Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vasso Apostolopoulos, Professor of Immunology and Associate Provost, Research Partnerships, Victoria University

An important factor in achieving herd immunity against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) is is how long the vaccines protect you.

If a vaccine continues to work well over a long period, it becomes easier to have a significant proportion of the population optimally protected, and in turn suppress or eliminate the disease entirely.

As the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines continues, public attention is increasingly turning to booster shots, which aim to top up immunity if it wanes. But is a third dose needed? And if so, when?

Let’s take a look at what the data tell us so far about how long immunity from COVID-19 vaccines might last.

First, what about immunity following COVID-19 infection?

The presence of antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 is used as an indicator of immunity, with higher levels indicating greater protection. Once antibody levels drop below a particular threshold, or vanish completely, the person is at risk of reinfection.

Initially, scientists observed people’s antibody levels rapidly decreased shortly after recovery from COVID-19.

However, more recently, we’ve seen positive signs of long-lasting immunity, with antibody-producing cells in the bone marrow identified seven to eight months following infection with COVID-19. In addition, scientists have observed evidence of memory T cells (a type of immune cells) more than six months following infection.

A study of over 9,000 recovered COVID-19 patients in the United States up to November 2020 showed a reinfection rate of only 0.7%. These findings closely align with a slightly more recent study suggesting reinfection after COVID-19 is very uncommon, at least in the short term.

À lire aussi :
5 ways our immune responses to COVID vaccines are unique

While it seems likely there’s some level of lasting protection following COVID-19 infection, if you’ve had COVID, getting vaccinated is still worthwhile.

There’s some evidence vaccination after recovery leads to a stronger level of immunity compared to “natural” immunity from infection, or immunity from vaccination alone. People with so-called “hybrid immunity” appear to exhibit a more diverse range of antibodies.

How long does immunity from vaccines last?

The vaccines deployed against COVID-19 in Australia and most of the western world come from two classes.

Those produced by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson are viral vector vaccines. They use an adenovirus (which causes the common cold) to prime the immune system to respond to SARS-CoV-2.

The vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna use mRNA-based technology. The messenger RNA gives your cells temporary instructions to make the coronavirus’ spike protein, teaching your immune system to protect you if you encounter the virus.

For the viral vector vaccines, despite ongoing trials, there’s little data available on the duration of the antibody response. The original studies showed efficacy for one to two months, however the duration of protection, and whether a booster will be needed, require further evaluation.

Notably, a vaccine similar to AstraZeneca against a related coronavirus (Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS) showed stable antibody levels over a 12-month follow-up period. This gives hope for lasting protection against similar coronaviruses.

À lire aussi :
How well do COVID vaccines work in the real world?

The Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are the first vaccines based on mRNA technology to be approved for human use. So there’s still significant research required to evaluate the nature and duration of immunity they induce.

Interestingly, “germinal centers” have been identified in the lymph nodes of people vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine. These act as training sites for immune cells, teaching them to recognise SARS-CoV-2, indicating a potential for long-lasting protection.

Initial studies only evaluated short-term efficacy, however recent research has found strong antibody activity at six months.

What about Delta?

Variants such as Delta, which are more transmissible and potentially more dangerous, are likely to increase interest in booster programs.

All vaccines show modestly reduced efficacy against Delta, so any decrease in protection over time could be more problematic than with the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, or other variants.

A recent preprint (a study yet to undergo peer review) found protection against the Delta variant waned within three months with both the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines.

This research from the United Kingdom showed the Pfizer vaccine was 92% effective at preventing people from developing a high viral load at 14 days after the second dose, but this dropped to 78% at 90 days. AstraZeneca was 69% effective against the same measure at 14 days, dropping to 61% after 90 days.

This study shows vaccinated people who become infected with Delta still carry high amounts of virus (viral load). Third booster doses will be important to reduce these breakthrough infections and subsequent transmission.

À lire aussi :
Why do we need booster shots, and could we mix and match different COVID vaccines?

Although the UK study looked at infections rather than hospitalisations or deaths, data from around the world continue to show the unvaccinated are making up the vast majority of patients who develop serious illness.

Nonetheless, scientists are continuing to investigate how waning immunity could affect protection against the more serious outcomes of COVID-19.

OK, so what now?

Pfizer has reported positive results from trials of a third dose to boost immunity, and the company is seeking formal approval for a booster from the United States Food and Drugs Administration.

The United States has announced it will begin distributing third doses next month to people who received an mRNA vaccine eight months ago or more.

Other countries, such as Israel, have already begun rolling out boosters. The move to offer third doses in some high-income countries has raised ethical concerns, with many people around the world still unable to access a first or second dose.

A number of countries have authorised booster doses for at-risk populations in response to the rise of the Delta variant.

This includes older adults and those with compromised immune systems, to combat the increased risk of severe disease and diminished vaccine protection in these people.

In Australia, there is likely to be a booster program in the future. But given the current issues surrounding supply, it’s unlikely to be for some months.

Vasso Apostolopoulos COVID-19 research has received internal funding from Victoria University place-based Planetary Health research grant and from philanthropic donations.

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

– ref. How long does immunity last after COVID vaccination? Do we need booster shots? 2 immunology experts explain – https://theconversation.com/how-long-does-immunity-last-after-covid-vaccination-do-we-need-booster-shots-2-immunology-experts-explain-164073

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

This week’s Newspoll, conducted August 25-28 from a sample of 1,528, gave Labor a 54-46 lead, a one-point gain for Labor since three weeks ago. Primary votes were 40% Labor (up one), 36% Coalition (down three), 10% Greens (down one) and 3% One Nation (steady).

Despite the three-point loss for the Coalition’s primary vote, Scott Morrison’s net approval returned to positive after going negative three weeks ago for the first time since the start of the pandemic. 49% were satisfied (up two) and 47% dissatisfied (down two), for a net approval of +2, up four points.

Read more:
First negative Newspoll rating for Morrison since start of pandemic; 47% of unvaccinated would take Pfizer but not AstraZeneca

Anthony Albanese gained one point for a -7 net approval. Morrison led Albanese by 50-34 as better PM (49-36 previously). Newspoll figures are from The Poll Bludger.

This Newspoll contradicts the Resolve poll that I wrote about on Thursday. In Resolve, the Coalition led Labor by 40-32 on primary votes, from 38-35 in July. Although Resolve’s issue-based questions have been skewed to favour the Coalition (see below), this would not affect voting intentions.

Newspoll is the most-watched poll in Australia, but that doesn’t mean it is right. At the 2019 federal election, the final Newspoll was 51.5-48.5 to Labor, overstating Labor by 3.0%. Newspoll has made changes to its methods since that debacle, but we need to wait until the next federal election to see if its accuracy improves.

In November 2018, Essential and Ipsos both gave Labor 52-48 leads while Newspoll continued to have Labor ahead by 55-45. Analysts considered Newspoll right, and that convinced other pollsters to “herd” their results to Newspoll for the 2019 election. Labor’s weakness in Resolve compared to Newspoll should not be ignored.

Read more:
Newspoll probably wrong since Morrison became PM; polling has been less accurate at recent elections

Although there was a three-point loss for the Coalition in Newspoll, it went to Others, not Labor, and may be easier to recover. It’s plausible this drop was due to Clive Palmer’s ubiquitous anti-lockdown ads gaining some support from the Coalition’s right.

The improvement in Morrison’s ratings is encouraging for the Coalition. During the pandemic, Morrison’s ratings have been far ahead of what would be expected from voting intentions.

The Guardian’s datablog shows 27.2% of Australia’s population (not 16+) is fully vaccinated, up from 17.8% three weeks ago. We still rank 35 of 38 OECD countries after we overtook Mexico, but were passed by South Korea. The Age shows 57.5% of 16+ have received at least one dose and 34.2% are fully vaccinated.

Electoral legislation to curb micro parties passes parliament

Legislation that will increase the number of members required to register a party from 500 to 1,500 passed parliament with Labor support last week. Existing parties that are not currently represented in federal parliament will have three months to show they have 1,500 members or be deregistered.

A 1,500 member threshold with Australia’s population is not a big ask. If parties cannot meet this threshold, it is unlikely they would be electorally viable.

The legislation also allows older parties to reserve their own names, such as Liberal or Labor. This will force the Liberal Democrats and the proposed New Liberals to change their names as the Liberal party was first. Confusion between the Liberals and Liberal Democrats has assisted the latter at some elections. The same applies for Labor and the Democratic Labour Party.

Analyst Kevin Bonham is tracking parties that are likely to be affected by these changes. If the government wants these changes implemented, an election is unlikely to be called until next year.

Pre-poll voting will be limited to the final 12 days before an election; it’s currently the final 19. Sorting of pre-poll booths will start at 4pm on election day, two hours before polls close. This is an attempt to avoid not having results from large pre-poll booths until very late on election night.

Resolve poll’s skewed question on reopening

I wrote last Thursday that in last week’s Resolve poll, 62% supported state and territory leaders sticking to the plan to ease restrictions at 70% fully vaccinated, with only 24% saying the leaders should go their own way.

However, there was a paragraph added to the bottom of this article after I had first looked at it. This paragraph contains the actual question the poll asked, and includes the clause “such as using less severe restrictions once their populations reach 50 per cent vaccination or easing restrictions at 70 and 80 per cent if case numbers are still high”.

So the choice in this question was between sticking to the plan or easing restrictions faster, with no option for easing restrictions slower.

This is not the first time Resolve has skewed questions to favour the Coalition. I wrote about a skewed Resolve question on climate change in its June poll.

Read more:
Victorian Labor holds comfortable lead; flawed climate change question in federal Resolve poll

Despite lockdowns, unemployment rate falls to 4.6% in July

Although Sydney was in lockdown for all of July, the ABS reported on August 19 that the national unemployment rate for July fell 0.3% from June to 4.6%. The unemployment rate was last this low before the 2008-09 global financial crisis.

A 0.2% drop in the participation rate to 66.0% partly explains the unemployment rate’s fall, but the employment population ratio – the percentage of eligible Australians who are employed – decreased less than 0.1% to 62.9%, just off its peak that was higher than for the last ten years.

Economic analyst Greg Jericho wrote in The Guardian that many people during lockdowns were still counted as employed, but worked zero hours. If those people were counted as unemployed, the unemployment rate in July would be 6.8%, up from 6.5% in June and 5.1% in May, when there were no lockdowns. By this measure, the unemployment rate in April 2020 was 14.4%, much higher than the official 6.4%.

Very large poll for Australian Conservation Foundation finds strong support for climate action

Nine newspapers reported on Monday that a poll of 15,000 respondents conducted by YouGov for the Australian Conservation Foundation found 67% believed the government should be doing more to address climate change.

I am very sceptical of this poll because it was conducted by a lobby group with a vested interest in promoting climate change action. And the actual results at the 2019 election were not favourable to climate change action.

NSW state redistribution finalised

Boundaries for the 93 NSW lower house seats that will be used at the 2023 NSW state election have been finalised. ABC election analyst Antony Green wrote that Labor gains one notional seat from the Coalition, reducing the Coalition’s seat lead over Labor to 47-37 from 48-36, with three seats each for the Greens, Shooters and independents.

Opposition Leader Chris Minns’ seat of Kogarah has had its Labor margin cut from 1.8% to just 0.1%.

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

– ref. Coalition slumps but Morrison gains in Newspoll; electoral changes to curb micro parties – https://theconversation.com/coalition-slumps-but-morrison-gains-in-newspoll-electoral-changes-to-curb-micro-parties-166886

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael James Walsh, Associate Professor, University of Canberra

Twitter has come under increasing public scrutiny for facilitating hostile communication online. While the micro-blogging site promotes itself as providing a “free” and “safe” space to talk, critics have highlighted the company’s inept response to repeated instances of trolling, harassment and abuse.

Our research into how people present themselves and manage their interactions with other users on Twitter suggests that case-by-case responses are inadequate. We found Twitter’s design promotes avoidance as the easiest solution to hostility, without offering space for the kind of restorative activity that could lead to more genuine resolution of conflict.

Who faces hostility on Twitter?

Hostility on Twitter is disproportionately directed towards women, people of colour and marginalised groups. For example, in 2016 US comedian Leslie Jones was inundated with racist tweets following the release of the film Ghostbusters.

Black and Indigenous sportspeople, such as Adam Goodes, Glen Kamara and Lewis Hamilton, have also been subjected to racist abuse on Twitter and implored the platform to do more to respond to the situation.

More recently, racist tweets against Black English footballers proliferated after the national team’s loss to Italy in the UEFA European Football Championship.

In 2018, Amnesty International published a report detailing the extent of abuse directed at female users, describing Twitter as “a toxic place for women”. The report criticised Twitter for failing to respect women’s rights and respond to reports of violence in a transparent manner.

Twitter’s response: how platform design encourages hostile interaction

Part of the reason for the degree of hostility on Twitter is because of the way the platform is designed. Sociologist Ian Hutchby called this the “affordances” of a technology: the material possibilities a technology affords its users, the type of actions it enables and constrains.

Twitter’s affordances shape how users interact on the site. This includes platform features (such as likes, retweets, and mentions), accounts being public by default and the capacity for users to be anonymous. The character limit of tweets also facilitates brief, impulsive, inimical exchange.

In 2017, the company introduced changes to reduce hostility on Twitter. Notable changes included doubling the length of tweets from 140 to 280 characters. Twitter also introduced “threads” to connect a series of tweets into a longer commentary and provided the option to hide replies. These changes were an attempt to “help minimise unwanted replies and improve meaningful conversations” on the platform, but hostility on Twitter persists.

Read more:
Twitter tries to tackle abuse as research shows that most of us can be trolls online

One reason for the degree of hostility on Twitter is that the site’s metrics can be gamed to elevate controversial and abusive content. Research also shows false and misleading news is retweeted more than authentic stories, especially among like-minded groups.

In 2018, Twitter launched a “healthy conversation strategy”. This aimed to assess the “health” of interactions on Twitter with a view to improve them.

User strategies to avoid hostility on Twitter

In 2019 we conducted an online questionnaire to explore how internet users respond to hostility on Twitter. Our study found Twitter users deploy several common strategies to manage hostile interactions on the site.

These include the use of pseudonyms and multiple accounts to achieve a degree of anonymity and privacy, as well as blocking users and self-censoring to pre-emptively limit exposure to harassment and abuse.

Read more:
Why I block trolls on Twitter

Users know they are vulnerable on the platform and artfully manage their social interactions by anticipating hostility, managing the immediate information environment through protecting their tweets, adopting different personas via multiple accounts and limiting how they communicate online.

Saving face on Twitter and minimising exposure

These observations suggest users are finding ways to “save face” online. The sociologist Erving Goffman called this kind of activity “face-work”.

In Goffman’s model, we employ different “faces” to adapt to specific interactions and environments:

We have party faces, funeral faces, and various kinds of institutional faces.

The aim of face-work is to create a positive impression of ourselves to others. When we “have face”, we succeed in presenting a consistent self that others validate. In contrast, we “lose face” when information arises that undercuts our presentation of self.

Our research extends the idea of face-work to examine the strategies Twitter users employ to interact with others.

We suggest that users adopt a type of “Twitter-face”: a face-work tactic of responding to hostile interactions in a way that will protect the user’s metaphorical face.

Hostile interactions on Twitter often take specific forms, such as doxing, pile-ons and ratioing. In each of these, a user’s face is confronted by co-ordinated attacks that disrupt the positive impression they are trying to present.

Two kinds of face-work

Face-work generally occurs in two ways. The first is avoidance, in which people try to avoid face-threatening information or prevent others from seeing it. The second is correction, where people make efforts to apologise for their own face-threatening actions.

We can see an example of corrective face-work on Twitter below, where a person’s face is threatened, they attempt to correct the threatening information, and the conflict is resolved with an apology and acceptance.

Avoidance, on the other, often takes the form of blocking other Twitter users.

Our findings show Twitter users overwhelmingly use avoidance practices as a defensive strategy to prevent hostility on the site. Specific techniques include

• blocking accounts

• protecting tweets (making them unavailable to the public)

• creating multiple accounts

• self-censoring and avoiding certain topics.

Under normal circumstances both avoidance and correction are vital aspects of face-work, but on Twitter there appears to be an overemphasis on avoidance at the expence of correction.

