of wind power. That’s not unreasonable — Australia has built that much in five years. We should hurry. Renewable power plants take time to build and industries take time to scale up.

Other factors to consider

Switching to renewable energy solves the problems of fuel and climate change, but not those of escalating resource use. Building a whole new energy system takes a lot of material, some of it rare and difficult to extract. Unlike burnt fuel, metal can be recycled, but that won’t help while building a new system for the first time.

Research concluded that although some metals are scarce (particularly cobalt, cadmium, nickel, gold and silver), “a fully renewable energy system is unlikely to deplete metal reserves and resources up to 2050”. There are also opportunities to substitute more common materials, at some loss of efficiency.

But many metals are highly localised. Half the world’s cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo, half the lithium is in Chile, and 70% of rare earths, used in wind turbines and electric motors, are in China.

Wasteful consumption is another issue. New technologies (robots, drones, internet) and economic growth lead to increased use of energy and resources. Rich people use a disproportionate amount of energy and model excessive consumption and waste others aspire to, including the emerging rich in developing countries.

Read more:
Renewable energy can save the natural world – but if we’re not careful, it will also hurt it

Research analysing household-level emissions across European countries found the top 1% of the population with the highest carbon footprints produced 55 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions each, compared to a European median of 10 tonnes.

Scientists have warned about consumption by the affluent and there is vigorous debate about how to reduce it while preserving a stable society.

One way of turning these questions around is to start from the bottom and ask: what is the minimum energy required for basic human needs?

One study considered “decent living” to include comfortable housing, enough food and water, 10,000km of travel a year, education, healthcare and telecommunications for everyone on Earth — clearly not something we have managed to achieve so far. It found this would need about 4,000kWh of energy per person per year, less than a tenth of what New Zealanders currently use, and an amount easily supplied by renewable energy.

All that carbon under the ground was energy ripe for the picking. We picked it. But now it is time to stop.

Robert McLachlan 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. Climate explained: how much of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels and could we replace it all with renewables? – https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-how-much-of-the-worlds-energy-comes-from-fossil-fuels-and-could-we-replace-it-all-with-renewables-167190

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bronwyn Carlson, Professor, Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University

Last week’s National Summit on Women’s Safety was intended to gather input from stakeholders as the government finalises the next National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children in 2022. A series of invite-only virtual roundtables was also held prior to the summit.

The catalyst for the spotlight on violence against women and the calls for the prime minister to act was the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in Parliament House and the violent deaths of Hannah Clarke and her children last year.

Read more:
Politics with Michelle Grattan: Linda Burney on the treatment of Indigenous Women

On average in Australia, a woman is killed by her partner every week and a quarter of all women have experienced violence by an intimate partner.

As the prime minister addressed the summit, he conceded that Australia does have a problem.

There is indeed a problem with gender-based violence in Australia, but concern is not afforded in the same way to all groups. Violence experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women does not produce the same alarm.

The horrific statistics of violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are not unknown to the government. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been calling for a separate national plan (among other initiatives) to address family, domestic and gender-based violence for a long time.

Read more:
No public outrage, no vigils: Australia’s silence at violence against Indigenous women

Violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women is ignored

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience violence at horrifying rates and are 32 times more likely to be hospitalised and 11 times more likely to die from gender-based violence.

Dr Hannah McGlade, Dr Marlene Longbottom and I wrote an open letter to Our Watch, a group that works to prevent violence against women and children in Australia. We shared our frustration about the lack of outrage regarding violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, which we argue has been normalised and rendered invisible.

We also called for a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander council on violence against Indigenous women, as we know the issues facing Indigenous women require our own leadership and direction.

We are constantly calling for Indigenous-led solutions, adequate resources and flexibility over programs to take into account the diversity of our communities. Instead, we continue to be excluded from these conversations.

A polarising example is non-Indigenous women and criminologists supporting the criminalisation of coercive control — even though Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts have demonstrated how this would cause us harm.

As Longbottom and Dr Amanda Porter have outlined in their submission to the Queensland Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce:

there is a need to investigate the impact of state-based violence and how the state along with those employed within the system apply coercive control in their surveillance of Indigenous community members.

‘Nobody listens to us’

During the Women’s Safety Summit, as I listened to Professor Marcia Langton, June Oscar, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, and Sandra Creamer, chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Council, I was reminded of just how long we’ve been making the call for our own leadership.

As Langton told the summit,

Let me be very clear about this. Nobody listens to us.

And Oscar said,

We have always experienced being an afterthought, add on or linked-in measure. We have got to stop that practice.

As Langton further noted, no national plan has ever worked for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities.

There has also been criticism of the summit’s processes, especially in relation to the invite-only roundtables. Many felt excluded from the consultation, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers who work in this area.

This is problematic because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been the focus of much research generally led by non-Indigenous people. We are often cited as being over-researched in this way.

We will always need our own researchers producing the evidence we need to develop solutions that work for us.

The summit also revealed a lack of statistics on the experiences of LGBTQIA+ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who experience gender-based violence. While the summit did include a private LGBTQIA+ roundtable, the event was still framed as the “Women’s Safety Summit”, which excludes many.

Read more:
LGBTQ+ people are being ignored in the national discussion on family and sexual violence

A national summit to end gendered violence was suggested as an alternative. This would be more inclusive and address the breadth of the issue.

Throughout the event, there were also multiple calls for a separate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander national plan to address violence against women and their children. This resulted in the Women’s Safety Minister Anne Ruston agreeing to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to develop one.

There are, however, concerns about whether this is another plan that never achieves anything. Or a plan putting the responsibility on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities, but not the power or resources required to do the work.

Bronwyn Carlson is a member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Council to inform the next National Plan to end family, domestic and sexual violence.

– ref. We need a national plan to address family violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – https://theconversation.com/we-need-a-national-plan-to-address-family-violence-against-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-people-167640

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Allan Saul, Senior Principal Research Fellow (Honorary), Burnet Institute

In a pandemic, you expect that as new public health measures are introduced, there’s an observable impact on the spread of the disease.

