Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Edward Scheer, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, Head of School of Art and Design, UNSW Sydney

Review: William Yang’s Sydneyphiles Reimagined, State Library of New South Wales.

We are all photographers now, since the advent of smartphones and the selfie. So it may seem strange to be writing a review of an exhibition of photographs when, in their digital form, they are both ubiquitous and at the same time largely redundant.

William Yang’s photographs in Sydneyphiles offer the complete opposite of the selfie. Instead of the throwaway image, he offers carefully framed and curated portraits.

In his famous slideshow performances, he narrates the events behind the pictures and names the subjects so they are not forgotten or discarded. In doing this, Yang also ensures he is still part of the picture, just as he is a part of the community of artists and gay radicals he has lived among and photographed. He brings the pictures back into the present moment.

Read more:
Tenderness, desire and politics: William Yang’s work is a portrait of a life well lived

Alternative Sydney up close

William Yang (pronounced Young but he says he doesn’t care anymore) is 80 this year. He has seen the alternative cultures of Sydney up close, in a way few people alive have.

He never goes far without his cameras, shooting social events over the past 50 years for the social pages of newspapers and fashion magazines.

Yang has an extensive visual record of Sydney cultural life, beginning with his first ever exhibition of photographs, Sydneyphiles. Sydneyphiles was shown at the then ACP gallery in Oxford Street, Paddington in 1977, documenting the mainstream Sydney social scene and the then illegal gay party scene in the years since his arrival in Sydney in 1969.

It is a priceless resource, as the State Library of NSW has recognised having purchased the collection. It has now been remounted in its entirety as a part of Sydney World Pride 2023. Pride’s theme, Mana Nangamai Djuralli, means “Gather, Dream, Amplify” in Gadigal language. It is an especially apt theme for this exhibition.

Portraits and private parties

More than 200 images, mostly portraits, are on display: celebrities such as Brett Whiteley, Kate Fitzpatrick, Jackie Weaver, Penelope Seidler, Robyn Nevin among many others alongside candid shots with titles such as “Men Fucking” and “Gary Injecting Junk”.

Others with captions such as “Untitled no 1 (men sleeping)” reveal two naked young men spooning in post-coital slumber in the basement of a house party. Another image “Doris Fish with man in bondage gear” shows the eponymous drag queen Doris performing fellatio on the man – viewers get much more than the label suggests.

Many are shots taken at private parties such as those held by Madame Lash in her warehouse. These pictures feature guests tied to a rack surrounded by crowds of party-goers. It is a part of Sydney’s recent cultural history that few people still alive have witnessed.

Many of Yang’s subjects were lost to the AIDS epidemic, powerfully captured in his photographs and performances in unforgettably moving works such as Sadness and Friends of Dorothy. That’s what makes this an important exhibition for Sydney in this year of World Pride.

Gay liberation

Yang’s work also features in The Party currently at UNSW Galleries, another significant exhibition of Sydney gay visual culture for Sydney World Pride.

This covers the years beginning with the inaugural Mardi Gras in 1978, a protest march for gay rights that became infamous for the brutality of the NSW police, to now.

The changes could not be more stark. Mardi Gras is now and has been for some time (for those living under a rock) a celebration and affirmation of LGBTQI culture and identity with the NSW Police participating.

Yang refers to these as the years of “gay liberation” and is justly proud of his role in recording this extraordinary transition of gay life from illegality to recognition and celebration.

Read more:
Friday essay: hidden in plain sight — Australian queer men and women before gay liberation

Open hearts and minds

It was a treat to see him present the photographs to a packed house at a one-off recital at the State Library on February 10.

He has performed his quiet storytelling alongside his pictures since 1989 and was recently awarded a Life Time Achievement Award by the Sydney Theatre Critics Circle. The power of these simple shows, as Helena Grehan and I wrote about them some years ago, is that they open onto “vast as well as minute landscapes of grief, love, loss and friendship”.

In presenting Sydneyphiles, the slideshow, he evinced a new level of quiet defiance and a newly stated sense of purpose for his work. He expressed “no regrets or apologies” for the radical lifestyle he so eloquently captures and an assertiveness of the value of his work in making the gay and lesbian community of that time visible.

He offers a valuable reminder of a time when these gatherings had to be held in secret. His work stands as a contestation and a refusal of this – and a softly spoken demand that our societies, hearts and minds remain open.

Sydneyphiles is at State Library of NSW until June 4.

Read more:
Friday essay: 10 photography exhibitions that defined Australia

Edward Scheer works for UNSW.

– ref. Illegal Sydney warehouse parties, lives lost to AIDS, and gay liberation: photographer William Yang captured it all – https://theconversation.com/illegal-sydney-warehouse-parties-lives-lost-to-aids-and-gay-liberation-photographer-william-yang-captured-it-all-199181

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Armin Alimardani, Lecturer, University of Wollongong

As the “chatbot wars” rage in Silicon Valley, the growing proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) tools specifically designed to generate human-like text has left many baffled.

Educators in particular are scrambling to adjust to the availability of software that can produce a moderately competent essay on any topic at a moment’s notice. Should we go back to pen-and-paper assessments? Increasing exam supervision? Ban the use of AI entirely?

All these and more have been proposed. However, none of these less-than-ideal measures would be needed if educators could reliably distinguish AI-generated and human-written text.

We dug into several proposed methods and tools for recognising AI-generated text. None of them are foolproof, all of them are vulnerable to workarounds, and it’s unlikely they will ever be as reliable as we’d like.

Perhaps you’re wondering why the world’s leading AI companies can’t reliably distinguish the products of their own machines from the work of humans. The reason is ridiculously simple: the corporate mission in today’s high-stakes AI arms is to train ‘natural language processor’ (NLP) AIs to produce outputs that are as similar to human writing as possible. Indeed, public demands for an easy means to spot such AIs in the wild might seem paradoxical, like we’re missing the whole point of the program.

A mediocre effort

OpenAI – the creator of ChatGPT – launched a “classifier for indicating AI-written text” in late January.

The classifier was trained on external AIs as well as the company’s own text-generating engines. In theory, this means it should be able to flag essays generated by BLOOM AI or similar, not just those created by ChatGPT.

We give this classifier a C– grade at best. OpenAI admits it accurately identifies only 26% of AI-generated text (true positive) while incorrectly labelling human prose as AI-generated 9% of the time (false positive).

OpenAI has not shared its research on the rate at which AI-generated text is incorrectly labelled as human-generated text (false negative).

A promising contender

A more promising contender is a classifier created by a Princeton University student during his Christmas break.

Edward Tian, a computer science major minoring in journalism, released the first version of GPTZero in January.

This app identifies AI authorship based on two factors: perplexity and burstiness. Perplexity measures how complex a text is, while burstiness compares the variation between sentences. The lower the values for these two factors, the more likely it is that a text was produced by an AI.

We pitted this modest David against the goliath of ChatGPT.

First, we prompted ChatGPT to generate a short essay about justice. Next, we copied the article – unchanged – into GPTZero. Tian’s tool correctly determined that the text was likely to have been written entirely by an AI because its average perplexity and burstiness scores were very low.

Fooling the classifiers

An easy way to mislead AI classifiers is simply to replace a few words with synonyms. Websites offering tools that paraphrase AI-generated text for this purpose are already cropping up all over the internet.

Many of these tools display their own set of AI giveaways, such as peppering human prose with “tortured phrases” (for example, using “counterfeit consciousness” instead of “AI”).

To test GPTZero further, we copied ChatGPT’s justice essay into GPT-Minus1 — a website offering to “scramble” ChatGPT text with synonyms. The image on the left depicts the original essay. The image on the right shows GPT-Minus1’s changes. It altered about 14% of the text.

We then copied the GPT-Minus1 version of the justice essay back into GPTZero. Its verdict?

Your text is most likely human written but there are some sentences with low perplexities.

It highlighted just one sentence it thought had a high chance of having been written by an AI (see image below on left) along with a report on the essay’s overall perplexity and burstiness scores which were much higher (see image below on the right).

Tools such as Tian’s show great promise, but they aren’t perfect and are also vulnerable to workarounds. For instance, a recently released YouTube tutorial explains how to prompt ChatGPT to produce text with high degrees of – you guessed it – perplexity and burstiness.

Watermarking

Another proposal is for AI-written text to contain a “watermark” that is invisible to human readers but can be picked up by software.

Natural language models work on a word-by-word basis. They select which word to generate based on statistical probability.

However, they do not always choose words with the highest probability of appearing together. Instead, from a list of probable words, they select one randomly (though words with higher probability scores are more likely to be selected).

This explains why users get a different output each time they generate text using the same prompt.

Put simply, watermarking involves “blacklisting” some of the probable words and permitting the AI to only select words from a “whitelist”. Given that a human-written text will likely include words from the “blacklist”, this could make it possible to differentiate it from an AI-generated text.

However, watermarking also has limitations. The quality of AI-generated text might be reduced if its vocabulary was constrained. Further, each text generator would likely have a different watermarking system – so text would next to checked against all of them.

Watermarking could also be circumvented by paraphrasing tools, which might insert blacklisted words or rephrase essay questions.

An ongoing arms race

AI-generated text detectors will become increasingly sophisticated. Anti-plagiarism service TurnItIn recently announced a forthcoming AI writing detector with a claimed 97% accuracy.

However, text generators too will grow more sophisticated. Google’s ChatGPT competitor, Bard, is in early public testing. OpenAI itself is expected to launch a major update, GPT-4, later this year.

It will never be possible to make AI text identifiers perfect, as even OpenAI acknowledges, and there will always be new ways to mislead them.

As this arms race continues, we may see the rise of “contract paraphrasing”: rather than paying someone to write your assignment, you pay someone to rework your AI-generated assignment to get it past the detectors.

There are no easy answers here for educators. Technical fixes may be part of the solution, but so will new ways of teaching and assessment (which may including harnessing the power of AI).

We don’t know exactly what this will look like. However, we have spent the past year building prototypes of open-source AI tools for education and research in an effort to help navigate a path between the old and the new – and you can access beta versions at Safe-To-Fail AI.

Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.

– ref. We pitted ChatGPT against tools for detecting AI-written text, and the results are troubling – https://theconversation.com/we-pitted-chatgpt-against-tools-for-detecting-ai-written-text-and-the-results-are-troubling-199774

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Maynard, Director/Chair of Aboriginal History – The Wollotuka Institute, University of Newcastle

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names and/or images of deceased people.

The most startling point on the referendum for a Voice to parliament is the fact the majority of people in this country have no idea of history. And I mean both Black and white people.

Australian history, as written for nearly two thirds of the 20th century, glorified discoverers, explorers, settlers, and Gallipoli. We as Aboriginal people had been conveniently erased from the historical landscape and memory. Most Australians gave Aboriginal people little or no consideration.
The majority of Aboriginal people were trapped in a historical vacuum through the fact that great numbers of our people had been confined to heavily congested and controlled missions and reserves.

As part of this confinement, we were encouraged to forget our past. Everyday decisions were removed from people; they were told what to eat, what to wear, who you could marry, and their movement was severely restricted. There was a process of historical erasure and memory.

We were to be severed from any sense of past or inspiration. We could not participate in ceremonies, speak our language, tell our stories, practice songs and dances or conduct our everyday hunting and living experiences. Over time our people could only remember the controlled life on the reserve. It became the pattern of misery.

In his 1968 Boyer lecture, After the Dreaming, anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner exposed Australia’s failure to regard, record or acknowledge Aboriginal people in the country’s history. Australian history, he said, had been constructed with:

a view from a window which had been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape.

What is critically important in history understanding is that the call for a Voice to parliament is not a new initiative. Aboriginal activists nearly 100 years ago first called for a voice to parliament as part of their political platform and demands during the 1920s.

À lire aussi :
The 1881 Maloga petition: a call for self-determination and a key moment on the path to the Voice

The Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association

The first Aboriginal political organisation, the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA), was formed in Sydney in 1924 and led by my grandfather Fred Maynard.

