Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Russell, Senior Lecturer in Crime, Justice & Legal Studies, La Trobe University

Over the past 12 months, up to 1,200 people spent time in Victoria’s maximum-security women’s prison without being convicted and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. They were on remand: waiting in custody for their trial or sentencing, or to be granted bail.

Since 2018, Victoria’s bail laws have made remand the default option for an expanded list of offences. Even when a woman’s alleged offending is non-violent and relatively low level, her chance of being granted bail can be impossibly low. This is especially so if she is experiencing severe social disadvantage. Many women will be denied bail because they don’t have an address: they’re living in their car, couch-surfing, or unable to return home because of family violence.

Thanks to a series of punitive bail reforms, the remand situation in Victoria’s prisons has now reached crisis level.

In the past ten years, the number of people entering the women’s prison on remand in Victoria has trebled. For First Nations women, the number has increased five-fold.

Shockingly, remandees now outnumber sentenced prisoners in the women’s system. Most will spend less than one month on remand, although a significant proportion (32%) spend between one and six months in custody. The majority will leave the women’s prison without having spent any time under sentence.

Read more:
Not for punishment: we need to understand bail, not review it

Unfortunately, Victoria is not an outlier. In New South Wales, 43% of women in prison are on remand, compared to 31% in 2013. National figures show more than a third (37%) of women in prison are unsentenced, up from 22% in 2010.

On a global scale, Australia’s startling rate of growth in its remand populations far outpaces those of similar jurisdictions internationally, such as England and Wales, and Canada.

Increased churn of unsentenced prisoners is a result of the politicisation of bail laws. State governments have used bail reform to send a “tough on crime” message when confronted with the fallout from high-profile instances of violent offending by people on bail.

In Victoria, this occurred after James Gargasoulos drove his car into a busy mall in central Melbourne, killing six pedestrians in January 2017. While recently released findings from the coronial inquest into these deaths found changes to policing practices, not bail laws, were required to prevent a similar event occurring in the future, the Victorian government had already acted.

Twenty-two changes to the Bail Act were implemented in 2018, making it the strictest bail regime in the country. But there is little consideration of the wider impact of making it harder for people to be granted bail, especially for groups that are already over-policed, such as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and people experiencing homelessness.

Changes to bail in Victoria were intended to enhance community protection. But lawyers working within the bail and remand system report they are disproportionately affecting women who are homeless and victim-survivors of family violence. According to lawyers, a lack of safe housing options is the biggest barrier to women accessing bail in the current system.

Lawyers estimate the vast majority of women they represent in the bail and remand court are victim-survivors of family violence — a claim supported by an analysis of women entering prison on remand. They fear that even short periods of remand will further traumatise women and cause major disruptions to their lives and families.

Although remand is not intended to inflict punishment, its punitive effects are difficult to ignore. Being remanded can result in someone losing their housing, their job, and having their children removed and placed in out-of-home care.

Lawyers are also concerned that high thresholds for bail are pressuring women to plead guilty just to avoid extended periods of time on remand awaiting their day in court. This will mean more women are trapped in cycles of incarceration that have damaging flow-on effects.

Read more:
We need to consider granting bail to unsentenced prisoners to stop the spread of coronavirus

Despite the overall trend of growth, last year remand numbers in Victoria declined significantly due to the impacts of COVID-19. As infection rates rose, magistrates were wary of sending people to prison unsentenced, knowing they would be held for weeks in quarantine conditions that amount to solitary confinement. The ban on prison visits would also be particularly hard on women, who are more likely to be mothers and primary carers.

Victorian remand numbers are now bouncing back. Yet the 2020 downturn showed us prisoner reductions are possible and necessary. When the harmful effects of imprisonment are given serious consideration – with or without a pandemic – women can and should be diverted from prison.

To reduce rates of remand, we need to repeal changes to the Bail Act that have made prison the default, not a last resort. Diverting prison funds towards public housing will also produce longer-term benefits for women, their children and the community.

Emma Russell is affiliated with Smart Justice for Women.

– ref. Number of women on remand in Victoria soars due to outdated bail laws – https://theconversation.com/number-of-women-on-remand-in-victoria-soars-due-to-outdated-bail-laws-165301

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jathan Sadowski, Research Fellow, Emerging Technologies Research Lab and CoE for Automated Decision-Making and Society, Monash University

I’m a Luddite. This is not a hesitant confession, but a proud proclamation. I’m also a social scientist who studies how new technologies affect politics, economics and society. For me, Luddism is not a naive feeling, but a considered position.

And once you know what Luddism actually stands for, I’m willing to bet you will be one too — or at least much more sympathetic to the Luddite cause than you think.

Today the term is mostly lobbed as an insult. Take this example from a recent report by global consulting firm Accenture on why the health-care industry should enthusiastically embrace artificial intelligence:

Excessive caution can be detrimental, creating a luddite culture of following the herd instead of forging forward.

To be a Luddite is seen as synonymous with being primitive — backwards in your outlook, ignorant of innovation’s wonders, and fearful of modern society. This all-or-nothing approach to debates about technology and society is based on severe misconceptions of the real history and politics of the original Luddites: English textile workers in the early 19th century who, under the cover of night, destroyed weaving machines in protest to changes in their working conditions.

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

Our circumstances today are more similar to theirs than it might seem, as new technologies are being used to transform our own working and social conditions — think increases in employee surveillance during lockdowns, or exploitation by gig labour platforms. It’s time we reconsider the lessons of Luddism.

A brief — and accurate — history of Luddism

Even among other social scientists who study these kinds of critical questions about technology, the label of “Luddite” is still largely an ironic one. It’s the kind of self-effacing thing you say when fumbling with screen-sharing on Zoom during a presentation: “Sorry, I’m such a Luddite!”

It wasn’t until I learned the true origins of Luddism that I began sincerely to regard myself as one of them.

The Luddites were a secret organisation of workers who smashed machines in the textile factories of England in the early 1800s, a period of increasing industrialisation, economic hardship due to expensive conflicts with France and the United States, and widespread unrest among the working class. They took their name from the apocryphal tale of Ned Ludd, a weaver’s apprentice who supposedly smashed two knitting machines in a fit of rage.

The contemporary usage of Luddite has the machine-smashing part correct — but that’s about all it gets right.

First, the Luddites were not indiscriminate. They were intentional and purposeful about which machines they smashed. They targeted those owned by manufacturers who were known to pay low wages, disregard workers’ safety, and/or speed up the pace of work. Even within a single factory — which would contain machines owned by different capitalists — some machines were destroyed and others pardoned depending on the business practices of their owners.

Second, the Luddites were not ignorant. Smashing machines was not a kneejerk reaction to new technology, but a tactical response by workers based on their understanding of how owners were using those machines to make labour conditions more exploitative. As historian David Noble puts it, they understood “technology in the present tense”, by analysing its immediate, material impacts and acting accordingly.

Luddism was a working-class movement opposed to the political consequences of industrial capitalism. The Luddites wanted technology to be deployed in ways that made work more humane and gave workers more autonomy. The bosses, on the other hand, wanted to drive down costs and increase productivity.

Third, the Luddites were not against innovation. Many of the technologies they destroyed weren’t even new inventions. As historian Adrian Randall points out, one machine they targeted, the gig mill, had been used for more than a century in textile manufacturing. Similarly, the power loom had been used for decades before the Luddite uprisings.

It wasn’t the invention of these machines that provoked the Luddites to action. They only banded together once factory owners began using these machines to displace and disempower workers.

The factory owners won in the end: they succeeded in convincing the state to make “frame breaking” a treasonous crime punishable by hanging. The army was sent in to break up and hunt down the Luddites.

The Luddite rebellion lasted from 1811 to 1816, and today (as Randall puts it), it has become “a cautionary moral tale”. The story is told to discourage workers from resisting the march of capitalist progress, lest they too end up like the Luddites.

Neo-Luddism

Today, new technologies are being used to alter our lives, societies and working conditions no less profoundly than mechanical looms were used to transform those of the original Luddites. The excesses of big tech companies – Amazon’s inhumane exploitation of workers in warehouses driven by automation and machine vision, Uber’s gig-economy lobbying and disregard for labour law, Facebook’s unchecked extraction of unprecedented amounts of user data – are driving a public backlash that may contain the seeds of a neo-Luddite movement.

As Gavin Mueller writes in his new book on Luddism, our goal in taking up the Luddite banner should be “to study and learn from the history of past struggles, to recover the voices from past movements so that they might inform current ones”.

What would Luddism look like today? It won’t necessarily (or only) be a movement that takes up hammers against smart fridges, data servers and e-commerce warehouses. Instead, it would treat technology as a political and economic phenomenon that deserves to be critically scrutinised and democratically governed, rather than a grab bag of neat apps and gadgets.

Read more:
Doomsaying about new technology helps make it better

In a recent article in Nature, my colleagues and I argued that data must be reclaimed from corporate gatekeepers and managed as a collective good by public institutions. This kind of argument is deeply informed by the Luddite ethos, calling for the hammer of antitrust to break up the tech oligopoly that currently controls how data is created, accessed, and used.

A neo-Luddite movement would understand no technology is sacred in itself, but is only worthwhile insofar as it benefits society. It would confront the harms done by digital capitalism and seek to address them by giving people more power over the technological systems that structure their lives.

This is what it means to be a Luddite today. Two centuries ago, Luddism was a rallying call used by the working class to build solidarity in the battle for their livelihoods and autonomy.

And so too should neo-Luddism be a banner that brings workers together in today’s fight for those same rights. Join me in reclaiming the name of Ludd!

Read more:
The unmaking of the Australian working class – and their right to resist

Jathan Sadowski 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. I’m a Luddite. You should be one too – https://theconversation.com/im-a-luddite-you-should-be-one-too-163172

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Shelley Hannigan, Senior Lecturer in Art Education, Deakin University

This article is part of a series providing school students with evidence-based advice for choosing subjects in their senior years.

If you’re thinking of taking a performing or visual arts subject in years 11 and 12, you are probably weighing up a few considerations. These may include your passion and interest in the subject, how doing one or two arts subjects might affect your entry into university and what you could do with the skills you learn.

Nearly 30% of all year 12 students across Australia (53,311 year 12 students in total) chose to study visual or performing arts in year 12 in 2019. But twice as many girls took an arts subject (40%) as boys (18%).

The arts subject selection you have will depend on what state you live in. But these are the types of subjects you can broadly choose from in visual and performing arts.

Visual arts

Visual arts is a theory-based subject. You will learn about different artworks and the role of artists in society. You will engage in discussions and writing tasks about what artworks mean. This includes ideas from historical and contemporary arts and culture.

Read more:
Here’s looking at: Blue poles by Jackson Pollock

In studio arts, you will learn about artists’ practices and the art industry while also developing your own art.

You will experiment with techniques and art processes in the mediums of your choice. These include photography, painting, drawing, printmaking, film, digital arts, ceramics or textiles. You will develop your own artworks, document this process and exhibit your work.

Media arts involves researching and learning about narrative across different media forms. You will demonstrate your understanding of production processes by designing a media product (such as a film or photographic exhibition) and presenting it.

Product design and technology involves learning about, and experimenting with, materials and processes. The materials will vary from school to school, but you may be able to choose from wood or timber, metal, fabrics, polymers, glass or ceramics. You will learn how to design and put these designs into production.

Performing arts

Dance will teach you about dance traditions, styles and works from different cultures. You will learn about music theatre, the work of tap or jazz or street performers, ballet and modern dance, and choreography. As you learn this content through theory and practice, you will engage in analysis of dance that will help you develop your own choreographed performance with others.

Drama involves studying practice and theory to understand the ways theatre and performance can communicate stories and ideas. You will explore different traditions of drama including costume, set design and lighting, make-up, masks, props and puppetry and sound design. You will ultimately create, develop and present a solo performance.

Music has different pathways depending on what state you live in. In the Victorian curriculum, there are three pathways culminating in units 3 and 4 of music investigation and music performance. These pathways require at least four years’ experience in learning an instrument. Another pathway, VET music industry, focuses on performing in public.

While each pathway and qualification is different, you will learn through listening, performing and composing. You will apply creative thinking skills to analyse and critique contemporary and historical music and musicians.

What benefits will I get through studying arts?

From my research and practice as an artist and university educator of 15 years, I know any of the year 11 and 12 art subjects will enable you to learn from extensive creative processes. Developing a set of paintings will require experimenting with techniques, learning from other artists, developing a theme or message to convey, and ensuring the subject matter in your paintings is suitable for conveying the message and appropriate for the style you are working in.

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Thrash not trash ?: why heavy metal is a valid and vital PhD subject

Your technique must be proficient to achieve good marks. You also need to document the development of your research and ideas with visual images you created and written statements in journals. This is somewhat risky as you are putting yourself out there. It must also come together in a certain time frame, which can be challenging and stressful.

But it will pay off as research shows arts education has many benefits.

Beyond technical knowledge and skills, benefits include actual enjoyment and stress relief. The senior years can be stressful years, so adding an arts subject to the mix can actually be a way to take care of yourself. It is well documented the arts offer mental health benefits as the focus on creating art is a form of mindfulness.

Creating art is a process of focusing on bringing together subject matter, technique and creative experience to communicate a story or an idea. The ability to express your feelings through the arts is a form of release. And reflecting on its meaning can provide insights into your self, which is therapeutic.

Read more:
Choosing your senior school subjects doesn’t have to be scary. Here are 6 things to keep in mind

In addition, you will develop a range of skills that will help you in any area of life. Beyond creativity and thinking skills, research shows arts education will help you enhance your communication and expressive skills, as well as boosting your confidence and self-esteem. Teamwork, too, is a big part of the arts, and learning this skill will be helpful at university and in your future employment.

The presentation, communication and performance skills you learn are adaptable for public speaking, community and public art careers, as well as teaching.

Will doing the arts bring down my ATAR?

The ATAR is a university-based system that determines how many students will get into particular courses. Like a queue, it ranks you against everyone in the year 12 age group.

But university entry, particularly when it comes to the arts, doesn’t rely on ATAR. It often requires an interview process with presentation of a portfolio.

If you’re not looking to do arts at university, it’s still important to choose senior subjects you are interested in and good at. Plus, skills you learn in the arts can enhance your entry prospects. For instance, entry into a medical degree requires a high ATAR. But most universities also conduct an interview to test your empathy, collaboration and ethical reasoning skills – all of which are enhanced by the arts.

What will I do with these skills after school?

Many students who study senior art go on to study the visual and/or performing arts at university. Some become self-employed artists. Others practise art on the side and that helps them maintain a good balance in life.

One ex-student, now in her late 20s, studied visual art and music in school but is now a psychiatric nurse who is also in a band. She said being a musician helps her cope with the stresses of her job.

Another ex-student, a 20-year-old male, studied the VCE VET in music industry as well as media arts, studio arts, visual arts, psychology and literature. He is a full-time intern in a technology company. He said the networking he does now is very close to what he had to do for the documentary he made in media arts. He also said his creative skills were helpful in the marketing material he designs.

You have to be a creative strategist to get people to give you time of day in sales and marketing.

Read the other articles in our series on choosing senior subjects, here.

Shelley Hannigan 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. Art, drama and music lower stress. Here’s what you need to know if you’re thinking of taking arts in years 11 and 12 – https://theconversation.com/art-drama-and-music-lower-stress-heres-what-you-need-to-know-if-youre-thinking-of-taking-arts-in-years-11-and-12-164713

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 4-7 from a sample of 1,527, gave Labor a 53-47 lead, unchanged from three weeks ago. Primary votes were 39% Coalition (steady), 39% Labor (steady), 11% Greens (up one) and 3% One Nation (steady). Figures are from The Poll Bludger.

49% were dissatisfied with Scott Morrison’s performance (up four), and 47% were satisfied (down four), for a net approval of -2, down eight points. This is Morrison’s first negative rating since the start of the COVID pandemic in April 2020. Analyst Kevin Bonham said Morrison had the fourth longest streak of positive Newspoll ratings for a PM.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s net approval was steady at -8. Morrison’s better PM lead narrowed from 51-33 to 49-36.