Improving Twitter’s environment

This places Twitter in a difficult situation. Users desire greater control over how they interact, but new features allowing greater control seem to privilege avoidance and may reduce attempts to engage in restorative interactions.

Beyond introducing isolated features, which place responsibility on the individual user, Twitter needs to reconsider the algorithms and metrics (such as likes and retweets) that enable the company to profit from co-ordinated harassment campaigns, controversy and abuse. This could include hiding likes or removing re-tweets and algorithms.

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

– ref. Twitter’s design stokes hostility and controversy. Here’s why, and how it might change – https://theconversation.com/twitters-design-stokes-hostility-and-controversy-heres-why-and-how-it-might-change-166555

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Birgita Hansen, Senior Research Fellow, Federation University and Better Data for Better Decisions Constellation Leader, Food Agility CRC, Federation University Australia

Imagine having to fly non-stop for five days over thousands of kilometres of ocean for your survival. That’s what the Latham’s Snipe shorebird does twice a year, for every year of its life.

This migratory shorebird, similar in size to a blackbird, completes this gruelling migration to warmer climes, where it prepares itself for its return flight and the next breeding season.

Unfortunately, their wetland habitat is now being lost to development and other pressures, putting this tough little bird at risk.

Read more:
Be still, my beating wings: hunters kill migrating birds on their 10,000km journey to Australia

A feat of incredible endurance

Latham’s Snipe breeds in northern Japan and parts of eastern Russia during May-July and spends its non-breeding season (September to March) along Australia’s eastern coast.

Like other migratory shorebirds, it has incredible endurance, undertaking a non-stop, over-ocean flight between its breeding and non-breeding grounds.

It arrives at its destination severely malnourished and spends the Australian summer months building up its strength and body fat to complete its long return flight.

Unlike many other migratory shorebird species in Australia, you won’t find Latham’s Snipe in large flocks enjoying picturesque estuaries and bays. Instead, it hides away in thickly vegetated wetlands during the day to avoid local predators.

Their characteristic brown mottled feathers help them hide in wetlands.

Large eyes high on their heads allow them to see far and wide. Their exceptional eyesight helps them constantly scan for dangers at night, when they forage for food in open wet and muddy areas.

Latham’s Snipe is the ultimate sun-seeker. It breeds in the northern hemisphere when the snows have melted and the weather is warm, then returns to the southern hemisphere to take advantage of spring rains, warmer weather and food-rich wetlands.

It spends its entire time in Australia feeding, resting and growing new flight feathers in preparation for the long haul back to Japan in autumn.

No food and nowhere to rest

Latham’s Snipe, formerly known as the Japanese Snipe, was once a popular game bird. Hunting and wetland loss during the 20th century have contributed to a decline in Latham’s Snipe in south-eastern Australia.

The signing of the Japan Australia Migratory Bird Agreement in 1981 has stopped snipe hunting in both countries. However, their wetland habitat continues to be lost due to land development and drying of wetlands.

Imagine flying for five days straight, arriving at your destination emaciated and exhausted, only to find your habitat has disappeared. No food and nowhere to rest. This is the crisis facing Latham’s Snipe and many other migratory shorebird species.

No formal protection for many of its wetlands

Under the Australian government Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, any grouping of 18 or more snipe at a wetland site is considered nationally important. Unfortunately, however, development on snipe habitat still occurs.

In 2014 — triggered by a plan to allow housing construction on an important snipe wetland area — a team of passionate researchers and citizen scientists banded together to initiate a monitoring program of Latham’s Snipe in south-west Victoria.

After the first year of the monitoring, the Latham’s Snipe Project expanded to other parts of the country with help from a large number of dedicated volunteers and professionals.

The story from this monitoring is still unfolding but two clear patterns are emerging:

1. Latham’s Snipe often congregate in urban wetlands; and

2. the majority of these important wetlands have no formal protection from development or disturbance.

7,000km, non-stop, in three days

Between 2016 and 2020, the Latham’s Snipe Project started tagging snipe with small electronic devices to try and learn about their migratory routes.

The team uncovered an amazing migration from a female snipe captured in Port Fairy. She left her breeding grounds in northern Japan and flew directly to south-east Queensland in three days, a non-stop flight of around 7,000km. A trip that might normally take around five days, this incredible individual did in three.

This is one of the fastest bird migrations on record and highlights how demanding these over-ocean migrations are. It also shines the spotlight on the critical importance of good quality wetland habitat when the snipe return to Australia.

Urban development continues to threaten Latham’s Snipe habitats. Several snipe sites in eastern Australia are at risk from housing developments and large infrastructure projects.

However, a different way of doing things is possible.

Eco-friendly developments like the Cape Paterson Ecovillage in Victoria provide hope. Here, researchers and citizen scientists have worked with the developer to help design conservation areas within the development to protect and restore wetlands for snipe.

Such progress is heartening, but a critically important next step is to make changes to local planning schemes that explicitly recognise wetlands for Latham’s Snipe.

Read more:
Birds use massive magnetic maps to migrate – and some could cover the whole world

Birgita Hansen has received funding in the past from the Victorian and ACT state governments and through Glenelg Hopkins CMA.

– ref. This bird’s stamina is remarkable: it flies non-stop for 5 days from Japan to Australia, but now its habitat is under threat – https://theconversation.com/this-birds-stamina-is-remarkable-it-flies-non-stop-for-5-days-from-japan-to-australia-but-now-its-habitat-is-under-threat-165964

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Read, Professor of History, Australian National University

This article contains mentions of the Stolen Generations, and policies using outdated and potentially offensive terminology when referring to First Nations people.

Earlier this month, the Commonwealth government announced a reparations scheme for Stolen Generations survivors in the Northern Territory, Jervis Bay and the ACT.

While well-intended, this scheme suffers from the same fatal flaw as similar schemes in other states in that not every eligible person will qualify.

Due to the government’s misplaced faith in the records of child removal policies, possibly less than half the elderly Stolen Generations survivors will qualify under the current compensation packages.

Read more:
The discovery of Indigenous children’s bodies in Canada is horrific, but Australia has similar tragedies it’s yet to reckon with

Not the first redress scheme

Some states have already financially compensated Stolen Generations survivors with varying amounts, while others are under considerable pressure to do so.

In NSW, for instance, survivors may claim compensation if they were removed by or came into the care of the state Aboriginal administration between 1909 and 1969.

Because of the current guidelines, however, it is likely the NSW scheme will apply to fewer than half of the living Aboriginal children who were removed under separation policies.

The new reparations scheme from the government follows sustained pressure for financial compensation, including the threat of a class action lawsuit, ever since the Bringing Them Home report in 1997.

Supporters of this redress scheme may well see it as a necessary element of Closing the Gap.

Welcoming the announcement, the CEO of the Northern Territory Stolen Generations Aboriginal Corporation, Maisie Austin, asks:

What price is there to pay for children who have been institutionalised and have lost their identity, their family, their culture, their country? Some of them never met their mothers again, they’ve lost their hierarchy in their country. The main thing is, they feel like they don’t belong anywhere.

Read more:
Why delaying legislation on a Voice to parliament is welcome — it allows more time to get things right

A history of stolen children

In the late 1960s, when most state agencies were winding up their punitive, Indigenous-specific acts relating to child removal, there would have been many thousands eligible to claim compensation. Now, it is almost too late because many of the original Stolen Generations have passed away without seeing justice.

Under the current scheme, no provision has been made for the intergenerational trauma endured by the children of the survivors who often suffered, and suffer still, the same crippling disadvantages outlined by Austin.

In NSW until 1969, Aboriginal children could be removed either through the Aboriginal protection and welfare acts, or under other acts, such as the Child Welfare Act 1939 (NSW), not specific to Aboriginal children.

If a child welfare inspector removed a child under the Welfare Act, Aboriginal children could be sent to non-Aboriginal institutions like Mittagong, rather than the homes established specifically for Aboriginal children at Cootamundra and Kinchela. This is because the act didn’t specify where they should go.

In these circumstances, Aboriginal children potentially might not have even known of their Indigeneity. This was a tactic used by the government to separate children from their culture for forced integration.

The consequences of this legalised sleight of hand for three of four generations of children were enormous. It’s possible more NSW Aboriginal children were removed under state welfare laws than under the Aborigines Protection Act.

Read more:
Stolen wages: Northern Territory class action will hold the Commonwealth to account

Unfounded faith in records of stolen children

It seems the federal government is relying on there being records of children being taken, when this was not always the case.

Joy Janaka Williams, who famously sued the state in 2003, was removed under NSW’s 1939 Welfare Act. She would not be eligible for compensation, either. This was because she was taken under the Welfare Act, and the NSW government insists on survivors being taken under the specific Aboriginal acts to be compensated.

Services such as Link-Up provide Stolen Generations survivors with help finding their families after sometimes decades of separation. Through her work at Link-Up NSW, Lizzie May, one of the co-authors here, has heard stories of many Stolen Generation survivors who will not be eligible for compensation. These are a few:

1) there was a child whose presence at home on a school day was noticed by a housing commission officer, and within a week was taken out of school to be institutionalised, where he was abused until he left 18 months later. He is not entitled to compensation under the present scheme

2) another case was a child who was held up in a church one Sunday in a western NSW town and the congregation asked, “Who wants this beautiful black baby?” Someone took her, but no official record of her exists

3) a mother was pressured by her boyfriend into handing over her child to be cared for temporarily in a religious institution. She later found out she could never bring him home. There’s no state record of that transaction, either.

State governments need to amend the criteria to consider the plight of those Stolen Generations survivors whose histories haven’t be documented.

The latest redress scheme inches forward the long struggle for justice for the Stolen Generations. But at present, we can’t even call it a half-step forward until the federal and state governments properly review all of their files relating to Aboriginal state wards and compensate survivors properly and equally.

Peter Read is affiliated with Link-Up (NSW)

Lizzie May is affiliated with Link-Up NSW.

– ref. The government’s Stolen Generations redress scheme is piecemeal and unrealistic – https://theconversation.com/the-governments-stolen-generations-redress-scheme-is-piecemeal-and-unrealistic-165878

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sabine Matook, Associate Professor in Information Systems, The University of Queensland

Australian universities invest heavily in the employability of their graduates. The Australian government supports this goal with annual funding to increase to A$20 billion by 2024. This includes $900 million in grants through the National Priorities and Industry Linkage Fund. A key focus is on expanding work-integrated learning.

Work-integrated learning (WIL) includes internships, fieldwork and placements, but also on-campus work projects. In these settings, students solve business problems, implement innovations and manage uncertainties. This makes it a practice-based approach.

According to the National Strategy on Work-Integrated Learning in University Education, it should provide authentic, meaningful and relevant experiences to prepare students for the workplace.

Read more:
Work Integrated Learning: why is it increasing and who benefits?

The question today is no longer whether to offer work-integrated learning, but how to do it well.

A digitally driven shift in focus

Teaching for workplace readiness must make the transition to digital so learning does not depend on location.

As recently as 2017, 52.7% of all work-integrated learning was off-campus. But limited places, especially during COVID-19 economic downturns, mean fewer students get a practice-based experience.

Digitalising work-integrated learning makes it available for many more students.

The University of Sydney program Job Start Edge, for example, offers international students workplace skill learning in fully digital form. Other universities work with talent platforms such as Forage to offer “micro internships” of 5-6 hours.

Another model is to bring workplace practice to students, instead of the students to practice. The insourcing model provides work readiness in a digital classroom.

The University of New South Wales’ Sandbox Education Program, for example, digitally simulates a professional working environment. By bringing real-world scenarios and problems into the classroom, it offers a safe space to build and test workplace readiness.

Digital on-campus models provide learning that is resilient to lockdowns and working from home. Universities with simulated work integration in the classroom continued the learning even during the peak of COVID-19. The digital transition has enabled learning anytime and anywhere.

Read more:
To improve internships and placements, embed technology in their design

Delivering concrete benefits for industry

Industry partners are essential for showing students the dynamics of real workplaces. Fortunately, broad support from industry exists. The Australian Industry Group invites its members to join these partnerships.

This was not always so. Employers were once hesitant to commit time and resources as university partners. Gaining access to fit-for-purpose talent was simply not enough incentive.

The motivation changed when work-integrated learning outcomes began to deliver concrete benefits. Then students produce ready-to-use products or services of value.

Read more:
How to get the most out of research when universities and industry team up

For example, at The University of Queensland, we pioneered the concrete delivery model in an information systems project with Siemens Digital Industries and Variety – the Children’s Charity of Queensland.

Variety wanted a safe digital space for its vulnerable children to stay connected, especially during lockdowns. It also required an events management feature for post-lockdown times.

Students developed the software app using the low-code development platform Mendix. Kids in Variety programs such as Kids Choir and Youth Ambassadors now use the app to plan and chat.

The concrete delivery model directly benefits Australian businesses. The transferable value makes partnerships more attractive.

Read more:
How to improve research training in Australia – give industry placements to PhD students

Making sure of quality outcomes

Large-scale work-integrated learning initiatives exist. Swinburne University of Technology has announced it will offer work-integrated learning to all undergraduate degree students. At this scale, effective governance with defined quality standards and output measures is imperative.

Universities and educational groups have developed such systems. The University of Waterloo, Canada, developed a work-integrated learning quality framework to govern quality internally. The Australian Collaborative Education Network provides a framework for member universities to control process and product quality.

When applied comprehensively, these frameworks provide transparency on the use of WIL funding.

Governance systems also enhance educators’ accountability for investments by industry partners. The University of Tasmania, for example, developed an evaluation tool to identify areas for curriculum improvement.

High-quality learning experiences depend on excellent teaching. Effective governance systems can ensure it’s delivered.

Read more:
5 ways university education is being reimagined in response to COVID-19

Creating infrastructure to support work-integrated learning

Early WIL efforts focused on creating boutique-style learning for small cohorts of students. This teaching format places high demands on educators. The demands will increase as we expand work-integrated learning.

The government’s funding under the Job-ready Graduates Package aims to increase the number and variety of WIL programs. Not surprisingly, universities are ramping up their efforts to meet government funding requirements. This is a risky strategy.

The delivery of more boutique-style programs is not sustainable in the long term. A mental shift is required to focus on creating infrastructure for large-scale work-integrated learning.

For example, Monash University provides an academic tool kit with the fundamental building blocks for work-integrated learning. Educators save time and effort as they only need to contextualise the blocks for a particular initiative.

The essential elements for work-integrated learning to be done well include:

• the experience is authentic for all students
• all stakeholders receive concrete benefits
• teaching frameworks must be adaptable
• governance systems ensure this all happens.

Then work-integrated learning is worth the government’s investment.

Sabine Matook was the lecturer for the university course and as such interacted with the industry partners, particularly representatives from Variety Queensland and Mendix.

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

– ref. How work-integrated learning helps to make billions in uni funding worth it – https://theconversation.com/how-work-integrated-learning-helps-to-make-billions-in-uni-funding-worth-it-166017

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Latoya Aroha Rule, PhD Candidate, University of Technology Sydney

This article contains information on deaths in custody and the violence experienced by First Nations people in our encounters with the Australian carceral system. It also contains references to and the names of people who are now deceased.

“They killed him.”

David Dungay Jr died in Sydney’s Long Bay prison in 2015. In the opening scene of the documentary Incarceration Nation, Dunghutti woman Aunty Leetona Dungay, David’s mother, sets the scene for what viewers are about to witness.

While David Dungay’s family’s campaign was not discussed in depth in the documentary, there’s no question why they have lodged a complaint with the United Nations Human Rights Committee to seek accountability for the guards involved in his death.

David Dungay’s death is one of about 500 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the Royal Commission report was released in 1991. No one has ever been held accountable for these deaths.

Directed by Guugu Yimithirr man Dean Gibson, Incarceration Nation is relentless and emotionally demanding of its audience. This is due to scenes of explicit violence perpetrated against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – especially children – by those in authority. It might be one of the most disturbing things you ever watch.

For non-First Nations people, Incarceration Nation has the potential to shake the very core of your understanding of what it means to be Blak on this continent.

Colonial carceral system

First Nations people make up 3.3% of Australia’s population. Yet 65% of children incarcerated in this country between the ages of 10 and 13 are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. First Nations children make up 55% of the child prison population overall.

Aboriginal women, the fastest growing prison population, make up 34% of those incarcerated in women’s prisons.