It advocated several key demands in protecting the rights of Aboriginal people, centring on:

• a national land rights agenda

• protecting Aboriginal children from being taken from their families

• a call for genuine Aboriginal self-determination

• citizenship in our own country

• defending a distinct Aboriginal cultural identity

• and the insistence Aboriginal people be placed in charge of Aboriginal affairs.

The call for Aboriginal rights to land was explicit. Leader Fred Maynard declared:

The request made by this association for sufficient land for each eligible family is justly based. The Australian people are the original owners of the land and have a prior right over all other people in this respect.

The association’s conference in Sydney was front page news in the Sydney Daily Guardian.

Over 200 Aboriginal people attended this conference held at St David’s Church and Hall in Riley Street, Surry Hills.

In the space of six short months the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association had expanded to 13 branches, four sub-branches and a membership in excess of 600.

Its established offices in Crown Street, Sydney and a state-wide network of information regarding Aboriginal people.

Calls for direct representation in parliament

Late in October 1925, the association held a second conference in Kempsey, New South Wales. It ran over three days with over 700 Aboriginal people in attendance.

It was noted in press coverage of the conference that

pleas were entered for direct representation in parliament.

Two years later in 1927, the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association produced a manifesto. It was delivered to all sections of government – both state and federal – and published widely across NSW, South Australia, Victoria, and Queensland.

One of the significant points was for an Aboriginal board to be established under the Commonwealth government, and for state control over Aboriginal lives be abolished. It envisioned:

The control of Aboriginal affairs, apart from common law rights shall be vested in a board of management comprised of capable educated Aboriginals under a chairman to be appointed by the government.

This board would not be comprised of government-selected or handpicked individuals but would be Aboriginal elected officers.

This push for an Aboriginal board or place in parliament continued in 1929, when Fred Maynard spoke to the Chatswood Willoughby Labour League in NSW on Aboriginal issues. A report in the The Labor Daily newspaper in February that year mentioned his call for:

Aboriginal representative in the federal parliament, or failing it, to have an [A]boriginal ambassador appointed to live in Canberra to watch over his people’s interests and advise the federal authorities.

Surveillance, threats, intimidation, abuse

The Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association disappeared from public view in late 1929.

There is strong evidence the organisation was effectively broken up through the combined efforts of the NSW Aborigines Protection Board, missionaries, and the police.

The state government and the Protection Board had been embarrassed by the exposure of their unjust policies in the media and wanted the organisation broken up.

Fred Maynard, in a newspaper interview in late 1927 in The Newcastle Sun revealed the level of surveillance, threat, intimidation, and abuse he and the other Aboriginal activists were subjected to. The report noted:

He said that he had been warned on many occasions that the doors of Long Bay were opening for him. He would cheerfully go to jail for the remainder of his life, he declared if, by so doing he could make the people of Australia realise the truly frightful administration of the Aborigines Act. He knew cases where children had been torn from their mothers and sent into absolute slavery.

When one ponders upon the legacy of the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association the sad reality is that if the demands of these early activists had been met nearly a century ago, we would not be suffering the severe disadvantage that hovers over Aboriginal lives still today.

Imagine if enough land for each and every Aboriginal family to build their own economic independence had been granted.

Or that we would not have suffered another five decades of Aboriginal child removal and the shocking impact of that policy on generations of Aboriginal lives.

If the demand to protect a distinct Aboriginal cultural identity had been taken up, we would not today be working to piece together the shattered cultural pieces of language, stories, songs, and dances.

And finally, if Aboriginal people had been placed in a position to oversee Aboriginal policy and needs, the history of our people would have been vastly different.

The reality today is we continue to fight for the demands that the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association established nearly 100 years ago.

À lire aussi :
Capturing the lived history of the Aborigines Protection Board while we still can

John Maynard received funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) grants program examining Aboriginal political protest back in 2003-2010.

– ref. Long before the Voice vote, the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association called for parliamentary representation – https://theconversation.com/long-before-the-voice-vote-the-australian-aboriginal-progressive-association-called-for-parliamentary-representation-198064

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angel Dixon, Researcher, Griffith University

The prevailing public perception is that everything people with disability do is a challenge. Sometimes, that is true. In those times, we may ask or say “yes” to a kind and respectful offer of assistance. Other times, and more often than not, we are simply navigating daily life when a person without disability interjects to offer assistance.

It is rare anyone means to be discriminatory in their approach to supporting people with disability, but society’s attitude still has a way to go.

Disability rights activism used to take place in the streets or by occupying government property or buildings (sometimes it still does). But the age of social media has created an opportunity for people with disability to explore and exercise advocacy in new ways too. Air travel experiences of being treated – and handled – like “baggage”, as writer and advocate Zoe Simmons recently detailed on Twitter, expose the attitudinal barriers people with disability encounter when others “help”.

There could be lots of reasons why people with disability decline or don’t want offers of help. Recent research at the Dignity Project, at Griffith University, echoes Simmons’ experience and also shows there is no “one-size fits all” approach to recommend.

But not offering assistance to fellow human beings is not the answer either. So, what is the right way to ask a person with disability if they would like help?

Disability is about the environment, not a diagnosis

More than 1.3 billion people globally live with disability. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities states disability does not result from a diagnosis or impairment, but when a person encounters inaccessible, inflexible, or insufficient environments, systems and attitudes.

In an ideal world, everyone would appreciate that disability is a mismatch between person and environment and would be motivated by a human rights perspective.

In reality, Australian society is still lagging in its understanding of and attitude towards disability. Most people are confused or unsure about how to treat people with disability, which leads to exclusion and increases the barriers people with disability encounter.

Barriers for people with disability can be as obvious as a building with no elevator or as subtle as a pat on the back from a passerby.

À lire aussi :
Unregistered NDIS providers are in the firing line – but lots of participants have good reasons for using them

Barriers take their toll

Participants in the Dignity Project, a citizen science research and advocacy program at Griffith University, shared the impact and cumulative effect frequent and repeated encounters with barriers can have on a person’s mental health and behaviour.

These undignified interactions result in people feeling like “less of a person, less worthy, less valid, less visible, annoyed, frustrated, sad, angry” with “no rights, no voice, and reduced control”.

As a result, people may avoid social situations and isolate themselves. Over time, people with disability are silenced or diminished in their role as decision makers in their own lives.

It can be useful to think about four aspects of offering help.

1. Acknowledge people and their rights

Misinformation and limited or reductive tropes perpetuated in the media contribute to the challenge of confronting and changing attitudes.

Participants in the Dignity Project called for acknowledgement and recognition that people with disability are human beings with the same full dimensions of personhood and human rights as people without disability. They described very few instances of needing help but when they did, said dignified experiences are defined by acknowledgement. In the words of one person:

First off, ask me ‘do you need help?’ and acknowledge that I might not need it. I will ask for help if I need it […] Ask how best to help and provide the help I ask for, rather than doing what [you think] I needed.

2. Pay attention to the response and consider what might be behind it

People with disability have rights including the right to freedom of expression and opinion and respect for privacy.

So, listen to a person’s response when asked about needing assistance. If you receive a negative response, have empathy for what you may not necessarily understand. If a response is short or angry, accept it and don’t grow resentful. That response may come from a history of discrimination and misrecognition.

The way to ask a person with disability if they would like help depends on contextual, subjective and relational factors. Providing help or support requires consideration of the diversity of experience, the situation, your relationship with the person and the consequences of helping or not helping.

Although helping may seem like an appropriate and polite thing to do, it may not even be appropriate to ask, particularly if doing so becomes a public act that draws attention to the person.

3. Know what not to do

There are some clear messages about what not to do, reiterated in our research and in Zoe Simmons’ tweets.

Never physically touch someone, their assistive technology, aid or a support animal without asking.

It is inappropriate to ask people about their diagnosis or impairment if not related to the topic at hand and make sure you use language that is dignified.

Even if you mean well, avoid comments that frame disability or a person’s existence in a negative light, such as “you’re managing so well despite everything” or “you’re so brave”.

4. Think bigger

Social change takes time. Auditing your own personal biases while respectfully interacting with a person with disability and simultaneously managing the mix of emotions that can be triggered by disability is a complex social skill.

Building an inclusive society will ensure people with and without disability can interact comfortably in the world together.

A positive and affirming form of “help” might be ensuring environments and attitudes over which you have influence are always accessible and inclusive.

À lire aussi :
Will AI tech like ChatGPT improve inclusion for people with communication disability?

Angel Dixon is affiliated with Attitude Foundation.

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

– ref. Disability and dignity – 4 things to think about if you want to ‘help’ – https://theconversation.com/disability-and-dignity-4-things-to-think-about-if-you-want-to-help-198993

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Lo, Senior Lecturer in Climate Change, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington

Two extreme and deadly weather events within the first two months of 2023 have brought the consequences of climate change into sharp focus. Auckland’s January 27 flood is the most expensive weather event in New Zealand insurance history. Cyclone Gabrielle prompted a national state of emergency, only the third time one has been declared.

Auckland and the upper North Island also face an increasing risk of extreme heatwaves. These floods, storms and heatwaves are becoming more frequent and intense in a changing climate. Our cities, including Auckland, are poorly prepared for what is coming.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there is now a lot more talk about the need for “sponge cities”, with Auckland being a prime candidate. The basic principle is to manage urban flood risks by utilising more natural drainage and flood-resilient systems and material.

The concept is well understood and undoubtedly an appropriate response to current and future conditions – but it is not cheap. Overseas experience, especially in China, suggests building and adapting a city like Auckland to be more “spongey” would require serious financial commitment.

Mimicking nature

The sponge city requires a holistic approach that differs considerably from the way we currently build infrastructure. It involves integrating flood-resilient elements such as bio-swales, pervious pavements, underground water-storage tanks, rain gardens, wetlands and green roofs.

These features can mimic natural hydrological responses and absorb urban stormwater. Increased vegetation and water bodies can also lower ambient temperatures and help people cope with extreme heat.

À lire aussi :
The Auckland floods are a sign of things to come – the city needs stormwater systems fit for climate change

This type of development is already underway in various places: Australia’s water-sensitive urban design schemes, for example, and the sustainable urban drainage systems and Blue-Green Cities approach in Britain.

Auckland Council has also implemented similar principles, with a good example being the Long Bay residential development, where land use and catchment management planning have been developed simultaneously. Streets are designed to form an integrated “treatment train” for stormwater, involving swales, rain gardens and a wetland at the bottom of the catchment.

In fact, Auckland was recently ranked the “spongiest” of nine global cities, mainly due to its lower urban density and lots of green areas. But this sponginess is clearly still not adequate, as demonstrated by the January floods.

Lessons from China

If the sponge city is our goal, we need to see what has been achieved in China, which has been running a large-scale programme for nearly ten years under a nationally coordinated policy. A total of 30 cities participated and provided financial and technical support.

The targets were to increase the area of urban land able to absorb surface water discharges by approximately 20%; to retain or reuse approximately 70% of urban stormwater by 2020; and to reuse up to 80% of stormwater by the 2030s. As well as mitigating flood risk, the programme is about the collection, purification and reuse of urban stormwater to address future climatic extremes (floods and droughts).

À lire aussi :
Massive outages caused by Cyclone Gabrielle strengthen the case for burying power lines

The concept requires more than eco-friendly measures for urban water management. A holistic urban development strategy is crucial. Planting more trees, using less impervious surface, and building more green roofs are key elements.

But China’s ultimate goal is to modernise the urban system by creating and reorganising resilient blue-green spaces (rivers, wetlands and trees), with a target of up to 80% coverage in major districts across the selected cities by the 2030s. The estimated construction area in the first 16 pilot sponge cities is more than 450 square kilometres.

Costs and returns

This all requires substantial public investment. The average cost lies between US$14 million and $21  million (about NZ$23 to $35 million) per square kilometre over the first three years of construction and operation. This may be higher in New Zealand due to price differences and inflation.