But while that might have been the case in Melbourne’s second wave last year, the highly contagious Delta variant is different. In Sydney’s current second wave, none of the increased restrictions seemed to directly decreased the spread of COVID-19. Until now.

Our modelling shows the curfew with the other restrictions introduced on the August 23 in the 12 local government areas (LGAs) of concern has worked to halt the rise in cases.

And this wasn’t due to the level of vaccinations achieved so far. It suggests other LGAs with rising case numbers should not rely solely on vaccination to cut case numbers in the short to medium term. They may need to tighten restrictions to get outbreaks under control.

What are the tighter restrictions?

Restrictions across Sydney have been in place in various forms since June 23. But daily case numbers only plateaued in the 12 LGAs after the latest round of restrictions were introduced on August 23.

These included:

• a curfew from 9pm to 5am, to reduce the movement of young people
• restricting public access to hardware, garden supplies, office supplies and pet stores to click-and-collect only
• closure of face-to-face teaching and assessment in most educational institutes that remained open
• limiting outdoor exercise to one hour a day.

These came on top of the existing restrictions in these 12 LGAs: only four reasons for leaving home (work/education, care/compassion, shopping for essential supplies, and exercise), 5km travel restrictions and the closure of non-essential shops.

Read more:
A tougher 4-week lockdown could save Sydney months of stay-at-home orders, our modelling shows

What impact did these restrictions have?

There was a marked and significant decrease in the growth of the outbreak in the 12 LGAs of concern, starting a week after restrictions were introduced.

The expected growth rate of the Delta variant, in the absence of any controls, has a R0 between 5 and 9. This means one infected person would be expected to pass the virus on to five to nine others.

In the 12 LGAs, the Reff — which takes into account how many others one infected person will transmit the virus to with public health measures in place — reduced from 1.35 to 1.0. That means one case currently infects just one other person.

Cases numbers went from doubling every 11 days to case numbers being constant.

Without the additional restrictions introduced on August 23, the outbreak would have continued with close to an exponential increase (see the dashed orange line in Figure 1 below).

Without these stricter measures we expect about 2,000 cases per day by now and about 4,000 per day by the end of the month instead of the 1,000 per day currently in these 12 LGAs.

It’s not possible to assign which specific part or parts of the restrictions package were important, or how they functioned. Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to see a direct association of restrictions and impact on COVID-19 cases.

Vaccination rates have risen, but that’s not the reason

Vaccination rates have steadily risen in the 12 LGAs of concern. Currently, 74-86% of those aged 16 and over have had least one dose, and 34-42% have had both doses.

These vaccination levels have increased substantially in the past month from about 45% with at least one dose and only 22% fully vaccinated.

Read more:
Pfizer vaccinations for 16 to 39-year-olds is welcome news. But AstraZeneca remains a good option

However, taking into account that it takes about two weeks for vaccination to be fully effective, we calculate that from August 23 to September 9, the increased vaccination rates will have only reduced the transmission of COVID by about 9% in the these LGAs. This is nowhere near enough to account for the dramatic change in the case numbers.

Interestingly, outside these 12 LGAs, there was a gradual slowing of the growth rate that very closely matched the decrease in growth expected from increased vaccine coverage – but no sign of the abrupt change seen in the 12 LGAs of concern.

What does this mean for other parts of Sydney?

The gains associated with the more stringent restrictions are readily reversible. If they are lifted before vaccination can permanently reduce growth, COVID-19 cases could rapidly increase again in these 12 LGAs.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 cases outside the 12 LGAs of concern continue to grow strongly. With the current restrictions in place, cases in the rest of Sydney will soon overtake the cases within these 12 LGAs.

Having slowed the growth in the 12 LGAs of concern, it would be devastating if the strong growth in the rest of the state resulted in hospitals being further overloaded and a substantial increase in severe disease and deaths.

It may be necessary to impose greater restrictions — such as curfews and restricting retail outlets such as hardware stores to click-and-collect only — in at least in some of the LGAs with higher growth rates to curb this growth.

Why we need a vaccine-plus strategy

Increased levels of vaccination remains both crucial and urgent to prevent death and severe disease from COVID-19. But we are some way from vaccination levels that can allow us to relax.

While the national plan aims for 70% and 80% initial vaccination coverage it’s not yet clear how vaccination levels will impact on case numbers, given we still don’t know how well vaccines reduce transmission of the Delta variant.

Our ability to keep case numbers in check will be highly dependent on the efficiency of ongoing public health measures such as the contact tracing.

Read more:
What is life going to look like once we hit 70% vaccination?

As low case numbers remain a crucial component of a safe exit, “lockdown” restrictions will be important for some time yet to maintain these lower levels in NSW and Victoria.

States and regions that have no community transmission should fiercely protect that status until vaccine levels reach very high levels or else they may also face stringent restrictions.

But lockdowns are clearly not sustainable in the long term. At best, they give health services a temporary breathing space until we get high levels of vaccine coverage.

The Burnet Institutes receives funding from the NSW Government for COVASIM modelling. Brendan Crabb receives funding from state and federal government for other projects. He is a member of the National COVID-19 Health and Research Advisory Committee research advisory committee and OzSAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies).

Mark Stoové is a recipient of a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Senior Research Fellowship and has received investigator initiated research funding from Gilead Sciences and AbbVie, and consultant fees from Gilead Sciences, for activities unrelated to this work. He has also received funding to support research and program activities from the Commonwealth and Australian jurisdictional governments.

Allan Saul 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. Flattening the COVID curve: 3 weeks of tougher lockdowns in Sydney’s hotspots halved expected case numbers – https://theconversation.com/flattening-the-covid-curve-3-weeks-of-tougher-lockdowns-in-sydneys-hotspots-halved-expected-case-numbers-167778

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma F. Jackson, PhD Candidate, Department of Psychology, Macquarie University

A newly released report by a NSW parliamentary inquiry ignores scientific research in supporting changes to the Education Act. These changes are likely to add to the risks of harm that transgender and gender-diverse young people face.