While these statistics are often used by criminologists and the state to represent the problem as one of “over-representation”, in reality they reflect the colonial function of incarceration in the Australian settler colony — to further the erasure of First Nations people.

These statistics are increasingly recognised as a serious breach of human rights internationally.

Yet in Australia, despite demands from First Nations communities to prioritise decarceration and community-based responses to ensure our safety, state and territory governments continue to prioritise carceral expansion. There are even plans to build more prisons and increase policing resources.

Keenan Mundine, co-founder of Deadly Connections, an Aboriginal community-led organisation that provides services to First Nations people impacted by child removal and carceral systems, responds to the issue of underfunded Aboriginal community organisations and increasing police budgets in the documentary:

[police have] been given more resources and more funding, to do what they do best, which is terrorising Aboriginal communities.

Fund community solutions not police budgets

Incarceration Nation weaves together historical records, archival footage, statistics, expert advice, and the testimonies of individuals with lived experience and families who have lost loved ones in custody.

For First Nations viewers and our advocates, aspects of this documentary stand within a powerful apparatus to expose the systemic, colonial underpinnings of Australia’s “justice” system.

This film has the potential to be a valuable resource attesting to an indisputable reality that First Nations people have always been acutely aware of: that Australia’s carceral system is founded on a genocidal and colonial intent toward Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. An intent driven by a desire for land.

For this documentary to move beyond identifying this problem – one consistently highlighted by First Nations people and communities – it requires non-First Nations people, particularly white people, to change.

Change will not be achieved through reform, but through the abolition of the colonial system, and the strategic governance and nation-building efforts of First Nations people.

From the views expressed by many First Nations people in Incarceration Nation, including public servants, it is clear that expectations of policies and programs to ensure “stronger” relationships between Aboriginal people and police have lapsed. What is being requested now is that policing and imprisonment be overhauled and dismantled.

Trusting in carceral reforms alone is, in fact, a dangerous solution. As Yuin Aunty Vickie Roach, an advocate for prison abolition, highlights in the documentary, it is not possible to fix a system that is not broken, but rather operating exactly as it was designed to do.

The limits of police reform are also highlighted in the documentary by Yorta Yorta, Wemba Wemba and Barapa Barapa woman Apryl Watson, whose mum Aunty Tanya Day died in police custody in 2017. Speaking to the failure of police to follow their own guidelines, Apryl Watson explains:

They failed their duty of care, they didn’t even follow their own police manual to check her effectively.

Ethical considerations

Incarceration Nation brings to the forefront the intimate relationship between the incarceration and policing of First Nations people and ongoing colonisation.

However, for First Nations audiences, we conclude that your discretion is advised. We don’t believe this film was made for a Blak audience.

As First Nations people researching, educating and campaigning in this space, watching Incarceration Nation raised a number of ethical questions that we feel are imperative to ask:

• how do we speak about violence without reproducing it?

• how do we speak about violence while ensuring the safety of our own people?

• how do we honour the stories and lived experiences of those surviving state-sanctioned brutality, without producing consumable stories of damage which, according to Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck, settlers hunger so ravenously for?

We believe these critical questions required further attention from the creators of this film, specifically in relation to the impact on First Nations audiences.

Read more:
Not criminals or passive victims: media need to reframe their representation of Aboriginal deaths in custody

How you can take action

While this documentary included the testimonies of those with lived experience, less present was how these individuals and families are leading the resistance against continued state-sanctioned brutality. Given the premise of this film, this was a missed opportunity.

Here is how you can support this critical work:

• support community-based responses, which support First Nations people through their encounters with this violent system

• demand that taxpayers’ money is used to build homes not prisons and funding is redirected away from the carceral system and into transformative justice and prevention, such as secure housing and health and well-being services

• donate to organisations, campaigns and mutual aid groups working to support First Nations people and other groups who are criminalised by the state.

If Blak lives really matter to you, after watching this film we ask you to hold elected representatives, police and prison officers, coroners, judges and the courts accountable. We implore you to identify how you may be implicated, particularly in your silence, and to act.

As Wiradjuri and Wailwan lawyer Teela Reid relays in Incarceration Nation:

We need people to show up. Not just on the front line, but every day in their personal life and in their professional lives to dismantle these legacies of oppression.

Once you’ve watched this documentary you cannot say you didn’t know. If you watch this film, hear these stories, and don’t do something about it, your lack of action is complicity.

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. Incarceration Nation exposes the racist foundations of policing and imprisonment in Australia, but at what cost? – https://theconversation.com/incarceration-nation-exposes-the-racist-foundations-of-policing-and-imprisonment-in-australia-but-at-what-cost-165951

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Higgins, Senior Research Fellow, Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW

US President Joe Biden’s deadline of August 31 to complete US evacuation efforts from Afghanistan is fast approaching. And after last week’s bombing at the Kabul airport, the security situation for Afghans trying to flee the country has become even more perilous.

Yet, thousands of Afghan nationals are still hoping for an escape.

Leaders of G7 nations have said they are pushing for the Taliban to grant “safe passage” for Afghans who need to leave after this week’s deadline passes. According to international refugee advocates, safe passage could include an “orderly departure program” for would-be refugees, like those previously run in Vietnam, Cuba and many other countries.

History shows these programs hold promise and pitfalls. But if combined with other measures — such as expanded resettlement efforts — a scheme for orderly departure by air or through safe land corridors could offer a vital additional way out.

How orderly departure worked in Cuba and Vietnam

Orderly departure is a unique practice. Ordinarily, a person at risk of persecution or other serious harm must first flee across an international border before trying to access protection under international refugee and human rights law.

In contrast, orderly departure involves some, if not all, of the immigration, medical and security checks to be conducted while applicants are still in their home country, otherwise known as “in country”.

Read more:
Where do Afghanistan’s refugees go?

Would-be refugees may be transferred to a transit country if the paperwork cannot be finalised quickly enough, something the Biden administration already organised for the Afghan nationals evacuated before the August 31 deadline.

The United States has more experience with this set-up than most. Most recently, the Biden administration re-opened an Obama-era “in-country” program through which Central American children can apply to enter the US to access protection as refugees.

In fact, “in-country processing” has had a permanent place in the United States’ annual refugee admissions program for decades.

After President Fidel Castro encouraged an exodus of Cubans by boat to Florida in 1965, the US worked through the Swiss government to strike a deal with Castro’s regime to allow a massive airlift of Cubans to the US.

This involved primarily those with close relatives in the US, who travelled aboard two flights every weekday to Miami from 1965–73. Despite Havana’s tight restrictions on eligibility, some 300,000 Cubans were brought to the US in total.

In 1979, four years after the end of the United States’ war in Vietnam, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and the Vietnamese government signed a deal under which more than 30 countries participated in an orderly departure program out of Vietnam.

Foreign governments exchanged lists of names with the Vietnamese government to secure exit permits for people. While the program was far from perfect — the US and Vietnam disagreed over eligibility criteria — it nonetheless allowed 650,000 Vietnamese to leave from 1979 to the mid-1990s.

Read more:
We can’t compare Australia’s intake of Afghan refugees with the post-Vietnam War era. Here’s why

Some countries, like Australia, opted to admit many Vietnamese on family reunion visas rather than humanitarian ones, demonstrating the flexibility with which foreign governments could approach a similar program today.

Yet, departures were not always orderly

History shows negotiating the safe and orderly departure of would-be refugees from home countries can take time to organise and get up and running. It can also take time to gain the confidence of people who might seek to leave.

Word-of-mouth and proof-of-concept build momentum. In Vietnam, the orderly departure program was secured by the UN refugee agency years after the communist forces took Saigon. Prospective applicants were initially cautious.

Many fled clandestinely by boat instead, telling US immigration officials in Malaysia they “were unaware” of how the program would work and “had seen no signs of its implementation”.

Even after the programs in both Vietnam and Cuba were set up, authorities in both countries still exercised some influence over the ability of people to leave.

This is why orderly departure programs today must operate in addition to other efforts by the international community to protect refugees who flee on their own.

Read more:
Afghanistan: western powers must accept defeat and deal realistically with the Taliban

Will the Taliban agree to it?

One major obstacle the orderly departure of would-be refugees is it requires the consent – tacit or otherwise – of authorities in the country of origin.

Scores of countries have signed a join statement calling for the Taliban to allow

the safe and orderly departure of foreign nationals and Afghans who wish to leave the country.

The Taliban is looking increasingly wary of allowing a longer-term evacuation to take place. Last week, a spokesman for the group declined to extend the deadline beyond August 31 and told the US to stop encouraging skilled Afghans to flee.

However, with the spotlight on Afghanistan’s new leaders, the former foreign ministers of 25 countries have argued there’s room to negotiate.

France and Britain are now reportedly set to propose a UN resolution calling for the establishment of a safe zone in Kabul that would “allow humanitarian operations to continue”, according to French President Emmanuel Macron.

The international community must use this opportunity to make good on promises to help former locally-engaged staff and their families, as well as women leaders, journalists, ethnic minorities, and and many others who might face persecution or other serious harm under the new regime.

Former interpreters who fled Afghanistan years earlier have reported their family members are now at risk by association, so it is essential the US and other governments cast a wide net in trying to get Afghans out.

If orderly departure arrangements can be established, however, this doesn’t mean governments can close off other pathways through which Afghans can seek protection, such as asylum procedures and expanded resettlement programs.

No matter how orderly or safe a program is, there are many reasons why some people will still need to flee across an international border to seek protection.

The need for foreign governments to protect their Afghan partners was known for years. As August 31 approaches, now is the time to double down, not to back out. Safe passage may still be possible.

Claire Higgins receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. There’s a way to get refugees out of Afghanistan after this week’s deadline — if the Taliban agrees – https://theconversation.com/theres-a-way-to-get-refugees-out-of-afghanistan-after-this-weeks-deadline-if-the-taliban-agrees-166739

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Hurley, Policy Fellow, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

With a 6% drop in revenue, 2020 was a year Australian universities would prefer to forget, a report released today by the Mitchell Institute shows.

The report, Australian investment in higher education, analyses over a decade of data to trace changes in university policy and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It shows university revenue fell by A$2.2 billion, down 6% from 2019. Operating surpluses across the sector fell by A$1.6 billion.

The main cause of the falls was reduced international student revenue and income from investments, such as dividends.

The silver lining to the clouds over 2020 was the losses were not as bad as expected. But our analysis points to some very dark clouds on the horizon for Australia’s universities.

Special government support for the sector ends in 2021. Continuing border closures mean international student revenue is likely to keep falling.

In 2022 and 2023, universities will have to navigate some of the most challenging conditions they have ever faced.

Read more:
As hopes of international students’ return fade, closed borders could cost $20bn a year in 2022 – half the sector’s value

Decades of strong revenue growth ended abruptly

Universities had experienced an almost unbroken run of growth in revenue since 1995. The chart below shows increases in total revenue from 2009 to 2019, before the pandemic caused a fall in 2020.

There are two main reasons for the growth universities experienced.

The first was the introduction of demand-driven funding in 2012. This uncapped the number of government-funded places for domestic students. The result was increases in enrolments.

The second was the growth in international student numbers.

By 2020, both these sources of growth had come to a halt. However, investment income was the biggest contributor to the drop in revenue in 2020, falling by A$1.1 billion compared to 2019.

As the chart below shows, the combined impact of these factors meant university surpluses fell.

In 2020, operating results across the sector were a total surplus of A$680 million, a 1.6% margin. This is well below the 6% margin generally considered to be financially prudent.

Fifteen of the 38 universities included in the analysis reported a deficit in 2020. Operating surpluses were concentrated in the three largest universities – Monash (A$267 million), Melbourne (A$178 million) and Sydney (A$107 million).

The extent of losses and shrinking surpluses in 2020 suggests the pandemic has already made it difficult for universities to cope with further falls in revenue forecast for 2021 and beyond.

Read more:
Which universities are best placed financially to weather COVID?

What has happened to international student revenue?

In the short term, the greatest challenge universities face is continuing problems with enrolling international students. Since 2015, revenue from this source had almost doubled. In 2019, it totalled about A$10 billion.

In 2020, international student revenue fell in real terms by A$868 million, or 8.6%, to A$9.2 billion.

This fall was less than expected. We suggest the timing of border closures and students deferring their courses (but remaining enrolled) mean it has taken time for the disruption to international student enrolments to be fully felt.

The chart below shows how international student enrolments at universities began to fall in 2020. By December 2020, trend levels were about 10% below what they were in December 2019.

As the pandemic progresses, the drop in international enrolments is accelerating. In the first six months of 2021, international student enrolments at public higher education institutions fell at an annualised trend rate of between 20% and 24%.

Read more:
Australia’s international education market share is shrinking fast. Recovery depends on unis offering students a better deal

This suggests every missed six-monthly intake of international students is collectively costing universities about A$1 billion to A$1.2 billion.

What lies ahead?

With border closures set to continue, universities face a difficult future.

Federal government support of an extra A$1 billion in research funding is due to finish in 2021.

The Job-Ready Graduates Package introduced in 2020 means universities are likely to be asked to enrol more domestic students for less money if they wish to maintain government funding levels.

Our report highlights that Australian universities have increasingly been encouraged to collect fee-for-service and commercial revenue. Government support as a proportion of total revenue has fallen.

Read more:
Big-spending ‘recovery budget’ leaves universities out in the cold

This has made universities more vulnerable to economic shocks, like the one caused by the pandemic and international border closures.

Universities play very important roles in Australia’s society and economy. Without further support, parts of the university sector are likely to face very difficult choices that will mean further cuts to staffing, courses and research.

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. Universities lost 6% of their revenue in 2020 — and the next 2 years are looking worse – https://theconversation.com/universities-lost-6-of-their-revenue-in-2020-and-the-next-2-years-are-looking-worse-166749

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brigid Magner, Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies, RMIT University

Audiobook listening has been called a “silent revolution” in the publishing industry over the last decade. The US audiobook market is estimated to be worth US$1.1 billion annually and is growing at a rate of more than 10% each year. Industry insiders say this is a fresh market, with 37% of Australian audiobook listeners only taking up the habit in the last year.

Audiobook downloads (up 15% on the previous year) were part of a pandemic boost for publisher revenues. Some are read by the authors themselves or by famous actors including Elizabeth Moss and Tom Hanks.

But are listeners really reading? If we challenge what we think we know about reading, audiobooks can be seen as not just a cheat’s shortcut for catching up on classics and bestsellers, but a new way to engage more people with stories.

Read more:
How reading aloud can be an act of seduction

From vinyl to digital

Audiobooks are not new. The term refers to any authored print book vocalised through a variety of technologies — from records through to cassette players, and CDs. Digitally downloaded or streamed audiobooks have added a new dimension to this heritage technology, traditionally viewed as a compensatory tool for visual impairment or reading difficulties such as dyslexia and the rarer condition of alexia.

The surge in audiobook sales is likely a halo effect of the huge popularity of podcasts. But audiobooks are single-voiced, immersive listening experiences. Audiobooks do not include book-length texts “read” by an automated voice.

Audible (owned by Amazon) dominates the audiobook market and is now getting into the “original audiobook” game, meaning they produce the audio version rather than a book publisher. Other services offer “born audio” productions. Storytel Originals bypass print as the starting point in the traditional book publishing cycle.

Librivox — a site dedicated to making “all books in the public domain available, narrated by real people and distributed for free” emerged from a group of friends reading aloud from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It draws its 15,000 titles from Project Gutenburg’s 60,000 free ebooks.

Unlike the commercial services, with narration and soundscapes on par with radio drama productions, the quality of Librivox audiobooks is highly variable. There are excellent recordings and “readings that sound as if they come from your worst nightmare of community theatre — either monotone or way over the top”, according to one LA Times reviewer.

How we read

Reading is a complex process. Rather than a single cognitive act of decoding, we know from imaging technologies that reading engages several discrete actions within the brain’s visual region. When the reader encounters an irregular letter-sound relationship, neurologist Stanislas Dehaene tells us the auditory brain region fires up as well.

When reading, we engage a bundle of brain skills that have evolved over centuries if not millennia. A recent study used fMRI scans to show people generate word meaning in the same way whether they see it or hear it.

Though reading is still usually thought of as a stationary, silent and solo practice, there is a long tradition of reading communally and aloud. This is not only reading by adults to children, but also among adults.