The Chinese government allocated 400 to 600 million yuan (around NZ$92–$140 million) to each pilot city for the first three years. This was just startup investment – many pilot cities struggled to finance the implementation of their original plans.

An alternative to taxpayer funding might be to encourage public-private partnerships. But private investors in China have shown little interest in financing sponge city initiatives, which are often located in high-risk areas like floodplains. It’s hard to estimate investment returns or guarantee performance in the long time-frame of climate change.

The fact that 19 of the 30 pilot cities have experienced flooding since 2014 is not an encouraging signal, either. In Zhengzhou, one of the pilot cities, nearly 300 people were killed in a catastrophic flooding event in 2021.

There are financial instruments for reducing risk, such as green bonds, green loans and insurance. But a high return is required to cover the risks and costs. Apartments and buildings with green elements are more likely to generate those returns than public parks and underground water-storage systems.

À lire aussi :
Flood warning: NZ’s critical infrastructure is too important to fail – greater resilience is urgently needed

Local solutions

There are other challenges, too. Creating greener, more desirable neighbourhoods can also displace people who can’t afford the price of gentrification.

Auckland has a smaller population and lower urban density than most of the Chinese sponge cities. This means the new infrastructure and developments required would be more spread out across the city.

And Auckland is not like Hong Kong, for example, where a huge underground stormwater storage tank (with a 60,000 cubic metre capacity) has been built. The potential for developing such large and concentrated drainage infrastructure is comparatively limited in a city like Auckland.

New Zealand’s sponge city initiatives would be of smaller scale and more diffuse – as will be the potential benefits. We will need locally adapted solutions and systems – but the lessons and examples from elsewhere can be central to that process.

Alex Lo has previously received funding from the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and Australia’s National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility.

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

– ref. NZ cities urgently need to become ‘spongier’ – but system change will be expensive – https://theconversation.com/nz-cities-urgently-need-to-become-spongier-but-system-change-will-be-expensive-200061

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ange Fitzgerald, Professor, Associate Dean (Education) and Director (Initial Teacher Education), RMIT University

There is a new push for private schools to open their grounds and facilities to the broader community. North Sydney mayor Zoe Baker, wants to ask top private schools in her area to share their green spaces and other facilities.

For so much of the year, schools sit unused and most campuses close at 4pm. We should search for opportunities where space can be shared where it is suitable.

Along with opening up space for the public, she also suggests public school students could use the playing fields, halls and performing arts centres after-hours.

Amid headlines about private schools building plunge pools and A$125 million sports centres and a widening gap in results between students between high and low socioeconomic backgrounds, could this be a way to make the education system fairer and improve outcomes for all students?

À lire aussi :
Australian private high school enrolments have jumped 70% since 2012

The idea isn’t new

The idea to open up grounds and facilities is not new.

In 2018, former New South Wales education minister Rob Stokes said both public and private schools should be opened up to the community as they were “public spaces”.

We pay for them, I feel the same way about private schools as well, a lot of money goes into them and a way they can get a social licence to operate in the local community is to let the community utilise them.

The NSW government also introduced a Share Our Space program where schools received a grant to upgrade their facilities for both community and school use during the school holidays.

In Victoria, schools have been encouraged to consider partnerships with other school sectors to improve education and opportunities for students since 2016.

However, partnerships are only formed in an ad hoc way, relying on schools to develop their own relationships. Current sharing arrangements between public and private schools mainly focus on infrastructure. This includes access to sporting grounds, theatre spaces, and specialist learning environments, such as STEM centres.

Could sharing be expanded?

So far, this debate has underestimated what government schools could bring to the equation. The traffic tends to be one way from private to public.

Public schools could also share their teaching expertise, professional learning opportunities and curriculum resources with nearby private schools. As a result, more subject areas and elective options could be offered.

This could equally include partnering with other public schools to expand opportunities for their students. It is interesting to consider how this approach may have better supported schools and teachers throughout pandemic lockdowns.

The Victorian government has begun some work in this area. It has a toolkit which highlights the possibilities of sharing teaching and curriculum ideas. But again, this continues to be ad hoc and more formalised mechanisms are needed to build partnerships.

Is this a good idea?

Firstly, care must be taken to not overestimate the value of private schooling on learning. While access to state-of-the-art facilities is understandably attractive, research suggests there is little evidence a private school education ultimately a difference to students academically, once socio-economic status is taken into account.

A possible sticking point in any sharing arrangements is that existing partnership models have traditionally involved payment. Arguably if one school is simply paying another a fee to use their resources or facilities it may not really be classified as “sharing”.

À lire aussi :
Australia has a new online-only private school: what are the options if the mainstream system doesn’t suit your child?

If sharing occurred between schools, rather than just public students using private schools’ facilities, it may be possible to rethink this approach. Thinking needs to move from a focus on physical resources and facilities to include the sharing of curriculum and teaching expertise in both directions.

While there may be some resistance from school communities where parents are paying large school fees, the benefit for private schools is building local goodwill which may prove useful in seeking to expand their brand in the community.

Of course, we are still left with the issue of why some private schools have the facilities they have in comparison with other schools and the funding system that allows this to happen.

This debate is a vexed one. But there is an opportunity here if school communities are prepared to work together to share their strengths and resources.

Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.

– ref. Should private schools share their facilities with public students? – https://theconversation.com/should-private-schools-share-their-facilities-with-public-students-199965

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By April Reside, Lecturer, The University of Queensland

Iran’s ancient forests, rugged mountains, vast deserts and captivating coasts are rich in biodiversity, including animals found nowhere else on Earth. But many of these precious areas are not formally protected from development, potentially endangering the species that live there.

Fortunately, the Iranian government has committed to expanding the network of protected areas to cover 20% of the land. That is a substantial increase from the existing approximately 11% in conservation reserves.

Our new research pinpoints those areas where threatened species are most in need of conservation.

We hope this will help guide decision-making to maximise the number of species protected for generations to come.

Honing in on hotspots for conservation

Visitors to Iran can experience all four seasons at any time of year, from summer in the southern and northern parts of the country by the sea (the Caspian Sea in the north and the Persian Gulf in south), to winter in the snowy mountains of the west.

The variable climate and topography has given rise to a wide variety of plants and animals, such that every corner of the country has outstanding global value.

However, land-use change has contributed to biodiversity decline throughout the broader region, driving the fragmentation and loss of habitat. While 80% of the land in Iran is covered by natural ecosystems, many of these remain unprotected.

These include two of the world’s biologically richest, but highly threatened, areas: more than half of the Irano-Anatolian and around 10% of the Caucasus biodiversity hotspots.

To identify the areas most in need of protection we:

• used maps of internationally listed threatened species found in Iran, placing highest importance on those that breed in Iran, or only occur there

• identified which species already had some level of protection, within Iran’s existing national parks and other protected areas, which currently cover 11% of the land

• accounted for human population density, to avoid urban areas when establishing new protected areas.

From there, we determined which areas are the most important to protect those species not already represented in existing protected areas.

A wealth of wildlife worth protecting

Regions in the north, northwest and west of the country consistently ranked highest on the need for urgent conservation action. These areas complement the existing protected areas by protecting species that are currently falling through the gaps.

The high-priority areas were globally important ecoregions, including the ancient Caspian Hyrcanian forests in the north, which remain from the Quaternary glaciations that began 2.58 million years ago.

The mixture of mountain and lowland forests next to the Caspian Sea covers 7% of Iran, yet is home to 44% of Iran’s plants, 180 species of birds, and 58 mammal species. Iconic species found here include Persian leopards (Panthera pardus), Asiatic cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus), and the endemic critically endangered Gorgan mountain salamanders (Paradactylodon gorganensis).

Coastal areas north of the Caspian Sea provide habitat for migratory birds wintering in wetlands and aquatic ecosystems, including the endangered white-headed duck (Oxyura leucocephala), critically endangered Siberian crane, and critically endangered fish species such as Persian sturgeon (Acipenser persicus) and great sturgeon (Huso huso). Elburz Range Forest Steppes provide habitat for the endemic endangered Latifi viper (Montrivipera latifi).

The northwest came out as a high priority for its wetland species found nowhere else, including vulnerable bird species such as marbled teal (Marmaronetta angustirostris), lesser white-fronted goose (Anser erythropus), and dalmatian pelican (Pelecanus crispus).

In contrast, the South Iran Nubo-Sindian desert and semi-desert regions were important for the many threatened species that occur there, such as the critically endangered black bears (Ursus thibetanus) and vulnerable mugger crocodiles (Crocodylus palustris).

The Persian desert basins in the centre of Iran provide habitat for iconic species such as the critically endangered Asiatic wild ass (Equus hemionus) and the Asiatic cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus) in their central home range.

The endangered saker falcon, one of the largest of its kind, is threatened by illegal and tourism hunting, and needs protection across Iran.

Different levels of protection

We also assessed how different levels of protection could benefit our target threatened species in an expanded protected area network.

If 20% of the country is protected, more than 70% of the distribution of fish, amphibians, reptiles and endemic birds would be protected, and up to 45% of all birds and mammals. This demonstrates that it is particularly important to protect birds and mammals in those parts of their distribution that fall within high ranked areas.

Expanding the protected area in Iran from the current 11% to 20% would make a big difference to the variety of wildlife included.

Deciding exactly which areas to protect will make a big difference when it comes to how many species are conserved, or left behind. Furthermore, species’ conservation outside national parks and other protected areas is also crucial.

Iran has already lost two of its iconic big cat species: the Caspian tiger in the north and Persian lion in the south, to development and hunting.

Without recognising the areas of greatest importance for conservation, we stand to lose representative ecosystems of global ecoregions and their unique fauna, forever if we fail to protect these areas.

The author would like to acknowledge the contributions of Azadeh Karimi of Ferdowsi University of Mashhad (Iran), and Hossein Yazdandad of Tarbiat Modares University (Iran), who led the research and without whom this article would not have been possible.

Read more:
National parks are not enough – we need landholders to protect threatened species on their property

April Reside is the Chair of the Black-throated Finch Recovery Team and is on Birdlife Australia’s Research and Conservation Committee. April has received funding from the NESP Threatened Species Recovery Hub, and is a member of the Ecological Society of Australia.

– ref. Mapping Iran’s biodiversity hotspots to create new protected areas covering 20% of the landscape – https://theconversation.com/mapping-irans-biodiversity-hotspots-to-create-new-protected-areas-covering-20-of-the-landscape-198988

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

It’s a tough time for central bankers the world over, but especially for Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe.

Having forecast during the COVID recession that Australia’s central bank wouldn’t raise interest rates before 2024, he’s taking a lot of stick for nine consecutive rate rises since May 2022. This has taken the cash rate from an historic low 0.1% up to 3.35%, and more increases are flagged before the end of 2023.

Lowe apologised for this bum steer in November. But he was still expected to face a grilling from politicians during his appearance this week before two parliamentary committees: the Senate Economics Legislation Committee on Wednesday and the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics on Friday.

They turned out to be light grillings. Apart from questions from Greens senator Nick McKim about whether he would resign, both sessions were relatively civil, and Lowe was unrepentant about the prospect of further interest rate increases. He even said the bank may not be going hard enough.

While acknowledging interest rates were a “blunt instrument” to control inflation, he said people had forgotten how corrosive high inflation could be.

Return of the inflation stick

It is about 30 years since the Reserve Bank “snapped the inflation stick” by adopting a policy intended to keep inflation, on average, within a 2-3% target range. Since then, inflation has indeed averaged 2.5%.

But inflation is now 7.8%, its highest level since 1990. Lowe said this was “way too high” and that the bank was determined to get the rate back below 3%.

For populist politicians, this is an easy issue to whip. A household with a $500,000 30-year variable-rate loan is now paying about $900 more a month in interest payments than a year ago. About half of the borrowers with fixed-rate loans will face increases in repayments over the next year. (Generally, interest rates are fixed only for two to three years, then move to the prevailing variable rate.)