Newspoll’s COVID questions continued to show declines for Morrison. On overall handling of COVID, he has a 49-48 poor rating (52-45 good three weeks ago and 70-27 good in April). The vaccine rollout had a 59-38 disapproval rating (57-40 three weeks ago, 53-43 approval in April).

With Sydney in an extended lockdown that is likely to last until vaccination rates are high, and current and recent lockdowns in Melbourne and south-east Queensland, people have become frustrated with the slow vaccination rollout.

But the next election is not required until May 2022. Vaccination levels will very likely be high enough by then to reopen. While the economy will be damaged by the lockdowns, past experience in Australia and overseas shows that the economy will recover quickly once the lockdowns end.

Read more:
Labor gains clear Newspoll lead during Sydney lockdown, but will the economy save the Coalition?

The Guardian’s datablog shows 17.8% of Australia’s population is fully vaccinated, while 17.5% has received just one dose (this means 35% have had either one or two doses). Among OECD countries, we currently rank 35 of 38 in our fully vaccinated share. We were last a month ago, but have overtaken South Korea, New Zealand and Costa Rica.

47% of unvaccinated in Essential would take Pfizer but not AstraZeneca

In last week’s Essential poll, 47% of those who have not yet been vaccinated said they would be willing to get the Pfizer vaccine, but not AstraZeneca.

About one in a million people who receive AstraZeneca die from a blood clot issue. Alarmism from the media and health authorities has tainted an effective COVID vaccine. Australians’ reluctance to get AstraZeneca has impaired the vaccination rollout.

ATAGI’s June recommendation that only those aged over 60 be vaccinated with AstraZeneca, and Queensland Chief Health Officer Jeannette Young’s attacks on AstraZeneca have been particularly unfortunate. It took until late July for ATAGI to change its advice on AstraZeneca, and then only for those in Sydney.

By contrast, the UK has vaccinated most of its adult population using AstraZeneca, and AstraZeneca creator, Sarah Gilbert, received a standing ovation at Wimbledon.

Other Essential questions and Morgan poll

In other Essential questions, 50% approved of Morrison’s performance (down one since July), and 40% disapproved (steady), for a net approval of +10. But Albanese’s net approval slumped ten points to -4. Morrison led Albanese by 45-26 as better PM (46-28 in July).

While Morrison’s ratings were stable, the federal government’s response to COVID was rated as good by just a 38-35 margin (46-31 good in mid-July, and 58-18 in late May, before the current lockdowns began).

The NSW government’s response to COVID was rated good by 47% (down seven), the Victorian government’s by 54% (up five), and South Australia’s by 73% (up five). This poll was taken before the new Victorian lockdown.

50% of NSW respondents thought NSW did not lock down hard enough, with 39% believing it to be about the right level and 11% too harsh. For Victoria, responses were 71% about right, 23% too harsh and 6% not hard enough.

By 66-11, voters supported the return of JobKeeper to assist people and businesses affected by lockdowns. By 67-18, voters opposed the recent anti-lockdown protests in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

A Morgan federal poll, conducted July 24-25 and July 31-August 1 from a sample of over 2,700, gave Labor a 53.5-46.5 lead, a 1% gain for Labor since mid-July. Primary votes were 37% Coalition (down two), 37% Labor (steady), 12.5% Greens (up one) and 3% One Nation (steady).

Federal redistribution finalised

Draft federal electoral boundaries for Victoria and WA were released in March, with Victoria gaining a seat, while WA lost one. Final boundaries were gazetted by August 2, and will be used at the next election.

Read more:
Morrison’s ratings take a hit in Newspoll as Coalition notionally loses a seat in redistribution

The WA seat axed was Liberal-held Stirling, while the new Victorian seat of Hawke will be safe for Labor. No other seat changed its notional holder. Ignoring Craig Kelly’s defection, the Coalition notionally starts the next election with 76 of the 151 seats and Labor 69.

ABC election analyst Antony Green has published a post-redistribution pendulum. Labor lost the two party vote by 51.5-48.5 in 2019. For the Coalition to lose its majority, a net loss of one seat is required, a 0.4% swing to Labor under the uniform swing assumption.

For Labor to win more seats than the Coalition, they would need four more net seats for a 73-72 seat lead. That’s a 3.1% swing (51.6% two party to Labor). A Labor majority needs a net seven gains (3.3% swing or 51.8% two party).

Swings are never uniform, but the pendulum suggests that Labor will need a bit more than 50% two party to oust the Coalition. I wrote about Labor’s problems after the last election.

Read more:
Difficult for Labor to win in 2022 using new pendulum, plus Senate and House preference flows

UK COVID data two weeks after “Freedom Day”

July 19 was “Freedom Day” in England, when virtually all remaining COVID restrictions were relaxed. I had an article for The Poll Bludger on August 2, two weeks after Freedom Day. Almost 89% of UK adults have received at least one vaccine dose and over 74% are fully vaccinated. About 95% of English aged over 55 are fully vaccinated.

New UK COVID daily cases were over 54,000 on July 17, two days before Freedom Day, and were predicted to surge to over 100,000. But instead they declined to under 22,000 last Monday, though they have risen back to 27,400 Sunday. Average daily deaths are 86, way short of the horrific January peak of over 1,200.

German polling ahead of the September 26 federal election, and Biden’s ratings and US COVID data were also covered in the article.

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. First negative Newspoll rating for Morrison since start of pandemic; 47% of unvaccinated would take Pfizer but not AstraZeneca – https://theconversation.com/first-negative-newspoll-rating-for-morrison-since-start-of-pandemic-47-of-unvaccinated-would-take-pfizer-but-not-astrazeneca-165665

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Phil Bellinger, Lecturer in exercise science, Griffith University

The Tokyo Olympic Games have seen incredible performances in the short-distance track events. We have seen two major world records fall: the men’s and women’s 400-metre hurdles – and numerous personal best times.

In the women’s 400-metre hurdles, five of the eight competitors in the final ran personal bests. Jamaica’s Elaine Thompson-Herah set an Olympic record to win the women’s 100-metre event. A European record was set in the men’s 100-metre event, and all medallists in the race were slightly faster than the respective medal-winning times at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

What’s behind these super-fast times? Some have suggested the composition of the track, new “super spike” running shoes, or hot weather are responsible. While these almost certainly contributed to the results, another reason is likely to be more uninterrupted training through reduced international travel and competition in the months leading into the Tokyo Olympic Games.

This better preparation in turn is due to two things: first, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant less competition and more time for training; and second, steady improvements in sports science and applied research are maximising the extremes of human performance.
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Bouncy tracks, super spikes and heat

The track surface at the Tokyo Olympic stadium, installed by an Italian company called Mondo, is designed to allow runners to better grip the surface while also providing better shock absorption. The surface contains hexagonal air chambers that can compress and bounce back with each step.

Many athletes are also wearing relatively new spikes containing a stiff and lightweight plate made from carbon fibre. The Nike version of these so-called “super spikes” also features a foam layer under the carbon fibre to provide additional spring.

Read more:
Super shoes: Explaining athletics’ new technological arms race

These Nike shoes in particular have been criticised as providing an unreasonable advantage, including by 400m hurdles champion Karsten Warholm. Warholm wore Puma carbon-fibre spikes without the additional foam in his world record-setting win, while silver medallist Rai Benjamin wore Nike’s version.

The weather in Tokyo, with temperatures in the 30s and humidity sometimes over 80%, may have also contributed to the fast times in sprint events. Hot conditions means warmer muscles, which can produce force more quickly, making for faster sprinting.

Heat and humidity also put greater strain on athletes over longer distances, which is the main reason we have seen fewer records fall in the track endurance events.

Uninterrupted training and competition

However, suggesting these personal best performances and record times in sprint events can be fully attributed to environmental conditions, new shoe technology and the track surface is a little disrespectful to the athletes. Both Warholm and Sydney McLaughlin, who respectively set the new men’s and women’s records for 400m hurdles, broke previous records they had recently set themselves.

On Tuesday Warholm smashed the record he had claimed in July, and on Wednesday McLaughlin beat the time she set in June. Both athletes were in career-best form heading into Tokyo.

All the athletes were aiming to achieve peak performance at Tokyo by precisely timing their training and recovery cycles. This gives them the best chance of maximal performance: personal best times, and for some Olympic or world records.

In addition to manipulating their training programs to peak at Tokyo, at the Olympics the best are racing against the best. This high level of competition raises the standard of each round compared with other international races, and this too contributes to the number of world-class performances in Tokyo.

For example, McLaughlin and her US teammate Dalilah Muhammad have both previously set the 400m hurdles world record when competing against each other. There is no doubt competition with other world-class athletes creates a favourable scenario for achieving more fast times.

COVID and research

Perhaps surprisingly, COVID-19 may have also played a role in these intense track performances. The pandemic has meant a reduced racing schedule over the past 18 months, with far less international travel and few races.

This may have allowed for more consistent training with fewer interruptions and peaks and declines organised around races. It is conceivable that this has contributed to some of the world-class performances we have seen.

Read more:
Record-setting performances at the Tokyo Olympics come after months of pandemic-induced stress

In addition to all of these factors, sports science research and support plays an important role in improving performance. Continued applied sports science research in athletes and the ongoing effort to push human limits to performance means we are likely to see world records being broken at the next Olympic Games in Paris in 2024 and beyond.

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

– ref. What’s behind the spate of super-fast sprints at the Tokyo Olympics? Technology plays a role, but the real answer is training – https://theconversation.com/whats-behind-the-spate-of-super-fast-sprints-at-the-tokyo-olympics-technology-plays-a-role-but-the-real-answer-is-training-165737

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

Murmurs regarding the decline of the Olympics appear to have been premature. Despite the well-founded critiques, doubts, concerns, and ambivalence before the Tokyo games began, they have provided many compelling moments, stories, and discussion points that have gripped much of the world.

Indeed, many people have expressed surprise at just how much they have become swept up in these games – at how much meaning they have derived from a sporting event that before it began, seemed out of place in a world still grappling with the devastating COVID pandemic.

There’s even a palpable grief for some people at the end of the Olympics, particularly in areas of the world still enduring lockdowns.

In the aftermath of the Tokyo Olympics, it’s worth reflecting on just what kind of meaning the games still generate. What’s at stake in the passions, struggles, triumphs, and heartache that, alongside COVID, have dominated news cycles for the past three weeks?

The power of national glory

The modern Olympics have long been based on the notion that sport is a force for good. Put simply, they still purport to help make the world a better place.

Yet, after the disastrous second and third Olympics in Paris (1900) and St Louis (1904) that were overshadowed by festivals of white supremacy, it was the playing out of national rivalries — and the possibility of national glory — that drove rising public interest in the games.

By 1912, Australians were already so emotionally invested that they raised enough funds to send swimming star Fanny Durack to the Stockholm Olympics.

The modern Olympics had been developed to showcase and celebrate strong, athletic men. But after winning gold in the women’s 100-metre freestyle, Durack became a national hero, as did her silver-medal winning compatriot Mina Wylie (whose family had paid the costs of her travel to the games).

The strange, yet powerful, sense of national achievement – and even vindication — in the deeds of athletes continues to shape much of the ongoing fascination with the Olympics. Australian athletes have had many remarkable performances at the Tokyo Olympics. Like Durack and Wylie before them, Ariarne Titmus, Patty Mills, Jess Fox, Melissa Wu, Peter Bol, and so many others have captivated a nation.

These athletes bring joy, amazement, pride, and inspiration. And they are loved for it. But the Tokyo Olympics have also given us a clearer insight into the costs that such adoration entails.

Love and betrayal

The focus on individual athletes — especially those expected to bring national glory — is intense. Those athletes deemed to have “failed” can quickly find the love they were previously showered with was conditional.

Olympic athletes are loved for what they have done or might do — not (so much) for who they are as people. This adoration is based on the powerful, joyous feelings they can bring and the way their triumphs are vicariously shared.

At issue is a powerful form of identification that can become possessive. For many fans, it feels like the athletes not only represent their nation, but also them as individuals. These fans frequently behave as if what happens to the athlete happens to them. Hence the ecstasy when the athlete achieves greatness.

On the flip side, however, when the expectations of fans are not met, they frequently react as if they have been personally betrayed.

The bitterness, judgement, and even hate directed at Simone Biles when she withdrew from the gymnastics team event was extreme. Although Biles also received an outpouring of support on social media, the racial – and racist – dynamics of the stinging criticism and vilification directed at her were striking.

Many white men in particular seemed personally offended that Biles had prioritised her physical and mental health, saying no to a performance that they had expected would bring them pleasure.

In Australia, Ben Simmons was similarly vilified for withdrawing from the men’s basketball team, as if he had broken an unwritten contract to perform for the nation’s benefit. (In stark contrast, Patty Mills was fulsome in his support of Simmons.)

Even Jess Fox was castigated on social media for “only” winning a bronze medal in the K1 slalom, although her “failure” was quickly forgiven after she won gold in the C1 event.

Read more:
The power of no: Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka and Black women’s resistance

What (and who) is forgotten

The fervent meaning so many Australians find in Olympic performances regularly disproves the notion we are more interested in watching men play sports than women.

As is frequently the case, most of the Australian heroes of the Tokyo Olympics have been women. And millions of people have tuned in to watch them compete.

Yet, somehow the compelling, thrilling performance of female athletes is conveniently forgotten when questions are raised about why competitions like the AFLW still receives less financial investment and media coverage than AFLM.

Equally disturbing, even in the midst of an Olympics characterised by inspiring feats from Australian women, 80% of the mainstream Australian media’s general sports coverage (across all sporting competitions) still focused on men.

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

And it is not only the performances of Australian women that are frequently forgotten. The coverage of Rohan Browning’s impressive performance in the men’s 100-metre heats tended to elide the feats of Kaanju man Patrick Johnson, who represented Australia in sprint events in the 2000 and 2004 Olympics.

Johnson not only holds the Australian record for the fastest time in the 100 metres, but remains the only Australian to have run a time under 10 seconds. That he is less well-known than the slower Matt Shirvington (who also competed in the 100 metres at the 2000 Sydney Games) reveals much about Australian race relations.

These Olympics have also raised vital questions regarding the treatment of trans athletes, the problematic policing of gender, and the way gender diversity challenges the strict binary nature of most sporting competitions.

A force for justice?

The relationship of Australia to the First Nations people whose land remains unceded was a focus for the Matildas team who took a photo of themselves behind the Aboriginal flag after arriving in Tokyo.

In doing so, the Matildas were following a long tradition of using the national and international focus on the Olympics to raise (more) vital issues.

Around the same time, the International Olympic Committee was banning its numerous media staff from posting photos of athletes who took a knee before their events in support of the Black Lives Matter movement. Although the IOC soon retracted this ban after it drew widespread criticism, it highlighted the organisation’s reluctance for the Olympics to provoke discussions of justice, despite the IOC’s professed commitment for the games to improve the world.

To the IOC’s likely dismay, the anti-protest rule in the IOC charter, which was written in the aftermath of the famous Black power salute at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, is in the news again.

Raven Saunders, a queer, Black American, crossed her raised arms over her head in an “X” after winning the silver medal in the Women’s Shot put. As Saunders later explained, the “X” was “the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet”.

While the IOC suspended their investigation into Saunders after the tragic death of her mother, the matter once again raises questions as to the immense meaning the Olympics generate, and what this meaning might facilitate.

Like many Olympics before it, the Tokyo Games have created compelling sporting moments — when, for a few minutes, it felt like nothing else mattered. The end of the men’s high jump competition, when the two leaders decided to share the gold medal rather than have a jump-off, was celebrated around the world as an act of inspiring sports-personship.

Yet, while the power of the Olympics should not be underestimated, especially when it comes to the public fascination with women’s sports, the IOC should be less frightened of the way the games might promote the need for justice.

Until then, the burden of dealing with, resisting, and making use of the spotlight that comes with the Olympics will fall unequally on the athletes themselves.