Streamed audiobooks available through smartphones enable reading-as-listening while mobile. The kinetic dimension of reading-as-listening while moving through space, commuting, walking or while driving is yet to be fully understood.

Read more:
Books offer a healing retreat for youngsters caught up in a pandemic

New reading, old storytelling

Audiobooks challenge established practices and assumptions about reading, but also remind us of the oral cultures of storytelling from which print cultures developed.

In Australia, streamed audiobook listening might offer a 21st century way of celebrating the affective, imaginative and kinetic dimensions of the Indigenous songlines that criss-cross the continent, either by remediating print books or bypassing the written form altogether.

Listening to audiobooks may help to close the gender gap common with reading literature. The Reading the reader report from Macquarie University found that more than 60% of “frequent readers” are women. Of “non-readers”, three quarters are men. Yet, men and women are equally likely to consume digital format books such as ebooks and audiobooks. Audiobooks may inspire more male readers to participate in bookclubs, which traditionally involve more women than men.

Read more:
Freud, Nietzsche, Paglia, Fanon: our expert guide to the books of The White Lotus

Audiobooks could also be used more in higher education. Princeton University Press recently announced the release of their PUB audio series, signalling new educational formats for scholars and students.

Rather than being one act for one purpose, literacy researcher Sam Duncan argues reading is a bigger umbrella than we may have previously realised, under which sits a diversity of practices, involving different “skills, challenges and pleasures”.

Listening-as-reading to vocalisations of books enables a level of imaginative and affective engagement that should not be diminished by our traditional assumptions.

Here are three great books to listen to:

1. Carpentaria by Alexis Wright

The audiobook of Alexis Wright’s epic Carpentaria, is narrated by Noongar actor and dramaturg Isaac Drandich. Using a range of voices, he offers the reader-as-listener an enhanced experience.

2. Taboo by Kim Scott

Reading his own book, Kim Scott’s gentle voice animates his sparse prose style beautifully.

The novel dramatises a brutal past event and its present day reckoning.

3. The Odyssey by Homer. Translated by Emily Wilson.

Claire Danes’s vocalising of Emily Wilson’s translation brings this ancient text into the contemporary world through plain speaking and her emphasis on satellite characters.

Brigid Magner receives funding from the Australian Research Council for the project Reading in the Mallee: The past and future of a literary region.

Linda Daley 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. Yes, audiobooks count as ‘real reading’. Here are 3 top titles to get you started – https://theconversation.com/yes-audiobooks-count-as-real-reading-here-are-3-top-titles-to-get-you-started-166097

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

National Cabinet met on Friday after a week of intensifying debate about the vaccination thresholds in the national plan for reopening the nation.

While expectations for the meeting were high, there was no showdown — at least as far as we know.

The current plan is vague, with words such as “may occur” and only subject to “in principle” agreement.

And the Doherty Institute modelling, which underpins the plan, acts as a fig leaf for the Commonwealth government to hide behind. So the plan has survived to live another day.

Deferring the day of reckoning has papered over the cracks. National Cabinet is holding tight for another week and awaiting further modelling.

A decision to hold tight is likely a compromise between the three factions in the virtual meeting room. But it leaves many questions unanswered.

Read more:
Opening with 70% of adults vaccinated, the Doherty report predicts 1.5K deaths in 6 months. We need a revised plan

We have three factions

1. Commonwealth and NSW

In one faction, you have the Commonwealth and New South Wales, both committed to easing restrictions according to the vaccination thresholds set out in the Doherty report: 70% and 80% of the population aged 16 and over.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison probably wanted to hold firm. After repeated failures to hit his vaccine rollout targets, he cannot afford another change in the plan.

At the same time, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has probably recognised she has lost the fight to control COVID in her state and wants political cover to claim victory. She has already announced the easing of some minor restrictions for fully vaccinated people.

2. Other states handling NSW leaks

In the second faction, you have states such as Queensland and Victoria affected by leaks of COVID cases from NSW.

These states would have wanted the modelling to reassure them their health systems would not be overwhelmed if they started to ease strong public health measures at low vaccination thresholds.

3. COVID-zero states

The third faction comprises the COVID-zero states, such as Western Australia, which would be concerned about any heightened risk of COVID leakage from other states.

These states only see downsides from easing restrictions too early, when not enough people are vaccinated. They do not want to throw away the benefits of their hard-won COVID-zero status.

How to broker peace?

To reconcile these conflicting positions, the leaders found peace in process: they decided to seek more information.

They agreed to establish a cross-jurisdictional working group, led by the heads of health departments, to investigate health and hospital system capacity and workforce needs in the next phases of the national plan.

This work will draw on the Doherty modelling, which shows many deaths will occur months after lockdowns end.

The group is due to report back by next week, presumably taking into account rapid advances in our understanding of how Delta might impact our health systems.

The other states will not want to replicate the makeshift responses NSW was forced into — such as triage tents to assess patients — because of escalating hospital admissions.

This process may provide a way out for the Commonwealth. At the moment, states are highlighting the impacts of the Commonwealth’s failures on slow vaccination rollouts. But they could be brought around by a big-enough payment to compensate for the increased pressure reopening could put on their hospital systems.

As former Prime Minister Paul Keating said, “never get between a premier and a bucket of money”.

States will also need more Pfizer doses. At the moment, the lion’s share of the available Pfizer doses is going to NSW, leaving GPs in other states — especially Victoria — scrambling to find doses to meet demand.

Although these side-deals will not mean the states come out ahead, at least, financially, they will not be so far in the red.

How about the Doherty modelling?

As the National Cabinet’s behind-the-scenes negotiations were going on, the Doherty Institute reconfirmed its recommendation of the 70% and 80% (adult population) vaccination thresholds. It continues to undertake further modelling, including specification of public health measures in areas of low vaccination coverage.

While the thresholds may not have changed, further modelling is yet to show how Australia’s rapidly rising COVID-19 case numbers impact the phasing, and the substance, of the plan.

For instance, specific policy measures, such as exempting vaccinated people from restrictions, must be incorporated into the modelling, since vaccinated people can still spread the virus.

What privileges are extended to fully vaccinated people — holders of a validated vaccine passport — will be one of the next big challenges for the states, both politically and in terms of implementation and monitoring.

How does vaccinating 12 to 15-year-olds fit in?

National Cabinet’s meeting took place the same day the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) recommended vaccination for 12 to 15-year-olds, to begin on September 13.

But there were no updates to the national plan to include this age group as part of the total population vaccinated. The plan’s targets are still expressed as a proportion of the population aged 16 and over, rather than of the population soon eligible to be vaccinated, those aged 12 and over.

Read more:
Should we vaccinate children against COVID-19? We asked 5 experts

This means 12 to 15-year-olds are completely missing from the plan. It makes no sense for the nation to track progress towards vaccination targets without including this group.

Any plan to ease restrictions must also consider the impact on children and their education, especially for those under 12, who are not expected to be vaccinated this year.

What next?

While National Cabinet might be holding tight, there is still much work to be done to fill the many gaps in the current plan. We still need a robust national plan all states can sign up to, without hedging or caveats.

Grattan Institute began with contributions to its endowment from each of the Federal and Victorian Governments, BHP Billiton, and NAB. In order to safeguard its independence, Grattan Institute’s board controls this endowment. Grattan Institute also receives funding from corporates, foundations, and individuals to support its general activities as disclosed on its website. Grattan Institute has published three Reports on COVID issues, and has developed models which simulate the pandemic and the impacts of opening up at various population vaccination rates.

Anika Stobart 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. National Cabinet leaves us in the dark about reopening the nation, so we’re left joining the dots – https://theconversation.com/national-cabinet-leaves-us-in-the-dark-about-reopening-the-nation-so-were-left-joining-the-dots-166887

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Laura Schuijers, Research Fellow in Environmental Law, The University of Melbourne

This week was another big one in the land of climate litigation.

On Thursday, a New South Wales court compelled the state Environment Protection Authority (EPA) to take stronger action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. It’s the first time an Australian court has ordered a government organisation to take more meaningful action on climate change.

The case challenging the EPA’s current failures was brought by a group of bushfire-affected Australians. The group’s president said the ruling means those impacted by bushfires can rebuild their homes, lives, and communities, with the confidence the EPA will also work to do its part by addressing emissions.

The group’s courtroom success shows citizens can play an important role in bringing about change. And it continues a recent trend of successful climate cases that have held government and private sector actors to account for their responsibility to help prevent climate-related harms.

Who are the bushfire survivors?

Members of the group, the Bushfire Survivors for Climate Action, identify as survivors, firefighters and local councillors impacted by bushfires and the continued threat of bushfire posed by climate change.

Their stories paint a picture of devastating loss, and fear of what might be to come. One member, who lost her home, tells of harrowing hours looking for friends and family amid a dark, alien moonscape. Another, a volunteer firefighter, describes the smell of charred and burnt flesh and the silence of the incinerated forests that haunted him.

The group argues that because the NSW EPA is required, by law, to protect the environment through quality objectives, guidelines and policies, these instruments also need to cover greenhouse gas emissions.

Their reasoning is hard to fault: climate change is one of the environment’s most significant threats. In today’s world, you can’t protect the environment without addressing climate change.

To establish this point, the bushfire survivors presented the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was released while the trial was being heard. The report describes how the temperature rise in Australia could exceed the global average, and predicts increasingly hotter and drier conditions.

Read more:
Climate change has already hit Australia. Unless we act now, a hotter, drier and more dangerous future awaits, IPCC warns

An unperformed duty

The EPA’s statutory duty to protect the environment was already known before the litigation began. That’s because the duty is contained within the EPA’s own legislation.

The EPA protects the environment from other types of pollutants by issuing environment protection licences, monitoring compliance, and imposing fines and clean-up orders. The bushfire survivors were seeking to force the EPA to address greenhouse gas emissions as well.

The EPA unsuccessfully tried to establish it is not required to address any specific environmental problem — i.e. climate change. And it argued that even if it is, it has already done enough.

But the court agreed with the bushfire survivors that the EPA’s instruments already in place aren’t sufficient, leaving the duty “unperformed”.

The court didn’t specify exactly how the EPA should remedy the fact it isn’t adequately addressing climate change, meaning the EPA can decide how it develops its own quality objectives, guidelines and policies, in a way that leads to fewer emissions. It is not the court’s job to make policy.

The EPA might, for example, target the highest-emitting industries and activities, via controls or caps on greenhouse gases.

Importantly, however, the court said the EPA doesn’t have to match its actions with a particular climate scenario, such as a global temperature rise of 1.5℃.

Other states on notice

Although this ruling is specific to NSW, other state environment protection authorities also have legal objectives to protect the environment.

This case may cause other Australian environmental authorities to consider whether their regulatory approaches match what the law requires them to do. This might include a responsibility to protect the environment from climate change.

Another thing we know from the NSW case is that simply having policies and strategies isn’t enough.

The court made it clear aspirational and descriptive plans won’t cut the mustard if there’s nothing to “set any objectives or standards, impose any requirements, or prescribe any action to be taken to ensure the protection of the environment”.

The EPA tried to point to NSW’s Climate Change Framework and Net Zero Plan as a way of showing climate change action. But neither of these was developed by the EPA.

The EPA also presented documents it did develop, including a document about landfill guidelines, a fact sheet on methane, and a regulatory strategy highlighting climate change as a challenge for the EPA.

The court found these weren’t enough to address the threat of climate change and discharge the EPA’s duty, calling the regulatory strategy’s description of climate change “general and trite”.

An Australian first, but not an anomaly

Globally, climate litigation is playing a role in filling gaps in domestic climate governance. Cases in Europe, North and South America, and elsewhere have led to courts pushing governments to do more.

Read more:
In a landmark judgment, the Federal Court found the environment minister has a duty of care to young people

One of the world’s first major successful climate change cases, Massachusetts v EPA, was similar to the bushfire survivors’ case. Back in 2007, the state of Massachusetts, along with other US states, sued the federal US EPA. They were seeking to force regulatory action on greenhouse gas emissions, and a recognition of carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.

While the NSW case comes 14 years after the US case, there has been plenty of courtroom action in Australia in the meantime, with cases against the financial sector, government actors, and corporations.

In fact, on the same morning as the bushfire survivors’ case, a lawsuit was filed against oil and gas giant Santos in the Federal Court.

The Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility will argue statements made in Santos’s annual report are misleading and deceptive. These statements include that natural gas is a “clean fuel” and that it has a “clear and credible” plan to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040.

Climate change is an inevitable problem, and one that will be costly. Lawsuits seeking to force action now aim to limit how great the costs will be down the track. By targeting those most responsible, they are a means of seeking justice.

Laura Schuijers receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Bushfire survivors just won a crucial case against the NSW environmental watchdog, putting other states on notice – https://theconversation.com/bushfire-survivors-just-won-a-crucial-case-against-the-nsw-environmental-watchdog-putting-other-states-on-notice-166820

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

Michelle Grattan discusses the week in politics with University of Canberra Associate Professor Caroline Fisher.

This week the pair discuss the terror attack in Kabul as Australia wraps up it’s Afghanistan evacuation efforts, as well as Craig Kelly’s candidacy with Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party, and Scott Morrison’s aspirations to reach the 70-80% full vaccination rate amongst adults.

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

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on Kabul, Craig Kelly, and vaccination rates – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-kabul-craig-kelly-and-vaccination-rates-166885

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom Womack, PhD Candidate, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

New Zealand may be relatively small, but its fossil record reveals a globally important ecological relationship between the number of species, their role in the ecosystem and ocean temperatures.

We used New Zealand’s exemplary fossil record of molluscs from the past 40 million years to examine how ocean temperatures influence the number of species. Our research shows a new, fundamental pattern.

We found an increase in species richness during periods with warmer ocean temperatures, as well as higher numbers of species filling similar ecological roles in New Zealand’s coastal cool-water ecosystems. The latter is a measure known as functional redundancy.

Such ecological redundancy can increase ecosystem resilience to environmental change. Taken at face value, our findings might be seen as encouraging news for New Zealand’s biodiversity in the face of global heating.

But our findings are based on natural changes in ocean temperature in the past. At the rate of current human-driven warming, the unfolding biodiversity crisis — hailed as the sixth mass extinction — is likely to play out differently from previous mass extinction events.

The impact on New Zealand’s future biodiversity is also likely to deviate from the patterns we can glean from the fossil record.

Measuring biodiversity

Biodiversity measures the variety of life on Earth, typically as the number or abundance of species. Past patterns of diversity can be used as a baseline for understanding how current human-induced changes are affecting it.

But biodiversity has many dimensions, and a simple count of the number of species only measures one aspect.

Recent research has highlighted the importance of ecosystem function, which describes the range of things organisms do in an ecosystem. Ecosystem function can be measured as functional richness.

For example, the common shellfish toheroa (Paphies ventricosa) and tuatua (Paphies subtriangulata) found along New Zealand’s shorelines are two different bivalve species. But both perform very similar ecological roles. They live on sandy beaches and filter microscopic food particles from the surf.

Read more:
Ocean ecosystems take two million years to recover after mass extinction – new research

We refer to an increase in the number of species performing the same ecological role as high functional redundancy. This has been associated with better ecosystem resilience in the face of environmental change.

Conversely, the loss of species in an ecosystem with low functional redundancy is likely to lead to functional extinction, and as a result, ecosystem collapse.

The results of our study are based on the geographic distribution of fossil species and the relationship to functional richness through geological time. This relationship implies that an increase in ocean temperature around New Zealand should lead to an increase in both the number of species living in our waters and functional redundancy.

This in turn suggests that during past warmer intervals, New Zealand’s ecosystems may have been more resilient to environmental change.

New Zealand’s fossil record of molluscs provides a baseline for what should be expected over hundreds of thousands to millions of years from natural ocean warming.

The observed link between functional redundancy and ocean temperature over the last 40 million years is consistent with observations from the modern, living marine fauna. The latter also shows increasing numbers of species and functional redundancy at warmer, lower latitudes. This suggests this pattern is a long-lived relationship of regional and global importance.

The future of New Zealand’s shallow marine ecosystems

The sixth mass extinction refers to the ongoing loss of global biodiversity as a direct cause of human activity.

As atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to rise in tandem with increased rates of habitat degradation, we commit currently surviving species to extinction far into the future. This is known as “extinction debt”.