Schools need to provide appropriate care to all students. The proposed changes to the law will prevent staff from doing that for transgender and gender-diverse young people. By further marginalising them, the changes could increase their already high rates of bullying, mental illness and suicide.

Read more:
Supporting trans people: 3 simple things teachers and researchers can do

The Education Committee’s report ignored scientific research findings and recommendations presented in submissions to its inquiry into the Parental Rights Bill. One Nation MP Mark Latham, who introduced the bill to parliament last year, chaired the committee. Its report endorsed proposed amendments to the Education Act 1990 and Bulletin 55: Transgender Students in Schools that will prevent schools from teaching that gender and sex are distinct concepts.

The amendments may also prevent school staff from affirming and supporting their transgender students until consent has been gained from potentially unsupportive parents, and lengthy, expensive medical procedures have been completed. By preventing appropriate care for all students, such changes will further alienate and marginalise transgender and gender-diverse young people.

What does the science say about sex and gender?

Scientific research has for many decades regarded sex and gender as distinct, but related. Sex refers to the biological and anatomical characteristics attributed to males and females. Gender encompasses the social and cultural characteristics of men and women – for example, personality, stereotypical interests, and behaviour.

Researchers recognise that sex and gender can be more related for some individuals and less related for others.

Scientific research also acknowledges that neither gender nor sex is binary. The physiological characteristics used to define sex, such as chromosomes and external genitalia, can display variation outside a clear division of male and female.

Moreover, both cisgender (sex and gender are in alignment) and transgender (sex and gender do not align) people may engage in gender nonconformity through their styles of dress, interests and behaviours. Nonbinary individuals can also have characteristics of both men and women, change between the categories, and/or see themselves as being outside the binary of male and female.

What are the risks of harm?

Rates of mental health problems are much higher in gender-nonconforming youths. In Australia, up to three in every four of these youths have been diagnosed with depression and/or anxiety. Much of this is due to school experiences such as peer rejection and bullying.

Read more:
Bullying linked to gender and sexuality often goes unchecked in schools

Alarmingly, one in two transgender and gender-nonconforming youths have attempted suicide. And about four in five report self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Those who experience victimisation in school are four times more likely to attempt suicide than those who are not victimised.

Schools have a vital role to play. Support and acceptance from teachers and peers are important protective factors in reducing rates of mental health concerns and suicidality. Support for gender-nonconforming young people significantly reduces their risks of depression and suicidality.

A positive classroom climate increases the academic success as well as the safety of these students.

Read more:
Why education about gender and sexuality does belong in the classroom

Report ignores science

According to the committee report, teaching about gender diversity should be avoided due to concerns of a “social contagion” effect. In 2018, a research paper examining gender dysphoria (the experience of distress due to incongruence of gender and sex) suggested social contagion might explain why some parents surveyed reported that more than one young person within their child’s friendship group began identifying as transgender at a similar time, despite the overall low prevalence of transgender children in the population.

Criticism of this paper and its methodology led to it being corrected. The paper was republished alongside additional text that noted the significant weaknesses of the study design and the limitations of the findings.

An earlier study showed siblings of transgender children displayed flexibility in their gender stereotype knowledge while retaining their sense of gender as cisgender. Thus, we currently have no strong scientific reason to believe that learning about gender diversity leads to people misattributing their gender.

Some parents may be concerned their children may incorrectly claim a transgender identity. However, comprehensive education about gender will ensure students are well equipped to understand and determine their gender.

Read more:
Crossroads program: should we teach children that gender identity is fluid? Here’s what the research says

This education also will provide a supportive environment for all students to explore their interests without fear of judgement by peers or punishment by schools. Students will be inspired to take part in activities that were once stereotypically gendered. For example, more girls may pursue science and technology while more boys may consider teaching.

What should schools be able to do?

Rather than prohibit the accurate teaching of gender and sex and restrict the support available to transgender students, the law should empower schools to employ strategies that support the safety and well-being of all students. Such strategies should include:

• teaching about gender in a scientifically informed, inclusive manner

• using correct pronouns

• training teachers in how to support gender-nonconforming students.

School staff require training in how to:

• combat transphobic language and behaviour

• provide inclusive and accurate sex education

• advocate for inclusive and protective policies for gender-nonconforming students.

Every child deserves a supportive, quality education based on science. Equality Australia has made it easy for you to convey this sentiment to your political leaders.

If this article has raised issues for you or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or beyondblue on 1300 22 46 36.

Emma F. Jackson is affiliated with the Academic Senate of Macquarie University.

Jonathan David is an employee of Twenty10 inc GLCS NSW and President of Dayenu – Sydney’s Jewish LGBTQ+ Community.

Melissa Norberg is the Deputy Director for the Centre for Emotional Health (CEH) and the National President for the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behaviour Therapy (AACBT).

Veronica Sheanoda is a Consumer Advisory Committee member for her local Primary Health Network.

– ref. NSW inquiry rejects expert advice on Parental Rights Bill, and it will cause students to suffer – https://theconversation.com/nsw-inquiry-rejects-expert-advice-on-parental-rights-bill-and-it-will-cause-students-to-suffer-167539

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Luskin, Lecturer in Conservation Science, The University of Queensland

For more than 40,000 years, Indigenous communities in Borneo have hunted and eaten bearded pigs – huge, nomadic animals that roam the island in Southeast Asia. These 100kg creatures are central to the livelihood and culture of some Bornean peoples – in fact, some hunters rarely talk of anything else.

But this ancient relationship is now at serious risk. Oil palm expansion and urbanisation are forcing changes to hunting practices in Sabah, a Malaysian state in Borneo. Our research examined these changes by focusing on Indigenous Kadazandusun-Murut hunters, for whom bearded pigs are a favourite game animal.

The oil palm industry has cleared much of Borneo’s lowland tropical rainforests to make way for plantations. And a shift to a more agrarian and urbanised life means many people hunt less than they used to.