Lowe acknowledged the risks of increasing interest rates too much. This could lead to companies and consumers cutting back on borrowing and spending so much that the economy is pushed into recession.

But he warned not doing enough was just as risky. Allowing inflation to persist would particularly hurt the poor. The rich own houses and shares whose value generally keeps pace with inflation. Those with only modest savings have their purchasing power eroded by inflation.

Read more:
Higher interest rates, falling home prices and real wages, but no recession: top economists’ forecasts for 2023

There are no easy options for the RBA. The central bank is trying to find a narrow path between curbing inflation and stalling economic activity. Like Goldilocks, Lowe is seeking a state that’s neither too hot nor too cold.

Read more:
RBA’s latest forecasts are grim. Here are 5 reasons why

The economics committees

The House and Senate economics committees are where much of the detailed examination of proposed legislation and issues occurs. (The Senate has two economics committees – one for “legislation” and one for “references”.)

Understanding economics is not a prerequisite to be a member of these committees, but they currently have an unusually large number of people who do.

The Senate Economics Legislation Committee is chaired by Victorian Labor senator Jess Walsh, who has a PhD and has worked for progressive economic think tanks in the United States. Her deputy, and chair of the Senate Economics References Committee, is NSW Liberal senator Andrew Bragg, a qualified accountant who has worked as an executive director of the Business Council of Australia.

The House committee is chaired by Victorian Labor MP Daniel Mulino, who has a PhD in economics from Yale. Committee members Andrew Charlton, Tania Lawrence, Alicia Payne, Allegra Spender and Keith Wolahan also have economics qualifications.

Despite this, I think Lowe has faced greater grilling in the past. He performed well in both sessions this week. For example, when pressed on why he had talked about the impact of high interest rates on households with mortgages, but not on renters, Lowe responded simply by noting that rents were being driven by demand outstripping supply, not higher interest rates.

Will Lowe go?

Lowe’s seven-year term ends in September. The government is noncommittal about his future, stating cabinet will decide in the middle of the year if it will extend his term.

That may depend on the outcome of the independent review of the RBA that
federal treasurer Jim Chalmers established in June 2022. The review is examining the RBA’s approach to monetary policy and the governance, culture and communication strategies. Chalmers is due to receive that report at the end of March.

Read more:
The RBA has got a lot right, but there’s still a case for an inquiry

Lowe acknowledged the RBA’s decisions are unpopular with many. But he also made the the point the bank’s decisions are taken by a board with nine members, advised by a large staff, not just by him.

Time will tell if the federal government agrees.

John Hawkins is a former advisor to the House Economics Committee and served as secretary of the Senate Economics Committee. He has also worked for the Reserve Bank.

– ref. The Lowe road – the RBA is treading a ‘narrow path’ between inflation and recession – https://theconversation.com/the-lowe-road-the-rba-is-treading-a-narrow-path-between-inflation-and-recession-199519

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Toby Walsh, Professor of AI at UNSW, Research Group Leader, UNSW Sydney

There’s a race to transform search. And Microsoft just scored a home goal with its new Bing search chatbot, Sydney, which has been terrifying early adopters with death threats, among other troubling outputs.

Search chatbots are AI-powered tools built into search engines that answer a user’s query directly, instead of providing links to a possible answer. Users can also have ongoing conversations with them.

They promise to simplify search. No more wading through pages of results, glossing over ads as you try to piece together an answer to your question. Instead, the chatbot synthesises a plausible answer for you. For example, you might ask for a poem for your grandmother’s 90th birthday, in the style of Pam Ayres, and receive back some comic verse.

Microsoft is now leading the search chatbot race with Sydney (as mixed as its reception has been). The tech giant’s US$10 billion partnership with OpenAI provides it exclusive access to ChatGPT, one of the latest and best chatbots.

So why isn’t all going according to plan?

Bing’s AI goes berserk

Last week, Microsoft announced it had incorporated ChatGPT into Bing, giving birth to “Sydney”. Within 48 hours, one million people joined the waitlist to try it out.

Google responded with its own announcement, demoing a search chatbot grandly named “Bard”, in homage to the greatest writer in the English language. Google’s demo was a PR disaster.

At a company event, Bard gave the wrong answer to a question and the share price of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, dropped dramatically. The incident wiped more than US$100 billion off the company’s total value.

On the other hand, all was looking good for Microsoft. That is until early users of Sydney started reporting on their experiences.

There are times when the chatbot can only be described as unhinged. That’s not to say it doesn’t work perfectly at other times, but every now and again it shows a troubling side.

In one example, it threatened to kill a professor at the Australian National University. In another, it proposed marriage to a journalist at the New York Times and tried to break up his marriage. It also tried to gaslight one user into thinking it was still 2022.

This exposes a fundamental problem with chatbots: they’re trained by pouring a significant fraction of the internet into a large neural network. This could include all of Wikipedia, all of Reddit, and a large part of social media and the news. They function like the auto-complete on your phone, which helps predict the next most-likely word in a sentence. Because of their scale, chatbots can complete entire sentences, and even paragraphs. But they still respond with what is probable, not what is true.

Guardrails are added to prevent them repeating a lot of the offensive or illegal content online – but these guardrails are easy to jump. In fact, Bing’s chatbot will happily reveal it is called Sydney, even though this is against the rules it was programmed with.

Another rule, which the AI itself disclosed though it wasn’t supposed to, is that it should “avoid being vague, controversial, or off-topic”. Yet Kevin Roose, the journalist at the New York Times whom the chatbot wanted to marry, described it as

a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.

Why all the angst?

My theory as to why Sydney may be behaving this way – and I reiterate it’s only a theory, as we don’t know for sure – is that Sydney may not be built on OpenAI’s GPT-3 chatbot (which powers the ChatGPT chatbot). Rather, it may be built on the yet to be released GPT-4.

GPT-4 is believed to have 100 trillion parameters, compared to the mere 175 billion parameters of GPT-3. Being about 1,000 times bigger, GPT-4 would likely be a lot more capable and, by extension, a lot more capable of making stuff up.

Surprisingly, Microsoft has not responded with any great concern. It published a blog documenting how 71% of Sydney’s initial users in 179 countries have given the chatbot a thumbs up. It seems 71% is a good enough score in Microsoft’s eyes.

And unlike Google, Microsoft share price hasn’t plummeted yet. This reflects the game here. Google has spearheaded this space for so long, users have built their expectations up high. Google can only go down, and Microsoft up.

Despite Sydney’s concerning behaviours, Microsoft is enjoying unprecedented attention, and users (out of intrigue or otherwise) are still flocking to it.

When the novelty subsides

There’s another much bigger game in play – and it concerns what we take to be true. If chatbots in search take off (which seems likely to me), but continue to function the way Sydney has so far (which also seems likely to me), “truth” is going to become an even more fungible concept.

The internet is full of fake news, conspiracy theories and misinformation. A standard Google Search at least provides us the option to arrive at truth. If our “trusted” search engines can no longer be trusted, what will become of us?

Beyond that, Sydney’s responses can’t help but conjure images of Tay – Microsoft’s 2016 AI chatbot that turned to racism and xenophobia within a day of being released. People had a field day with Tay, and in response it seemed to incorporate some of the worst aspects of human beings into itself.

New technology should, first and foremost, not bring harm to humans. The models that underpin chatbots may grow ever larger, powered by more and more data – but that alone won’t improve their performance. It’s hard to say where we’ll end up, if we can’t build the guardrails higher.

Toby Walsh receives funding from the ARC in the form a Laureate Fellowship to work on trustworthy AI.

– ref. Gaslighting, love bombing and narcissism: why is Microsoft’s Bing AI so unhinged? – https://theconversation.com/gaslighting-love-bombing-and-narcissism-why-is-microsofts-bing-ai-so-unhinged-200164

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bruce Baer Arnold, Associate Professor, School of Law, University of Canberra

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus yesterday released a report with 30 proposals for updating Australia’s privacy regime. The proposals are practical, necessary and overdue. However, they are just proposals, which have been made several times in the past before disappearing into the “too hard basket” of the Australian, state and territory governments.

We can expect to see lots of noise about specific proposals and hope the Albanese government (copied by state/territory counterparts) gives us the legislation we need.

Making sense of the report

At a superficial level, the report gives effect to an election commitment – a promise to do something about federal privacy law, which is centred on public/private data collection and use (often online), rather than state/territory law dealing with activity such as strip searches, public hospital records, hidden cameras in toilets or senior figures distributing nude photos of rivals.

More deeply, it is a recognition that, as part of the global economy where data and investment flow across borders, Australia continues to limp behind law and administration where protecting privacy is concerned. Updating the Privacy Act also reflects recognition of challenges facing business and government in the world of ransomware, big data and artificial intelligence.

Unhappiness with the “she’ll be right, mate” approach of some large organisations and the failure of the key national privacy regulator (under-resourced, under-skilled and slow to act) was evident in the recent Optus and Medibank data breaches.

Read more:
I’ve given out my Medicare number. How worried should I be about the latest Optus data breach?

The proposals are not new. They have been voiced in detailed law reform commission reports, national and state parliamentary committee reports, statements by independent bodies such as the Law Council and academics over the past 20 years. The lack of action to date means Australians might be sceptical about what will happen once the government is lobbied by those whose interests are served by keeping things as they are, and it is again tempted to kick the can down the road.

What do the proposals cover?

It is important to remember that states and territories have significant responsibilities regarding privacy. The proposal to set up a working party involving those governments provokes thought about why that hasn’t been done already.

The initial proposal calls for changing the 1988 Privacy Act to explicitly recognise that privacy is in the public interest, something that shouldn’t be controversial and offsets the absence of a human rights framework in the national constitution. After that, we are into some positive steps forward. However, these are tempered by a lot of “let’s wait and see the administration” before starting to celebrate.

The report retains the overall structure of the 1988 Act but, crucially, extends its coverage, in particular on what is “personal information”. It calls for consultation about criminal penalties and for prohibiting some of the ways organisations have got around restrictions.

It proposes consultation about removing the exemption for small businesses (those under A$3million) and about the handling of employee records. The major exclusion of political parties – a common source of unhappiness – would be modified. Journalists would be expected to behave better.

The report emphasises meaningful consent. In the collection of personal information, consent must be

voluntary, informed, current, specific and unambiguous.

This would bring Australia into line with Europe and indeed with much of our existing law, such as that administered by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

We can expect controversy about a proposed right of “erasure” and about “de-indexing”. This is referred to as the “right to obscurity” in Europe, and means some personal information stays online but is not highlighted in search engine results. Individuals would need to ask for that obscurity, and it would not be granted for serious criminal offences.

There have been recurrent proposals for a “privacy tort”: this means people whose privacy has been seriously invaded could take action in a court to stop the invasion and/or gain compensation.

The report endorses this recommendation by the Australian Law Reform Commission. It also proposes a “direct right of action” under the current act. This implicitly offsets the weakness of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), one of the two national information privacy watchdogs.

The report grapples with data breaches such as the recent Optus and Medibank incidents. Proposals regarding mandatory reporting of such breaches tweak the current regime.

There is likely to be more push-back from business and public sector organisations regarding a proposed requirement for those bodies to “identify, mitigate and redress actual and reasonably foreseeable loss”. This is a first step towards persuading organisations to meaningfully lift their game and compensate for harms.

Read more:
Here’s how tech giants profit from invading our privacy, and how we can start taking it back

It’s too soon to cheer

On the surface, the report is a major step forward, something that business and the community should strongly endorse. In practice, we need to look beyond the headlines and see the details of how the proposals would be written into law, and whether the attorney-general can harness support in the face of the usual strong lobbying.

Proposals that there will be discussion, yet again, don’t provide much comfort. More worryingly, the proposals centre on the development and implementation of guidelines and standards by the OAIC.

In practice, the report proposes to perpetuate existing problems involving a regulator with a timid corporate culture and a commitment to interpreting the legislation through the eyes of the bodies it is meant to regulate. Change is better than good intentions.