But biodiversity is not evenly distributed across the Earth and individual regions may respond differently to environmental changes.

Read more:
Ancient sea creatures spent years crossing the ocean on rafts – we’ve worked out how it was possible

What does this mean for the conservation of New Zealand’s biodiversity?

Although species richness is expected to increase from the isolated effect of climate warming in New Zealand over long timescales, an ecosystem can simultaneously gain species through species migration while losing native species through extinction.

Recent research also suggests that the unfolding sixth mass extinction is associated with the selective removal of functional groups, for example large predatory fish. This will likely lead to increased rates of functional extinction.

Studies of the global marine fossil record suggest relatively minimal losses of functional richness during even the largest extinction events in Earth’s history.

This is corroborated in New Zealand’s shallow marine fossil record, where large drops in species richness over the last 40 million years have resulted in minimal loss of functional richness. As a result, the sixth mass extinction could be different and have unforeseeable consequences.

For these reasons, New Zealand’s conservation needs to consider the long-term impact of climate change and focus not only on protecting native species but on preserving ecosystem function.

As we commit to further ocean warming and biodiversity loss, we increase the extinction debt of the future, both globally and regionally. There is growing evidence the impact of human activity, including global heating, will deviate from patterns predicted from natural environmental change in the past.

This is particularly important for temperate marine ecosystems. They are vulnerable to climate change, but cover a large proportion of the Earth’s marine realm. In New Zealand, these ecosystems are home to many endemic animals and plants — our taonga to protect.

Tom Womack 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. New Zealand’s fossil record suggests more species lived in warmer waters. But the current rate of warming may break this pattern – https://theconversation.com/new-zealands-fossil-record-suggests-more-species-lived-in-warmer-waters-but-the-current-rate-of-warming-may-break-this-pattern-166660

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Walker, Vice-chancellor’s fellow, La Trobe University

US President Joe Biden is facing the worst moment of his presidency. Thirteen US troops and at least 60 Afghan civilians have been killed in a suicide bomb attack outside Kabul’s main airport, for which Islamic State has claimed responsibility.

He, like presidents before him, must face several uncomfortable questions. Could an attack on American forces, in such perilous circumstances as those in Kabul right now, have been foreseen?

Was Biden careless in his haste to get American troops out of Afghanistan and end his country’s longest war?

Was it a failure of judgment to set an August 31 deadline for the withdrawal of troops?

Could more have been done to protect the perimeter of Kabul airport, and prevent suicide bombers approaching American forces who were engaged in a humanitarian exercise to help evacuate US citizens and visa holders?

Why was the fortified Bagram airbase, built up by the US over decades, not maintained, instead using the vulnerable Kabul civilian airport?

Questions around Biden’s judgment and those of his advisers risk eating into his presidency in a way that will erode his authority.

In his moments of reflection, Biden might cast his mind back to other presidents who have endured similar catastrophes.

In 1983, Ronald Reagan was obliged to explain to the country how 241 American service personnel could have lost their lives in a vicious truck-bombing in Beirut, believed to have been carried out by Iranian-backed Shiite militants.

Then, as now in Biden’s case, Reagan was blamed for not ensuring US servicemen were adequately protected in their barracks near Beirut airport.

Reagan soon thereafter withdrew American forces from Lebanon, where they were seeking to establish order after Israel’s invasion in 1982. Reagan said at the time he would never again send ground troops anywhere in the Middle East.

His successors might have heeded his words.

Biden’s political adversaries, including former president Donald Trump, are mercilessly capitalising on a terrible day for the United States and those who look to Washington for leadership in a troubled world.

This is a very bad day for the Western alliance.

Read more:
What is ISIS-K? Two terrorism experts on the group behind the deadly Kabul airport attack and its rivalry with the Taliban

The question now becomes: how does Biden respond to this latest in a long history – going back decades – of sickening episodes in its entanglement in the Middle East?

This includes the September 11 bombings in New York and Washington by al-Qaeda terrorists that led to the greatest loss of life from a terrorist attack on American soil in the country’s history.

The 20th anniversary of that moment will again rub raw American memories about a day when the world shifted, and prompted decisions that have proven disastrous.

America’s attempts, over two decades in Afghanistan, to bring order to a country that has defied attempts by outsiders over millennia to tame its unruly elements have ended in failure.

Likewise, America’s rush to war in Iraq, rather than stabilising an inherently unstable Middle East, further catapulted the region into chaos.

All this has come at an immense cost to the United States in blood and money.

Clearly, America’s credibility, and that of the Biden presidency, has been diminished by strategic and tactical failures relating to its decision to leave Afghanistan without ensuring an orderly exit strategy.

Claims no-one could have foreseen the speed with which the Taliban would overrun Afghan government forces do not say much for US intelligence on the ground.

In an emotional speech, Biden uttered words and sentiments that have been characteristic of these moments of American trauma when a superpower has been wounded by an act of terror.

We will not forgive, we will not forget. We will hunt you down and make you pay.

In the circumstances, those words are to be expected. No American leader at a moment of national trauma would do otherwise.

However, the task of hunting down those responsible among an amorphous terrorist franchise in Afghanistan and in the wider region will be easier said than done.

Jihadists of whatever stripe across the entire Middle East and beyond will be emboldened.

In Afghanistan, a witch’s brew of terrorist groups is evolving, including the al-Qaeda-affiliated ISIS-K terrorist group, which has claimed responsibility for the Kabul suicide bombings.

What makes the apparent lack of security preparedness around Kabul airport surprising is that multiple warnings had been received that ISIS-K was planning to strike Americans as they departed.

Indeed, as recently as Sunday of this week, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, described the ISIS-K threat as “acute” and “persistent”. Those words are certain to be thrown back in the faces of US officials responsible for securing Kabul airport.

In the meantime, the test for America, as Biden stated, will be to complete its mission to remove its personnel from Afghanistan and to put behind it a bitter moment.

This includes expenditures of something like $2.6 trillion and deaths of 2,442 servicemen and women, not to mention those wounded and damaged by the experience.

In all of this and in sympathy for the hand Biden has been dealt, America was never going to prevail in Afghanistan. It became trapped in a war that was unwinnable.

Read more:
Remaining and expanding: what the Taliban’s return will mean for jihadi terrorism

Documents secured by The Washington Post and published in 2019 showed military commanders in Afghanistan knew it was a losing proposition, yet America stuck it out.

It did so until Trump reached a deal with the Taliban in 2020, which effectively sidelined the regime in Kabul, to have American forces out of Afghanistan by May 1. Biden shifted that end date to August 31.

The Trump agreement with the Taliban spelled the beginning of the end for the Kabul regime of Ashraf Ghani.

What is left now for America and its NATO allies in Afghanistan is to make the best of the chaos that surrounds efforts to stage an orderly withdrawal.

Since there is little or no prospect of American re-engagement in Afghanistan, the world will observe what is certain to be continued bloodletting and risks of an exploding refugee exodus.

The next chapter in Afghanistan may well dwarf what has happened in Yemen where a civil war has decimated the country and impoverished a population that had in any case been living on the edge.

Tony Walker 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. Kabul bombings a dark day for Afghanistan and Joe Biden — and a harbinger of worse to come – https://theconversation.com/kabul-bombings-a-dark-day-for-afghanistan-and-joe-biden-and-a-harbinger-of-worse-to-come-166883

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Erin C. Hunter, Lecturer in Global Health, University of Sydney

Menstruation has recently had a bit of a moment in Australia.

The Victorian and South Australian governments are now providing free pads and tampons in government schools, while New South Wales is trialling a pilot program to do the same.

Attention to menstruation is exciting and long overdue. But hurried efforts to provide free pads are not enough, particularly after decades of policy neglect.

To truly meet the needs of women, adolescent girls, and all people who menstruate, we must ask smart questions and develop evidence-based strategies for the long term.

What is menstrual health and how do we achieve it?

This year, a collaboration of global stakeholders and experts defined menstrual health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being in relation to the menstrual cycle.

The authors also shed light on the breadth of menstrual health needs. These extend well beyond access to pads, and highlight a number of things we need to consider if we’re going to better support menstrual health in Australia.

1. Information about the menstrual cycle

Knowledge about menstrual biology, reproduction and self-care practices is important. Understanding the body helps prevent distress and facilitates informed decision-making. This might include choice of menstrual product or decisions to seek medical support for period-related difficulties.

Studies in high-income countries have found women and girls don’t have enough information about menstruation, and research on menstrual disorders in Australia has found deficits in menstrual health literacy.

So we must ensure adolescents have comprehensive and timely education about menstruation in schools to promote body literacy and support their menstrual health.

2. Materials and facilities to care for the body

Beyond having enough products to manage a period, menstrual health requires supportive spaces to change products, dispose of single-use materials (for example, pads and tampons) or wash reusable products (for example, menstrual cups). Spaces need to be comfortable and private.

In high-income countries, little attention has been given to whether school and workplace facilities are adequately meeting these needs. This is especially relevant as reusable products such as menstrual underwear and cups are growing in popularity.

3. Diagnosis, care and treatments for discomforts and disorders

Pleasingly, we’ve seen menstrual health research and action focusing on disorders, with endometriosis receiving increased investment in the most recent federal budget.

But 92% of adolescents and young women in Australia report painful periods.

We need to see comprehensive policy that acknowledges the breadth of menstrual needs, and the varied levels of pain and discomfort associated with menstruation.

Read more:
I have painful periods, could it be endometriosis?

4. Positive and respectful environments

Menstruation continues to be stigmatised around the world. Social pressure to hide any sign of menstruation can dissuade girls and women from talking about their experiences or seeking support and advice. This can harm well-being.

Family members, education institutions, workplaces and government policies all have a role to play in creating environments that support those who menstruate.

For example, freedom to visit the toilet during the school day or to work flexibly around period pain can shape experiences of menstruation.

What’s the impact of unmet menstrual health needs?

A survey of young people in New Zealand found 8% reported missing school due to a lack of menstrual products.

A review of multiple studies estimated 12% of young women in high-income countries have missed school or university because of period pain.

We know from research in low-, middle-, and high-income countries there are a variety of other consequences of unmet menstrual health needs for physical, mental and social well-being.

But we have more to learn about the magnitude of these issues across populations and sub-groups.

Read more:
Imagine having your period and no money for pads or tampons. Would you still go to school?

Providing free menstrual products may seem like a “silver bullet”. But evidence from low- and middle-income countries has shown providing such products is not enough to improve menstrual health.

This is also likely to be the case in high-income countries like Australia where stigma and inadequate education around menstruation remain challenges.

What are we overlooking?

A narrow focus on providing pads and tampons also risks suppressing menstrual product choice, and overlooks opportunities to support more environmentally friendly options.

Policies in Australia focus on providing single-use products, which are not very good for the environment. A menstruating person will use thousands of disposable pads and tampons over their lifetime — a large proportion of which is plastic waste.

Technologies such as menstrual underwear, reusable pads and menstrual cups present environmentally and economically sustainable alternatives. The median cost of a menstrual cup is A$32 and it can be used for up to ten years: that’s just 25 cents per period.

Australian adolescents’ feelings about reusable products remain largely unexplored. If research shows they’re receptive to these options, funding could be directed accordingly.

For example, installing wash basins or toilet hoses inside toilet cubicles in schools could facilitate the use of menstrual cups.

Read more:
It’s time to teach the whole story about ovulation and its place in the menstrual cycle

Menstruation matters

To inform effective policy responses, we need robust research exploring menstrual health needs in Australia and the extent to which these contribute to broader health and education outcomes.

And if we are to sustain the support of governments over the long term, we need evidence of what works. We must invest in developing effective responses and commit to evaluating the effects of our policies in supporting girls, women and all people who menstruate.

Erin C. Hunter has received funding for research on menstrual health. She has conducted menstrual health research funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Grand Challenges Canada, and The Johns Hopkins Center for Qualitative Studies in Health and Medicine. She is currently an investigator on a National Health and Medical Research Council grant to study menstrual health in Myanmar.

Julie Hennegan has received funding for research on menstrual health. This has included from foundations (The Case for Her, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation) and research councils (she is currently an investigator on a National Health and Medical Research Council grant developing a menstrual health intervention in Myanmar). She led the development of the definition of Menstrual Health as part of the Terminology Action Group of the Global Menstrual Collective.

– ref. Supporting menstrual health in Australia means more than just throwing pads at the problem – https://theconversation.com/supporting-menstrual-health-in-australia-means-more-than-just-throwing-pads-at-the-problem-161194

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Nelson, Associate Professor of Economics, Griffith University

A long-anticipated plan to reform Australia’s electricity system was released on Thursday. One of the most controversial proposals by the Energy Security Board (ESB) concerns subsidies which critics say will encourage dirty coal plants to stay open longer.

The subsidies, under a so-called “capacity mechanism”, would aim to ensure reliable energy supplies as old coal plants retire.

Major coal generators say the proposal will achieve this aim. But renewables operators and others oppose the plan, saying it will pay coal plants for simply existing and delay the clean energy transition.

So where does the truth lie? Unless carefully designed, the proposal may enable coal generators to keep polluting when they might otherwise have closed. This is clearly at odds with the need to rapidly cut greenhouse gas emissions and stabilise Earth’s climate.

Paying coal stations to exist

The ESB provides advice to the nation’s energy ministers and comprises the heads of Australia’s major energy governing bodies.

Advice to the ministers on the electricity market redesign, released on Thursday, includes a recommendation for a mechanism formally known as the Physical Retailer Reliability Obligation (PRRO).

It would mean electricity generators are paid not only for the actual electricity they produce, which is the case now, but also for having the capacity to scale up electricity generation when needed.

Electricity prices on the wholesale market – where electricity is bought and sold – vary depending on the time of day. Prices are typically much higher when consumer demand peaks, such as in the evenings when we turn on heaters or air-conditioners. This provides a strong financial incentive for generators to provide reliable electricity at these times.

As a result of these incentives, Australia’s electricity system has been very reliable to date.

But the ESB says as more renewables projects come online, this reliability is not assured – due to investor uncertainty around when coal plants will close and how governments will intervene in the market.

Read more:
IPCC report: how to make global emissions peak and fall – and what’s stopping us

Under the proposed change, electricity retailers – the companies everyday consumers buy energy from – must enter into contracts with individual electricity generators to make capacity available to the market.

Energy authorities would decide what proportion of a generator’s capacity could be relied upon at critical times. Retailers would then pay generators regardless of whether or not they produce electricity when needed.

Submissions to the ESB show widespread opposition to the proposed change: from clean energy investors, battery manufacturers, major energy users and consumer groups. The ESB acknowledges the proposal has few supporters.

In fact, coal generators are virtually the only groups backing the proposed change. They say it would keep the electricity system reliable, because the rapid expansion of rooftop solar has lowered wholesale prices to the point coal plants struggle to stay profitable.

The ESB says the subsidy would also go to other producers of dispatchable energy such as batteries and pumped hydro. It says such businesses require guaranteed revenue streams if they’re to invest in new infrastructure.

A questionable plan

In our view, the arguments from coal generators and the ESB require greater scrutiny.

Firstly, the ESB’s suggestion that the existing market is not driving investment in new dispatchable generation is not supported by recent data. As the Australian Energy Market Operator recently noted, about 3.7 gigawatts of new gas, battery and hydro projects are set to enter the market in coming years. This is on top of 3.2 gigawatts of new wind and solar under construction. Together, this totals more than four times the operating capacity of AGL’s Liddell coal plant in New South Wales.

It’s also difficult to argue the system is made more reliable by paying dispatchable coal stations to stay around longer.

One in four Australian homes have rooftop solar panels, and installation continues to grow. This reduces demand for coal-fired power when the sun is shining.

The electricity market needs generators that can turn on and off quickly in response to this variable demand. Hydro, batteries and some gas plants can do this. Coal-fired power stations cannot – they are too slow and inflexible.

Coal stations are also becoming less reliable and prone to breakdowns as they age. Paying them to stay open can block investment in more flexible and reliable resources.

Critics of the proposed change argue coal generators can’t compete in a world of expanding rooftop solar, and when large corporate buyers are increasingly demanding zero-emissions electricity.

There is merit in these arguments. The recommended change may simply create a new revenue stream for coal plants enabling them to stay open when they might otherwise have exited the market.