Hunting is one of the most fundamental and enduring of human–wildlife relationships. But the changing dynamic between Borneo’s pigs and Indigenous peoples is a powerful reminder of the fragility of these connections. There is much at stake right now, for both the hunted and the hunter.

Changing times

As its name suggests, the bearded pig has a prominent beard. It’s a large species thought to move up to 650km in search of food, in large herds of up to 300 individuals.

Wild meat can contribute to as much as 36% of meals in Indigenous Bornean societies, and bearded pig meat accounts for 54–97% of this by weight. Bearded pig hunting is also central to recreation, gift-giving and social practices in many of Borneo’s Indigenous communities.

But widespread deforestation and agricultural expansion (primarily oil palm and rubber plantations) has drastically reduced bearded pig habitat in recent decades. The bearded pig is now listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List.

Sabah has been on the front lines of the oil palm boom since the late 20th century. As of 2015, roughly 24% of Sabah’s land area was covered by oil palm or pulpwood plantations.

Sabahans sometimes take work with oil palm companies, own their own oil palm smallholdings or move to urban areas for relatively well-paying jobs in manufacturing and retail.

Those who remain in rural parts of the state have reduced access to croplands and forests in some areas which, among other negative impacts, restricts their ability to hunt game.

Read more:
Human progress is no excuse to destroy nature. A push to make ‘ecocide’ a global crime must recognise this fundamental truth

‘This is our life’

We investigated how the above land-use changes have affected pig hunting practices of the Kadazandusun-Murut ethnic group, including 38 interviews with bearded pig hunters.

Hunters are adapting new methods to pursue pigs inside plantations. Respondents reported that hunting in oil palm plantations was easier overall than hunting in forests – because the walking was generally less tiring (and they could sometimes hunt from a car), it was easier to see pigs and foraging locations were more predictable.

Five respondents noted a difference between the taste of meat from pigs in oil palm plantations as compared to forest. One said:

The pig from the forest is much tastier, it’s more fit. If the pig eats oil palm its fat isn’t as sweet.

Many hunters said bearded pigs were “wilder”, “smarter” and more skittish than they had been in the past. Comments included:

The pigs can smell man; they are getting more wild because they are always getting shot by men.

Another participant said:

In the past pigs only looked, but now they run away. Now the pig has got a high school certificate.

Among hunters who had started hunting before 1985, 71% noted this increased flight response, whereas only 26% of those who began hunting after 1985 mentioned this behavioural change.

Respondents consumed wild bearded pig meat more frequently in rural villages than in urban contexts, indicating an important shift in dietary patterns. Some respondents also hunted less frequently when living in urban environments, due to having less time, increased distance to the forest, lower energy because of having to work or other factors.

But despite these substantial changes in hunting practices, much has remained the same over the last few decades.
Hunting with guns has remained the primary technique over the past two generations, and meat provision is the primary motivation to hunt.

One respondent said his father taught him:

This is our life. We live in the forest; this is our food.

Cultural practices, such as gifting the meat for community events, provided additional motivations to hunt. Some considered weddings, festivals and church events to be incomplete without bearded pig meat.

Preserving a fragile relationship

Our results show both the persistence and malleability of hunting practices among Kadazandusun-Murut people in Sabah. The challenge now is how best to manage bearded pig hunting in the face of ongoing oil palm expansion, urbanisation and broader political–economic changes.

The onslaught of African Swine Flu is complicating matters. For the pigs, the deadly virus is an extra burden for a species already in decline. For some Indigenous hunters, it threatens their food security and livelihoods.

The loss of bearded pigs also erodes traditional celebrations and family gatherings, and the passing down of ancient customary hunting practices to children.

Environmental governance initiatives should support the cultural traditions of Borneo’s Indigenous communities, and any new regulation should be devised in collaboration with local people and tailored to their needs. At the same time, these initiatives must ensure the long-term conservation of bearded pig populations and their habitat.

Read more:
Orangutans, gibbons and Mr Sooty: what the origins of words in Southeast Asia tell us about our long relationships with animals

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. ‘The pigs can smell man’: how decimation of Borneo’s ancient rainforests threatens hunters and the hunted – https://theconversation.com/the-pigs-can-smell-man-how-decimation-of-borneos-ancient-rainforests-threatens-hunters-and-the-hunted-166895

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hugh Breakey, President, Australian Association for Professional & Applied Ethics. Senior Research Fellow, Moral philosophy, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Law Futures Centre., Griffith University

COVID lockdown rules have thrust “dobbing” into the spotlight, with some asking whether Australia is a nation of dobbers.

But when is dobbing ethical and when is it wrong? This is a tricky question for adults and kids alike.

There is clearly a place for reporting wrongdoing — it can halt bad behaviour, see wrongdoers punished, help set societal expectations and prevent harm.

Still, there are reasons to be cautious about dobbing. It isn’t always the right thing to do.

A lot of our ideas about dobbing are formed in childhood — and as any parent, carer or teacher knows, not all dobbing is warranted.

Here are five questions worth thinking about before blowing the whistle — and how to talk to kids about dobbing.

1. Is it a clear violation?

Think carefully about exactly what behaviour you’re dobbing on, what rule it breaks and be sure you haven’t made assumptions.

There is no point calling authorities if the behaviour you’re dobbing on has a reasonable explanation.

For example, there may be ambiguity in the rules that you’ve failed to consider.

Or perhaps what you assumed was a violation wasn’t ever one at all, because the person had a valid exemption (such as a medical reasons for not wearing a mask).

Think before you dob.

Read more:
Australia has a long history of coercing people into work. There are better options than ‘dobbing in’

2. Is there a risk of genuine harm?

There are plenty of rule violations we typically don’t report. You probably don’t call the police when you see someone jaywalking, or a car parked improperly. You might even think it’s “none of my business”.

When someone reports us to the authorities, they essentially take a position of authority. They aren’t the police, but they are policing our behaviour. Widespread dobbing can also make us feel like we are continually being watched. So it’s perhaps no surprise many of us find dobbing for low-level breaches somewhat affronting.