Matthew Klugman has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council. He is the Co-convenor of the Olympic Research Network at Victoria University.

– ref. The Olympics still have the power to inspire — and reveal our nastier impulses and hypocrisies – https://theconversation.com/the-olympics-still-have-the-power-to-inspire-and-reveal-our-nastier-impulses-and-hypocrisies-165602

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Courtney Walton, McKenzie Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Mental Health in Elite Sports, The University of Melbourne

With the Olympics drawing to a close, many athletes will begin to turn their attention to a crucial yet daunting question: what’s next?

The Olympic Games are a unique event, with the potential for extreme highs and lows that accompany success, loss, injury, or regret. The experience of the games on athlete mental health goes far beyond the competition itself, though, with the weeks and months following the event crucial to athlete wellbeing.

It is critical to understand what can contribute to better or worse post-Olympic experiences for our athletes. In our recently published research, we set out to explore this question by interviewing 18 Australian athletes who had competed in the 2016 Rio Games.

Our goal was to explore what factors are most important to athlete wellbeing (and why), in addition to understanding the strategies athletes used to cope following their Olympic experiences.

The mental health of athletes is of increasing concern

The mental health of athletes has attracted increased attention, thanks to high-profile stars like Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles.

But even before the Tokyo Games, a 2019 statement from the International Olympic Committee highlighted that mental ill-health was common among elite athletes. It also emphasised how more needs to be done to improve the recognition and treatment of mental health issues, support athletes and reduce stigma around this topic.

For example, it has been estimated that approximately one-third of elite athletes around the world experience symptoms of depression or anxiety. Here in Australia, recent research has supported these findings, particularly among female elite athletes.

Publicly, athletes have spoken of dark post-Olympic periods, in particular. Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, has described bouts of suicidal thoughts in these moments. He said in a 2019 interview that after every Olympics he “fell into a major state of depression”.

Read more:
The power of no: Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka and Black women’s resistance

‘When you get home it’s really lonely’

In our research, the Australian athletes we interviewed felt the quality of their performances had a direct effect on their post-Olympic wellbeing.

Those who exceeded expectations, achieved their goals, or were satisfied with their performances were generally positive about the post-games phase, as the following athlete indicated:

I finally did my PB [personal best] in the final, and honestly for me, doing a PB at that point in my career was like winning a gold medal. I know it’s a cliché, but I did really have a fairy tale end to my career.

However, given how many external factors can influence performance outcomes, attention must also be focused on things that are more easily controlled. Pre-Olympic planning and having social supports in place, for example, were key for those who transitioned more easily to a post-Olympic life.

Several athletes described the importance of having a plan for what they would do next, saying this was absolutely crucial to their wellbeing. These plans varied from getting married or going on holiday to beginning a degree, a new job, or even a new athletic season.

Conversely, when athletes did not have clear plans — like being uncertain about whether to retire or continue competing — difficulties emerged. One athlete said,

When you get home it’s really lonely […] It’s quite depressing, and it is a little bit overwhelming, starting from square one again.

Another telling quote came from an athlete who described how some fellow Olympians would “really, really struggle” after the games.

They’ve come back from the Olympics and they haven’t had anything to do. So, they haven’t had university, they haven’t had work, they haven’t had a family, they haven’t had community engagement, they haven’t had a plan.

The benefit of support systems

The athletes also shared with us that support from family, friends, coaches, and their sporting organisations significantly enhanced their wellbeing.

Some said when this support dropped off, it made the transition back to normality far harder. For example, an athlete with a particularly difficult experience said,

[Before Rio] I had my head of my team, the strength and conditioning coach, a psychologist, the national coach, nutritionist, massage therapists, all that sort of stuff. Everyone was helping me […] Post-Rio, I didn’t get contacted by a single person, not one of them contacted me.

Unfortunately, providing systemic support for athletes can be difficult due to the ongoing stigma associated with seeking help for mental health challenges.

Previous research has shown that athletes face specific barriers to seeking help for mental health issues, such as fears of team selection changes and concerns they may be perceived as unable to cope.

Indeed, one athlete in our study highlighted this:

It’s that vulnerability of saying, ‘Yeah, I’m not coping.’ I guess that is what keeps me just looking within my inner circle because it’s not something you want to put your hand up and go, ‘Yeah, I’m over here. I’m struggling massively.’ There’s still that stigma involved with it.

Read more:
What Olympic athletes can teach us about regulating our emotions and staying dedicated

What can be done to help athletes transition?

So what can be done to help athletes? The Australian Institute of Sport established a mental health referral network in 2018, with over 50 mental health practitioners now providing confidential support to elite athletes in areas of psychology, psychiatry, neuropsychology and nutrition.

Our study suggests some athletes may still struggle to reach out for this sort of help, and having mental health professionals check in with them for a significant period of time after the games is crucial, too.

Athletes must also work on building an identity outside of sport that they can then immerse themselves in at the end of their careers or a competitive cycle. This is also something Australian sporting organisations are now striving to support.

For the rest of us, the general public and media should be empathetic and supportive of our Olympians. Social media abuse of athletes is on the rise, particularly for women and racial minorities, as we sadly saw with Biles’ experience during the Tokyo Games.

Given we know significant psychological distress is common following the Olympics, it’s critical to be compassionate, respectful and supportive towards those who do us proud on the biggest stage.

Andrew Bennie received funding from the Australian Olympic Committee for the research published in this article.

Courtney Walton 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. ‘When you get home it’s really lonely’: new research shows how athletes cope with post-Olympic life – https://theconversation.com/when-you-get-home-its-really-lonely-new-research-shows-how-athletes-cope-with-post-olympic-life-163576

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Fletcher, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

If it goes ahead, the social insurance scheme currently being discussed behind closed doors would be the biggest change to New Zealand’s welfare system since the introduction of the accident compensation scheme in 1974.

That change took a royal commission, seven years’ debate and hard, considered work to prepare the ground.

This time, a small group of trade union officials, business representatives and public servants is busy developing a scheme that would introduce a two-tier benefit structure into the welfare system.

And it appears the government is only promising a discussion document once the shape of such a scheme is formulated. It’s expected this will present a single preferred social insurance policy option, no non-insurance alternatives, and a plan to have legislation passed before the next election.

Not much is known about what this might look like, beyond it being an “ACC-style” scheme. It would pay eligible people who meet the work history criteria and lose their jobs 80% of their previous earnings up to a cap for a period of six months or more (the ACC cap is currently NZ$130,911 per year).

What is clear, however, is a social insurance scheme (sometimes being referred to as a social unemployment insurance scheme) will almost certainly favour those with higher long-term incomes at the expense of those on the lowest incomes. Others, like many school leavers, sole parents and people with disabilities, won’t qualify at all.

Alternatives need to be considered

It also seems clear other solutions that avoid such inequities are not being seriously considered. This means the public will not be given an opportunity to ask basic questions, such as:

• what problems are intended to be solved by social unemployment insurance?

• what are the alternative options — including non-insurance options — for addressing these problems?

• what perverse incentives might the scheme create?

• would the money to be raised for the scheme be better spent on alleviating poverty and unfair outcomes in the current welfare system rather than a new, more generous, middle-class insurance system on top of the current one?

Read more:
Why New Zealand’s government cannot ignore major welfare reform report

The ‘wage scarring’ argument

Among the problems social insurance is claimed to solve is so-called “wage scarring”, where people who are made redundant find they experience a long-term drop in earnings once they return to work.

There is indeed evidence wage scarring occurs in New Zealand, and on average it may be higher here than in other OECD countries.

But wage scarring can occur for a number of reasons. There is also little evidence it is happening here due to unemployed workers having no unemployment insurance and therefore having to take low-paid jobs rather than spend more time looking for better paid work.

Read more:
Why reducing unemployment should have been a focus for NZ’s well-being budget

Moreover, if wage scarring is the issue, other more equitable solutions should also be considered.

For example, higher base benefit rates, combined with some individual entitlement — so a partner’s earnings are less likely to disqualify someone from receiving a benefit — would also go a long way to allowing laid-off workers to manage incomes while they look for jobs. This would also help other beneficiaries, including those currently penalised heavily for entering a relationship.

Compulsory redundancy paid by employers is another option.

The future of work

Another rationale offered relates to economic changes and the changing nature of work. There are two dimensions to this, and it is far from clear unemployment insurance is the best policy response to either.

The first involves structural economic change, including deliberate policy decisions to quit certain industries for environmental and climate-change reasons.

Such “just transitions” — out of harmful or declining industries towards a low emissions economy — are crucial. But they require far more than simply an insurance payout, even a generous one.

Just transitions need bespoke industry-wide packages that include support for multi-year trades and university training, assistance with the relocation costs and new housing — as well as income support.

Read more:
If New Zealand can radically reform its health system, why not do the same for welfare?

It would be highly inefficient and wasteful to provide an expensive, economy-wide social insurance scheme to meet the needs of specific industry transitions.

The second dimension is the commonly cited rise of insecure, temporary and gig-economy work. However, precarious and low-earning workers would almost certainly be better served by a well-functioning and generous benefit system than through insurance.

Many of the most insecure workers won’t even meet the eligibility requirement for insurance. Most of those who do will receive payouts considerably less than better paid workers, because payouts are linked to past wages.

Coping with economic shocks

Another argument used to justify the proposed scheme is the frequency of economic shocks and the fact many New Zealand workers are poorly safeguarded against them.

Protection against poverty and hardship caused by economic recessions was one of the driving motivations for the establishment of our welfare system in the 1930s. For many years, it proved largely effective in those aims. It could do so again.

Given economic downturns affect many who would not be covered by insurance, it’s far from obvious social unemployment insurance is a better policy solution than improved welfare for all who need it.

What’s more, as we learned from the COVID-19 experience, a very large economic shock requires a tailored response.

With COVID, the government — quite rightly — protected people with its wage subsidy scheme, which ensured most people retained their jobs post-lockdown. An insurance scheme may have provided some with more money in the short term — but only once they had been laid off.

Read more:
COVID-19 is predicted to make child poverty worse. Should NZ’s next government make temporary safety nets permanent?

Full discussion of all options needed

Social unemployment insurance would undoubtedly benefit some people. But a lot of the gains are likely to go to those with less need. Meanwhile others — including young new job entrants, insecure self-employed workers, sole parents and people with reduced work capacity due to disability — will gain much less, or even nothing.

Even after the government’s recent welfare increases, a large number of beneficiaries remain below the poverty line.

To forge ahead with developing an expensive insurance scheme before addressing those issues raises serious questions about the government’s commitment to equity and well-being.

Such a large and fundamental change should not happen without a full, transparent and open discussion of all the issues and all the alternatives.

Michael Fletcher 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. Why is New Zealand’s Labour government trying to push through a two-tier benefit system? – https://theconversation.com/why-is-new-zealands-labour-government-trying-to-push-through-a-two-tier-benefit-system-165615

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Denholm, Associate Professor, Melbourne Health

By some estimates, 2 billion people are now infected worldwide, and in 2019, around 1.4 million people died from it.

It’s a pandemic infection, spread through the air — but it’s not COVID. It’s tuberculosis (or TB). Yet we’re not in lockdown for it. And we’re not queuing up for a vaccine.

Some people call TB “the forgotten pandemic”. But our knowledge of one pandemic is helping us manage the other.

Read more:
Explainer: what is TB and am I at risk of getting it in Australia?

They’re similar in some ways …

TB is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium tuberculosis. And COVID is caused by SARS-CoV-2, a virus. They’re quite different microorganisms. But it’s easy for them to overlap in people’s minds.

Both TB and COVID are infectious diseases that generally affect the lungs. Both are passed between people mainly by aerosols, when infected people cough, sing or otherwise release them into the surrounding air.

So some of the things we’re used to doing for COVID-19 – like wearing masks and good ventilation – also work for preventing the spread of TB.

However, there are some important differences between them, which mean our public health responses can look quite different.

Read more:
‘Kissing can be dangerous’: how old advice for TB seems strangely familiar today

… but not in others

We are all so familiar with COVID. So when I’m talking with people about TB, I’ve started highlighting three key differences between the infections.

1. TB is less infectious

TB is much less infectious. While COVID (especially strains like the Delta variant) may be transmitted after brief or “fleeting” contact, this is rare for TB.

As a rule of thumb, TB programs around the world often suggest you need to be in close contact with an infectious person for more than eight hours before that risk builds up to the point where you need to be tested for it.

This means people are more likely to spread the infection within their household or immediate family rather than at the shops.

2. TB symptoms take longer to show up

With TB, the “window” between being exposed and becoming unwell, known as the incubation period, is much longer.

Infections can stay dormant (or “latent”) in the body for many months or years before people become unwell. But almost everyone who becomes unwell with COVID has been infected within the past two weeks.

We don’t ask contacts of TB to isolate at home as we can’t predict when they might become unwell. It certainly wouldn’t be ethical or realistic to isolate people for months or years, just in case. Fortunately, people who have dormant TB cannot pass infection on to others in the meantime.

3. We have TB treatments to help curb the spread

As we’re uncertain about how long it takes between someone becoming infected and becoming unwell with TB, you’d think that would be a big problem.

But we have effective treatments to give people with dormant TB. These help prevent them developing active disease.

These treatments, particularly antibiotics such as isoniazid or rifampicin, can greatly reduce the risk of contacts becoming sick.

For COVID, we don’t yet have any treatments for people who are infected but who are not showing symptoms (known as post-exposure treatments) to minimise the chance of them spreading the virus.

Some have been tried, but so far none have convincingly been shown to be effective.

How about vaccines?

Perhaps the biggest difference in our response to these pandemics is we have a variety of effective vaccines against COVID.

For TB, we are relying on a 100-year-old vaccine, known as BCG (short for Bacille Calmette-Guerin), which is still one of the most widely used vaccines globally.

While it protects young children from the most severe forms of TB, the vaccine seems to give much less protection for adults.

The BCG vaccine, unlike COVID vaccines, is a live vaccine, meaning it contains live (but weakened) bacteria. So it can’t be given safely to people with immune suppressing conditions, like HIV, because they could get infected from it. This means its use is limited in some people who most need protection.

TB vaccine may protect against COVID

Perhaps the BCG vaccine and COVID will come full circle. The BRACE trial, launched from Melbourne’s Murdoch Children’s Research Institute, is studying whether the BCG vaccine might protect against COVID infection.

This investigation has been prompted by a long history of research showing the vaccine also improves our immune responses to other conditions such as viral infections.

We don’t know yet whether this will work, as the study is ongoing. Almost 7,000 health-care workers around the world at risk of COVID exposure have been recruited to the trial.

Read more:
Could BCG, a 100-year-old vaccine for tuberculosis, protect against coronavirus?

Whether or not BCG turns out to prevent COVID, there’s no question we need new and more effective vaccines for TB.

While we have an increasing number of potential vaccine candidates, right now there is still no alternative to our 100-year-old BCG.

The massive amount of activity globally in developing COVID vaccines has also stimulated calls for greater efforts and funding to develop new TB vaccines.

We hope these will lead to more effective and safer options, and be powerful tools for eliminating TB. Let’s hope we’re not left waiting another 100 years.

Read more:
Tuberculosis kills as many people each year as COVID-19. It’s time we found a better vaccine

Justin Denholm is the Medical Director of the Victorian Tuberculosis Program.

– ref. Tuberculosis, the forgotten pandemic relying on a 100-year-old vaccine – https://theconversation.com/tuberculosis-the-forgotten-pandemic-relying-on-a-100-year-old-vaccine-165303

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nerilie Abram, Chief Investigator for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes; Deputy Director for the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, Australian National University

The much-awaited new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is due later today. Ahead of the release, debate has erupted about the computer models at the very heart of global climate projections.

Climate models are one of many tools scientists use to understand how the climate changed in the past and what it will do in future.

A recent article in the eminent US magazine Science questioned how the IPCC will deal with some climate models which “run hot”. Some models, it said, have projected global warming rates “that most scientists, including the model makers themselves, believe are implausibly fast”.