Governments should also consider that up to A$5.5 billion in taxpayer assistance was allocated to coal-fired generators in 2012 to help them transition under the Gillard government’s (since repealed) climate policies. Asking consumers to again pay for coal stations to stay open doesn’t seem equitable.

The ultimate test

The nation’s energy ministers have not yet decided on the reforms. As usual, the devil will be in the detail.

For any new scheme to improve electricity reliability, it should solely reward new flexible generation such as hydro, batteries, and 100% clean hydrogen or biofuel-ready gas turbines.

For example, reliability could be improved by establishing a physical “reserve market” of new, flexible generators which would operate alongside the existing market. This generation could be seamlessly introduced as existing generation fails and exits.

The ESB has recommended such a measure, and pivoting the capacity mechanism policy to reward only new generators could be beneficial.

The Grattan Institute
has also proposed a scheme to give businesses more certainty about when coal plant will close. Together, these options would address the ESB’s concerns.

This month’s troubling report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was yet another reminder of the need to dramatically slash emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Energy regulators, politicians and the energy industry owe it to our children and future generations to embrace a zero-emissions energy system. The reform of Australia’s electricity market will ultimately be assessed against this overriding obligation.

Read more:
Climate change has already hit Australia. Unless we act now, a hotter, drier and more dangerous future awaits, IPCC warns

Tim Nelson is an Associate Professor at Griffith University and the EGM, Energy Markets at Iberdrola Australia, that develops renewable projects and batteries.

Joel Gilmore is an Associate Professor at Griffith University and the GM, Energy Policy & Planning at Iberdrola Australia, that develops renewable projects and batteries.

– ref. As the world battles to slash carbon emissions, Australia considers paying dirty coal stations to stay open longer – https://theconversation.com/as-the-world-battles-to-slash-carbon-emissions-australia-considers-paying-dirty-coal-stations-to-stay-open-longer-166814

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Kate Kelly, PhD Candidate, RMIT University

As lockdowns continue across Australia, many households are doing something they may not have considered just 18 months ago: ordering groceries online.

Australia’s supermarket duopoly, Coles and Woolworths, have raced to implement new technology and transform labour arrangements to keep up with the e-grocery boom.

Both are investing in “smart” warehousing and distribution systems with various degrees of automation, as well as making extensive use of app-driven gig workers for grocery picking and delivery via platforms such as Uber and Airtasker.

My research suggests a reimagining of the Australian supermarket is currently underway. And where Coles and Woolworths go, others will follow: the pair are Australia’s largest private-sector employers, and their current moves seem likely to speed up the trend towards on-demand and precarious labour.

Teaming up with big tech

When the pandemic hit Australia in March 2020, Coles and Woolworths were quickly overwhelmed. Unprecedented demand for home delivery caused massive delays, and online services were paused for five weeks to prioritise shoppers with special needs.

Both supermarket giants have since partnered with food delivery platforms to solve the “last mile” problem of home delivery using a precarious, on-demand network of delivery drivers.

Read more:
The coronavirus pandemic is boosting the big tech transformation to warp speed

This week Woolworths formalised a deal with Uber, trialled in 2020, to provide one-hour delivery from selected Metro stores in Sydney and Melbourne. Woolworths staff will pick and pack the order and hand it off to an Uber driver. These drivers, and on-demand couriers Sherpa and Drive Yello, are already delivering to thousands of Woolworths customers every week.

For Coles, partnerships with the on-demand economy predate the pandemic and have only grown more important. In 2017, Coles quietly teamed up with Airtasker, encouraging shoppers to put their grocery list up for auction and have gig workers bid each other down to win the job.

Coles also released a “Netflix and Chill essentials” range for delivery via UberEats in 2019, spanning ice cream, biscuits and other snacks. These partnerships suggest a strategy for restructuring labour relations was already under way before the pandemic.

The supermarket personal shopper

Inside the supermarket a growing number of “personal shoppers” can be found picking and packing orders for home delivery.

Some are employed by Coles or Woolworths, and they wheel around a multi-tiered workstation complete with scanner gun, measuring scales, and touch screen. Software determines the most efficient way to pick multiple orders at once and dictates the worker’s route through the store, which items to pick, what bag to put them in, and how long it should take.

Read more:
3 ways ‘algorithmic management’ makes work more stressful and less satisfying

Other “personal shopping” is done by plain-clothed gig workers, perhaps working through Airtasker on their mobile phone, who are indistinguishable from other shoppers.

Global tech companies shake up the warehouse

Demand for online grocery shopping has also accelerated Coles and Woolworths’ development of fully or semi-automated warehouses coordinated by “smart” management systems. Both supermarkets are working with global tech companies to develop billion-dollar, state-of-the-art warehouses, with some scheduled to open as soon as next year.

With UK software and robotics company Ocado, Coles is developing two data-driven “customer fulfillment centres” in Melbourne and Sydney, scheduled to open in 2022. Autonomous picking robots will retrieve items for human workers who, for now, are better able to scan goods and pack them for delivery.

The system is underpinned by the Ocado Smart Platform: end-to-end software, apps and technology to manage online grocery demand.

Woolworths is pursuing a slightly different strategy of “micro-fulfillment”, which involves smaller and more centrally located warehouses for faster home delivery.

These are hybrid warehouse-supermarket facilities developed by US company Takeoff Technologies. They cannibalise floor space in a retail store to incorporate a small warehouse with vertical racking, automation, and picking robots. As in the Ocado model, the robots retrieve items for workers to pack and deliver.

Two of these facilities are already up and running, with the second opening this week on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.

Traditional warehouses begin to close

These are just two of the new automated systems designed to replace traditional warehouses. The closure of existing warehouses will result in the loss of thousands of (mainly unionised) jobs. It is currently unclear if retrenched workers will be redeployed to automated sites, which will still require large numbers of workers to function.

Recent research led by sociologist Tom Barnes found that when unionised warehouse workers are retrenched due to automation, they are likely to continue working in warehousing, but in more insecure arrangements and for less pay. Put simply, when unionised jobs are lost, they are not recreated elsewhere.

The hidden labour of grocery home delivery

Online grocery shopping is promoted as an important measure for limiting contact between people and reducing the spread of COVID-19. However, this highlights the question of who gets to stay home and who continues to work, potentially putting themselves at risk.

Mapping of exposure sites across suburbs shows clear class divides between those who can work from home and order in, and those who cannot. Last year, as much as 80% of COVID-19 transmission in Victoria took place in insecure workplaces among precarious workers.

On-demand labour services require a stratified and unequal labour force, whereby some families outsource domestic labour to others. This outsourcing may provide an overall benefit, but it depends on workers who have been denied secure work or government assistance. By necessity, these people do the work deemed too risky by others.

The smart supermarket of tomorrow

Advances in technology and automation are not wiping out supermarket jobs but changing them. Fantasies of “lights-out” fully automated warehouses and drone deliveries are unlikely to become reality when a growing pool of precarious workers are available to do the work.

Coles and Woolworths are not straightforwardly outsourcing labour to the on-demand economy. Instead, they are bringing multiple forms of labour into their distribution networks.

Read more:
6 challenges of being a gig worker during the COVID-19 pandemic

Precarious workers and the more securely employed (often members of unions) work side by side in the complex labour process of grocery home delivery. Coles and Woolworths can shift risk and responsibility onto gig workers when needed, while maintaining control of the entire distribution network. This ability to outsource risk and keep control is not a new high-tech development, but a fixture of capitalist labour relations.

Partnerships with the on-demand economy and global tech companies suggest a reimagining of the Australian supermarket is currently underway. Although the supermarket may appear fixed and banal, it is an important social institution which is always changing and being renegotiated.

What will these changes mean for Coles and Woolworths, and for the rest of us? In the absence of organised labour resistance or government intervention, the trend towards an on-demand and precarious workforce seems likely to continue.

Lauren Kelly receives funding from the Australian Research Council for research on which this article is based.
Lauren Kelly works with United Workers Union which has members in the supermarket supply chain.

– ref. Coles and Woolworths are moving to robot warehouses and on-demand labour as home deliveries soar – https://theconversation.com/coles-and-woolworths-are-moving-to-robot-warehouses-and-on-demand-labour-as-home-deliveries-soar-166556

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kristen Rundle, Professor of Law, The University of Melbourne

This time last year, the nation was riveted by the Victorian COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry, launched to determine the cause of the state’s disastrous second COVID wave. The outbreak led to 768 deaths and a 111-day lockdown of Melbourne.

It didn’t take long before a problem revealed itself. It was not at all clear who made the decision to “contract out” the hotel quarantine enforcement to private security providers, which is what led to the virus seeping into the community.

A long line of senior political and governmental officials denied any association with it. The inquiry’s chair, Jennifer Coate, came to describe the decision as an “orphan”.

We did learn what went wrong from an infection control standpoint and reset the hotel quarantine system to be safer. But now, the debate has shifted to whether we should have hotel quarantine at all.

The question the inquiry left behind is a different one, and it’s not only about Victoria. Why are governments across Australia so reliant on private contractors in the first place?

Read more:
Victoria’s hotel quarantine overhaul is a step in the right direction, but issues remain

Contracting out is standard practice

“Contracting out” government functions for delivery by the private sector has become the standard way of doing things across all levels of government in Australia.

Indeed, it has become so standard that decision-makers might not see the matter as involving choice at all. It’s just how things are done.

Elsewhere, I have said more about the disintegrating effects this situation can have on the principles of responsible government, around which Australia’s constitutional systems are built. The entrenched status of “contracting out” means the potential for more “orphan” decisions can occur at any time and place.

There’s a long story behind how governments across Australia, of all political stripes, have arrived at a place where everything from defence security to disability services (and much in between) is performed by private contractors.

Yet, justifications for why outsourcing is used to perform the work of government still tend to be based more on assertions than arguments.

One of these assertions is that the private sector is more “efficient” than government. But the reality is outsourcing government service delivery doesn’t necessarily cost less. It just means less is spent on public employees.

But there’s more to it than contestable claims about efficiency. The functions government must perform and the services the private sector can provide are not necessarily the same thing.

For example, was the choice of outsourced “security services” for the hotel quarantine program led by a careful understanding of the nature of quarantine, or by what the private sector could deliver? Too little thought is given to what might get lost in translation.

Read more:
Hotel quarantine interim report recommends changes but accountability questions remain

Why nobody is looking at this issue

All of this requires a conversation about the appropriateness of “contracting out” in different contexts that we’ve basically never had. Outsourcing has rarely, if ever, been the subject of significant parliamentary debate in any Australian jurisdiction.

Indeed, sometimes the only way the public finds out about what’s going on with government contracting – in the many forms it might take – is through inquiries launched to investigate something that has gone wrong.

Ombudsmen and auditors-general can be empowered to look at particular instances of outsourcing and make recommendations in relation to them. We might occasionally also see a specific contract questioned in a Senate Estimates hearing.

But it’s important to highlight these “watchdogs” are not there to tell governments how to govern us. Opportunities to have that say are thin on the ground.

Read more:
Melbourne’s hotel quarantine bungle is disappointing but not surprising. It was overseen by a flawed security industry

A good illustration of this is the 2019 Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee inquiry into the impact of changes to models of government service delivery (including outsourcing). There was little in its terms of reference to suggest it sought views on whether we should be doing these things at all. The changes were going to happen, the inquiry was about their likely “impact”.

Perhaps we’ll also need an inquiry into the vaccine rollout to find out about the contractual arrangements there, given the Commonwealth Department of Health has argued multiple exemptions – including “national security” – in response to freedom of information requests about the agreements in place.

Once, there was an independent body called the Administrative Review Council that kept an eye on the “big picture” developments in government administration. Well ahead of the curve, it published a report in 1998 on the possible implications of Australia’s fulsome embrace of “contracting out” for those directly affected by outsourced government service delivery.

The ARC pledged to revisit this question if there was ever a need. But it was effectively abolished before it could do so. It was a casualty of the 2015 “smaller government” reforms that dismantled multiple government agencies and radically reduced the size of the public service, leading to even more outsourcing to private contractors.

The ARC’s functions were consolidated into the attorney-general’s department, to the extent that they continue to be performed at all.

If the public wants a discussion about how governments govern us – that is not led by governments themselves – it is up to us to pursue it. The silver lining is we at least get to set the terms of the conversation.

While we work out those terms, it would be unwise to relegate the Victorian COVID-19 Hotel Quarantine Inquiry to history. There’s still a whole lot we can learn from it.

Kristen Rundle 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. A year after the Victoria hotel quarantine inquiry, one significant question remains unanswered – https://theconversation.com/a-year-after-the-victoria-hotel-quarantine-inquiry-one-significant-question-remains-unanswered-166100

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daryl Sparkes, Senior Lecturer (Media Studies and Production), University of Southern Queensland

Our writers nominate the TV series keeping them entertained during a time of COVID.

Imagine if you were locked down with a recalcitrant alcoholic who belligerently passed scorn upon anyone who came into his orbit. A man who bullied and cajoled the only other person locked in with him, gaining sadistic pleasure from psychological torture.

Well, this is who I am spending my pandemic with. Luckily, he is on the other side of the screen. His name is Bernard Black.

Running for three seasons from 2000 to 2004, the television series Black Books starred Dylan Moran as the perpetually drunk and surly bookseller Black, Bill Bailey as his innocent and naïve offsider Manny Bianco and Tamsin Greig as fellow red wine connoisseur and best friend, Fran Katzenjammer.

The main plot revolves around the misadventures of the three main characters, mostly instigated by Bernard’s misanthropic distaste for anyone who dares enter his bookstore or, indeed, the public at large. This includes any loose associations with people he refers to as “friends”.

Bernard spends most of his time in a bookshop he doesn’t want anyone to come into, with an assistant who annoys him with his constant desire to please. Fran is continually trying to improve Black’s attitude and behaviour to the outside world — and always failing dismally.

Come to think of it, Bernard would probably relish being in lockdown.

‘A death ship’

Moran, the series’ creator, told The Observer in 2000:

Running a second-hand bookshop is a guaranteed commercial failure. It’s a whole philosophy. There were bookshops that I frequented and I was always struck by the loneliness and doggedness of these men who piloted this death ship.

Bernard loathes going into the outside world. On the rare occasion when he does, things always turn out bad for him. He is the epitome of the stereotyped drunken Irish rogue who sees his bookshop as his castle of misery. Inside it, he subjugates anyone foolish enough to enter with belittling and insults.

In the hands of a lesser talent this would come across to an audience as boorish and puerile. But in the hands of Moran, with his clever word play and childlike antics, the character is almost charming and witty.

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Noice. Different. Unusual. Watching Kath and Kim as a (locked down) historian

The fact that Bernard’s tantrums and bad behaviour always end up backfiring on him is central to the show’s success. He’s the one who suffers the most from his churlishness.

Still, Moran doesn’t get to steal every scene. He plays off against the seasoned performers Bailey and Greig, each with comedy chops as finely honed as Moran.

Usually, television comedies get better the longer they run, as the characters are fleshed out more and the actors get more comfortable with the material. Think how much better the later episodes of Friends or Seinfeld were compared to the earlier ones.

But Black Books doesn’t suffer from this slow start. The earlier episodes are as great as the later ones. And there are cameos from some of the best of British comedians: Martin Freeman, Simon Pegg, David Walliams from Little Britain and Academy Award winner Olivia Colman.

A comedy booster

It is a very British comedy, often leaning into the abstract and surreal in the tradition of The Young Ones, Father Ted and Monty Python.

Who can forget Bernard’s couch, which swallows children whole? Or when Manny is trapped in the bookstore overnight and roasts dead bees found on the window sill on a campfire spit?

À lire aussi :
Life of Brian at 40: an assertion of individual freedom that still resonates

In one episode, when Manny asks “Is space hot?”, Bernard replies,

Of course it is, where else do you think we get pineapples from.

It’s a shame Black Books didn’t run longer. It certainly wasn’t stale by the end of its third season. But British TV comedy shows are renowned for not wearing out their welcome.

Other major sitcoms of the same era like Spaced, Extras, The Mighty Boosh and even the immensely popular Little Britain and The Office only ran for two or three seasons.

Perhaps Black Books isn’t enough to see you through all of lockdown. But it is a much needed comedy booster shot (pardon the pun). At the very least, it will make you thankful you’re not locked up with Bernard Black.

Black Books is available on Netflix, Britbox and Apple TV.