However, these reasons shouldn’t stop us reporting if there is a real risk of harm.

In a pandemic, rule breaking can have grave or even deadly consequences, especially for vulnerable populations.

On this basis, repeated and flagrant violations are especially worth reporting. Such violations are also unfair; it is frustrating to see a person refuse to be bound by the rules the rest of us must accept.

For example, if a neighbour who is self-quarantining because they have tested positive to COVID seems to be having friends over, the authorities should be contacted. The risk of harm to others is very high.

3. What’s my relationship to the person I am dobbing on?

If you have an important relationship with the rule-breaker, that could be a reason to be cautious about reporting. For example, you might think carefully about poisoning an otherwise good relationship with a neighbour over a one-off or minor infraction.

But it’s also worth reflecting on whether you have a bad relationship with the person, or dislike them. If you’re dobbing on someone primarily because you don’t like them, or want them to get in trouble, you should examine your motivations closely.

This factor may play a role in public reporting on politicians’ mask wearing.

If the community is taking on a reporting role, it needs to be done fairly.

4. Can I resolve this informally?

Most of us have, at least once, forgotten to grab a mask, or to put it on.

Sometimes, a gentle reminder might be all that’s required. If you think an informal approach is likely to work, that may be a better option.

Just as children should learn to try to resolve their differences before seeking out an adult adjudicator, many of us could do more to find informal resolutions before involving authorities.

Of course, people can respond unpredictably and aggressively, even to good-natured approaches. An obligation to report doesn’t require putting yourself in harm’s way.

If you’re unsure about your safety, I think it’s ethically defensible to go straight to a higher authority.

(And if you’re the person being dobbed on and you think “Why couldn’t they have just said something to my face? I would have been fine about it,” just remember: it may have been impossible for your accuser to know that.)

5. What are my motivations?

There is a little bit of the self-righteous busybody in most of us. Dobbing can deliver a sense of authority and power (especially to those, like younger siblings, who may crave a fleeting sense of power because they have relatively little of it in their day to day life).

While it’s not easy to objectively survey your own motivations, it’s worth trying to make sure your heart’s in the right place.

Talk to children about the difference between dobbing and whistleblowing

We all learned about “dobbing” in the schoolyard. Children might encourage a social norm against dobbing because they think the rules are unfair, or because since they all break some rules, everyone is better off if nobody dobs.

But parents too can be frustrated by dobbing, such as when children seem to delight in getting a sibling into trouble.

Talk to your children about the difference between dobbing and whistleblowing. If the rule-breaking is clear and someone could be harmed, it’s important children know they should come forward. It’s always right to tell someone if you feel unsafe, or if someone is making you feel scared.

Equally though, not everything in life requires reporting to authorities. We all need to learn how to manage relationships with friends and siblings, and to resist the thrill of getting others into trouble.

When you’re the one getting dobbed on

An article on dobbing wouldn’t be complete without mentioning human beings are enormously clever about justifying rule-breaking.

We tell ourselves elaborate stories about how our “special” circumstances mean the rules shouldn’t apply to us.

When someone reports us, it can be tempting to feel outraged. But in doing so, we may avoid facing up to our own culpability.

Just as there is an ethics of dobbing, there is also an ethics of accepting responsibility.

Read more:
Troublemakers and traitors – it’s no fun being a whistleblower

Hugh Breakey 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. 5 questions to ask yourself before you dob — advice for adults and kids, from an ethicist – https://theconversation.com/5-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-you-dob-advice-for-adults-and-kids-from-an-ethicist-167789

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kewei Lyu, Postdoctoral Researcher in Ocean and Climate, CSIRO

Knowing how much sea levels are likely to rise during this century is vital to our understanding of future climate change, but previous estimates have generated wide ranges of uncertainty. In our research, published today in Nature Climate Change, we provide an improved estimate of how much our oceans are going to warm and its contribution to sea level rise, with the help of 15 years’ worth of measurements collected by a global array of autonomous underwater sampling floats.

Our analysis shows that without dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, by the end of this century the upper 2,000 metres of the ocean is likely to warm by 11-15 times the amount of warming observed during 2005-19. Water expands as it gets warmer, so this warming will cause sea levels to rise by 17-26 centimetres. This is about one-third of the total projected rise, alongside contributions from deep ocean warming, and melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Ocean warming is a direct consequence of rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere as a result of our burning of fossil fuels. This results in an imbalance between the energy arriving from the Sun, and the energy radiated out into space. About 90% of the excess heat energy in the climate system over the past 50 years is stored in the ocean, and only about 1% in the warming atmosphere.

Warming oceans cause sea levels to rise, both directly via heat expansion, and indirectly through melting of ice shelves. Warming oceans also affect marine ecosystems, for example through coral bleaching, and play a role in weather events such as the formation of tropical cyclones.

Systematic observations of ocean temperatures began in the 19th century, but it was only in the second half of the 20th century that enough observations were made to measure ocean heat content consistently around the globe.

Since the 1970s these observations indicate an increase in ocean heat content. But these measurements have significant uncertainties because the observations have been relatively sparse, particularly in the southern hemisphere and at depths below 700m.

To improve this situation, the Argo project has deployed a fleet of autonomous profiling floats to collect data from around the world. Since the early 2000s, they have measured temperatures in the upper 2,000m of the oceans, and sent the data via satellite to analysis centres around the world.

These data are of uniform high quality and cover the vast majority of the open oceans. As a result, we have been able to calculate a much better estimate of the amount of heat accumulating in the world’s oceans.

The global ocean heat content continued to increase unabated during the temporary slowdown in global surface warming in the beginning of this century. This is because ocean warming is less affected than surface warming by natural yearly fluctuations in climate.

Read more:
Ocean depths heating steadily despite global warming ‘pause’

Current observations, future warming

To estimate future ocean warming, we need to take the Argo observations as a basis and then use climate models to project them into the future. But to do that, we need to know which models are in closest agreement with new, more accurate direct measurements of ocean heat provided by the Argo data.