Read more:
Monday’s IPCC report is a really big deal for climate change. So what is it? And why should we trust it?

Some commentators, including in Australia, interpreted the article as proof climate modelling had failed.

So should we be using climate models? We are climate scientists from Australia’s Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes, and we believe the answer is a firm yes.

Our research uses and improves climate models so we can help Australia cope with extreme events, now and in future. We know when climate models are running hot or cold. And identifying an error in some climate models doesn’t mean the science has failed – in fact, it means our understanding of the climate system has advanced.

So lets look at what you should know about climate models ahead of the IPCC findings.

What are climate models?

Climate models comprise millions of lines of computer code representing the physics and chemistry of the processes that make up our climate system. The models run on powerful supercomputers and have simulated and predicted global warming with remarkable accuracy.

They unequivocally show that warming of the planet since the Industrial Revolution is due to human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases. This confirms our understanding of the greenhouse effect, known since the 1850s.

Models also show the intensity of many recent extreme weather events around the world would be essentially impossible without this human influence.

Scientists do not use climate models in isolation, or without considering their limitations.

For a few years now, scientists have known some new-generation climate models probably overestimate global warming, and others underestimate it.

This realisation is based on our understanding of Earth’s climate sensitivity – how much the climate will warm when carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in the atmosphere double.

Before industrial times, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere were 280 parts per million. So a doubling of CO₂ will occur at 560 parts per million. (For context, we’re currently at around 415 parts per million).

The latest scientific evidence, using observed warming, paleoclimate data and our physical understanding of the climate system, suggests global average temperatures will very likely increase by between 2.2℃ and 4.9℃ if CO₂ levels double.

The large majority of climate models run within this climate sensitivity range. But some don’t – instead suggesting a temperature rise as low as 1.8℃ or high as 5.6℃.

It’s thought the biases in some models stem from the representations of clouds and their interactions with aerosol particles. Researchers are beginning to understand these biases, building our understanding of the climate system and how to further improve models in future.

With all this in mind, scientists use climate models cautiously, giving more weight to projections from climate models that are consistent with other scientific evidence.

The following graph shows how most models are within the expected climate sensitivity range – and having some running a bit hot or cold doesn’t change the overall picture of future warming. And when we compare model results with the warming we’ve already observed over Australia, there’s no indication the models are over-cooking things.

What does the future look like?

Future climate projections are produced by giving models different possibilities for greenhouse gas concentrations in our atmosphere.

The latest IPCC models use a set of possibilities called “Shared Socioeconomic Pathways” (SSPs). These pathways match expected population growth, and where and how people will live, with plausible levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases that would result from these socioeconomic choices.

The pathways range from low-emission scenarios that also require considerable atmospheric CO₂ removal – giving the world a reasonable chance of meeting the Paris Agreement targets – to high-emission scenarios where temperature goals are far exceeded.

Ahead of the IPCC report, some say the high-emission scenarios are too pessimistic. But likewise, it could be argued the lack of climate action over the past decade, and absence of technology to remove large volumes of CO₂ from the atmosphere, means low-emission scenarios are too optimistic.

If countries meet their existing emissions reduction commitments under the Paris Agreement, we can expect to land somewhere in the middle of the scenarios. But the future depends on our choices, and we shouldn’t dismiss any pathway as implausible.

There is considerable value in knowing both the future risks to avoid, and what’s possible under ambitious climate action.

Read more:
The climate won’t warm as much as we feared – but it will warm more than we hoped

Where to from here?

We can expect the IPCC report to be deeply worrying. And unfortunately, 30 years of IPCC history tells us the findings are more likely to be too conservative than too alarmist.

An enormous global effort – both scientifically and in computing resources – is needed to ensure climate models can provide even better information.

Climate models are already phenomenal tools at large scales. But increasingly, we’ll need them to produce fine-scale projections to help answer questions such as: where to plant forests to mitigate carbon? Where to build flood defences? Where might crops best be grown? Where would renewable energy resources be best located?

Climate models will continue to be an important tool for the IPCC, policymakers and society as we attempt to manage the unavoidable risks ahead.

Nerilie Abram receives funding from the Australian Research Council through the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and from the Department of Agriculture, Water and Environment. She is a member of the international Climate Crisis Advisory Group.

Andrew King receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Andy Pitman receives funding from the Australian Research Council through the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and from the ARC Discovery Grants scheme.

Christian Jakob receives receives funding from the Australian Research Council through the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes and from the ARC Discovery Grants scheme.

Julie Arblaster receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the U.S. Department of Energy

Lisa Alexander receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Shayne McGregor receives funding from Australian Research Council.

Steven Sherwood receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Yes, a few climate models give unexpected predictions – but the technology remains a powerful tool – https://theconversation.com/yes-a-few-climate-models-give-unexpected-predictions-but-the-technology-remains-a-powerful-tool-165611

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Margaret Kristin Merga, Honorary Adjunct, University of Newcastle; Senior Lecturer in Education, Edith Cowan University

Parents at a loss to find activities for their children during COVID lockdowns can encourage them to escape into a book. New research shows how reading books can help young people escape from their sources of stress, find role models in characters and develop empathy.

Recent media reports have highlighted a concerning rise in severe emotional distress in young people. Isolation and disruption of learning in lockdown have increased their anxiety. Given the recent surge in COVID-19 cases and lockdowns in Australia, parents and educators may look to connect young people with enjoyable activities that also support both their well-being and learning.

A lot has been written about the role of regular reading in building literacy skills. Now, my findings from a BUPA Foundation-funded research project on school libraries and well-being provide insight into how books and reading can help young people deal with the well-being challenges of the pandemic.

The findings suggest books can not only be a great escape during this challenging time, but also offer further well-being benefits.

Escaping from a world of stress

We know that adults who are avid readers enjoy being able to escape into their books. Reading for pleasure can reduce psychological distress and has been related to mental well-being.

Reading-based interventions have been used successfully to support children who have experienced trauma. In a recent study, around 60% of young people agreed reading during lockdown helped them to feel better.

My research project confirms young people can use books and reading to escape the pressures of their lives. As one student said:

“If you don’t know what to do, or if you’re sad, or if you’re angry, or whatever the case is, you can just read, and it feels like you’re just escaping the world. And you’re going into the world of the book, and you’re just there.”

Connecting with role models in characters

If you enjoy reading, there’s a good chance you have favourite characters who hold a place in your heart. The project found young people can find role models in books to look up to and emulate, which can help to build their resilience. A student described her experience reading the autobiography of young Pakistani activist and Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai:

“I thought it was incredible how no matter what happened to her, even after her horrific injury, she just came back and kept fighting for what she believed in.”

Read more:
Nobel Peace Prize: extraordinary Malala a powerful role model

Other research has linked connecting with characters to mental health recovery, partly due to its power to instil hope in the reader. Building relationships with characters in books can also be used as “self-soothing” to decrease anxiety.

Young people also celebrate their affection for book characters in social networking spaces such as TikTok, where they share their enjoyment of the book journey with favourite characters.

Developing empathy through reading

Research supports the idea that reading books builds empathy. Reading fiction can improve social cognition, which helps us to connect with others across our lives. My previous work with adult readers found some people read for the pleasure they get from developing insight into other perspectives, to “see the world through other people’s eyes”.

In the project, a student described how reading books helped him to understand others’ perspectives. He explained:

“You get to see in their input, and then you go, ‘Well, actually, they’re not the bad guy. Really, the other guy is, it’s just their point of view makes it seem like the other guy’s the bad guy.’ ”

Your teacher librarian can help you

If parents are not sure what books will best suit their child’s often ever-changing interests and needs, they can get in touch with the teacher librarians at school. Even during lockdown they are usually only an email or a phone call away.

The library managers in the project played an important role in connecting students with books that could lead to enjoyable and positive reading experiences.

For example, a library manager explained that she specifically built her collection to make sure the books provided role model characters for her students. She based her recommendations to students on their interests as well as their needs. To support a student who had a challenging home life, she said,

“I recommend quite a number of books where we’ve got a very strong female character […] in a number of adverse situations and where she navigates her way through those.”

Fostering reading for pleasure is a key part of the role of the teacher librarian. They create spaces and opportunities for students to read in peace. They also encourage them to share recommendations with their peers.

In challenging times, many parents are looking for an activity that supports their children’s well-being. And as reading is also linked to strong literacy benefits, connecting them with books, with the support of their teacher librarian, is a smart way to go.

Margaret Kristin Merga has received funding from the BUPA Health Foundation, the Ian Potter Foundation, the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, Edith Cowan University and the Collier Foundation. She is the current Patron of the Australian School Library Association.

– ref. Books offer a healing retreat for youngsters caught up in a pandemic – https://theconversation.com/books-offer-a-healing-retreat-for-youngsters-caught-up-in-a-pandemic-165247

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charles Livingstone, Associate Professor, School of Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Monash University

Crown Resorts was very sorry it had done so many wrong things in running its Melbourne casino, the company’s
senior counsel, Michael Borsky, last week told Victoria’s Finkelstein royal commission.

But his main point was to argue that Crown should keep running the casino, because cancelling or suspending its licence would not be in the public interest.

His submissions — responding to the arguments made by the counsel assisting the commission, Adrian Finanzio, for why Crown should be stripped of its licence — emphasised allowing the company to get on with reforming as the best course of action. At worst, Borsky argued, an independent supervisor or monitor with broad powers could be be appointed to direct the company’s activities.

Crown’s spin is that the public interest is mostly about maintaining the employment of the 11,600 people who work at the sprawling Melbourne casino and entertainment complex. It argues Victoria’s tourism industry would be endangered, should the licence be lost, and it is important to keep the revenue the casino provides to Victoria’s treasury flowing.

But based on the evidence, this seems a very optimistic take.

The commission has heard a litany of revelations about Crown’s malfeasance and improper conduct across a range of areas.

Last month royal commissioner Ray Finkelstein observed that everywhere he looked in the company there was evidence of inappropriate or unlawful behaviour. Last week he compared Crown Resorts to a car thief who promises to stop stealing cars when apprehended. He suggested it was certainly not in the public interest for a decade of malfeasance to be rewarded.

Read more:
Responsible gambling – a bright shining lie Crown Resorts and others can no longer hide behind

Finkelstein’s options

Several paths are open to Finkelstein. He can recommend Crown Resorts lose its licence. He could recommend the company be granted some further opportunity to rehabilitate itself. Perhaps under supervision. A manager could be appointed until Crown achieves its reform agenda, or the business is sold. Some combination of all these might be possible.

But on the prospect of Crown reforming itself, Finanzio made the case that Crown could never again be trusted.

Read more:
Illegal, improper, unacceptable: revelations about Crown’s casino culture just get worse

The inevitability of any of the dire consequences painted by Crown if it loses its casino licence is also a question Finkelstein has kept open. Someone else might operate the casino, he has suggested. Given the profitability of the casino, why wouldn’t someone else want it?

But Crown doesn’t have much else to argue for why it should be allowed keep its casino licence.

It began spruiking these arguments to the state government more than a month ago, in a July 2 letter to the Victorian minister for gaming. That letter has been interpreted by Finkelstein and others as an attempt to short-circuit the royal commission’s findings.

Indeed, the whole point of the casino is to contribute to Victoria, as successive governments have argued.

So what, exactly, is this contribution?

What Crown Melbourne gives …

In 2018-19 (Crown’s last “normal” year of operation) ABS data shows the Melbourne casino contributed $268 million in gambling taxes to Victoria’s tax revenue. This amounts to 0.8% of state tax revenue (which was $29.2 billion in that year).

Overall, gambling taxes contributed 8.4% of state tax revenue. Poker machine gambling in pubs and clubs contributed 3.8% ($1.12 billion).

Crown Melbourne employs about 11,600 people. That’s about 0.32% of Victoria’s 3.45 million employes as of March 2021. It contributes about $30 million of the total $6.3 billion the state collects in payroll taxes. That’s about 0.45% of total payroll taxes, about 0.1% of total state tax revenue.

Thus, at the upper range, Crown contributes about 0.9% of state tax revenue.

… and what it takes

Of course 11,600 jobs are significant, as is $300 million a year in taxes.

But what is also significant is Crown’s disproportionate contribution to the $7 billion in annual costs attributable to gambling harm in Victoria.

The casino also significantly contributes to the 36,000 Victorians who are, at any one time, directly affected by serious gambling problems, and to the estimated 216,000 children, partners, employers and others connected to those gamblers who also suffer significant harm.

If Crown were to be placed into independent management, no one need lose their job — with the possible exception of a few board members and executives — and revenue would continue flowing to the state.

Business as usual is not an option

Whatever happens, business as usual at the casino cannot continue.

If effective responsible gambling interventions are put in place and properly observed, revenue will inevitably decline. If Crown’s permit to operate 1,000 “unlimited” poker machines is withdrawn or reduced (as it should be), revenue will decline. If it goes cashless and eliminates indoor smoking, revenue will decline. If criminal syndicates can no longer use the casino to launder money, revenue will decline.

These impacts are the least that can be expected from a reasonable review of casino operating practices in Victoria. A new operator may also impose their own operational requirements, and look to reduce the workforce.

Crown is not and has never been a magic pudding, producing something from nothing. What it has done is transfer large sums to shareholders from many ordinary people (and a few, often criminally connected, high rollers).

The consequences of this have been considerable, in harm to gamblers and their families, to the integrity of Australia’s attempts to stop criminals laundering money, and to stamping out political corruption.

Read more:
How Sydney’s Barangaroo tower paved the way for a culture of closed-door deals

Whatever the royal commission recommends, the profitability of the casino will be affected, with consequences for the jobs and tax revenue it provides.

But the gains — involving a reduction in gambling harm, a strengthening of the rule of law, and the reinforcement of effective regulatory systems — are worth a great deal more.

Charles Livingstone has received funding from the Victorian Responsible Gambling Foundation, the (former) Victorian Gambling Research Panel, and the South Australian Independent Gambling Authority (the funds for which were derived from hypothecation of gambling tax revenue to research purposes), from the Australian and New Zealand School of Government and the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education, and from non-government organisations for research into multiple aspects of poker machine gambling, including regulatory reform, existing harm minimisation practices, and technical characteristics of gambling forms. He has received travel and co-operation grants from the Alberta Problem Gambling Research Institute, the Finnish Institute for Public Health, the Finnish Alcohol Research Foundation, the Ontario Problem Gambling Research Committee, and the Problem Gambling Foundation of New Zealand. He was a Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council funded project researching mechanisms of influence on government by the tobacco, alcohol and gambling industries. He has undertaken consultancy research for local governments and non-government organisations in Australia and the UK seeking to restrict or reduce the concentration of poker machines and gambling impacts, and was a member of the Australian government’s Ministerial Expert Advisory Group on Gambling in 2010-11. He is a member of the Australian Greens.

– ref. Crown Resorts is not too big to fail. It has failed already – https://theconversation.com/crown-resorts-is-not-too-big-to-fail-it-has-failed-already-165659

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ruth McHugh-Dillon, Lecturer in European Languages (Spanish and Latin American Studies), Monash University

If you haven’t heard of Nada, one of the most important European novels of the 20th century, you’re not alone.

Written in a few short months by Carmen Laforet, it was originally published in Spain in 1944 to immediate acclaim. It won a wide readership and Spain’s inaugural Premio Nadal, now the country’s most prestigious literary prize. Yet Nada took more than 80 years to appear in English translation.

A classic in Spanish, it is still shamefully under-read in English.

In the 20th century, Spanish-language literature was dominated by groundbreaking international names from Latin America such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes.

Several of these writers credit Nada with forcing them to reconsider writing from Spain. Until belatedly discovering Laforet’s novel, Vargas Llosa writes, he had believed “everything over there reeked of fustiness, sacristy and Francoism”.

The atmospheric and cruel Nada overturned this verdict. Laforet’s achievement is remarkable, given her age (just 23 when she wrote Nada) and the challenges she faced as a woman to overcome the sexist bias of her time and secure her place in the literary canon.