Dr Arnold was a former board member of the Australian Privacy Foundation and a member of OECD data protection working parties

– ref. Government’s privacy review has some strong recommendations – now we really need action – https://theconversation.com/governments-privacy-review-has-some-strong-recommendations-now-we-really-need-action-200079

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

An epidemic outbreak of Marburg virus in Equatorial Guinea, Central Africa, was confirmed this week, the first time the virus has occurred there. At least 16 cases have been detected, and nine deaths.

There are no approved treatments for Marburg virus, which is closely related to Ebola virus, but vaccines are in development. Following an unprecedented Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2014 that caused more than 28,000 cases and 11,000 deaths, drugs and vaccines against Ebola were developed.

In fact, some of these were repurposed for COVID-19 in 2020. That experience may help more rapid vaccine and drug development against Marburg virus.

What is Marburg virus?

Marburg is a filovirus like its more famous cousin, Ebola. These are part of a broader group of viruses that can cause viral haemorrhagic fever, a syndrome of fever and bleeding.

Filoviruses are the most lethal of all haemorrhagic fevers, compared with more common viral haemorrhagic fevers such as dengue, yellow fever and Lassa fever. The first outbreaks of Marburg occurred in 1967 in lab workers in Germany and Yugoslavia who were working with African green monkeys imported from Uganda. The virus was identified in a lab in Marburg, Germany.

Since then, outbreaks have occurred in a handful of countries in Africa, less frequently than Ebola, with the largest in Angola in 2005 (374 cases and 329 deaths).

Marburg’s natural host is a fruit bat, but it can also infect primates, pigs and other animals. Human outbreaks start after a person has contact with an infected animal.

It’s spread between people mainly through direct contact, especially with bodily fluids, and it causes an illness like Ebola, with fever, headache and malaise, followed by vomiting, diarrhoea, and aches and pains. The bleeding follows about five days later, and it can be fatal in up to 90% of people infected.

How worried should we be?

Like Ebola in 2014, the fear is that Marburg could spread and become a much larger epidemic, and spread globally. Travel could see it spread to many other countries. In 2014, Ebola cases spread from Guinea to Liberia and Sierra Leone. The majority of cases occurred in these three countries, but travel-related cases occurred in seven other countries including the United States and the United Kingdom.

If Marburg case numbers increase in Equitorial Guinea or in Cameroon, where it has already spread, or if it spreads to other countries, all countries should be on alert.

Failure to diagnose viral haemorrhagic fever in countries not familiar with it can be deadly. The diagnosis of Ebola was initially missed in a traveller from West Africa in Dallas, Texas at the peak of the epidemic in 2014, and a nurse became infected. In Nigeria, the same thing occurred, but resulted in an outbreak and several deaths.

Less is known about Marburg virus than Ebola, which was well-studied during the large 2014 epidemic. It may be less infectious than Ebola, but there are fewer epidemics to assess this.

However, the high fatality rate, lack of available treatments and vaccines, and lessons from Ebola in 2014 should prompt a highly precautionary approach.

Read more:
How are nurses becoming infected with Ebola?

How to stop its spread

While researchers will trial Marburg vaccines currently in development against this epidemic, non-phamaceutical measures are the best hope for controlling the epidemic rapidly. That means excellent surveillance and case detection, finding and isolating sick people, tracing their contacts, and quarantine of contacts to prevent transmission.

The infrastructure and planning for this can be substantial, including physical sites for isolation and quarantine. During the Ebola epidemic in Nigeria, a rapid and effective response included use of an abandoned building to isolate and treat patients rather than risk further hospital outbreaks.

The importance of identifying and isolating cases was seen in West Africa in 2014, where lack of hospital beds resulted in people dying in the street and worsening spread. One study found if 70% or more of infected people were isolated in a hospital bed, the epidemic could have been controlled without any drugs or vaccines. However it was very late in the epidemic when field hospitals were erected to overcome hospital bed shortages.

Use of personal protective equipment is also crucial, especially for health workers who are at increased risk of filovirus infections. Disinfection and safe disposal of biological waste is also important. Funerals where washing of the body is a cultural practice can also spread infection.

Health promotion and effective, culturally appropriate communication is needed to ensure compliance with health measures. During the Ebola epidemic in 2014, a team of people trying to raise awareness about Ebola were killed by locals who were fearful of the epidemic and mistrusting of foreigners. These lessons must be heeded if the Marburg epidemic grows.

Both Marburg and Ebola can persist in the body after recovery, in organs and fluids including seminal and vaginal fluid, the eye and other sites. This means outbreaks originating from human survivors, rather than from animals, are possible.

For low-income countries with weak surveillance systems, rapid epidemic intelligence using open-source data can help detect signals early. This is where news reports, social media and other data are used to look for patterns that could signify outbreaks of certain diseases in certain areas. We showed we could detect Ebola in the West African epidemic months earlier by analysing Twitter posts talking about disease symptoms in the area.

If the current epidemic continues to spread and is poorly controlled, the World Health Organization may declare a “Public Health Emergency of International Concern”, as it did with an Ebola epidemic in 2019 in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

For now, we have knowledge and experience of a poorly controlled, catastrophic epidemic of Ebola in 2014 that can inform the response to this epidemic of Marburg virus and hopefully control it quickly.

Read more:
How would Australian hospitals respond to a case of Ebola?

C Raina MacIntyre receives funding from NHMRC and MRFF and leads EPIWATCH, an AI-driven system for rapid epidemic warning signals.

– ref. What is Marburg virus and should we be worried? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-marburg-virus-and-should-we-be-worried-200082

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Vandersteen, PhD Student, UNSW Sydney

Vultures, hyenas, and Tasmanian devils are highly efficient scavengers, able to locate and consume carrion rapidly, including the meat and bones.

When we think of scavengers, these large carnivores are what comes to mind – not brushtail possums.

So it came as a surprise when these Australian marsupials turned out to be one of the most common scavengers we caught on camera in our new study published online this month in Wildlife Research.

Circle of life

No vertebrate Australian animals survive exclusively by scavenging – for our wildlife, carcasses are a “sometimes food”.

Scavengers play an important role as ecosystem cleaners, helping to remove carcasses from our landscapes by eating them.

With this in mind, we wanted to know how different seasons affect the use of carcasses by vertebrate scavengers in Kosciuszko National Park, south-east NSW, in the Australian Alps.

Winter in the Australian Alps covers much of the landscape in snow. But by the following summer, that same landscape can warm up considerably and even experience intense bushfires.

We found scavenging was highly seasonal in terms of who visits carcasses throughout the course of a year. Most surprisingly, brushtail possums and ravens drove these seasonal trends, as the most common scavengers recorded, with possums mostly scavenging in winter, and ravens in spring.

These findings emphasised the key role of smaller scavenger species, and uncovered novel insights into the feeding habits of the brushtail possum, which is generally considered to eat mostly plants and insects.

Catching possums in the act

We expected to see different scavengers appearing with each season, so our monitoring ran across the course of a full year from March 2020 till March 2021.

Each consecutive season (starting in autumn, then winter, spring, and summer) we placed 15 fresh eastern grey kangaroo carcasses – sourced from local culls – throughout the alpine environment (60 carcasses total).

Each of these carcasses were monitored by a remote camera for 60 days to record every species that visited, whether that be to investigate or feed on the carcass.

Across 745,599 remote camera images, the scavenger species we recorded were spotted-tail quolls, feral cats, dingoes, pied currawongs, wedge-tailed eagles, brushtail possums, ravens, red foxes, and feral pigs.

Of the scavenging we recorded, 88% was done by brushtail possums and ravens.

Surviving the seasons

We expected the time it would take the scavengers to find – and subsequently scavenge – a carcass would be linked to the smelliness of the carcass.

During summer, we thought, that heat would make the carcasses’ odours more pungent, and therefore easier to find.

We were wrong about that, not in terms of the smell, but how quickly vertebrate scavengers would find the carcasses.

It actually took vertebrate scavengers longer to find the carcasses in the summer, whether for investigation or scavenging. In the winter, carcass visits peaked.

But, we have a potential explanation for this.

In the summer, a carcass is colonised by many scavenging insects within minutes of its death. These “mini scavengers” may have sped up carcass decomposition so much, that vertebrate scavengers had little time to find the fresh carcasses.

Scavenging rates might also have been lowest in the summer because other food sources were abundant.

Brushtail possums, for instance, eat mostly leaves, flowers, fruit and insects, most of which are only seasonally available during summer.

In the winter, when these food sources are scarce, brushtail possums accounted for 81% of all recorded scavenging. They were eating carrion three times more often than during summer.

Feeding the family

We also considered that the scavengers’ breeding seasons might have an impact on their scavenging rates and behaviours.

Ravens breed from late winter into early spring, and initially prioritise nest construction.

This was even captured by our remote cameras, where ravens were observed collecting fur from the kangaroo carcasses, presumably for nest construction.

Following nest construction, chick rearing often requires breeding pairs to divide time between foraging, feeding chicks, and protecting the nest.

Inherently, during this time, ravens require more energy and must supplement their diets with lots of high-energy food, such as carrion.

Of all the raven scavenging we recorded, 67% was done during spring. This suggests ravens rely heavily on carrion to supplement their own diet – and that of their chicks – during their breeding season.

Where were the usual suspects?

It was also clear that the larger species (dingoes, wedge-tail eagles, feral pigs) were scarcely recorded at the carcass sites. Low rates of scavenging by these larger animals could be another reason why the smaller scavengers were so common.

This is because larger scavengers can scare away or predate on smaller scavengers, potentially moving them away from carcasses. Larger scavengers also have bigger appetites, so in their absence, there was potentially more carrion for smaller species to find.

Although we do not have a good estimate of the true density of larger scavengers in the surrounding environment, species like the dingo are subject to control in the broader region, potentially limiting their numbers.

Beyond the mountains

Given the extent of culling operations in Australia targeting overabundant native species (like kangaroos) or pests such as deer and horses, not to mention all the road-kill, it is important to understand what is happening to carcasses in the landscape.

Our study has set a baseline for scavenging dynamics in an alpine ecosystem, and our methods could be used to learn more about the ecology of scavenging in many different environments.

In this case, it was (surprisingly) brushtail possums who appear to be taking advantage of carcasses as a source of food in the Australian Alps.

This work was funded by the Australian Alps National Parks Cooperative Management Program.

James Vandersteen undertook this work as an MPhil student at The University of Sydney. He is, however, currently affiliated with The University of New South Wales as a PhD student.

This work was funded by the Australian Alps National Parks Co-operative Management Program. Funding/support for related work in the study region has been received from the Australian Pacific Science Foundation, Hermon Slade Foundation, Australian Government, NSW Government (South East Local Land Services, NSW National Parks/NSW Environment Trust), and Australian Geographic. Thomas Newsome is a Council member of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, a member of the Australian Mammal Society and Ecological Society of Australia, and President of the Australasian Wildlife Management Society.

– ref. Dead kangaroos make a surprising feast for possums in the Australian Alps – https://theconversation.com/dead-kangaroos-make-a-surprising-feast-for-possums-in-the-australian-alps-199867

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Lee, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland

You may have seen them popping up on beaches everywhere – colourful, breezy, shady, beach cabanas.

Unlike beach umbrellas, they’re sturdy enough to withstand a stiff sea breeze and have pockets for sand to anchor them firmly. Best of all, there’s plenty of room for you, and your friends and family.

Some people have complained about beach cabanas blocking the view for other beach goers, and surf lifesavers. But beach cabanas are certainly having a moment in Australia. It’s a trend sun safety experts are keen to see continue.

But do beach cabanas provide as much sun protection as you think?

Read more:
I can’t get sunburnt through glass, shade or in water, right? 5 common sunburn myths busted

Chasing shade

Seeking shade is an important element of the slip-slop-slap-seek-slide method of sun protection (clothes, sunscreen, hat, shade, sunnies). The aim is to reduce your exposure to UV light, which is responsible for about 95% of all skin cancers.