The latest climate models, used in last month’s landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all show ocean warming over the period of available Argo observations, and they project that warming will continue in the future, albeit with a wide range of uncertainties.

Read more:
Explainer: what is climate sensitivity?

By comparing the Argo temperature data for 2005-19 with the simulations generated by models for that period, we used a statistical approach called “emergent constraint” to reduce uncertainties in model future projections, based on information about the ocean warming we know has already occurred. These constrained projections then provided an improved estimate of how much heat energy will accumulate in the oceans by the end of the century.

By 2081–2100, under a scenario in which global greenhouse emissions continue on their current high trajectory, we found the upper 2,000m of the ocean is likely to warm by 11-15 times the amount of warming observed during 2005-19. This corresponds to 17–26cm of sea level rise from ocean thermal expansion.

Climate models can also make predictions based on a range of different future greenhouse gas emissions. Strong emissions reductions, consistent with bringing surface global warming to within about 2℃ of pre-industrial temperatures, would reduce the projected warming in the upper 2,000m of the ocean by about half — that is, between five and nine times the ocean warming already seen in 2005-19.

This would equate to 8-14cm of sea level rise due to thermal expansion. Of course, reducing emissions so as to hit the more ambitious Paris target of 1.5℃ surface warming would reduce these impacts even further.

Other factors linked to sea levels

There are several other factors that will also drive up sea levels, besides the heat influx into the upper oceans investigated by our research. There is also warming of the deep ocean below 2,000m, which is still under-sampled in the current observing system, as well as the effects of melting from glaciers and polar ice sheets.

This indicates that even with strong policy action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the oceans will continue to warm and sea levels will continue to rise well after surface warming is stabilised, but at a much reduced rate, making it easier to adapt to the remaining changes. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions earlier rather than later will be more effective at slowing ocean warming and sea level rise.

Read more:
If we stopped emitting greenhouse gases right now, would we stop climate change?

Our improved projection is founded on a network of ocean observations that are far more extensive and reliable than anything available before. Sustaining the ocean observing system into the future, and extending it to the deep ocean and to areas not covered by the present Argo program, will allow us to make more reliable climate projections in the future.

Kewei Lyu receives funding from the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR).

John Church receives funding from The Australian Research Council and the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR), jointly funded by the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (QNLM, China) and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, Australia).

Xuebin Zhang received funding from Pacific Climate Change Science Program (PCCSP) and follow-up Pacific-Australia Climate Change Science and Adaptation Planning program (PACCSAP), both of which were funded by the Australian Government’s International Climate Change Adaptation Initiative, and also from Australian Climate Change Science Programme (ACCSP), National Environmental Science Programme (NESP), and Centre for Southern Hemisphere Ocean Research (CSHOR).

– ref. How much will our oceans warm and cause sea levels to rise this century? We’ve just improved our estimate – https://theconversation.com/how-much-will-our-oceans-warm-and-cause-sea-levels-to-rise-this-century-weve-just-improved-our-estimate-166417

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Douglas Elliffe, Professor of Psychology, University of Auckland, University of Auckland

Can we toilet train cattle? Would we want to?

The answer to both of these questions is yes — and doing so could help us address issues of water contamination and climate change. Cattle urine is high in nitrogen, and this contributes to a range of environmental problems.

When cows are kept mainly outdoors, as they are in New Zealand and Australia, the nitrogen from their urine breaks down in the soil. This produces two problematic substances: nitrate and nitrous oxide.

Nitrate from urine patches leaches into lakes, rivers and aquifers (underground pools of water contained by rock) where it pollutes the water and contributes to the excessive growth of weeds and algae.

Nitrous oxide is a long-lasting greenhouse gas which is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It accounts for about 12% of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions, and much of this comes from the agricultural sector.

When cows are kept mainly in barns, as is the case in Europe and North America, another polluting gas — ammonia — is produced when the nitrogen from urine mixes with faeces on the barn floor.

However, if some of the urine produced by cattle could be captured and treated, the nitrogen it contains could be diverted, and the environmental impacts reduced. But how might urine capture be achieved?

We worked on this problem with collaborators from Germany’s Federal Research Institute for Animal Health and Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology. Our research is published today in the journal Current Biology. It forms part of our colleague Neele Dirksen’s PhD thesis.

Read more:
Feeding cows a few ounces of seaweed daily could sharply reduce their contribution to climate change

Toilet training (but without the nappies)

In our research project, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, we applied principles from behavioural psychology to train young cattle to urinate in a particular place — that is, to use the “toilet”

Behavioural psychology tells us a behaviour is likely to be repeated if followed by a reward, or “reinforcer”. That’s how we train a dog to come when called.

So if we want to encourage a particular behaviour, such as urinating in a particular place, we should reinforce that behaviour. For our project we applied this idea in much the same way as for toilet training children, using a procedure called “backward chaining”.

First, the calves were confined to the toilet area, a latrine pen, and reinforced with a preferred treat when they urinated. This established the pen as an ideal place to urinate.

The calves were then placed in an alley outside the pen, and once again reinforced for entering the pen and urinating there. If urination began in the alley, it was discouraged by a mildly unpleasant spray of water.

After optimising the training, seven out of the eight calves we trained learned to urinate in the latrine pen — and they learned about as quickly as human children do.

The calves received only 15 days of training and the majority learned the full set of skills within 20 to 25 urinations, which is quicker than the toilet-training time for three- and four-year-old children.

This showed us two things that weren’t known before.

1. cattle can learn to attend to their own urination reflex, because they moved to the pen when ready to use it
2. cattle will learn to withhold urination until they’re in the right place, if they’re rewarded for doing so.

The next stages

Our research is a proof of concept. Cattle can be toilet trained, and without much difficulty. But scaling up the method for practical application in agriculture involves two further challenges, which will be the focus in the next stage of our project.

First, we need a way both to detect urination in the latrine pen and deliver reinforcement automatically — without human intervention.