Even now, analysis frequently emphasises the autobiographical or semi-autobiographical elements of the novel, diminishing its feat of extraordinary imagination.

A family drama

Nada centres on Andrea, an orphan who arrives in Barcelona aged 18, to stay with relatives she hasn’t seen for years. Escaping to Barcelona to study literature has long been her dream. But the city Andrea encounters resembles nothing of her happy childhood memories.

Once glorious, Barcelona is now defeated and dilapidated, “its silence vivid with the respiration of a thousand souls behind darkened balconies”. Arriving at her grandparents’ crumbling apartment, Andrea enters “what seemed like a nightmare”: a ragged array of relatives teetering between madness and starvation.

Andrea’s grandfather is dead and the household is under the command of her authoritarian aunt, Angustias, who promises to “mould” Andrea into obedience. Every day, the same violent dramas recur. Andrea’s arrogant artistic uncle Román goads his hot-headed brother, Juan, usually about his “piece of trash” wife, Gloria, who Román claims is obsessed with him.

If Gloria gets involved, Juan turns on her. Juan can be found either beating Gloria or painting bad nudes of her to sell for a pittance. Andrea’s tiny, tremulous grandmother tries to keep the peace, recalling how “there were never two brothers who loved each other […] like Román and Juanito”. The scowling maid, Antonia, lurks in the shadows with her dog, relishing the violence.

Censorship and stagnation after the Civil War

Nada, which in Spanish means “nothing”, emerged in one of the darkest and most stagnant periods of Spanish history.

For many Spaniards — already exhausted from the brutal Civil War that ripped the country apart between 1936 and 1939 — their worst nightmare had become a crushing, everyday reality. The dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, whose rebel armies had ultimately vanquished the left-wing Republicans, would drag on until his death in 1975.

While the rest of Europe was beginning to emerge from the nightmare of the second world war, by the mid-1940s Spain was settling into one of its bleakest periods. These early years of Franco’s regime are known in Spain as “the hunger years”.

It was in these hunger years Laforet wrote Nada. Andrea recalls how “[the] hunger I almost didn’t feel because it was chronic” weakens her will, making her irritable and unfocused. Sniffing around the kitchen, she drinks cold, leftover vegetable stock.

Bedbugs infest the rooms and characters have discoloured teeth; Gloria’s baby almost dies from pneumonia, a sickness of the undernourished. These are up-close glimpses of the severe deprivations that, as historian Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco argues, Franco used to consolidate his power.

Under Franco, literary works were subject to strict censorship enforcing conservative values and the fascist narrative of the Civil War. As sometimes happens to art made in restricted circumstances, the social and political critiques embedded within Laforet’s novel are all the more remarkable given her creative play with what can and cannot be said directly.

Read more:
Franco’s invisible legacy: books across the hispanic world are still scarred by his censorship

Apart from scattered references to the war, the political situation is rarely named. Yet the atmosphere is oppressive: walls ooze with damp, blinds are drawn against the daylight. Even the air itself is heavy. Family life is a gothic nightmare, replicated behind a thousand “darkened balconies” in Barcelona and beyond.

This apartment and the others like it, are haunted houses inhabited by the ghosts of past violence — but also by its survivors. Civil wars turn neighbour against neighbour, brother against brother. As they attempt to live side-by-side, the apparently intractable conflict between Juan and Román shows how violence can be subdued or domesticated, yet still bubbles beneath the surface.

Gloria now views her joy at the end of the war as naïve:

How could I imagine what came afterwards? It was like the end of the novel. Like the end of all sadness.

With Nada, Laforet wrote the novel of what happens after: when the conflict ends but life continues.

A transcendent story of longing and desire

As a work of art, one of Nada’s triumphs is how it transcends this bleak and repressive atmosphere without ignoring it. Laforet’s novel offers compelling testimony of Spain’s post-war hunger years. But it is not a documentary. The novel’s compassionate portrayal of Andrea and its black humour draw the reader into a story that is unsentimental but deeply human: an impatient young woman, learning how to be in the world.

For Andrea, the only reprieve from the suffocating apartment is university. There, she makes friends with people her own age, who provide comfort away from the “ghostly world of older people”.

The divide begins to blur, however, when her wealthy and magnetic friend, Ena, becomes drawn to Andrea’s uncle Román. Having already bewitched Gloria and the maid Antonia, Román’s predatory circling of Ena penetrates Andrea’s private world and threatens her most meaningful relationship.

Andrea’s relationship with Ena is charged with intense desire. She is drawn to Ena’s “pleasant, sensual face” and “terrible eyes” glittering with intelligence. Embraced by her friend’s family, Andrea must also endure the pain of watching Ena entertain her many male admirers. This, along with Andrea’s fascinated descriptions of Gloria’s naked body, has led to queer readings of the novel and its protagonist.

Named or unnamed, straight or queer, there is no doubt a deep sexuality surges beneath the novel’s surface. Angustias’s obsession with modesty, and her warnings Andrea stay away from Gloria, “an inappropriate woman”, represent the anxiety around sexual agency and transgression in Franco’s Spain.

Spanish culture before, during and after the dictatorship has challenged Franco’s repressive ideology. Written before the Civil War, Federico García Lorca’s play The House of Bernarda Alba (1936) also uses an authoritarian matriarch in the family home to explore repression and sexual freedom.

After Franco’s death, the Movida movement exploded in a riotous celebration of sexuality and transgression, on display in Pedro Almódovar’s many films.

Nada sits in between, passionate but understated, escaping the censors with a story of human longing, frustration and hope. Like all classics, it will be read, reread and given new context. Today, Andrea’s anguish at being trapped inside, waiting for life to begin, will speak to many.

Read more:
Pain and Glory: Pedro Almodóvar’s latest movie is as much self-therapy as it is self-portrait

Ruth McHugh-Dillon 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. Guide to the Classics: Carmen Laforet’s Nada captures longing and desire in post-war Spain – https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-carmen-laforets-nada-captures-longing-and-desire-in-post-war-spain-164495

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Karoly, Chief Research Scientist, CSIRO

On Monday, an extremely important report on the physical science of climate change will be released to the world. Produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the report will give world leaders the most up-to-date information about climate change to inform their policies.

It is an enormous undertaking, and has been a long time coming.

This report is the culmination of a marathon five-year assessment, writing, review and approval process from 234 leading scientists hailing from more than 60 countries. These scientists have worked together to rigorously evaluate the world’s climate change research papers — more than 14,000 of them.

I’ve been involved with the IPCC reports in multiple roles since 1997. For this current report, I was a review editor for one of the chapters.

This IPCC assessment report is the sixth overall, and the first since 2013. A lot has changed since then, from major governments setting ambitious climate targets, to the devastating floods, fires and heatwaves across the world.

So what is the IPCC is and why does this report matter so much? And given the report is commissioned and approved by national governments, should we trust it?

What is the IPCC?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was first established in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization. Their aim was to provide policymakers with regular and comprehensive scientific assessments on climate change, at a time when climate change was becoming a more mainstream concern around the world.

These reports assess the scientific basis of climate change, its impacts and future risks, and options for adaptation and mitigation. They’re required to be policy-relevant yet policy-neutral. They contain findings, and state the confidence with which the finding is made, but do not recommend action.

The first assessment was completed in 1990, and found

emissions resulting from human activities are substantially increasing the concentrations of […] carbon dioxide [and other greenhouse gases]. These increases will enhance the greenhouse effect, resulting on average in an additional warming of the Earth’s surface.

Since then, new assessment cycles have been completed every five to seven years.

The overall assessment — the Sixth Assessment Report — is divided into three main parts. Monday’s report is the first part on the physical science basis for climate change, and was delayed by almost a year due to COVID restrictions.

The next two parts will be released in 2022. One will cover the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability of, for example, people, ecosystems, agriculture, cities, and more. The other will cover the economics and mitigation of climate change.

The Sixth Assessment Report will culminate in a synthesis report, combining the first three parts, in September 2022.

What will we learn?

The report will provide the most updated and comprehensive understanding of the climate system and climate change, both now and into the future. For that reason, it’s relevant to everyone: individuals, communities, businesses and all levels of government.

Read more:
Climate explained: how the IPCC reaches scientific consensus on climate change

It will tell us how fast carbon dioxide emissions have been rising, and where they’re coming from. It’ll also tell us how global temperatures and rainfall patterns have changed, and how they are expected to change this century, with associated confidence levels.

Compared to the previous report in 2013, this report puts greater emphasis on regional climate change, on changes in extreme events, and how these events are linked to human-caused climate change.

This greater emphasis on extreme events at regional scales makes it even more important to policy makers and the public.

In recent months the world has watched in horror as heatwaves, bushfires and floods toppled homes and buildings, killing hundreds across China, Europe and North America. The report will help put disasters like these in the context of climate change, noting that similar events are expected to be more frequent and severe in a warming world.

The report also examines the effects of different levels of global warming, such as 1.5℃ and 2℃. It also looks at when such warming is likely to be reached.

Read more:
5 things to watch for in the latest IPCC report on climate science

Why should I trust it?

The scope of each IPCC report is prepared by scientists and approved by representatives of all governments. The 234 scientists who wrote the report are selected based on their expertise, and represent as many countries as possible.

The reports go through multiple stages of drafting and review. The first draft of the current report had more than 23,000 review comments from experts. Each comment received an individual response.

The second draft had more than 50,000 review comments from experts and governments, and these guided the preparation of the final draft.

You may be thinking that the IPCC reports should not be trusted because they involve government inputs and approval. However, this is probably one of their strengths. Involving government representatives ensures the reports are relevant to the policy interests of all governments.

Indeed, the multi-stage review and revision process used for the IPCC reports has been used as a model for international assessments of other scientific topics.

Can I read it?

The report will be released and free to read at 6pm Australian Eastern Standard time (10am Paris time) on Monday. But each chapter in the final report will be more than 100 pages long in a small font, so few people will read it all.

The most accessible part of the report is its Summary for Policymakers, aimed at a general readership and drafted by the expert authors.

The approval meeting for this report has been taking place over the last two weeks in Paris, as a video conference meeting of government representatives. The meeting approves each chapter, but most time is spent considering and approving the Summary for Policymakers.

Read more:
Top climate scientist: I put myself through hell as an IPCC convening lead author, but it was worth it

Every line in this summary is considered separately, comments from government representatives are considered, and changes must be approved by consensus of all governments. Sometimes reaching consensus can take a long time.

It’s clear the IPCC brings the best of global science together. It’s vital that governments keep the findings of this report front of mind in their decision-making, if the world is to avoid the worst-case climate scenarios.

David Karoly is employed in CSIRO and was Leader of the Earth Sciences and Climate Change Hub in the National Environmental Science Program, which received funding from the Australian government until it closed in June 2021.
David was a Review Editor in the IPCC 6th Assessment Report Working Group 1 chapter 12 and received travel funding from the Australian government to travel to one IPCC Lead Author Meeting in 2019.

– ref. Monday’s IPCC report is a really big deal for climate change. So what is it? And why should we trust it? – https://theconversation.com/mondays-ipcc-report-is-a-really-big-deal-for-climate-change-so-what-is-it-and-why-should-we-trust-it-165614

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

This piece is part of a new series in collaboration with the ABC’s Saturday Extra program. Each week, the show will have a “who am I” quiz for listeners about influential figures who helped shape the 20th century, and we will publish profiles for each one. You can read the other pieces in the series here.

Jawaharlal Nehru was not just the architect of modern India and the country’s first prime minister. He also played a central role in the discrediting of European imperialism and gave a voice to people across Asia and Africa struggling for self-determination and racial equality.

An unlikely revolutionary, Nehru was born in 1889 into wealth and privilege. His father was a Kashmiri, a high caste Brahmin and a successful barrister, able to fund the best education for the young Jawaharlal the British system could offer.

After attending Harrow School and Cambridge University, Nehru, too, became a lawyer and could easily have settled into a comfortable life.

Instead, Nehru was swept by the enigmatic Mahatma Gandhi into the campaign against British rule in India. For the next 25 years, he dressed in homespun cotton, endured long terms in prison and campaigned relentlessly for the cause.

Successes and failures

Once the British were overthrown and he rose to power, Nehru quickly set about ensuring his vast, impoverished and hugely diverse country was governed by democratically elected leaders and the rule of law.

In parallel, he tried to make India economically self-reliant, so that it could no longer be exploited or manipulated by foreign powers.

Perhaps inevitably, given the scale of the challenges involved, the results of these efforts were mixed.

Nehru’s hopes for a peaceful transition from British rule were dashed by the horrific violence that accompanied partition — the division of the British colony into the separate states of India and Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands died in clashes between Hindus and Muslims, and millions more were displaced and traumatised.

Nehru did succeed in the herculean effort of transforming India into a constitutional democracy, but his ambitious plans to modernise the economy proved harder to realise.

To be sure, India avoided mass famines like those that ravaged Bengal in mid-1940s and China during the so-called “Great Leap Forward” in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But most Indians did not see major improvements in their standard of living.

A vision for a post-colonial world

Where Nehru really shone was on the world stage. Urbane, well-read, charismatic and eloquent, he was convinced India had a special role to play in international politics, despite its poverty and relative weakness.

And to ensure that happened, Nehru served as his own foreign minister and ambassador-at-large.

Initially, Nehru’s principal concern was the struggle against European imperialism, especially in Asia. Britain, France and the Netherlands all reasserted control over their colonial possessions in the region after the second world war. In response, Nehru and Gandhi rallied anti-colonial leaders, holding the Asian Relations Conference in New Delhi in 1947 to chart the way forward for the continent.

Read more:
Gandhi is still relevant – and can inspire a new form of politics today

In Nehru’s view, Asia’s newly liberated or soon-to-be liberated states should show the world a different way to conduct international relations.

They need not be suspicious of each other’s intentions, nor greedy for each other’s territory, he argued. And they should not waste their scarce resources on building armies or atom bombs. Committed to social and economic development and to treating others with mutual respect, they could — and should — create a more just and peaceful world.

Nehru was highly adept in using new platforms like the United Nations and the global media to promote this vision. He delivered passionate speeches and charmed foreign journalists in long interviews.

He campaigned against nuclear weapons, calling in 1954 for the superpowers to halt their tests of increasingly destructive bombs. This paved the way for a partial ban on testing in 1963.

He called for an end to racial discrimination, most notably in South Africa. He also commissioned India’s diplomats to offer their services to mediate in a series of disputes, including the Korean war and France’s disastrous attempt to cling to its colonial possessions in Indochina.

The birth of non-alignment

Throughout, Nehru made the case for what became known as “non-alignment” — perhaps his greatest contribution to the 20th century world.

India and other post-colonial states, he argued, had no good reason to take sides in the Cold War and plenty of reasons to maintain cordial relations with both the US and Soviet Union.

Allying with one or the other was too costly and compromising. It brought obligations to build armies and fight distant wars. And it meant renouncing the ability to criticise your ally when it did things with which you disagreed.

Non-alignment annoyed Cold Warriors in both Moscow and Washington. But it proved popular elsewhere, especially among newly independent states.

It helped inspire a series of major meetings intended to promote African and Asian cooperation in the shadow of US-Soviet competition, including the Bandung Conference in 1955, as well as the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1970s.

Today, 120 states belong to the movement, though India’s interest in the bloc has waned as it has grown stronger and wealthier.

Read more:
The ‘Bandung Divide’: Australia’s lost opportunity in Asia?

Nehru’s greatest failure

Nehru helped delegitimise imperialism and usher in a new world no longer dominated by the Europe powers. He laid out principles that he hoped would encourage mutual respect in international relations – principles eagerly embraced, if not always followed, by other post-colonial leaders.

It is ironic, then, that arguably Nehru’s greatest failure – the one that irreparably tarnished his leadership and broke his health – concerned foreign policy.

Convinced China would abide by the “Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence” agreement it struck with India in the mid-1950s, Nehru failed to anticipate a military conflict over the long-disputed frontier. When Mao Zedong ordered a surprise attack in 1962, India’s forces were humiliated. And to Nehru’s dismay, neither the UN, nor the superpowers, intervened.