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

– ref. Think of it this way: at least you’re not locked down with drunken, misanthropic bookshop owner, Bernard Black – https://theconversation.com/think-of-it-this-way-at-least-youre-not-locked-down-with-drunken-misanthropic-bookshop-owner-bernard-black-166173

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Ziemann, Lecturer in Biotechnology and Bioinformatics, Deakin University

Autocorrection, or predictive text, is a common feature of many modern tech tools, from internet searches to messaging apps and word processors. Autocorrection can be a blessing, but when the algorithm makes mistakes it can change the message in dramatic and sometimes hilarious ways.

Our research shows autocorrect errors, particularly in Excel spreadsheets, can also make a mess of gene names in genetic research. We surveyed more than 10,000 papers with Excel gene lists published between 2014 and 2020 and found more than 30% contained at least one gene name mangled by autocorrect.

This research follows our 2016 study that found around 20% of papers contained these errors, so the problem may be getting worse. We believe the lesson for researchers is clear: it’s past time to stop using Excel and learn to use more powerful software.

Excel makes incorrect assumptions

Spreadsheets apply predictive text to guess what type of data the user wants. If you type in a phone number starting with zero, it will recognise it as a numeric value and remove the leading zero. If you type “=8/2”, the result will appear as “4”, but if you type “8/2” it will be recognised as a date.

With scientific data, the simple act of opening a file in Excel with the default settings can corrupt the data due to autocorrection. It’s possible to avoid unwanted autocorrection if cells are pre-formatted prior to pasting or importing data, but this and other data hygiene tips aren’t widely practised.

In genetics, it was recognised way back in 2004 that Excel was likely to convert about 30 human gene and protein names to dates. These names were things like MARCH1, SEPT1, Oct-4, jun, and so on.

Several years ago, we spotted this error in supplementary data files attached to a high impact journal article and became interested in how widespread these errors are. Our 2016 article indicated that the problem affected middle and high ranking journals at roughly equal rates. This suggested to us that researchers and journals were largely unaware of the autocorrect problem and how to avoid it.

As a result of our 2016 report, the Human Gene Name Consortium, the official body responsible for naming human genes, renamed the most problematic genes. MARCH1 and SEPT1 were changed to MARCHF1 and SEPTIN1 respectively, and others had similar changes.

An ongoing problem

Earlier this year we repeated our analysis. This time we expanded it to cover a wider selection of open access journals, anticipating researchers and journals would be taking steps to prevent such errors appearing in their supplementary data files.

We were shocked to find in the period 2014 to 2020 that 3,436 articles, around 31% of our sample, contained gene name errors. It seems the problem has not gone away, and is actually getting worse.

Small errors matter

Some argue these errors don’t really matter, because 30 or so genes is only a small fraction of the roughly 44,000 in the entire human genome, and the errors are unlikely to overturn to conclusions of any particular genomic study.

Anyone reusing these supplementary data files will find this small set of genes missing or corrupted. This might be irritating if your research project examines the SEPT gene family, but it’s just one of many gene families in existence.

We believe the errors matter because they raise questions about how these errors can sneak into scientific publications. If gene name autocorrect errors can pass peer-review undetected into published data files, what other errors might also be lurking among the thousands of data points?

Spreadsheet catastrophes

In business and finance, there are many examples where spreadsheet errors led to costly and embarrassing losses.

In 2012, JP Morgan declared a loss of more than US$6 billion thanks to a series of trading blunders made possible by formula errors in its modelling spreadsheets. Analysis of thousands of spreadsheets at Enron Corporation, from before its spectacular downfall in 2001, show almost a quarter contained errors.

A now-infamous article by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff was used to justify austerity cuts in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, but the analysis contained a critical Excel error that led to omitting five of the 20 countries in their modelling.

Read more:
The Reinhart-Rogoff error – or how not to Excel at economics

Just last year, a spreadsheet error at Public Health England led to the loss of data corresponding to around 15,000 positive COVID-19 cases. This compromised contact tracing efforts for eight days while case numbers were rapidly growing. In the health-care setting, clinical data entry errors into spreadsheets can be as high as 5%, while a separate study of hospital administration spreadsheets showed 11 of 12 contained critical flaws.

In biomedical research, a mistake in preparing a sample sheet resulted in a whole set of sample labels being shifted by one position and completely changing the genomic analysis results. These results were significant because they were being used to justify the drugs patients were to receive in a subsequent clinical trial. This may be an isolated case, but we don’t really know how common such errors are in research because of a lack of systematic error-finding studies.

Better tools are available

Spreadsheets are versatile and useful, but they have their limitations. Businesses have moved away from spreadsheets to specialised accounting software, and nobody in IT would use a spreadsheet to handle data when database systems such as SQL are far more robust and capable.

However, it is still common for scientists to use Excel files to share their supplementary data online. But as science becomes more data-intensive and the limitations of Excel become more apparent, it may be time for researchers to give spreadsheets the boot.

In genomics and other data-heacy sciences, scripted computer languages such as Python and R are clearly superior to spreadsheets. They offer benefits including enhanced analytical techniques, reproducibility, auditability and better management of code versions and contributions from different individuals. They may be harder to learn initially, but the benefits to better science are worth it in the long haul.

Excel is suited to small-scale data entry and lightweight analysis. Microsoft says Excel’s default settings are designed to satisfy the needs of most users, most of the time.

Clearly, genomic science does not represent a common use case. Any data set larger than 100 rows is just not suitable for a spreadsheet.

Researchers in data-intensive fields (particularly in the life sciences) need better computer skills. Initiatives such as Software Carpentry offer workshops to researchers, but universities should also focus more on giving undergraduates the advanced analytical skills they will need.

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. Excel autocorrect errors still plague genetic research, raising concerns over scientific rigour – https://theconversation.com/excel-autocorrect-errors-still-plague-genetic-research-raising-concerns-over-scientific-rigour-166554

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Camilla Nelson, Associate Professor in Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

On September 1, the Family Court of Australia will merge with the Federal Circuit Court. The Morrison government says this will “help reduce delays and backlogs in the family law courts”. However, the merger has been strenuously opposed by legal and family violence experts, who note Australia will be without a specialist, stand alone family court for the first time since the 1970s.

This is an edited extract from Broken, a new book by media academics Camilla Nelson and Catharine Lumby that explores the family court system.

In the early 1980s, the newly established Family Court of Australia — “born in hope”, and ideals of conciliation — was hit by a series of violent attacks in Sydney.

A judge was shot dead outside his home, and a string of lethal bombings followed.

One injured a judge and two school-age children while they slept, demolishing almost half of their quiet suburban home. Another killed a judge’s wife when she opened her front door. A third bomb exploded outside the family court building in Parramatta, and a fourth detonated inside a church hall, killing a member of the congregation, and seriously injuring 13 others, including children.

The murders and bombings remained unsolved until 2015, when Leonard Warwick was finally charged. His murderous rampage followed a legal dispute with his ex-wife over care of their five-year-old daughter.

His attacks on the family court indicated a fiercely held belief in his “right” to control his family. In sentencing Warwick, Justice Peter Garling acknowledged the political dimensions of the crimes, saying it “cannot be viewed as anything other than an attack on the very foundations of Australian democracy”.

Yet, after the bombs went off, commentators of the day did not condemn Warwick’s violence, but the court instead. Elizabeth Evatt, then chief justice of the family court, explained,

They said, “The Court has been bombed, what’s wrong with the Court?”

Successful terrorism

The family court bombings were remarkable in that they were successful as acts of terrorism. Although commentators at the time readily acknowledged the murders were wrong, many made excuses on behalf of the perpetrator.

In the media, the violence was rationalised as the actions of a man who had been treated unfairly — of a man who, as The Sydney Morning Herald reported, was “extremely distressed by a decision of the court”. The paper called for a “fundamental reappraisal” of the new court, opining, “There must be something seriously wrong with the Family Court system for such an outrage to occur”.

According to The Bulletin, the family court was “too much of a revolution” and the bombings had “exposed serious flaws in our divorce machinery”. Warwick’s rampage was explained in much the same way as domestic abuse is explained: as the inevitable reactions of a “distressed” man who had been driven too far. The Australian said, “No wonder the man often feels a sense of rage.”

Almost immediately, then Attorney-General Gareth Evans sent a letter to activists in the nascent men’s rights movement, offering them a seat at the policy-making table by asking them what changes they would like to see to the court. This willingness of the Hawke Labor government to take the bomber’s “message” on board set the scene for the hijacking of family law that would reach its apogee under Liberal prime minister John Howard.

By the time the Howard government took office on a “family values” platform in 1996 — with a campaign brochure that featured a pastel-coloured drawing of a house with a white picket fence — the stage was set for a reform agenda that effectively elevated the claims of perpetrators above domestic abuse victims’ claims to safety. It would irrevocably change the culture of the court, so the court’s founding ideals would seem like a distant memory.

Howard era changes

Of Howard’s changes to the family court, one of the least discussed was the creation of the Federal Magistrates Court in 1999, renamed the Federal Circuit Court in 2013. This week, it becomes the Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia, following the abolition of the standalone family court. The Federal Magistrate’s Court was designed to be “a lean, cost-effective court” — imposing a technocratic, financially rationalised form of justice on affected families.

Read more:
The government still wants a Family Court merger — new research shows why this is not the answer

Cases were to be solved swiftly and easily, often brutally. And this new managerialist behemoth progressively took over 90% of the family court’s caseload, transforming the practice of family law beyond recognition. Federal Circuit Court cases are rapid and hectic, with minimal transparency.

In 40% of family law matters, one or both parties will be self-represented. Studies show the most common reason for parties to self-represent is that they cannot afford escalating legal fees.

In a recent study by Jane Wangmann, Tracey Booth and Miranda Kaye, one lawyer described the Federal Circuit Court as a “zoo”, in which everybody struggles to understand what is going on because “there’s so many people and it’s so noisy and it’s so confusing”.

One self-represented litigant told researchers that judges “push to settle”. They say,

Just get it out of my court room, I don’t want to deal with this, get it out.

Another self-represented litigant said the judge asked her, “Why haven’t you settled, why haven’t you settled this yet?” The judge added:

I’m sick to death of people who won’t negotiate. Get out there and negotiate or I’m just going to flip a coin.

‘An absolute fantasy’

It should be unsurprising that parties to these proceedings frequently conclude that justice has not been served.

Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie — for all her populist, political complexity — seems to be one of the few politicians who has recently stepped inside one of the nation’s hyper-rationalised lower-tier courts.

She tried to convey the sense of shock in an excoriating speech to parliament in February 2021 as the Senate debated the bill that would ultimately secure the courts merger.

Maybe you’re thinking of a system where the bad guys get locked up and the good guys are quickly let go. In the back of your mind, you possibly have an idea that everybody has a high-powered lawyer in an expensive suit — and, my goodness, are they expensive. … If that’s what you’re thinking, you aren’t alone; that’s how I used to think our court system worked as well. Oh dear. It’s funny when you have life experience of something … nb small cut to quote here

In reality, judges are overworked and under-resourced, and therefore — as Lambie put it — forced to “churn through [family law matters] as though they’re on a production line”. In a memorable image, she likened the work of the judiciary to flipping greasy meals like “someone in a burger joint”.

The 2006 reforms included funding for already existing family support services, such as Relationships Australia, and the establishment of a new network of Family Relationship Centres. After this, separating parents increasingly began to turn to mediation to settle their differences, rather than the courts, reaching negotiated agreements through intermediaries.

Read more:
The family court does need reform, but not the way Pauline Hanson thinks

This turn to non-legal mediation and non-adversarial settlement has been pronounced, creating emotionally better, more affordable outcomes for families, although funding for the sector has dwindled dramatically and fails to meet demand.

At the same time, domestic abuse has become the central issue in the cases that continue to be brought before the family courts.

A ‘Rolls Royce’ system for the rich and another for everyone else

In Australia, 97% of separating families do not go to court, although 16% use mediation, counselling and lawyers to settle their disputes.

The remaining 3% of separating parents who are compelled to use the courts as their main pathway to making children’s arrangements are predominately families affected by domestic abuse, child safety concerns and complex risk factors, including drug and alcohol abuse and mental health issues.

Up to 85% of litigated family law matters involve domestic abuse. This figure includes 54% of families reporting physical violence, 50% reporting safety concerns, and 85% reporting emotional abuse. There are no reliable figures for financial abuse, but this is a frequent feature of all domestic abuse cases.

One of the many glaring problems in the courts is that the law has been written with less troubled families in mind.

It is a little-known fact that 49% of cases before the “specialist” Family Court are property matters. In practice, outside specialist lists — such as the Magellan list for “serious” child abuse — and the hearing of appeals, cases are commonly transferred from the allegedly “less specialist” Federal Circuit Court to the allegedly “more specialist” Family Court because they involve complex decision-making around taxation, superannuation, or companies and trusts.

Effectively, this means affluent families have their cases heard in what has long been dubbed the “Rolls Royce” system of the family court. And the less affluent — including domestic abuse cases with aggravating factors such as drug and alcohol addiction or mental illness — are more frequently heard by commercially trained judges in the hyper-rationalised Federal Circuit Court.

This includes judges with little specific family law experience. Or as Lambie put it in her speech,

Here is the divide between the rich and the poor.

The court merger will do little to change any of this.

Broken is released on August 30, via Black Inc.

Camilla Nelson receives funding as EG Whitlam Research Fellow at the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University.

Catharine Lumby 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. Book extract: ‘Broken’ — requiem for the family court – https://theconversation.com/book-extract-broken-requiem-for-the-family-court-166406

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Britton, Senior lecturer, Child and Adolescent Health, University of Sydney

Since the rise of the more infectious Delta variant, we’ve seen reports of more cases in children than with previous strains of the virus.

Many parents are becoming more concerned about COVID in kids. One question many are asking is whether kids can get “long COVID”, too, where symptoms persist for months after the initial phase of the illness.

I’m a paediatrician and infectious diseases expert, who cares for children with COVID-19, and have been following the research in this area.

Children can get long COVID, but it seems to be less common than in adults. And they tend to recover quicker. Let’s go through the data.

What is long COVID?

There’s still no standard definition of long COVID, and the syndrome itself is quite variable.

Even though there’s no one form of it, three broad types of symptoms frequently occur:

• cognitive effects, such as slowed thinking or “brain fog”

• physical symptoms, including fatigue, breathlessness and pain

• mental health symptoms, such as altered mood and anxiety.

Having symptoms that persist for more than 28-30 days following the onset of COVID is increasingly being labelled as long COVID in the medical literature.

The cumulative effect of long COVID symptoms can have a profound impact on sufferers’ ability to function in their daily life, work or schooling.

Leer más:
The mystery of ‘long COVID’: up to 1 in 3 people who catch the virus suffer for months. Here’s what we know so far

Does it occur in children?

Long COVID probably does occur in children but it is likely less common than in adults.

Two Australian studies are useful here. In one study of adults and children, researchers found 20% of over 2,000 COVID cases in New South Wales had persistent symptoms at 30 days. By 90 days, this had reduced to 5%. The youngest age group (0-29 years) were more likely to recover quicker than older age groups.

In a study from Victoria that looked at children only, 8% of 151 children with mostly mild infections had some persistent symptoms for up to eight weeks. However, all had fully recovered by 3-6 months.

The most comprehensive study to date was a large study in children aged 5-17 years with mild COVID from the United Kingdom. Of 1,734 children, 4.4% reported persistent symptoms 28 days after the start of their illness.

In these children, the number of symptoms at 28 days was fewer compared to that in the first week of their illness.

The study found 1.8% of children has symptoms at day 56. Headache, fatigue and loss of smell were the main issues.

Three-quarters of the children with persistent symptoms went on to report a full recovery. However, a quarter were not followed up, so it was unclear how many among this small group may have had longer-term problems.

The same study observed children who had other viral illnesses, not COVID. It found 0.9% showed persistent symptoms at 28 days. This suggests a “background rate” of non-specific symptoms like headache and fatigue occurs in children, which is important to consider — although the rate in children following COVID was considerably greater.

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Some studies of COVID in children, for example, from Italy and Russia, have found persistent symptoms to be more common.

But these studies looked at variable populations, such as only those who were hospitalised or had moderate to severe illness, or collected data retrospectively.

Also, the children were infected during the first wave of COVID in Europe and the overall societal impacts may have contributed to some of the ongoing problems reported in children, like fatigue and insomnia.