This is probably no more than a technical problem. An electronic sensor for urination wouldn’t be difficult to develop, and small amounts of attractive rewards could be provided in the pen.

Apart from this, we’ll also need to determine the optimal location and number of latrine pens needed. This is a particularly challenging issue in countries such as New Zealand, where cattle spend most of their time in open paddocks rather than barns.

Part of our future research will require understanding how far cattle are willing to walk to use a pen. And more needs to be done to understand how to best use this technique with animals in both indoor and outdoor farming contexts.

What we do know is that nitrogen from cattle urine contributes to both water pollution and climate change, and these effects can be reduced by toilet training cattle.

The more urine we can capture, the less we’ll need to reduce cattle numbers to meet emissions targets — and the less we’ll have to compromise on the availability of milk, butter, cheese and meat from cattle.

Read more:
Virtual fences and cattle: how new tech could allow effective, sustainable land sharing

Douglas Elliffe has received research funding from the Volkswagen Foundation.

Lindsay Matthews receives funding from VW Foundation. He is affiliated with Matthews Research International.

– ref. We managed to toilet train cows (and they learned faster than a toddler). It could help combat climate change – https://theconversation.com/we-managed-to-toilet-train-cows-and-they-learned-faster-than-a-toddler-it-could-help-combat-climate-change-167785

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wes Mountain, Multimedia Editor

COVID-19 has seen the world embrace sanitisers and formal hand washing procedures in our private lives like never before. But even as we’ve thought more and more about surfaces and the hands that touch them as vectors for disease, mobile phones have largely escaped scrutiny.

We carry them everywhere (including the toilet) but they’re rarely cleaned or sanitised, and we touch them with our hands many, many times per day.

Lotti Tajouri explains what his research team found when they surveyed hospital staff about their phone use, the bacteria, viruses and parasites they found on swabbed phones, and the very personal reason he began this research.

Transcript:

My name is Dr Lotti Tajouri, associate professor in molecular biology and genomics in health science medicine at Bond University. I’m also a member of the Dubai Future Council on Community Security. and the [biology and political] scientist committee.

The first time I actually got an interest in mobile phones as contaminated platforms was associated with my wife’s pregnancy. We came up to a situation where there was an emergency: my little girl was in breech while my wife was pregnant.

And we had to go very quickly to the theatre.

And what happened is when there was this preparation for the caesarean, I actually saw that there were some health care workers walking around with their mobile phones.

And really with the stress of the situation and knowing that I’m actually understanding clearly what is microbiology. I was really saying, “oh, there is a red flag here with some individuals, right there in the theatre, where there was my little girl about to be born”. Something was kind of wrong.

And of course, it’s nothing to blame the health care workers for, or how they do their job. The issue was that they don’t really know that mobile phones are actually contaminated with microbes.

So that was the very first time where I said to myself, “oh, I think I really need to do something about it”.

We did a survey within the hospital and we actually surveyed 165 health care workers, including doctors and nurses.

And we found something very interesting.

First of all, 98% of all those health care workers admitted that probably, indeed, their mobile phones are contaminated.

They are aware of that.

The other thing which was very interesting is their behaviour around mobile phones.

52% of them, out of 165 individuals used mobile phones in the bathroom and they used that for different reasons for media, social media, etc.

And the other very interesting statistic is that 57% of them never, ever washed their mobile phones.

We have also undertaken a massive amount of swabs of mobile phones.

And then what we wanted to do is, first of all, demonstrate that the microbes that are on the surface of mobile phones coming from health care workers, and if those microbes were viable or not.

After swabbing the mobile phones, we took around 30 mobile phones and we cultured them in different types of petri dishes.

It was very impressive.

If you look at the pictures that come up from those particular petri dishes, you see a huge amount of colonies coming out of it.

We found all sorts of types of bacteria: we found e.coli, demonstrating faecal contamination, we found pseudomonas aeruginosa (which is extremely resistant to different types of antibiotics), we found salmonella. We found listeria.

Even very, very interestingly, we found parasites, protozoa. One of them was, for example, entamoeba histolytica.

So those mobile phones are platforms that accommodate a huge panel, a huge spectrum of microorganisms that interact with each other and they are viable.

We started the video with me, for example, working in my office and holding the mobile phone and simulating a cough.

And with that cough, obviously, we deposited droplets on the surface of the mobile phone.

And then because we tend to text or touch our mobile phones, what would happen is that I would then obviously touch my keyboard, and do my whereabouts for my work, take a phone call or take a glass of water, etc.

And then after that, I decided, of course, to get out of my office and go, for example, to a kitchen.

And you will understand that because I touched my filthy mobile phone, I had actually the microbes on my hands.

And then when I went to the kitchen, and eat, and use whatever device I wanted to use, for example, the coffee machine. Well, the same again, you could see that spread going on again and again and disseminating itself in different areas.

Now, it will be natural for me once in a while to use the toilet. So then I decided to go to the bathroom. And same thing.

So in the bathroom, you’d touch different surfaces: the doors, the lid of the toilet.

So when you wash your hands, yes, your hands are clean. However, when you touch your filthy mobile phone, what happens is you contaminate yourself all over again.

The mobile phones are our third hand. Those ‘third hands’ needs to be ‘hand-washed or sanitised the same way as we ought to do with our two normal hands.

If we don’t decontaminate our mobile phones, it means that we negate the hand washing.

The solution is very simple.

At least, wipe off your mobile phone with a clean felt cloth, put a little bit of 70% isopropyl alcohol [on it]. But you have to be very careful when you wipe off your mobile phone with this type of material.

If you really want to clean your phone, never clean your phone when it is switched on, switch it off first. And the other advice I would tell you is probably to go back to your phone manufacturer recommendations, on how best you can clean your phone.

Our research, at Bond, is very clear. And this is also backed up by the literature. The best way forward [for public sector and industrial settings is] to sanitise your phone is by Ultraviolet C.