To critics, the Sino-Indian war exposed Nehru’s naivety and the limits of non-alignment. It compelled India to retrench and rearm, and laid bare his dream of an Asia free from “power politics”.

India has travelled far since Nehru’s time and left much of his legacy by the wayside. It now possesses the world’s second largest military – after China – and a nuclear arsenal. It has forged a strong security partnership with the United States.

But New Delhi still remains wary of alliances or anything that might compromise independence of voice or action. And it is as convinced today as when Nehru was in power that India is destined to play a special role in the world.

Ian Hall receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Jawaharlal Nehru’s vision for a just and equitable post-colonial world, with India leading the way – https://theconversation.com/jawaharlal-nehrus-vision-for-a-just-and-equitable-post-colonial-world-with-india-leading-the-way-156307

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Twomey, Professor of Constitutional Law, University of Sydney

When is a cabinet not a cabinet? When it is really an intergovernmental body that is pretending to be a cabinet so it can avoid transparency? Simply calling itself a “cabinet” is not enough to trigger an exemption in freedom of information legislation.

Justice Richard White this week so held in a proceeding before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal brought by Senator Rex Patrick.

What was the case about?

Patrick was seeking, through freedom of information (FOI), certain records of the “national cabinet” as well as documents concerning the formation and functioning of the cabinet. This would include its rules, how it makes decisions, whether any jurisdiction has a right of veto over its decisions, whether those decisions are binding, what conventions apply to it and whether its deliberations are recorded and transcribed.

The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) refused access to the records on the ground they were records of a committee of the federal cabinet and therefore exempt from disclosure.

Patrick successfully challenged this refusal in review proceedings before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Read more:
Morrison government loses fight for national cabinet secrecy

What is the ‘national cabinet’?

The national cabinet was established in March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, to replace the Council of Australian Governments (COAG). It is an intergovernmental body comprised of the political leaders of the Commonwealth, states and territories.

The national cabinet reaches agreed positions on matters of national and intergovernmental importance, so there can be some consistency and coordinated planning across the nation. But it leaves it to each jurisdiction to implement the agreed standards or principles in its own way.

What is meant by the term ‘cabinet’?

The Constitution does not refer to the cabinet or the prime minister, but it was always intended they exist. Their existence, however, is based on convention and an understanding of how the system of responsible government works.

Ministers advise the governor-general through the Federal Executive Council. But it is the cabinet (which at the federal level is a smaller group of senior ministers) that makes the important policy decisions.

Those decisions are given effect through the enactment of legislation or by formal acts of the governor-general (such as proclamations or regulations), or by public servants developing and administering the policies and programs of the government.

A critical element of a “cabinet” is that it derives its existence from, and is accountable to, parliament. This is a fundamental aspect of the principle of “responsible government”. Ministers are responsible to parliament for their actions as ministers. The lower house can hold the government to account for cabinet’s decisions by voting no confidence in it, forcing its resignation or an election.

Another important feature of a cabinet is that it makes collective decisions for which all members are equally responsible. To maintain this collective responsibility, records of who argued for and against a decision are kept strictly confidential for decades. Otherwise, ministers could absolve themselves of responsibility for government decisions by saying they did not support the decision at the time. If a minister fundamentally objects to a decision and is not prepared to support it publicly and be responsible to parliament for it, then he or she is, by convention, obliged to resign.

The convention of cabinet confidentiality applies to support this principle of collective ministerial responsibility.

Does calling something a ‘cabinet’ turn it into one?

Justice White rightly commented that the

mere use of the name ‘National Cabinet’ does not, of itself, have the effect of making a group of persons using the name a “committee of the Cabinet”. Nor does the mere labelling of a committee as a “Cabinet committee” have that effect.

He considered that a “committee of the cabinet” means a subgroup of the cabinet, and that the cabinet must be comprised of ministers who, according to the Constitution, must be members of parliament within three months of their appointment.

PM&C argued that any committee was a cabinet committee as long as the prime minister decided to establish it as such. Justice White called this argument “unsound”. He did not think the prime minister could change the statutory meaning of a cabinet committee simply by giving a committee that name.

In any case, he also concluded that neither the prime minister nor the federal cabinet created the national cabinet. It was instead established by resolution of COAG on March 13 2020.

Why is the ‘national cabinet’ not a federal ‘cabinet committee’ under FOI?

First, a cabinet and its committees are comprised, at least substantially, of ministers responsible to the one parliament or government. National cabinet is comprised of ministers responsible to different parliaments, governments and political parties. Only the prime minister is a member of both the national cabinet and the federal cabinet.

Another feature of a federal cabinet committee is that the prime minister appoints its members. In contrast, Justice White found that the members of the national cabinet were not appointed by the prime minister. They are members of national cabinet because of the offices they hold.

Federal cabinet committees derive their powers from the federal cabinet, have their decisions endorsed or overridden by that cabinet, and are ultimately subject its powers and directions. The national cabinet does not meet this description. Its decisions do not have to be endorsed by the federal cabinet and the federal cabinet cannot overrule them. National cabinet also addresses matters over which the federal cabinet has no authority or control.

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

What are the consequences?

The Commonwealth has 28 days to initiate an appeal of the decision. No doubt it will – even though the decision seems to be plainly correct. If the decision stands, it means Rex Patrick will be able to gain access to the national cabinet’s documents (unless other exemptions apply), increasing transparency about how it operates and the decisions it makes.

It will also remove a convenient method for the Commonwealth government to assert secrecy over anything it wants.

Finally, it should (but probably won’t) put an end to the government’s claims of cabinet confidentiality when parliamentary committees seek access to the documents of the national cabinet or any other dubiously established cabinet committees. If this were to happen, it would greatly enhance government accountability.

Anne Twomey has received funding from the Australian Research Council and occasionally does consultancy work for governments and inter-governmental bodies.

– ref. Nowhere to hide: the significance of national cabinet not being a cabinet – https://theconversation.com/nowhere-to-hide-the-significance-of-national-cabinet-not-being-a-cabinet-165671

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Wark, Conjoint Professor, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

We learned this week of the tragic death of a 27-year-old man from Sydney who had COVID-19. This follows a 38-year-old woman who died from the virus last month.

Throughout the current Delta outbreak in New South Wales, we’ve heard young people are making up a greater proportion of people in hospital compared with earlier in the pandemic. We’re seeing similar patterns overseas.

In NSW between June 13 and July 17, the 30-49 age group represented the highest number of COVID-19 hospitalisations, with 45 people in their 30s and 40s admitted (26% of total COVID hospitalisations). Some 13 people aged 49 and under were admitted to ICU, representing 36% of total ICU admissions, with the youngest just a teenager.

What’s behind this worrying trend? Is it the fact more older people are now vaccinated? Or perhaps the Delta variant is causing more severe disease in young people? It may well be a bit of both. Let’s take a look.

Older age is the biggest risk factor

As we learned about COVID-19 last year, it became clear the elderly were the most likely to get very sick. This is true of other infectious diseases too.

A review published late last year shows the steep rise of the infection fatality rate (the chance of dying from COVID-19 if you contract it) with increasing age:

• age 10 — 2 in 100,000
• age 25 — 1 in 10,000
• age 55 — 4 in 1,000
• age 65 — 14 in 1,000
• age 75 — 5 in 100
• age 85 — 15 in 100.

Read more:
Does anyone know what your wishes are if you’re sick and dying from coronavirus?

But younger people are more likely to be infected

People aged in their 20s have consistently made up a high proportion of COVID-19 cases in Australia and overseas. If we look at all cases of COVID recorded in Australia since the pandemic began, 20 to 29-year-olds account for the highest number (around 22% of total infections).

Reports indicate 67% of new cases recorded in NSW on Thursday were in people under 40.

Some people have proposed greater social contact among those under 40 explains the higher infection rates in this age group. But equally it’s been acknowledged this may reflect more widespread testing among younger people, greater shielding by older people (staying at home to reduce their risk of infection), and a failure to communicate important public health messages around social distancing to younger people probably contribute.

Whatever the reasons, while the risk of death from COVID-19 is low for younger people, it’s self-evident that if more younger people become infected then more will develop serious illness and die.

There are other risk factors for young people

Age is not the only factor that influences outcomes with COVID-19.

Having a chronic illness is associated with higher likelihood of more severe disease and death.

Being male and being obese also increase the risk of dying from COVID-19. Obesity may in fact add more significantly to the risk of serious disease in younger people.

Of course, none of these risk factors have to be present for a person to develop severe COVID-19.

Read more:
COVID-19 cases are highest in young adults. We need to partner with them for the health of the whole community

For younger people who are unwell enough to be hospitalised with COVID-19, the outcomes can be quite serious. A large study from the United Kingdom showed 27% of 19 to 29-year-olds admitted to hospital suffered some form of organ damage to the liver, lungs or kidneys — any of which can lead to permanent disability.

A separate study showed 14% of patients under 40 admitted to ICU died, compared with 31% across all ages.

There is evidence COVID-19 can be associated with sudden deterioration and death in people who seem to be OK, presumably from damage to the heart and sudden cardiac arrest. This phenomenon is very rare at any age.

And younger people are certainly not spared from “long COVID”. A recent Norwegian study looked at people aged 16-30 who had COVID-19 but hadn’t needed hospital treatment. It found after six months, 52% had persistent symptoms including loss of taste or smell, fatigue, breathlessness or impaired concentration.

The Delta variant

While more people are being vaccinated every day, at the same time, the virus is changing. Most recently we’ve seen the rapid global spread of the Delta variant, which is behind Australia’s current outbreaks.

Delta is estimated to be 60% more transmissible compared to the Alpha variant, and may be up to twice as likely to lead to hospitalisation.

The Delta variant also seems more likely to infect younger people. In the UK it’s thought to now be spreading through schools more than any other setting. Last year, school transmission was relatively rare.

There’s been concern in Europe infection with the Delta variant may be leading to a greater proportion of younger people being hospitalised and treated in intensive care compared to earlier in the pandemic. Data from Switzerland show people being admitted to ICU are on average five years younger, have a higher body-mass index, and are presenting with more severe lung failure.

How much of this is due to the change in the virus and how much is because older adults are increasingly vaccinated remains to be determined.

Read more:
Why is Delta such a worry? It’s more infectious, probably causes more severe disease, and challenges our vaccines

Some reassurance

Despite the increased transmission and what appears to be increased severity of infection with the Delta variant, protection from vaccines is holding up. Certainly both the Pfizer and the AstraZeneca shots continue to be very effective at preventing severe illness and death.

The take home message, though, is that nobody is safe from COVID-19. Serious infection, and even death, can occur at any age; we can’t predict this.

Until we’ve vaccinated enough people in Australia we will need to take care and follow the public health advice, such as social distancing and wearing a mask. This is just as important if you’re 20 as it is if you’re 80.

Peter Wark 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. Younger adults can get very sick and die from COVID too. Here’s what the data tell us – https://theconversation.com/younger-adults-can-get-very-sick-and-die-from-covid-too-heres-what-the-data-tell-us-165250

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nick Kelly, Senior Lecturer in Interaction Design, Queensland University of Technology

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the tech giant will shift from being a social media company to becoming “a metaverse company”, functioning in an “embodied internet” that blends real and virtual worlds more than ever before.

So what is “the metaverse”? It sounds like the kind of thing billionaires talk about to earn headlines, like Tesla chief Elon Musk spruiking “pizza joints” on Mars. Yet given almost three billion people use Facebook each month, Zuckerberg’s suggestion of a change of direction is worth some attention.

Read more:
Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn Facebook into a ‘metaverse company’ – what does that mean?

The term “metaverse” isn’t new, but it has recently seen a surge in popularity and speculation about what this all might mean in practice.

The idea of the metaverse is useful and it’s likely to be with us for some time. It’s a concept worth understanding even if, like me, you are critical of the future its proponents suggest.

The metaverse: a name whose time has come?

Humans have developed many technologies to trick our senses, from audio speakers and televisions to interactive video games and virtual reality, and in future we may develop tools to trick our other senses such as touch and smell. We have many words for these technologies, but as yet no popular word that refers to the totality of the mash-up of old-fashioned reality (the physical world) and our fabricated extensions to reality (the virtual world).

Words like “the internet” and “cyberspace” have come to be associated with places we access through screens. They don’t quite capture the steady interweaving of the internet with virtual realities (such as 3D game worlds or virtual cities) and augmented reality (such as navigation overlays or Pokémon GO).

Just as important, the old names don’t capture the new social relationships, sensory experiences and economic behaviours that are emerging along with these extensions to the virtual. For example, Upland mashes together a virtual reflection of our world with non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and property markets.

Facebook’s announcement speaks to its attempts to envision what social media within the metaverse might look like.

It also helps that “metaverse” is a poetic term. Academics have been writing about a similar idea under the name of “extended reality” for years, but it’s a rather dull name.

“Metaverse”, coined by science fiction writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, has a lot more romantic appeal. Writers have a habit of recognising trends in need of naming: “cyberspace” comes from a 1982 book by William Gibson; “robot” is from a 1920 play by Karel Čapek.

Read more:
Do we want an augmented reality or a transformed reality?

Recent neologisms such as “the cloud” or the “Internet of Things” have stuck with us precisely because they are handy ways to refer to technologies that were becoming increasingly important. The metaverse sits in this same category.

Who benefits from the metaverse?

If you spend too long reading about big tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft, you might end up feeling advances in technology (like the rise of the metaverse) are inevitable. It’s hard not to then start thinking about how these new technologies will shape our society, politics and culture, and how we might fit into that future.

This idea is called “technological determinism”: the sense that advances in technology shape our social relations, power relations, and culture, with us as mere passengers. It leaves out the fact that in a democratic society we have a say in how all of this plays out.

For Facebook and other large corporations, determined to embrace the “next big thing” before their competitors, the metaverse is exciting because it presents an opportunity for new markets, new kinds of social network, new consumer electronics and new patents.

What’s not so clear is why you or I would be excited by all this.

A familiar story

In the mundane world, most of us are grappling with things like a pandemic, a climate emergency, and mass human-induced species extinction. We are struggling to understand what a good life looks like with technology we’ve already adopted (mobile devices, social media and global connectivity are linked to many unwanted effects such as anxiety and stress).

So why would we get excited about tech companies investing untold billions in new ways to distract us from the everyday world that gives us air to breathe, food to eat and water to drink?

Metaverse-style ideas might help us organise our societies more productively. Shared standards and protocols that bring disparate virtual worlds and augmented realities into a single, open metaverse could help people work together and cut down on duplication of effort.

In South Korea, for example, a “metaverse alliance” is working to persuade companies and government to work together to develop an open national VR platform. A big part of this is finding ways to blend smartphones, 5G networks, augmented reality, virtual currencies and social networks to solve problems for society (and, more cynically, make profits).

Similar claims for sharing and collaboration were made in the early days of the internet. But over time the early promise was swept aside by the dominance of large platforms and surveillance capitalism.

The internet has been wildly successful in connecting people all around the world to one another and functioning as a kind of modern Library of Alexandria to house vast stores of knowledge. Yet it has also increased the privatisation of public spaces, invited advertising into every corner of our lives, tethered us to a handful of giant companies more powerful than many countries, and led to the virtual world consuming the physical world via environmental damage.

Beyond the one-world world

The deeper problems with the metaverse are about the kind of worldview it would represent.

In one worldview, we we can think of ourselves as passengers inside a singular reality that is like a container for our lives. This view is probably familiar to most readers, and it also describes what you see on something like Facebook: a “platform” that exists independently of any of its users.

In another worldview, which sociologists suggest is common in Indigenous cultures, each of us creates the reality that we live in through what we do. Practices such as work and rituals connect people, land, life and spirituality, and together create reality.

A key problem with the former view is that it leads to a “one-world world”: a reality that does not permit other realities. This is what we see already on existing platforms.