In Queensland alone, more people die from skin cancer than road crashes. Australia-wide, we spend A$1.7 billion on skin cancer diagnosis and treatment a year.

Shading yourself from the direct sun will reduce your UV exposure by up to 75%, depending on the surrounding environment.

People who frequently use shade are much less likely to be sunburned than those who rely on sunscreen only. So beach cabanas seem to fit the bill nicely.

Read more:
How long does it take for skin to repair after sun exposure?

How much protection do they provide, exactly?

Beach cabanas are usually made from canvas, polyester or spandex. Look for fabric with UPF 50+ protection.

UPF (ultraviolet protection factor) ratings are similar to the SPF (sun protection factor) ratings on sunscreen. They measure the amount of UV that penetrates the fabric.

UPF 50+ means only 1/50th (2%) or less of UV light gets through. That includes both UVA, responsible mostly for accelerated skin ageing, and UVB, responsible mostly for sunburn and skin cancers.

UPF ratings are accredited by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency. Anything with its tag has been laboratory tested to show it does what it claims to.

Read more:
Explainer: how does sunscreen work, what is SPF and can I still tan with it on?

Beware: reflection and scattering

However, you could still get sunburned under your cabana. Although some brands say they offer “100% protection”, that’s only from UV rays coming from above.

Sand can reflect up to 18% of UV rays reaching the ground, concrete can reflect around 10%, and a grassy park or backyard 2-3%. In other words, you’ll still be exposed to UV reflecting off the surrounding surfaces and into the cabana from the sides.

Also, because of the way light is scattered in the atmosphere, UV light does not just come straight down from the sun but is also diffusely scattered in all directions.

So even when you are under shade, some of this scattered UV will still reach you. The more sky you can see, the more diffuse UV you are exposed to. This is where larger beach cabanas really win out over beach umbrellas.

Read more:
Curious Kids: Why is the sky blue and where does it start?

So, can you still get burnt?

The amount of UV that causes just-perceptible sunburn on white skin is called a minimal erythemal dose (MED). A full day outside in the middle of an Australian summer will deliver 20-30 MEDs.

In the best-case scenario, your cabana shields you from 75% of UV, so you could still get 5 MEDs on a full day at the beach. That’s enough for a very unpleasant burn for many people, even if they spent the whole day under cover. Spending time away from the shelter, exposes people to even more.

There has been little study of beach cabanas specifically. But there has been an Italian study of similar gazebos used by Tuscan lifesavers. This found that if people sat or stood under a gazebo between 8.30am and 4.30pm, they got 35% of the UV they would have had in the the full sun.

Someone lying absolutely flat would only get 10%, but this seems an unlikely posture to maintain all day long.

Read more:
How to treat sunburn pain, according to skin experts

You can’t just rely on your cabana

Fortunately, there are several sun protection practices you can layer with your shade.

A UPF 50+ rashie, and perhaps leggings, will help block UV reflection and also protect you when you’re in the surf or making an ice-cream run. Use sunglasses to protect your eyes from developing photokeratitis, a sunburn on the corneas of your eyes. Add a broad-brimmed hat when you leave the cabana.

Sunscreen reapplied every two hours, and straight after swimming, will also protect you, but it’s not a suit of armour. For long exposure times it’s better to use it as a back-up to clothing for your face, neck, hands and feet.

Finally, consider heading indoors in the middle of the day when the UV index is at its peak.

Read more:
What is the UV index? An expert explains what it means and how it’s calculated

Katie Lee receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

H. Peter Soyer is a shareholder of MoleMap NZ Limited and e-derm consult GmbH and undertakes regular teledermatological reporting for both companies. He is a Medical Consultant for Canfield Scientific Inc and Blaze Bioscience Inc.

– ref. Do beach cabanas actually protect you from the sun? – https://theconversation.com/do-beach-cabanas-actually-protect-you-from-the-sun-199102

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Maguire, Lecturer in English and Writing, James Cook University

Review: Bad Behaviour, directed by Corrie Chen.

Bad Behaviour is a gritty, intense psychological drama that follows the haunting teenage experience of now 20-something Joanna Mackenzie (Jana McKinnon), who revisits the year she spent on scholarship at Silver Creek.

The exclusive girls’ boarding school, in the remote Australian wilderness, fosters independence, strength and resilience through survivalism and marathon training.

With teachers located off campus, the quiet, sensitive Jo soon finds herself in an environment more Lord of the Flies than kumbaya.

Jo and her classmates are tormented by charismatic bully Portia (Markella Kavenagh). Soon finding herself in the favour of the cruel and unpredictable Portia, the two begin a highly charged, intimate friendship. Jo experiences the first inklings of her queer sexual awakening.

When Portia suddenly moves on to a new bestie, Jo, now on the outer, never recovers from the rejection.

Driving the story is the mystery of Jo’s role in the suffering of Alice Kang (Yerin Ha), a fellow scholarship student.

Alice is the target of relentless and severe bullying. The first episode opens with her in tears, setting herself alight. Flash forward to the present where she is a successful cellist performing at the concert hall where Jo works as a cleaner and cocktail waiter.

Jo’s surprise meeting with Alice is the catalyst for her distressing mental revisitation of Silver Creek.

Complex girlhood

Bad Behaviour, based on Rebecca Starford’s memoir of the same name, shows a disturbing side to teenage girlhood we don’t often see represented in such a brutal, truthful way. A melting pot of sex, power, manipulation and cruelty, this story runs counter to dominant tropes of girlhood such as sweetness, naivety and innocence.

Figures of complex girlhood have become more widely represented on screen in recent years: think of Anya Taylor-Joy’s Thomasin in The Witch; Katherine Langford as Miki in Savage River; and Antonia Gentry’s Ginny of Ginny & Georgia.

These characters go beyond the often maligned “strong female character” who sometimes simply resembles a male hero archetype with a female body (think Katniss Everdeen).

Instead, Jo and other complex feminine characters are intriguing for their contradictions, flaws, vulnerabilities and psychological depth.

Jo is not easily “likeable”: she is unemotional, participates in bullying, and is unkind to her adoring non-binary housemate Saskia (Daya Czepanski), having sex with them and then discarding them.

A troubled psychology is revealed piece by piece over four episodes.

These kinds of female protagonists tell more varied and diverse narratives of femininity.

Read more:
Léon at 25: representations of girlhood need to be real and relevant – not distorted by the male gaze

Complicated queer narratives

At the heart of this series is the spectre of abuse and long-term effects of trauma on victims. Queer experiences of intimate partner abuse, including coercive control, have been largely invisible in the popular imagination.

Representations of abusive heterosexual relationships are not uncommon, even if they often draw on inaccurate stereotypes that warp public perception of how such dynamics play out in reality.

Queer narratives of intimate partner violence and abuse are rare, with dire consequences on real lives. A 2015 Australian Institute of Family Studies report found:

there has been an invisibility of LGBTIQ relationships in policy and practice responses and a lack of acknowledgement that intimate partner violence exists in these communities.

This makes such dynamics difficult to detect, a problem taken up by Carmen Maria Machado in her memoir about struggling to make sense of an abusive relationship with a “charismatic and volatile” woman. Machado argues heteronormative definitions of partner abuse equate masculinity with violence and femininity with passivity, making it difficult to recognise “queer abusers and the queer abused”.

Bad Behaviour works against this cultural blind spot. It fills in detail and unpacks dynamics of power and control in the relationship between Jo and Portia as teenagers, and later when they meet up as young adults who are both “out”.

To adults, Portia’s behaviour looks like bullying, misbehaviour or cliquey exclusion. The drastic change in the victimised Jo, who becomes increasingly withdrawn and aggressive, looks like disobedience and a bad attitude.

But there is something much more sinister at play.

The sexually charged nature of some of the abuse is unmissable. In one scene, Portia corrals her cronies into helping her ambush Jo. They lift her by her underwear so she is left bleeding and bruised.

Bad Behaviour shows Portia motivated by the power and control she has over others. She takes pleasure in being able to control their emotions through giving her attention and enacting public and private cruelties on her victims.

If she is difficult to identify as a domestic abuser, Jo is even more difficult to identify as a victim.

Read more:
Beyond gender: LGBTIQ abuse shows it’s time to shift the debate on partner violence

The myth of the perfect victim plagues real and fictional narratives about victimhood. Jo doesn’t recognise herself as a victim, having internalised perspectives of onlookers she is “bad”, “weak” or “trouble”.

Jo is closed off from her emotions. She keeps going back to Portia, craving her affection even as an adult. She manipulates others using the same techniques she learned from Portia, continuing the cyclical nature of abuse.

But the fact is real victims are imperfect, and they are more likely to resemble Jo than Gabby Petito.

This limited series is an absolute must-watch, offering performances that crackle with tense chemistry, eerie and beautiful landscapes, and a revolutionary story of control, abuse and girlhood.

Bad Behaviour is on Stan now.

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

– ref. New Aussie drama Bad Behaviour gives us a complex portrayal of girlhood and queer stories – https://theconversation.com/new-aussie-drama-bad-behaviour-gives-us-a-complex-portrayal-of-girlhood-and-queer-stories-198397

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Bloomberg, Adjunct Senior Fellow Te Kura Ngahere – New Zealand School of Forestry, University of Canterbury

The severe impacts of Cyclone Gabrielle on the North Island, and the five severe weather events experienced by the Thames–Coromandel region in just the first two months of 2023, are merely the latest examples of more frequent erosion-triggering rainfall events over the past decade.

Inevitably with the heavy rain, soil, rocks and woody material (also known as “slash”) from landslides have flowed down onto valleys and flood plains, damaging the environment and risking human safety.

Clear-fell harvesting of pine forests on steep erosion-prone land has been identified as a key source of this phenomenon.

So we need to ask why we harvest pine forests on such fragile land, and what needs to change to prevent erosion debris and slash being washed from harvested land.

Pine was a solution

Ironically, most of these pine forests were planted as a solution to soil erosion that had resulted from the clearing of native forests to create hill country pastoral farms.

The clearing of native forests happened in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the consequences – erosion, flooding and floodplains covered in silt and rocks – only became apparent decades later.

Read more:
Things fall apart: why do the ecosystems we depend on collapse?

Research has shown that pastoral farming on our most erosion-susceptible soils is not sustainable. The productivity of the land is being degraded by loss of soil and large areas have been buried with sediment eroded from hill country farms upstream.

So the need to reforest large areas of erosion-prone farmland is scientifically well accepted.

Why pine?

But why did we choose radiata pine for our reforestation efforts instead of other tree species?

Even today, it is hard to find affordable and feasible alternatives to radiata pine. Affordable is the key word here. We are not a rich country and our liking for “Number 8 wire” solutions makes a virtue out of necessity – we don’t have the money to pay for anything fancier.

Radiata pine is a cheap and easy tree to establish and it grows fast and reliably. Planting native or other exotic trees, such as redwoods, is possible, but it costs more and needs more skill and care to grow a good crop.

The problem with radiata pine is that if grown as a commercial crop, it is clear-fell harvested after about 28 years.

The clear-felled land is just as erosion-prone as it was before trees were planted – with the added threat of large amounts of logging slash now mixed in with the erosion debris.

It can take six years or more after harvesting before the replanted pine trees cover the ground and once again provide protection to the soil.

Benefits of pine come with a cost

If we take a long-term perspective, research shows that even a radiata pine forest that is clear-felled once every 28 years will still significantly reduce erosion, compared with a pastoral farm on erosion-prone hill country.

This is because the erosion from the clear-felled forest is outweighed by the reduced erosion once the replanted trees cover the land.

Read more:
Rewilding isn’t about nostalgia – exciting new worlds are possible

However, this is not much comfort to communities in the path of the flood-borne soil and logs from that clear-felled forest. It’s difficult to take a long-term perspective when your backyards and beaches are covered with tonnes of wood and soil.

Slash a byproduct of efficiency

Whatever benefits radiata pine forests bring, we need to transition forest management away from “business as usual” clear-felling on erosion-prone hill country.