And there are some great technologies out there that do the job within 10 seconds, that will really be the solution for our community, for our health care workers and for any type of professional sector.

And my dream is to get the World Health Organisation, the CDC, etc. to embrace this technology.

To, first of all, understand that those mobile phones are actually probably transmitting diseases because those mobile phones are Trojan horses for the enemies that we carry with us all the time: all those germs.

– ref. WATCH: Our mobile phones are covered in bacteria and viruses… and we never wash them – https://theconversation.com/watch-our-mobile-phones-are-covered-in-bacteria-and-viruses-and-we-never-wash-them-167784

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

The latest figures available show there are 1,189 people admitted with COVID-19 to hospitals in New South Wales, with 222 of them in intensive care units (ICU), 94 needing ventilation.

This week there were over 9,700 people with new COVID infections. That means about one in every 10 people with COVID are sick enough to need admission to hospital.

Recently released modelling predicts COVID admissions in NSW will rise steeply over the coming weeks and will peak in mid-October. NSW has also just announced plans for some restrictions to ease once 70% of adults in the state are fully vaccinated, a date also expected to land in October.

Here’s what this will look like for patients admitted with COVID and for hospital staff caring for them.

Here’s what happens to the lungs

Healthy lungs are like soft, fresh sponge cake, wrapped in two layers of cling wrap (the pleura), all sealed in the cake tin of the chest wall.

But with severe COVID, people develop pneumonia. This is when the spongey lung fills with fluid and becomes stiff and the muscles we use to breathe are weakened by inflammation that rages in all tissues of the body. The major consequence of this is an inability to breathe properly, a reduction in oxygen levels and inadequate oxygen supply to the body.

Severe pneumonia is usually managed in the ICU. In this pandemic, the sheer number of critically breathless patients means the intensive level of respiratory care they require is being delivered outside ICU, in wards designed for patients with other health problems.

So most of the patients admitted to hospital with COVID are actually managed by lung specialists and infectious diseases physicians with a huge input from our junior doctors in training.

COVID pneumonia is what kills patients who develop severe COVID.

About one in five develop severe breathlessness. This is when the stiffened lungs are full of fluid and every breath requires extra effort.

This severe breathlessness is hard to explain until you experience it. But it’s relentless, exhausting and frightening. Patients describe it as like “an elephant on your chest”, “a suffocation”, or there not being “enough air in the room”.

Read more:
ICU ventilators: what they are, how they work and why it’s hard to make more

People with COVID pneumonia need oxygen but oxygen alone isn’t enough to help with severe breathing difficulties and COVID pneumonia. Those who are most unwell may need intubation. This is when we insert a tube into the lungs connected to a machine that does the work of breathing, via mechanical ventilation. This happens in the ICU.

Expert care in an acute COVID ward is critical. Patients successfully managed will have better odds of a shorter hospital stay and not needing intubation, with its increased risk of dying.

We’re also worried about filling up the available ICU beds — a clearly finite resource.

Read more:
We’re seeing more COVID patients in ICU as case numbers rise. That affects the whole hospital

We want to avoid intubation

As the pandemic has swept across the globe, we’ve rapidly learnt from our colleagues overseas about supporting the breathing of patients with COVID pneumonia.

Our treatments are aimed at helping patients recover more quickly and reduce the need for mechanical ventilation. Measures include:

• delivering warm and humid oxygen, which is more comfortable for patients, and protects the lining of the airways from further inflammation

• lying patients on their belly or “proning”, aims to prevent fluid from pooling at the bottom of the lungs. This improves oxygen levels and makes breathing more comfortable. It also reduces the need for mechanical ventilation. This is safe and cheap, and is comfortable for most people even those who are very overweight, and pregnant women

• continuous positive airway pressure or CPAP can also be used to help reduce the work of breathing for people with severe breathlessness. These machines are used to deliver oxygen via a mask and help by opening up fluid-filled, stiff lungs.

These treatments are labour intensive and have long been available in the ICU where nursing to patient ratios are higher.

However, in NSW, hospitals with the highest current numbers of patients with severe COVID (such as Liverpool, Nepean and Westmead) have had to rapidly adapt their wards to deliver this treatment outside the ICU.

The published modelling predicts such treatments will spill further into the COVID wards of every hospital in NSW.

Read more:
Opening with 70% of adults vaccinated, the Doherty report predicts 1.5K deaths in 6 months. We need a revised plan

We need the staff to manage this

Treatments like proning and CPAP are time-consuming and require experienced doctors, nurses and support staff.

Ideally, every patient with severe COVID pneumonia should have at least one nurse each for every hour of the day — a 1:1 nursing ratio.

Staff need to know when to start these treatments. They also need to know how to read the signs of deterioration that signal the patient, who despite everyone’s best efforts, will need intubation.

Fitting the CPAP mask and adjusting the oxygen requires experience and training. Staff help patients to eat and drink, go to the toilet. They administer complex medications, comfort the grieving, frightened and confused.

They do this while dressed in a hot gown, wearing goggles and gloves and a tight, fitted N95 mask. Every single clinical interaction is stressful and intense.

Read more:
‘Living with COVID’ looks very different for front-line health workers, who are already exhausted

Plans are under way

Plans are under way to manage the expected surge in cases.

Staff are being trained and we are preparing to get enough equipment where it’s needed. The problem is this will go on for many more weeks, staff will get tired, physically and emotionally, and we don’t want this to be any worse than it must be.

If you want to help, get vaccinated and stay at home. Please put up with the restrictions and lockdowns for a little longer.

Now is the time for everyone to come together so we come out of this in one piece and can continue to offer the best of medical care.

Peter Wark is affiliated with the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand, National Asthma Council , Lung Foundation of Australia and Cystic Fibrosis Australia

Lucy Morgan is Director of the Board of Lung Foundation Australia. Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand.

– ref. We’re two frontline COVID doctors. Here’s what we see as case numbers rise – https://theconversation.com/were-two-frontline-covid-doctors-heres-what-we-see-as-case-numbers-rise-167195