The current version of Facebook may increase your ability to connect to other people and communities. But at the same time it limits how you connect to them: features such as six preset “reactions” to posts and content chosen by invisible algorithms shape the entire experience. Similarly, a game like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (with more than 100 million active users) allows limitless possibilities for how a game might play out – but defines the rules by which the game can be played.

The idea of a metaverse, by shifting even more of our lives onto a universal platform, extends this problem to a deeper level. It offers us limitless possibility to overcome the constraints of the physical world; yet in doing so, only replaces them with constraints imposed by what the metaverse will allow.

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

– ref. What is the metaverse? A high-tech plan to Facebookify the world – https://theconversation.com/what-is-the-metaverse-a-high-tech-plan-to-facebookify-the-world-165326

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Quentin Grafton, Australian Laureate Professor, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

On July 15, New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian said Sydney’s COVID lockdown wouldn’t end until the number of new cases not in full isolation was zero or as close to zero as possible.

But by August 1 the premier’s message had shifted:

Once you get to 50% vaccination, 60%, 70% it obviously triggers more freedoms […] The challenge for us is to get as many people vaccinated in August as possible so that by the time August 28 comes around, we have a number of options before us as to how we can ease restrictions.

There are around five million Australians under 16 who aren’t eligible to be vaccinated (bar a few groups of 12-15-year-olds whom the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) said this week should be prioritised for vaccination, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and those with certain underlying health conditions).

So, vaccinating 50% of the eligible population represents only about 40% of the whole population. Vaccinating 70% of the eligible population means only 56% of the whole population are vaccinated.

There can be no relaxation options determined solely by vaccination rates of 50% or even 70% of the eligible population. We cannot give up on our safety by pretending these vaccination rates in over-16s during an insufficiently controlled COVID outbreak would be like “living with the flu”. It won’t be.

Relaxing lockdown prematurely based solely on an arbitrary (and much too low) vaccination rate will likely lead to escalating cases and impose huge costs on Sydney and the rest of Australia.

Having not gone early, hard and fast, we propose seven key actions to save Sydney.

Crucially, Sydney’s lockdown needs to continue until the number of new daily cases who weren’t in full isolation reaches zero.

What does 70% of the eligible population vaccinated mean for Australia?

The premier’s August 1 announcement was similar to the federal government’s National Transition Plan released on July 30. The plan states that when 70% of Australians over 16 are vaccinated, governments should “ease restrictions on vaccinated residents”, and that lockdowns will be “less likely but possible”.

Read more:
Vaccination rate needs to hit 70% to trigger easing of restrictions

As we’re seeing in Southeast Queensland now, Delta is acquired and transmitted by children. This means only vaccinating 70% of over-16s will leave our kids vulnerable to COVID outbreaks. In the absence of public health measures, these children will pass it on to their friends and families.

While the risk of death from COVID, even with Delta, is lower among children than adults, there’s still a risk of long-term health consequences called “long COVID” among the young (and old).

Researchers dispute how common long COVID is in kids. But a study of children in Italy who have had COVID reported more than half had at least one symptom lasting more than four months, and more than 40% had a health problem due to long COVID that impaired their daily activities.

A UK survey of 23,000 households, published online as a preprint in June, found 5% of children infected with COVID had suffered persistent post-COVID symptoms for longer than four weeks.

What could happen if Sydney’s lockdown is relaxed too soon?

As of August 6, and since the Delta outbreak began in Sydney on June 16, there have been 4,610 locally acquired cases and 22 deaths. On August 6 there were 304 people hospitalised, 50 in intensive care with 22 requiring ventilation.

Using these stats, we can estimate what might happen should there be a partial relaxation of the current Sydney lockdown after 70% of over-16s in Greater Sydney are fully vaccinated and the outbreak is still ongoing.

First, if the vast majority of new daily cases aren’t in full isolation while infectious when lockdown restrictions are relaxed, this could easily result in a rapid growth in infections. This is because Delta is highly transmissible — infected people develop a viral load on average 1,000 times higher than the original strain. Even with new daily case numbers much lower than the numbers in early August, contact tracing wouldn’t be an effective secondary prevention strategy.

Let’s say partial relaxation after August 28 resulted in rapid and uncontrolled growth of new cases. We estimate that over a few months, and in the absence of subsequent lockdowns, this could result in as many as 100,000 cumulative hospitalisations, a total of more than 10,000 COVID patients in intensive care and, tragically, thousands of deaths in Greater Sydney alone.

This assumes that in an uncontrolled spread, eventually all unvaccinated people become exposed to COVID. We based these figures on the current ratios of how many people in Sydney have been hospitalised and died from COVID from the total number of cases, multiplied these numbers by the unvaccinated population, and extrapolated these numbers forward in the scenario of an uncontrolled outbreak.

Based on our previous research, the minimum economic cost of those hospitalisations (ignoring lost wages and the costs of “long COVID” and ongoing care generally) in Greater Sydney could easily exceed half a billion dollars. The economic costs from the expected loss of life would be in the tens of billions.

Read more:
No, we can’t treat COVID-19 like the flu. We have to consider the lasting health problems it causes

7 ways to fix Sydney’s outbreak

Experience from Australia and around the world tells us what needs to be done to protect public health and the economy.

NSW must:

1. ensure Sydney’s lockdown continues beyond August 28 until the number of new daily cases who aren’t in full isolation reaches zero

2. focus on daily testing of essential and front-line workers so pre-symptomatic and asymptomatic workers are identified before they enter the workplace. NSW should use the very best rapid test technology. Essential workers can be quickly and easily screened at a fraction of the cost and time of the standard PCR test

3. ensure everyone in lockdown gets adequate financial support to stay home, including those on visas. This is much more cost-effective than having those struggling financially not get tested and go to work, get infected and possibly spread COVID

4. actively minimise leakage to rural NSW, including setting up a “ring of steel” around Greater Sydney. This should include checking essential services drivers are up to date with daily rapid testing and measures to prevent other travellers from leaving

5. make masks mandatory outdoors as well as indoors (outside the home) throughout Greater Sydney

6. maintain the focus on increasing the vaccination rate among Sydneysiders by taking vaccinations to essential workplaces

7. recognise that until Sydneysiders, including children, have had the opportunity to be fully vaccinated then stringent lockdowns will need to be implemented rapidly whenever there are uncontrolled outbreaks of COVID.

Quentin Grafton has received funding from the Australian Research Council for his research. However, he has received no funding from any source in relation to his COVID-19 modelling or research.

Mary-Louise McLaws is a member of the World Health Organization Health Emergencies Ad Hoc COVID-19 Infection Prevention and Control Guidance Discussion Group

Tom Kompas has received funding from the Australian Research Council for his research. However, he has received no funding from any source in relation to his COVID-19 modelling or research.

– ref. We can’t rely solely on arbitrary vaccination levels to end lockdowns. Here are 7 ways to fix Sydney’s outbreak – https://theconversation.com/we-cant-rely-solely-on-arbitrary-vaccination-levels-to-end-lockdowns-here-are-7-ways-to-fix-sydneys-outbreak-165658

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deirdre Howard-Wagner, Senior Fellow, College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

There is a national incarceration crisis impacting First Nations women in Australia.

First Nations women are the fastest-growing prison population, constituting 37% of the female prison population, despite making up only 2% of Australia’s total population. The daily average number of women in full-time custody in the 2021 March quarter was 3,302, of whom 1,247 were First Nations women.

First Nations women in Australia are also imprisoned at more than 20 times the rate of non-Indigenous women.

The incarceration of First Nations women is interwoven with the experience of domestic, family, sexual and other forms of violence against women. A high number of First Nations women spend time in custody unsentenced for domestic violence incidents that would never result in a custodial sentence.

Read more:
Carceral feminism and coercive control: when Indigenous women aren’t seen as ideal victims, witnesses or women

Thirty years on from the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Report, prominent cases continue to draw attention to the wrongful imprisonment of First Nations women:

• the case of Jody Gore, who after experiencing decades of abuse, killed her former partner and was found guilty in 2016 and sentenced to life behind bars.

• Ms Dhu, who was detained after calling for help during a domestic violence incident in 2014, only to be detained for unpaid fines. She subsequently died in police custody from septicaemia caused by a previous domestic violence injury.

• Ava, who called police because she feared for her safety after a fight with her son in 2020. She was misidentified by police as the primary aggressor and spent five weeks in custody.

These cases draw attention to the connection between the multiple forms of violence First Nations women experience, and incarceration.

Links with domestic violence

Up to 90% of women in prison have experienced domestic and family violence. Most First Nations women in prison report experiencing multiple forms of violence at different times in their life.

Some had witnessed and experienced family violence as children and gone on to experience sexual assault, social isolation and physical intimate partner violence as young people and adults.

Trauma from these experiences contributes to other risk factors for incarceration, such as poor mental health, substance misuse, unemployment and low education. These factors disproportionately affect First Nations women and are linked to their own offending.

Twenty years ago, a report by the NSW Aboriginal Justice Council found that at least 80% of First Nations women linked previous abuse to their offending. This report revealed sexual abuse was “a central feature of pathways into offending”.

Domestic and family violence is also driving the incarceration of First Nations women through misidentification by police and other authorities.

Often, women who have experienced long-term abuse from an intimate partner are misidentified as the primary abuser and/or are named as the respondent in domestic violence orders. A domestic violence order sets out rules that must be obeyed by the respondent — the person who committed domestic violence — to protect the person listed as the aggrieved.

Women who have used retaliatory or pre-emptive violence in response to abuse or to protect themselves also come into contact with the criminal legal system. First Nations women are also more likely to encounter structural racism in their interactions with the criminal legal system.

Read more:
Another stolen generation looms unless Indigenous women fleeing violence can find safe housing

First Nations women misidentified as perpetrators of violence

Misidentification can have disastrous and devastating consequences for women.
Research has found that almost half of the women murdered by an intimate partner in Queensland had formerly been misidentified by police as a domestic violence perpetrator.

Alarmingly, in nearly all of the domestic and family violence-related deaths of Aboriginal people, the deceased person had been recorded as both a respondent and an aggrieved party in domestic violence orders.

Not only is the misidentification of First Nations women as the primary domestic violence abuser driving incarceration rates, it is costing women their lives. Not only are they not protected, they are being killed, and when they try to protect themselves, they are jailed.

Behind the increasing incarceration rates lies a serious crisis with many Indigenous policy considerations, such as the experiences of trauma, sexual and emotional abuse, and family and intimate partner violence.

We haven’t even addressed mental health issues, homelessness and entrenched social and economic disadvantage among incarcerated First Nations women. Or how, ten years ago, Australian Bureau of Statistics data revealed 67% of all First Nations women in prison had been incarcerated before, compared with fewer than half of non-Indigenous women.

The data also showed more than 80% of First Nations women in prison were mothers.

What needs to happen

Community-led, trauma-informed preventative support programs for First Nations women are desperately needed. This would include significant investment in community-based services and housing for vulnerable First Nations women at risk of becoming involved in the criminal legal system.

Systemic change is needed to divert women from entering prison by addressing the way the police and criminal legal system identify primary domestic violence abusers and respond to domestic, family, and sexual violence.

Ultimately, addressing violence against women requires long-term commitment to create social and cultural change through the promotion of gender and racial equality.

Deirdre Howard-Wagner is the recipient of funding from the Australian Research Council and the Commonwealth and NSW government departments in relation to Indigenous policy research. That funding is not related to the topic of this piece.

Chay Brown receives funding from ANROWS and the Office for the eSafety Commissioner. She is affiliated with the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research at the Australian National University and the Equality Institute.

– ref. Increased incarceration of First Nations women is interwoven with the experience of violence and trauma – https://theconversation.com/increased-incarceration-of-first-nations-women-is-interwoven-with-the-experience-of-violence-and-trauma-164773

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

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

This week Michelle and Paddy discuss the ongoing lockdowns across the nation, and the plans released by the government this week to increase the vaccine rollout, and put lock downs behind us. One incentive, proposed by the opposition, is a $300 payment to any individual who is fully vaccinated by 1 December.

They also discusses a judgment delivered by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal on Thursday which says the minutes of National Cabinet should be released under the Freedom of Information Act.

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 Closing the Gap, National Cabinet, and an 80% vaccination rate – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-closing-the-gap-national-cabinet-and-an-80-vaccination-rate-165733

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

If you ask most people what economists do, they might tell you it has something to do with money. Or perhaps forecasting what the economy will look like a year from now. Most of the other comparisons would be less charitable. I’ve heard plenty that can’t be printed.

The reality is very different.

For example, my UNSW colleague Pauline Grosjean and her economist co-authors published a paper in 2020 that asked “can heroes legitimise strongly proscribed and repugnant political behaviours?” and answered the question using recently declassified intelligence data on nearly 100,000 soldiers serving under French Field Marshall Philippe Petain at the battle of Verdun in 1916.

It turns out the home municipalities of these soldiers ended up producing 7% more Nazi collaborators during the Petain-led Vichy government from 1940-44.

While there are “market economists” whose job it is to try to produce credible forecasts, academic economists largely use an economic lens — and often very rich data sources — to understand and describe the world in which we live, and how to improve it.

Ironically, it is the “ivory-tower” types who do some of the most interesting work — on a range of social and economic issues that might surprise you in its breadth.

#whateconomistsdo

As is often the case, social media has amplified misunderstandings about the role of economists and laced it with a good dose of bile. In reaction to this misconception, prominent economists in Europe and the United States began tweeting about #whateconomistsdo.

If you check out that hashtag you will see an avalanche of academic papers on all sorts of interesting topics. What they have in common is the use of economic theory to inform analysis of incredibly rich data to answer big, social-scientific questions.

Questions such as:

• what works in education?
• does gender diversity on corporate boards lead to better outcomes for those beyond the board?
• does increasing sleep among the urban poor improve cognition or productivity?
• why do new technologies complement skills?

The identification revolution

The big ideas in economics involve formal (i.e. mathematical) theory.

Think of things like supply and demand, when and why markets are an efficient way to allocate resources, how asymmetric information can lead markets to break down, and the role of innovation and capital accumulation in driving economic growth.

Economic theory of this kind is incredibly important and influential. But most of what most economists do most of the time, involves working with data.

As I wrote in June (in discussing teenage driving accidents), empirical economics is basically about the so-called “identification problem” — figuring out how to identify the true causal effect of a policy intervention.

Read more:
Vital Signs: how to halve serious injuries and deaths from teenage driving accidents

Developing and applying a set of empirical techniques to do this is what MIT economist Joshua Angrist has called “the credibility revolution”.

I personally prefer the term “identification revolution”. It’s an important part of what many of us teach in undergraduate economics classes, but with applications to political science, law and other fields beyond economics.

It’s a “revolution” because scholars have developed ways to credibly identify the causal effect of all manner of policy interventions. That allows us researchers to provide sensible policy prescriptions based on empirical evidence.

This is the true spirit of the oft-abused term “evidence-based policy”; and because public policy covers a lot of territory — from social policy to economic policy —these techniques have been applied to lots of important policy questions.

Take three that might seem quite disparate.

• the effect of incarceration on crime rates
• peer effects on the United States Supreme Court
• whether media bias affects how people vote

Each of these are policy-relevant topics where economists have brought modern techniques and good data to bear. This, in turn, provides useful, factual input into important political debates.

Read more:
Is economists’ view of people as rational still credible?

What to ask economists

It has been suggested that economics isn’t very useful because, for example, few economists predicted the financial crisis of 2008, and forecasts of things such as GDP, unemployment or house prices are usually pretty lousy.

It’s true that economic forecasting is a mug’s game. In the words of that great line typically attributed to American baseball legend Yogi Berra, it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.

So if you want to know what the dollar will be worth two years from now, the best answer is probably “whatever it is today”. If you want to ask anyone, ask an astrologer, not an economist.

But since the identification revolution, economists around the world have contributed to a vastly richer understanding of important public-policy questions by combining rich data with clever empirical methods.

It also makes for much more interesting dinner party conversation than macroeconomic forecasting.