This variability between studies makes it hard to compare them to work out the real rate of long COVID in children. Taken together, there seems to be a relative increase of persistent symptoms in teenagers compared with younger children.

What about Delta?

These studies were done before the effects of new variants of concern, most notably Delta, which has shown an increase in the number of COVID infections in children.

Delta might be leading to increased severity of COVID in adults. But there’s no compelling evidence yet that Delta is more severe in children.

Current admission rates in the 2021 Delta outbreak in NSW are no greater than those in children across Australia during 2020.

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Both adults and potentially children who get more severe COVID in the initial (“acute”) stage of their illness seem to be at increased risk of long COVID. But if Delta isn’t causing more severe illness in kids, it’s reasonable to expect Delta won’t increase the risk of long COVID in children either.

Scientists need to agree on a consensus definition of long COVID, and a standardised way to measure it.

Given the non-specific nature of many long COVID symptoms, research also needs to include a control group of kids who haven’t had COVID to really determine the COVID effect.

Do persistent symptoms occur following other viral infections?

Yes. Common examples include the glandular fever virus, also known as Epstein Barr virus, and Ross River fever virus.

Studies report up to 10-15% of children and adults with these infections report chronic symptoms including fatigue, pain, slowed thinking and altered mood.

What actually causes persistent symptoms following viral infections, including COVID, remains a major focus of researchers. Persisting infection itself is not likely.

Major theories include chronic inflammation, blood flow disturbances or nervous system damage.

What should I do if my child has had COVID?

Some children do have persisting cough and fatigue around the four-week mark.

Parents are understandably concerned, but should be reassured most children will fully recover. If there’s a pattern of improvement, that’s a reassuring sign.

If symptoms continue beyond four weeks, it’s sensible to stay in touch with your GP or paediatrician.

In terms of persistent symptoms following other infections, we do know what helps to promote recovery. Things to consider are:

• ensuring good sleep

• aiming to have your child gradually return to normal activities

• where fatigue is an issue, use rest well, in short periods and after doing activities.

Returning to normal activities may require planning, including liaising with teachers around school return, which is especially important in the context of online learning.

Aim for incremental gains, remain optimistic about recovery, and always seek help if you’re not sure what to do.

Philip Britton receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Commonwealth Department of Health and NSW Ministry of Health.

– ref. Do kids get long COVID? And how often? A paediatrician looks at the data – https://theconversation.com/do-kids-get-long-covid-and-how-often-a-paediatrician-looks-at-the-data-166277

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dominique Potvin, Senior Lecturer in Animal Ecology, University of the Sunshine Coast

This article is part of the “Who would win?” series, where wildlife experts dream up hypothetical battles between predators (all in the name of science).

America’s most-loved bird versus a scrappy Aussie scavenger. In a clash that might rival Crocodile Dundee in New York City, here we’ll pit two iconic birds of prey against one another: the wedge-tailed eagle and the North American bald eagle.

As a disclaimer, this exercise is well and truly hypothetical. Wedge-tailed eagles are native to Australia and would never encounter a bald eagle, which has a range covering most of North America, in the wild.

This is probably why they can both exist in the healthy numbers on both continents: their similar niches would likely result in high levels of competition for resources such as food and nesting sites, especially sites close to the ocean.

In fact, wedgies, Australia’s largest raptor, have such few competitors, they’ve actually taken on the role played by vultures and condors in the rest of the world: that of scavenger. While bald eagles will also scavenge large prey, their speciality is fish.

So before we get into the details of the fight (and, potentially, a diplomatic incident), let’s learn more about these two enormous birds of prey.

Their fan base

Both species are thankfully doing well in terms of numbers, which is great news for humans because they play important roles. They clean up carrion and keep numbers of rapidly reproducing small mammals in check — think rabbits, mice, rats.

Read more:
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They are both also very important in the culture of Indigenous people on both continents. In Australia, many Aboriginal Dreaming stories include the wedge-tailed eagle, especially in depictions of Bunjil the creator, and some have even associated constellations with it. In native North American cultures, bald eagle feathers are highly esteemed, symbolising bravery, strength and holiness.

The birds’ sheer size means they are easily recognised in their native ranges, making them apt emblems.

Of course, the bald eagle has the honour of being the United States’ national bird, appearing on its coat of arms. The wedge-tailed eagle is an emblem in the Northern Territory, and appears on the Royal Australian Air Force badge.

Each country also has one professional football team named after the respective birds: The Philadelphia Eagles in the US, and the West Coast Eagles in Australia’s AFL.

So despite historical conflict with humans blaming the birds for losses to livestock, they both have a pretty strong fan base today.

While both eagles are part of the same family group (Accipitridae), they are not very closely related, belonging to different genera.

The wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila audax) fits in a group sometimes referred to as “true eagles”, which also holds some of the most widespread eagles in the world, such as the golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos).

Bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), on the other hand, belong in the Haliaeetus genus, a group of predominantly fish-eating birds of prey that includes Australia’s own white-bellied sea eagle (Haliaeetus leucogaster).

Thus, it may seem like the odds are already stacked: what chance would a bird that eats fish as its main meal have against a bird that eats just about anything – alive or dead?

A close match

Well, they are in fact well matched in terms of potential fighting ability.

Both average about four to five kilograms, with almost identical wingspans of between 1.8 and 2.3 metres. Both have large, curved, strong beaks for tearing meat off the bones of their prey.

What opponents need to most be wary of, however, are the legs and talons.

Both species have strong feet with which to grab prey of the ground (or water) and carry it away to eat in peace. Neither have natural predators. It would indeed be a close match.

So, let’s say — hypothetically of course — that a wedge-tailed eagle and a bald eagle are in the same place at the same time, vying for the same prey.

It’s likely the bald eagle would be perched on a nearby clifftop, and the wedgie would be circling in the skies, high above. A poor, unassuming rodent (perhaps of unusual size, making it highly prized) is minding its own business on the ground below.

Both predators see the rodent as well as each other with their excellent vision — eagles generally have the best eyesight of all known vertebrates. A speedy downwards dive by both, up to 160 kilometres per hour, would signal the fight has commenced.

Before hitting the ground, the rodent, or each other, they’d flap their wings to slow down, revealing their legs and talons. These would reach out towards the opponent and, depending on where each bird grabs, might signify the end for the other. It would likely be quite the grapple and possibly even a trial of endurance.

The verdict?

My money, however, is on the wedge-tailed eagle.

While wedge-tailed eagles are a similar size to bald eagles, they’re able to kill slightly bigger prey. Bald eagles tend to feed on fish and small mammals (as well as reptiles, and carrion to an extent), but they rarely target anything bigger than, say, a racoon or beaver.

While wedge-tails regularly eat similarly sized mammals such as rabbits, they will also attack kangaroos, koalas and even goannas.

This might make them more accustomed to targeting diverse, large prey.

But the real tests that clinch my decision are odd encounters these birds face in the real world.

Recently, numbers of bald eagles have increased such that their range now overlaps with the common loon in North America, a diving waterbird with a sharp beak. And it appears that loons are able to stab bald eagles trying to obtain their young as prey, killing them. Canada 1: USA 0.

Not a great look for the majestic baldie.

Compare this to the wedge-tailed eagle, which is the only bird in the world known to actively attack paragliders and hang gliders , as well as drones. They do this because they likely see them as threats, and are attempting to defend their territory.

Therefore, in terms of motivation and sheer boldness when taking on an opponent, my bets are placed firmly in the talons of the wedgie.

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Dominique Potvin 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. Who would win in a fight between a wedge-tailed eagle and a bald eagle? It’s a close call for two nationally revered birds – https://theconversation.com/who-would-win-in-a-fight-between-a-wedge-tailed-eagle-and-a-bald-eagle-its-a-close-call-for-two-nationally-revered-birds-164400

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Harcourt, Industry Professor and Chief Economist, University of Technology Sydney

Sean Turnell, an Australian who became a trusted economic adviser to Aung San Suu Kyi, has been in a Myanmar prison for more than six months.

The economics professor was arrested on February 5, four days after the military coup that put a stop to the nation’s slow path towards full democracy and unravelling the economic corruption entrenched by decades of junta rule.

I spoke to him between the coup and the arrest. He was remarkably calm and dedicated to the welfare of the Burmese people despite the situation.

He awaits trial on charges he violated the country’s immigration and official secrets acts by trying to leave the country after the coup with sensitive financial information.

Those familiar with the situation are optimistic he will be released after the trial of Suu Kyi, who is also facing charges widely considered to be trumped up. The judge overseeing that trial has said it should be complete by the end of year.

An economics star

I have known Turnell as a family friend and colleague for many years. But it was not until I travelled to Yangon in 2017 that I really saw him in his element.

I had spent the week interviewing prominent Australians in Myanmar for my podcast The Airport Economist. They included Australia’s then ambassador Nicholas Coppel, Austcham Myanmar chief executive Jodi Weedon, lawyer Chris Hughes (founder of the independent law firm SCM Legal) and Alison Carter (founder of Three Good Spoons, which teaches Burmese women cooking and other skills to improve their employment opportunities.

But among all these distinguished speakers, the highlight was definitely Turnell’s presentation at a conference organised by the Australian Myanmar Institute (the brain child of Christopher Lamb, a former ambassador to Myanmar).

Turnell explained the Myanmar economy comprehensively, from macroeconomic conditions to microeconomic reform. He drilled down in great detail into fiscal and monetary policy, industrial development and infrastructure needs, financial markets, trade and tourism and, most importantly, education and human capital.

After the conference was formally closed, students milled around Sean like he was a celebrity — a rock-star economist.

Life before Myanmar

Turnell grew up in the working-class suburb of Macquarie Fields in south-western Sydney. Showing brilliance from an early age, he gained his bachelor’s degree economics at Macquarie University in north-western Sydney. Then a PhD. He ended up an associate professor at the university.

“Macquarie is everywhere in both our lives and careers,” his sister Lisa Brandt told me. She also studied economics at Macquarie University and is now a senior manager at the Macquarie Group.

After his undergraduate degree, Turnell worked for the Reserve Bank of Australia. There he was a popular and hard-working member of the central bank’s economics department.

Colleague Sean Aylmer, who went on to become a finance journalist, rising to editorial director at Fairfax Media, remembers Turnell for being both a good applied economist and an extrovert. “Which is most welcome at a place like the RBA,” he told me during a conversation for my podcast.

Professor David Throsby, former chair of the Macquarie University’s economics department, told me he believed Turnell could have been anything at the RBA. “But he was culturally more suited to academia and more at home in a university environment.”

Turnell joined the Macquarie University’s economics department in 1991. He excelled in academia. He wrote a PhD with a brilliant dissertation on John Maynard Keynes. He was also a “Hamiltonian” well before the musical. His deep interest in the life and times of Alexander Hamilton, the first US Secretary of the Treasury, drew him to Washington DC to spend many hours in the national archives and museums looking into the details of his hero.

Working for Aung San Suu Kyi

But it was Myanmar that became the centre of Turnell’s professional life, with his research increasingly focused on that country’s political economy and economic history.

He met Aung Sung Suu Kyi in the 1990s, and their professional relationship firmed from there. In 2001 he established the Burma Economic Watch, a blog providing reliable economic data and commentary to make up for the paucity of information available under the military junta.

When democracy was partially restored in 2011, Turnell got to work as a technical economist, covering all aspects of the Myanmar economy. His commitment to this work was shown in his presentation to the Australian Myanmar Institute conference. Though he continued to live in Sydney, he visited Myanmar regularly.

Then came the military coup on February 1. His arrest on February 5 made him the first foreign national arrested by the junta as part of the coup.

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There is no reason for his detention. He has done nothing wrong and has only devoted his time and energy to improving the welfare of the Burmese people.

The Australian government has called for his immediate release. So has the US Congress and others.

Awaiting his return to Australia is his family and wife Ha Vu, also an economist at Macquarie University and dedicated to development economics.

Even with Myanmar back under the control of a corrupt and incompetent junta, Sean’s knowledge of the Myanmar economy can still be put to good use, helping to improve the lives of the Burmese people and the rest of South East Asia.

Tim Harcourt no recibe salario, ni ejerce labores de consultoría, ni posee acciones, ni recibe financiación de ninguna compañía u organización que pueda obtener beneficio de este artículo, y ha declarado carecer de vínculos relevantes más allá del cargo académico citado.

– ref. Fate of detained Australian economist Sean Turnell may be tied to Aung Sung Suu Kyi – https://theconversation.com/fate-of-detained-australian-economist-sean-turnell-may-be-tied-to-aung-sung-suu-kyi-166516

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

For Australia’s habitually-abused financial consumers it’s Back to the Future (minus the DeLorean).

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg appears to have thrown the most important findings of the banking royal commission under a bus, in glorious double-speak.

On Thursday he issued a direction to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission through what is known as a statement of expectations.

It is very different from the previous such statement, issued in 2018.

This one includes an entirely new clause, placed right at the top.

The government expects ASIC to:

identify and pursue opportunities to contribute to the government’s economic goals, including supporting Australia’s economic recovery from the COVID pandemic.

It’s an odd role for a corporate cop, on its face inconsistent with the way ASIC itself describes its function in the “our role” tab on its homepage.

Perhaps not yet updated to take account of the guidelines, ASIC’s description says it is a regulator whose job is to “take whatever action we can, and which is necessary, to enforce and give effect to the law”.

From ‘why not litigate’…

It’s how the royal commission saw ASIC’s role. In his final report, Commissioner Kenneth Hayne was scathing about how ASIC carried out those duties, saying it was too ready to negotiate, and not keen enough to litigate.

Financial services entities are not ASIC’s ‘clients’. ASIC does not perform its functions as a service to those entities. And it is well-established that ‘an unconditional preference for negotiated compliance renders an agency susceptible to capture’.

Negotiation and persuasion, without enforcement, all too readily leads to the perception that compliance is voluntary. It is not.

Hayne said the first question ASIC should ask whenever misconduct was identified was “why not litigate?”.

Frydenberg’s new statement of expectations turns that on its head.

…to ‘why not capitulate’

Rather than “why not litigate,” it reads as “why not capitulate” — justified by the need to identify opportunities to contribute to Australia’s economic recovery.

The statement says the government expects ASIC to “act independently” but also says it should “consult with the government and treasury in exercising its policy-related functions” — a requirement not previously expressed in those terms.

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It should “minimise regulatory burdens” (including presumably those that require regulated firms to act in the best interest of their customers).

It should ensure any guidance it offers to financial service providers is not “unduly prescriptive”.

The banks have not earned leniency

Granted, these are conditions that could be interpreted positively if ASIC was charged with supervising an industry that had demonstrated its trustworthiness and its commitment to putting its customers first.

But after the evidence that was ventilated before the Hayne Royal Commission no one – not even the Australian Banking Association makes such a claim.

Indeed, the damage done by more than a decade of financial industry misconduct, fraud, criminality and venality, committed on an industrial scale, is yet to be fully quantified.

Colleagues at the University of Melbourne estimate the full cost at north of A$200 billion, affecting approximately 54% of the population.

Frydenberg’s solution appears to be to put the needs of industry first. Separately, he is trying to scrap responsible lending laws.

From somewhere, to nowhere

What will the upshot be of a newly enfeebled ASIC? In light of the demonstrable failure of banks, super funds and insurers to act with integrity after the royal commission, the upshot will be more of the same.

Indeed, as reported in The Klaxon in November, the almost one million customers in Westpac-BT’s “retirement wrap” umbrella fund had been gouged as much as $8 billion over the past decade, thanks to exorbitant fees.

Between mid-2018 and mid-2020 returns to members were close to zero (0.1%).

According to Australian Prudential Regulation Authority data, had the performance of the Westpac funds been merely average, its customers would have been $5 billion better off.

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The matter was reported to ASIC on November 23 last year. All ASIC has done since is “review” the situation. In that time fund members might have lost a further $1.5 billion relative to the industry average.

A better way to support a post-COVID economic recovery would be to give customers confidence that the laws meant to protect them were being properly enforced. It isn’t the road the treasurer has taken.

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. Frydenberg’s directions to ASIC throw the banking royal commission under a bus – https://theconversation.com/frydenbergs-directions-to-asic-throw-the-banking-royal-commission-under-a-bus-166813