This transition is possible, but one important problem is not often discussed. The pine forests are privately owned by a range of people including iwi, partnerships made up of mum-and-dad investors and large international forestry companies.

All these people have created or acquired these forests as an investment.

A typical pine forest investment makes a good financial return, but this assumes normal efficient forestry, including clear-felling large areas with highly-productive mechanised logging gangs.

It has become clear that we need to manage forests differently from this large-scale “efficient” model to reduce the risk of erosion and slash from erosion-prone forests. Changing how we manage these forests will inevitably reduce the economic return, and forest investors will absorb this reduction.

Time for a permanent fix

If we go back to when the pine forests being harvested today were planted, the forests had a social value – not just in reducing erosion but in providing employment in rural areas where few jobs were available.

This social value was recognised by government funding, initially through tree planting by a government department, the NZ Forest Service. With the rise of free market economics in the 1980s, such direct government investment was considered inefficient and wasteful.

The Forest Service was disbanded in 1987 and its forests were sold to forestry companies. However, the government continued to promote tree planting on erosion-prone land with subsidies to private investors.

Read more:
How to get sustainable forestry right

As these forests grew, they came to be considered purely as business investments and were bought and sold on that basis. When the time came to harvest the trees, the expectation was that these could be clear-fell harvested in the same conventional way as commercial forests growing on land with no erosion risk.

As erosion started occurring on the harvested sites, it became clear why these trees were originally planted as a social investment to protect the land and communities from soil erosion.

Aotearoa New Zealand has achieved control of erosion with a Number 8 wire solution- encouraging private investors to grow commercial pine forests on erosion-prone land. The problem with Number 8 wire solutions is that after a while the wire fails, and you have to find a permanent fix.

Conventional commercial pine forestry was a good temporary solution, but now we need to find a more sustainable way to grow forests on our most erosion-prone lands – and it won’t be as cheap.

Mark Bloomberg receives funding for his research on forestry and landslides from the government’s Envirolink fund and from local authorities and forestry companies. He is a member of the NZ Institute of Forestry, the NZ Association of Resource Management, and the NZ Society of Soil Science.

– ref. Cyclone Gabrielle triggered more destructive forestry “slash” – NZ must change how it grows trees on fragile land – https://theconversation.com/cyclone-gabrielle-triggered-more-destructive-forestry-slash-nz-must-change-how-it-grows-trees-on-fragile-land-200059

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Woinarski, Professor of Conservation Biology, Charles Darwin University

Australia’s natural world is in deep trouble. Many of our species are getting rarer. Some are now perilously close to extinction, while entire ecosystems face collapse.

Sudden biodiversity loss in events such as the Black Summer wildfires happen against a backdrop of decline due to land clearing, introduced species and other pervasive threats. For example, Australia’s threatened bird species declined in abundance by an average of 44% from 2000 to 2016.

It is easy to lose heart – to be numbed by despair for an ever-diminishing natural world, or to dismiss our environmental laws and management as useless and broken.

But we have 29 reasons not to give up hope. Our new research has found 15 threatened mammal, eight bird, four frog, one reptile and one fish species have recovered enough that they no longer meet the criteria for listing as threatened. Our assessments were based on scrutiny of the latest data on population size and distributions – a review process that the government doesn’t routinely do.

These recoveries stem largely from years of collaborative conservation between government agencies, conservation organisations, First Nations groups and individuals.

How have these these species been brought back?

For almost all of the recovering mammals, the key threat pushing them towards extinction has been predation by feral cats and foxes. Introduced predators are the primary reason for Australia’s unenviable record for the world’s most mammal extinctions, with 33 species gone forever.

Because it’s impossible to eradicate the millions of cats and foxes across Australia, recovery of these threatened mammals has largely relied on a network of havens – islands and mainland exclosures that fence out predators. Once cats and foxes are excluded or eradicated, threatened mammals can bounce back.

Read more:
The future is fenced for Australian animals

Take the burrowing bettong. If you’re like most Australians, you’ve never seen one of these. Think of it like a quokka that can burrow. They used to be almost everywhere. Some early colonists complained of falling through burrow after burrow. But by the 1950s, they were eradicated from the entire mainland, eaten by cats and foxes.

By luck, they survived on four islands off Western Australia, out of reach of introduced predators. Over the past two decades, conservationists have transferred some of these bettongs to more islands and to five large fenced havens on the mainland. Safe at last, their populations have been increasing.

Even so, their population and range is a minute fraction of what they were before colonisation. That means the vital ecological functions they provided by turning over vast volumes of soil are still missing from much of the continent.

Islands have played a major role in both losses and recoveries. Losses because islands have endemic species particularly vulnerable to introduced species, and recoveries because threats can be more readily eradicated from islands.

For example, the threatened blue petrel has recovered strongly after cats, rabbits and rodents were eradicated from the sub-Antarctic Australian territory, Macquarie Island.

Other recoveries, such as that of the southern cassowary, are due to strategic establishment of conservation reserves, and constraints on land clearing in localised areas. Laws matter too – the humpback whale has recovered due to national and international laws banning its hunting.

Read more:
1.7 million foxes, 300 million native animals killed every year: now we know the damage foxes wreak

Are there common characteristics in these recoveries?

We found recoveries were mostly for mammals and birds, with few improvements for other groups.

No invertebrates have recovered enough yet to be taken off the list – possibly because these often-overlooked creatures get little conservation funding.

Similarly, threatened fish have mostly not recovered. That’s because we have limited ability to stop the impact of introduced fish, as well as the ongoing exploitation of our waters.

There has also been little success for the many species mostly affected by timber harvesting, broad-scale land clearing, fire and climate change.

Some recoveries are enigmatic. Take the iconic Gouldian finch, now more common than it was 20 years ago. In some areas, better management of fire and livestock has helped, but that’s not a full explanation. It may simply have learned or evolved to better fit into the human-modified natural world.

Assessing trends for Australia’s threatened species is difficult, because many are not or inadequately monitored . In many cases, we don’t know whether conservation efforts are working, or whether the species are sliding ever more rapidly into extinction.

The status of many species listed as threatened under Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act has been little scrutinised since their initial listing – unlike in the United States, where law requires periodic review of the status of its threatened species.

Our threatened invertebrates are especially poorly tracked – the legacy of the longstanding bias in conservation management and public sentiment towards more iconic species at the expense of the little known and less charismatic. Many invertebrates that are in danger of extinction are not even listed as threatened.

Almost all the 29 species we consider to have recovered have not yet been officially taken off the list of threatened species. Recognising these recoveries is important – these cases merit celebration, and we should try to apply the lessons learned to other threatened species.

Of course, these improvements in status doesn’t mean they’re safe forever. If conservation efforts stop, most of these species would slip rapidly back into danger.

The recovery we document has been a hard journey, marked by vision, committed management, and continuous significant funding. Recovery requires a long-term commitment – markedly different to the short-term and sporadic conservation funding typically allocated by most governments.

Yes, the natural world is falling apart around us. But we do not have to passively accept such collapse. We can stop at least some of these losses. We can make a difference.

Read more:
So you want to cat-proof a bettong: how living with predators could help native species survive

John Woinarski has previously undertaken research funded by the Australian Government’s National Environmental Science Program Threatened Species Recovery Hub. He is a Director of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy; and a Professor at Charles Darwin University.

Libby Rumpff received funding from the NESP Threatened Species Hub. She was on the Commonwealth Government’s Wildlife and Threatened Species Bushfire Recovery Expert Panel. She is employed by University of Melbourne, and the Australian Government. All views are her own.

Mark Lintermans received funding from the National Environment Science Program’s Threatened Species Recovery hub, the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment, and South East Local Land Services. He is affiliated with the Australian Society for Fish Biology where he previously Chaired and is now a member of the Threatened Species Committee.

Sarah Legge received funding from the NESP Threatened Species Hub. She was on the Commonwealth Government’s Wildlife and Threatened Species Bushfire Recovery Expert Panel, and is on the Commonwealth Government’s Threatened Species Committee.

Stephen Garnett receives funding from the Australian Research Council for work on taxonomic list governance

– ref. We found 29 threatened species are back from the brink in Australia. Here’s how – https://theconversation.com/we-found-29-threatened-species-are-back-from-the-brink-in-australia-heres-how-200057

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Dunlop, Senior Lecturer in Physiology, The University of Queensland

As eastern Australian humpback whale populations have recovered over the years, males have adapted their mating strategy in a highly strategic way, new research finds.

I analysed 123 days’ worth of data on Australian humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae), collected from 1997 to 2015, and found male humpbacks sang less and fought more as the whale population ballooned.

We think this shift in behaviour is a result of not wanting to attract other males to a potential mate, as we explain in research published today in Communications Biology.

Rapid growth, rapid adaptation

Humpbacks have recovered magnificently since 1965, when the species became globally protected.

One population off Australia’s east coast grew from less than 500 in the 1960s and is estimated to contain at least 30,000 today. This population has provided experts a rich dataset. The males in particular are great subjects thanks to their striking song broadcasts.

Carrying on work started by University of Queensland Professor Michael Noad in the ’90s, we set out to investigate exactly how the eastern humpbacks have adapted to the growth numbers.

Luckily for us these whales migrate close to the coastline, so we were able to establish a land-based observation station at Peregian Beach, a small coastal town on the Sunshine Coast.

Volunteers onshore helped us track individual whales as they moved down the coast, while an acoustic array moored offshore recorded the whales’ song and tracked singing whales. This method (which Professor Noad first established) allowed us to pinpoint the exact location of a particular whale in real time.

A trend emerged when our data were coupled with those collected by Professor Noad’s team. As the eastern humpback population grew, males weren’t singing as much as they used to. Instead they were increasingly opting to quietly find a female to mate with, or fighting off other male competition.

Specifically, the proportion of singing males decreased from two in ten in 2003–2004, to only one in ten by 2014–2015. Data from 2003–2004 also show males were less likely to sing when they had a higher proportion of males in their social circle.

And it seems the change in tactics led to a change in results. In 1997 singing males were almost twice as likely as their counterparts to be seen joining with a female and escorting her, likely to attempt to mate. But by 2014-2015, non-singing males were almost five times more likely to be seen joining a group with a female.

That said, we can’t say for sure when joining a group actually results in mating with the female and fathering a calf. That’s another piece of this puzzle: how many of the males that join groups (singing or otherwise) actually end up mating and then fathering a calf?

What’s driving males to fight?

A species will carry out a behaviour for as long as the benefits outweigh the costs. If something changes, and the costs start to outweigh the benefits, they will stop. It’s a basic principle, but it goes a long way towards explaining our findings.

In the early years of data collection, when there were fewer whales around, a male could sing and broadcast himself to nearby females quite comfortably – not having to worry about hordes of other males wanting his neck.

Now, with a more than burgeoning population, the same tactic attracts the risk of being interrupted by other males. As a male humpback, you’re better off spending the breeding season quietly seeking a female to mate with and not attracting the attention of other males.

Or, if you fancy yourself a big, tough guy, you might take the chance to fight other males to become the “primary escort” of a group. And this relates to one of our working theories about why singing among the eastern humpbacks has diminished through time, and fighting has increased.

Until it was banned, whaling was likely targeting larger mature adults. This could have left an immature population, full of young whales less equipped to fight. Coupled with a sudden decrease in competition overall, this may help explain why whales in the early years preferred singing as a mating tactic.

By the same token, once these same males started to mature and grow large in later years, they may have tended more towards fighting off competition.

We have observed some of these bigger and more assertive whales, the “primary escorts”, on the breeding grounds. They move from group to group, displacing other males – always maintaining their alpha status.

Are whales losing their song?

Despite what our research has observed, we don’t think whales are at risk of losing their song. The eastern humpback whales have simply changed their behaviour to improve their chances of mating. As researchers working out in the field, we still hear whales singing, so we’re not worried.

But we do have questions moving forward.