That’s #whateconomistsdo.

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

– ref. Vital Signs: If you want predictions, ask an astrologer. Economists have better things to do – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-if-you-want-predictions-ask-an-astrologer-economists-have-better-things-to-do-165616

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zoe Staines, ARC DECRA Research fellow, The University of Queensland

Talk of healing, care, and well-being is woven throughout the refreshed Closing the Gap agreement. These things were also central to Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s announcement of the Closing the Gap implementation package this week.

As part of the package, the government launched a redress scheme to support “intergenerational healing”, though this was really in response to a class action by survivors of the Stolen Generations.

The package also directs additional funding to Aboriginal community-controlled health organisations to “maintain the high level of care they offer”.

Recognition of the significant violence perpetrated by the settler state and measures to support healing are welcome and long overdue. However, history gives us good reason to be sceptical of the government’s lofty Closing the Gap rhetoric around pursuing improved well-being.

If improved well-being is supposed to underpin the refreshed Closing the Gap approach, then this must filter into all actions taken under the framework. However, measures to promote healing and care will only be treating the symptoms and not the cause while governments continue inflicting harm on Indigenous people.

We use the example of employment policy (targets 7 and 8 in the Closing the Gap agreement) in remote areas to show how government policies continue to create damage that must later be healed.

Stop punishing the unemployed in remote Australia

Since 2015, Indigenous peoples living remotely have been routinely punished under the Community Development Program (CDP). CDP requires individuals on income support payments to complete activities (like job searches and “work for the dole”) to receive their social security benefits. These activities were mandatory from 2015–20, though work for the dole was recently made voluntary.

CDP has roughly 40,000 participants, around 80% of whom are Indigenous. So harsh was this policy that the Commonwealth government has been taken to court by one remote council that claims the program is racist.

Read more:
Chelsea Bond: The ‘new’ Closing the Gap is about buzzwords, not genuine change for Indigenous Australia

The introduction of the punitive scheme has hardly budged the number of Indigenous people in work, with employment numbers barely rising in remote Australia between 2008 and 2018–19.

However, mass unemployment is not a result of people choosing to remain on welfare. There are just not enough jobs for everyone. Consequently, attempts to close the “employment gap” in remote Australia by targeting the attitudes and behaviours of the unemployed have failed because they ignore the real cause: unemployment is structural, not behavioural.

CDP has meanwhile caused significant harm and torn at the social fabric of remote communities. It has disproportionately high levels of penalties and payment suspensions, which have lowered already impoverished household incomes.

Low rates of social security in places where
food is extremely expensive results in “real hunger” and worsening physical and mental health. CDP activities also redirect people away from other important work, like caring for family and kin.

CDP is a dire example of how, on the one hand, the government talks about wanting to enable healing, while on the other hand, its own policies are a significant cause of ongoing harm.

Still listed in the Closing the Gap plan

In a welcome announcement around the time of the 2021–22 budget, the Morrison government committed to abolish CDP and replace it with a new “co-designed” program from 2023.

Yet, CDP remains listed in the Commonwealth’s implementation plan as an “action” that will contribute to closing the gap on “Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people engaged in employment or education” (target 7).

Indeed, the Commonwealth did not announce any new initiatives yesterday that will assist in meeting its employment targets.

The failure of CDP provides an opportunity to carefully reconsider its harmful effects and to move forward in a manner consistent with Closing the Gap commitments around healing, caring, and ensuring well-being.

Care work for people, Country and culture

There are unquestionable health and well-being benefits associated with work. However, if future policy looks to support people to engage in work, then suitable work must be available.

Pathways into waged jobs will only be open to a minority of unemployed Indigenous peoples in remote Australia. Yet, there is much productive work already being done that is unpaid. Policies that deploy narrow definitions of “work” ignore these diverse forms of labour, which are critically important in supporting the strained social fabric of remote communities.

An example is care work: a term we use here to refer to caring for people, as well as for Country and culture — all of which are interlinked and mutually interdependent.

While some caring for Country and culture work is recognised and remunerated under the successful Indigenous ranger and language maintenance programs, much “caring for people” work remains unsupported and unpaid. Such work is overwhelmingly provided by Indigenous women.

If the Australian government is serious about supporting well-being and healing as key elements of Closing the Gap targets, then it must ensure care work in all its forms is supported, irrespective of its position within or beyond the formal economy.

Read more:
How can the new Closing the Gap dashboard highlight what indicators and targets are on track?

Governments of all persuasions are increasingly embracing the notion of caring for Country. In the past 15 years, they have recognised, and more appropriately supported, Indigenous efforts in environmental healing.

We argue it is time that far greater emphasis is also placed on caring for people; a CDP replacement should have this objective as an underpinning feature.

The CDP overwhelmingly failed to care for people; its unintended consequence was to further deepen poverty and anomie. There will never be a better time to shift our policy focus in a positive direction as the nation reflects on our collective failure to Close the Gap, and as a new employment and income support program is being co-designed.

Zoe Staines receives funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC).

Elise Klein has received funding from the British Academy. She is a board member for the Institute of Postcolonial Studies.

In the last three years, Francis Markham has received funding from the National Native Title Council, the Commonwealth Department of Social Services, Aboriginal Affairs New South Wales, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and the former Commonwealth Department of Communications and the Arts.

Jon Altman 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. To enable healing, there’s a more effective way to Close the Gap in employment in remote Australia – https://theconversation.com/to-enable-healing-theres-a-more-effective-way-to-close-the-gap-in-employment-in-remote-australia-165662

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Smith, Associate Professor in American Politics and Foreign Policy, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

Conservative Christians are prominent in Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition parties. Scott Morrison and Tony Abbott are two of the most devout and theologically conservative prime ministers in Australian history.

State Coalition parties have had influxes of religious conservatives as the Coalition absorbs Christian parties and their voters. At the same time, the Christian right is suffering major defeats on its biggest issues.

Since 2018, Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia have all liberalised their abortion laws. This happened under Coalition governments in NSW and SA, to the dismay of some conservatives. Abbott and Barnaby Joyce appeared at protests against the NSW laws. Morrison declined to get involved, despite his “conservative” views on abortion.

In the 2017 postal survey on marriage equality, only five of the Coalition’s 76 federal seats saw majorities vote “no”. The law subsequently passed with the support of most Coalition MPs.

In a new article in Religion, State and Society, I examine why Australian Christian conservatives are losing policy battles even when they win elections. Compared to the United States, Australia does not have a strong link between Christianity and nationalism. I show that, if anything, the concept of Australia as a “Christian nation” has declined over the past decade. This makes it harder for religious traditionalism to piggyback on the electoral success of exclusionary nationalism.

The rise and fall of the Christian right

Religious adherence is declining in Australia, but this doesn’t necessarily mean the end of religious influence in politics.

In her book Nations Under God, Anna Grzymala-Busse shows religious groups can continue to shape policy even in countries where people are averse to their involvement in politics. They can do this when they are seen as being “above politics”. Religious figures are powerful when they appear to be giving non-partisan guidance to political figures, legitimised by a strong relationship between church and nation.

Australia’s history has not created the kind of fusion between Christianity and nationalism that we see in places like Poland or the United States. But during the prime ministership of John Howard, politicians increasingly blended Christianity into a conservative vision of the Australian nation. This in turn created a favourable environment for religious influence.

In a 2014 article, Marion Maddox described the success of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) in Canberra. Howard brought the ACL to prominence by treating it as a “legitimate peak body” for Christianity.

The ACL’s political access continued under Labor prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.
At a 2007 ACL conference, Rudd and Howard both spoke, with Rudd describing how his Christian beliefs gave him a unifying vision for the nation.

Gillard, raised Baptist but a self-described atheist, held private meetings on anti-discrimination laws with ACL leader Jim Wallace. In a 2011 interview, Gillard described herself as a “cultural traditionalist” who believed it was important for people to understand the Bible because “the Bible has formed such an important part of our culture”. As prime minister, Gillard opposed same-sex marriage.

Maddox warned that Australians had failed to recognise the “extremist” right-wing nature of the ACL. It successfully presented itself as “middle of the road” politically, theologically and culturally. In reality, it represented a small, ultraconservative slice of mostly neo-Pentecostal Christianity.

Even at the peak of the Christian right’s power, political scientists noted its electoral and policy limitations. Abbott’s 2013 election victory didn’t help it. His ascendancy hardened “culture war” divisions, limiting the influence of Christian conservatives to the Coalition side of politics. Labor stopped courting conservative Christian votes, despite having conservative Christian voters.

The Coalition could form electoral majorities, but was itself divided on the big “moral” issues where conservatives are in the minority.

Read more:
Same-sex marriage results crush the idea that Australian voters crave conservatism

From ‘Christian nation’ to ‘religious freedom’

Critics of religious influence see ominous signs in the Morrison government’s push for a religious freedom bill. They warn such legislation will carve out spaces for religious groups to discriminate. But the shift to a religious freedom agenda also marks a retreat of religious power in Australian life.

As Carol Johnson and Marion Maddox point out, Australia’s biggest churches used to oppose efforts to expand religious freedom. They did so from a position of majority dominance, worried that efforts to protect minorities could lead to stricter separation of church and state.

In 2008, the Human Rights Commission conducted the Freedom of Religion and Belief in Australia Inquiry. An analysis found 40% of public submissions included the “assertion that Australia is a Christian nation”. That assertion is much rarer today.

Even large churches are now conscious of being in a national minority on issues like marriage and sexuality. In 2017 the Turnbull government announced a Religious Freedom Review in response to conservative worries about the implications of changing marriage laws. In my analysis of the 15,500 public submissions to the review, I found just four assertions that Australia is a Christian nation or country.

The term “Christian nation” was used 101 unique times across print media (in reference to Australia) from the beginning of 2016 to the end of 2020. It appears to be in decline as a term. It appeared 35 times in 2016, 34 times in 2017 (the year of the same-sex marriage referendum), 16 times in 2018, 7 times in 2019 and 8 times in 2020. Furthermore, nearly half the times it was mentioned, it was by someone refuting the claim that Australia is a Christian nation.

When Australians do refer to their country as “Christian”, they are usually talking about heritage, rituals, holidays and census numbers. These may involve implied racial boundaries.

But Australians generally lack the classic ingredients of true religious nationalism: a sense of being “chosen” by God or of a sacred covenant between God and the nation.

Read more:
How religion rises – and falls – in modern Australia

Many of Australia’s devoutly Christian politicians don’t like calling Australia a Christian nation. Indeed, Abbott once described Australia as “relentlessly secular”. I can find no record of Morrison publicly calling Australia a Christian nation or country. The last prime minister to do so was Malcolm Turnbull, who described Australia as a “majority Christian nation” sharing a biblical heritage with Israel.

The debate around religious freedom reflects a new concept of religious traditionalists as minorities requiring protection. It also reframes religious alliances in terms of multiculturalism and diversity.

Conservative religious actors will fight to protect their existing privileges and will try to carve out new ones. But they are no longer in a position to bring Australian society into line with their beliefs.

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

– ref. A ‘Christian nation’ no longer: why Australia’s religious right loses policy battles even when it wins elections – https://theconversation.com/a-christian-nation-no-longer-why-australias-religious-right-loses-policy-battles-even-when-it-wins-elections-165169

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rhonda Garad, Senior Lecturer and Research Fellow in Knowledge Translation, Monash University

As we write this article, the Delta strain of COVID-19 is reminding the world the pandemic is far from over, with millions of Australians in lockdown and infection rates outpacing a global vaccination effort.

In the northern hemisphere, record breaking temperatures in the form of heat domes recently caused uncontrollable “firebombs”, while unprecedented floods disrupted millions of people. Hundreds of lives have been lost due to heat stress, drownings and fire.

The twin catastrophic threats of climate change and a pandemic have created an “epoch of incredulity”. It’s not surprising many Australians are struggling to cope.

During the pandemic’s first wave in 2020, we collected nationwide data from 5,483 adults across Australia on how climate change affects their mental health. In our new paper, we found that while Australians are concerned about COVID-19, they were almost three times more concerned about climate change.

That Australians are very worried about climate change is not a new finding. But our study goes further, warning of an impending epidemic of mental health related disorders such as eco-anxiety, climate disaster-related post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and future-orientated despair.

Which Australians are most worried?

We asked Australians to compare their concerns about climate change, COVID, retirement, health, ageing and employment, using a four-point scale (responses ranging from “not a problem” to “very much a problem”).

A high level of concern about climate change was reported across the whole population regardless of gender, age, or residential location (city or rural, disadvantaged or affluent areas). Women, young adults, the well-off, and those in their middle years (aged 35 to 54) showed the highest levels of concern about climate change.

Read more:
The rise of ‘eco-anxiety’: climate change affects our mental health, too

The latter group (aged 35 to 54) may be particularly worried because they are, or plan to become, parents and may be concerned about the future for their children.

The high level of concern among young Australians (aged 18 to 34) is not surprising, as they’re inheriting the greatest existential crisis faced by any generation. This age group have shown their concern through numerous campaigns such as the School Strike 4 Climate, and several successful litigations.

Of the people we surveyed in more affluent groups, 78% reported a high level of worry. But climate change was still very much a problem for those outside this group (42%) when compared to COVID-related worry (27%).

We also found many of those who directly experienced a climate-related disaster — bushfires, floods, extreme heat waves — reported symptoms consistent with PTSD. This includes recurrent memories of the trauma event, feeling on guard, easily startled and nightmares.

Others reported significant pre-trauma and eco-anxiety symptoms. These include recurrent nightmares about future trauma, poor concentration, insomnia, tearfulness, despair and relationship and work difficulties.

Overall, we found the inevitability of climate threats limit Australians’ ability to feel optimistic about their future, more so than their anxieties about COVID.

How are people managing their climate worry?

Our research also provides insights into what people are doing to manage their mental health in the face of the impending threat of climate change.

Rather than seeking professional mental health support such as counsellors or psychologists, many Australians said they were self-prescribing their own remedies, such as being in natural environments (67%) and taking positive climate action (83%), where possible.

Many said they strengthen their resilience through individual action (such as limiting their plastic use), joining community action (such as volunteering), or joining advocacy efforts to influence policy and raise awareness.

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

Indeed, our research from earlier this year showed environmental volunteering has mental health benefits, such as improving connection to place and learning more about the environment.

It’s both ironic and understandable Australians want to be in natural environments to lessen their climate-related anxiety. Events such as the mega fires of 2019 and 2020 may be renewing Australians’ understanding and appreciation of nature’s value in enhancing the quality of their lives. There is now ample research showing green spaces improve psychological well-being.

An impending epidemic

Our research illuminates the profound, growing mental health burden on Australians.

As the global temperature rises and climate-related disasters escalate in frequency and severity, this mental health burden will likely worsen. More people will suffer symptoms of PTSD, eco-anxiety, and more.

Read more:
New polling shows 79% of Aussies care about climate change. So why doesn’t the government listen?

Of great concern is that people are not seeking professional mental health care to cope with climate change concern. Rather, they are finding their own solutions. The lack of effective climate change policy and action from the Australian government is also likely adding to the collective despair.

As Harriet Ingle and Michael Mikulewicz — a neuropsychologist and a human geographer from the UK — wrote in their 2020 paper:

For many, the ominous reality of climate change results in feelings of powerlessness to improve the situation, leaving them with an unresolved sense of loss, helplessness, and frustration.

It is imperative public health responses addressing climate change at the individual, community, and policy levels, are put into place. Governments need to respond to the health sector’s calls for effective climate related responses, to prevent a looming mental health crisis.

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

Rhonda Garad is an elected local Councillor and a member of the Greens party.

Rebecca Patrick received funding from the Institute for Health Transformation (Deakin University) to undertake the research reported in this article . She is affiliated with the Climate and Health Alliance.

Joanne Enticott 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. Australians are 3 times more worried about climate change than COVID. A mental health crisis is looming – https://theconversation.com/australians-are-3-times-more-worried-about-climate-change-than-covid-a-mental-health-crisis-is-looming-165470