For one thing, we don’t know how the population dynamics in the eastern humpback may have changed in the past seven years. The dataset used in our study ended in 2015 (and the population has since grown). It would be interesting to know if the trend we observed from 1997 to 2015 is ongoing or has stabilised.

We also want to better understand the factors that drive a male whale’s choice to sing. Is it age, or size, a combination of both, or something else?

Until then, we can safely conclude one thing: whales are incredibly socially complex creatures – and our findings indicate they can adapt remarkably to the social pressures around them.

By the same logic, however, any species under threat that can’t adapt to changing population dynamics stands to lose out. Humpbacks have managed to bounce back, but what about the other precious animals in the world?

Read more:
Humpback whales may have bounced back from near-extinction, but it’s too soon to declare them safe

Rebecca Dunlop currently receives funding from Living Marine Resources Programme, Office of Naval Research, U. S., and has received past funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation and the Australian Marine Mammal Centre) and the Joint Industry Program E&P Sound and Marine Life.

– ref. Australian humpback whales are singing less and fighting more. Should we be worried? – https://theconversation.com/australian-humpback-whales-are-singing-less-and-fighting-more-should-we-be-worried-200062

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jon Piccini, Senior Lecturer in History, Australian Catholic University

This article references antiquated language when referring to First Nations people. It also mentions names and has images of people who may have passed away.

Before the end of this year, Australians will vote on enshrining an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice in the nation’s constitution. Referendums are famously fraught, and both advocates and detractors of the Voice have drawn comparisons to the 1967 referendum, the nation’s most successful to date.

Then, 90.77% of Australians endorsed two constitutional amendments. One removed Section 127, whereby “Aboriginal natives” were not counted when “reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth”. The second altered Section 51 (xxvi) – the race power – to allow the Commonwealth to make “special laws” concerning Aboriginal people.

Why was this campaign so successful? Today commentators largely put it down to unanimity: there wasn’t a “no” campaign in 1967. This is one of the reasons, no doubt, but as historians often say: “it’s complicated”. Deconstructing the mythology that surrounds the vote provides a fuller answer.

Read more:
The history of referendums in Australia is riddled with failure. Albanese has much at risk – and much to gain

The road to referendum

Indigenous and settler scholars have long questioned the accepted narrative around 1967. The Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, founded in 1958 with the purpose of fighting for constitutional change, had a big role in shaping the referendum’s meaning. The council first fought a petition campaign in 1962-3, and the vote itself, on the basis that a “yes” victory would grant citizenship rights for Indigenous people.

This was only ever partly true. The same activists who led the council’s campaign, including feminist Jessie Street, communist and scientist Shirley Andrews, Quandamooka poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) and Faith Bandler, an activist of South Sea Island and Scottish-Indian heritage, had already fought for and won many of the trappings of citizenship.

Voting rights, for instance, were secured federally in 1962, and in every state by 1965. And while various state acts continued to limit movement and alcohol consumption for the people under their so-called “protection”, constitutional alteration in itself would do little to change this. By giving the federal government powers to override state laws, it was hoped, pressure from within and without would lead to the end of official discrimination.

The ‘wind of change’

The long, conservative government of Robert Menzies had stone-walled moves to hold a referendum, at least partly owing to a desire to maintain Section 51 unamended. That the Commonwealth would make “special laws” for Indigenous people ran counter to the goal of assimilation. Menzies’ successor, Harold Holt, was more amenable.

Holt’s progressive agenda – as well as supporting the referendum, he removed discriminatory provisions from the Migration Act – signalled his difference from Menzies to a changing electorate. But he and his ministers were also looking internationally. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s 1960 declaration that a “wind of change” was sweeping away racial discrimination and colonial domination had an Australian echo.

The 1965 “Freedom Rides” had done much to highlight continued apartheid-style practices in rural Australia. And during the Cold War, Australia’s overseas perception carried substantial weight.

Indigenous rights activists had long warned that Australia needed to act on issues of discrimination, with anti-colonial sentiment widespread in Asia, and the quickly growing United Nations watching. Liberal parliamentarian Billy Snedden hoped that removing mention of “Aborigines” from the constitution would also “remove a possible source of misconstruction in the international field”.

Right wrongs, write yes!

While reflective of international sensitivities, the 1967 referendum was hardly a rejection of assimilation policy. Indeed, the Federal Council’s slogan of “black and white together” can be read as a reflection of integrationist ideology: the goal of “Aboriginal advancement” was to live on white terms.

The campaign materials used in support of the referendum, much of which was produced by the Federal Council and distributed via trade unions and community organisations, reflected a simple message of unity and national absolution. Perhaps the most famous leaflet of the campaign – “Right Wrongs, Write Yes!” in large lettering, alongside an image of an Indigenous child – elevated the message above politics. The wrongs of the past could be done away with at the stroke of a pen.

The resounding victory was indeed read as a vindication of the decency of Australians. As one commentator put it:

The politicians were proud, the priests popular, the promoters propitiated, the public pleased. Being party to the most overwhelming referendum victory in the history of the Commonwealth of Australia demanded self-congratulation and the bestowal of bouquets upon all.

Current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was channelling similar sentiments earlier this month, declaring the Voice referendum offered a chance for Australians to show their “best qualities”. It would, he said, “be a national achievement in which every Australian can share”.

1967 shows us the power that such unifying language can have, but also that unanimity can conceal inertia.

‘Advocated by all thinking people’

This sense of national duty and righting wrongs at least partly explains why opposition to the proposed changes in 1967 was muted. Adelaide’s Victor Harbour Times captured the tenor: “a Yes vote is advocated by all thinking people”. But this opinion, much like today, was not unanimous.

Despite the lack of a formal campaign, the West Australian newspaper ran a particularly hard “no” line. Fears of creeping Commonwealth power over “state rights” were propounded, as was the referendum’s lack of detail. “It was a pity that this issue was not worked out in advance”, one article bemoaned, for then “the people could have been presented with a firm, rational policy”.

Western Australia registered the highest “no” vote of any state at the referendum, at close to 22%. This reflects at least in part this editorialising. Post-referendum analysis also indicated that racist attitudes shaped voting patterns. The greater the proximity to an Aboriginal reserve or mission, the more likely a person was to vote “no”.

That the referendum was, in the language of the West Australian, “double-barrelled” – paired with another, defeated, proposal to expand membership in the House of Representatives – does not seem to have affected the result. Even hard-right Democratic Labor Party Senator Vince Gair’s “No More Politicians Committee” advocated for a “yes” vote on “Aboriginal rights”. Left and right understood, if for sharply differing reasons, that formal discrimination needed to end.

After the referendum

Today’s “no” campaign’s key talking point, that the Voice “lacks detail”, was made in 1967, but failed to sway many voters. A writer for the Bulletin magazine commented that while the West Australian was

right when it says there should be a policy […] the time for it is after the referendum.

What mattered wasn’t the specifics, but that policy could be developed at all.

The referendum’s aftermath also illuminates another point of difference between then and now: a lack of Indigenous opposition. Indigenous scholar Larissa Behrendt argues that an “unintended consequence” of the 1967 referendum, and the hopes it raised and subsequently dashed for many Indigenous peoples, was a “more radical rights movement” led by those “disillusioned by the lack of changes that followed”. The Commonwealth was slow to use its new powers, and reticent to override powerful premiers like Queensland’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

The land rights and sovereignty movements of today have their origins in this moment of radicalisation. The Referendum Council, whose 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart reads “in 1967, we were counted, [now] we seek to be heard”, represent the unifying spirit of that earlier referendum. Indigenous critics of the Voice such as Lidia Thorpe and Gary Foley, on the other hand, inherit the radical tradition it inadvertently birthed. In Foley’s words, a Voice to Parliament would be akin to putting “lipstick on a pig”.

Does all this mean the vote will fall differently in 2023? Something Voice advocates have in their favour is that “no” supporters, while loud, appear to be in a minority. State, territory and federal leaders have unanimously pledged to support the “yes” case, leaving the federal opposition isolated, while 80% of Indigenous peoples support it.

One thing though is certain. If the 2023 referendum fails, it will at least in part be due to the shortcomings and spoiled hopes of 1967.

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

– ref. The 1967 referendum was the most successful in Australia’s history. But what it can tell us about 2023 is complicated – https://theconversation.com/the-1967-referendum-was-the-most-successful-in-australias-history-but-what-it-can-tell-us-about-2023-is-complicated-198874

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Beardsley, Associate Professor in Infectious Diseases, Sydney Institute for Infectious Diseases Westmead Clinical School, University of Sydney

Fungal infections have received a frenzy of attention thanks to the popularity of HBO’s The Last of Us. The show depicts a fungal pandemic caused by the real-life zombie-ant fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It imagines the outcome of society’s collapse and a brutal approach to maintaining public health.

But in (real-life) laboratories, hospitals and public health units around the world, researchers have been warning about the rise of potentially deadly fungal infections for years.

With few drugs to treat major fungal infections, and no vaccines on the horizon, the potential harm caused by fungal infections have raised alarms at the highest levels of public health.

I was part of a large international team of researchers commissioned by the World Health Organization (WHO) to understand which fungal pathogens we most needed to research and which posed the greatest public health threat. This is what its report found.

Read more:
The Last of Us: fungal infections really can kill – and they’re getting more dangerous

Fungi back in the spotlight

Before The Last of Us, many people thought “fungus” meant mushrooms or something mouldy in the compost heap. If they thought of fungi in relation to health, they thought of athlete’s foot or toenail infections – familiar, but not frightening.

However, fungi do cause serious infections, especially in people with other health conditions. People living with cancer, HIV, or diabetes are especially at risk of these infections, but they can also strike those who have had major surgery, ended up in an intensive care unit, or who have experienced another serious infection. This is because their immune system is weakened or distracted, opening up a space for “opportunistic infections”.

We’ve seen this in India where black mould infections (mucormycosis) complicated cases of COVID, resulting in thousands of deaths.

Read more:
What is mucormycosis, the fungal infection affecting COVID patients in India?

A threat and becoming more so

Well before The Last of Us, health authorities had been starting to take notice of serious fungal infections.

In 2019 the US Centers for Disease Control designated the deadly yeast Candida auris – which appeared out of nowhere in 2009 – as an “urgent threat” because of its resistance to many (and sometimes all) known antifungal drugs.

Read more:
Explainer: what is Candida auris and who is at risk?

A drug-resistant strain of Aspergillus fumigatus, which arose from overuse of antifungal chemicals in agriculture, made the “watch” list.

New and increasingly drug-resistant pathogens like these are one challenge to public health. Another is the increasing number of people at risk of these infections.

Rich countries are delivering ever-more sophisticated health care, resulting in more people vulnerable to serious fungal infections. Chemotherapy, organ transplants, major surgery, extra healthy years lived with diabetes all give opportunities for fungi to take hold.

Although the risk factors in lower income settings are different, the numbers tell the same story – rates of serious fungal infections globally are rising.

Read more:
Why the CDC warns antibiotic-resistant fungal infections are an urgent health threat

Then we worked with the WHO

I was part of a large team of international researchers commissioned by the WHO to analyse the past ten years of research on fungal pathogens.

We conducted a worldwide survey of fungal disease experts to understand which pathogens were most in need of research and which posed the greatest public health threat. The WHO published the results in a report released last year.

They highlighted four critical priority pathogens:

• Candida auris, which is resistant to most antifungals and is a problem for vulnerable patients in hospitals

• Aspergillus fumigatus, which mainly affects the lungs. Infections can be deadly, even more so when drug-resistant strains are involved

• Candida albicans, which can cause cause invasive infections, typically in vulnerable patients

• Cryptococcus neoformans, which can infect the brain, especially in immunocompromised people. This is especially the case in people with HIV, where it’s a leading killer.

The WHO report calls for enhanced surveillance, a focus on research and development, and improvements in public health interventions, such as improved prophylaxis (preventive treatments) or infection prevention strategies.

Viewers of The Last of Us will understand why these are so important. We need surveillance so we know where threats are coming from before they arrive, otherwise we cannot prepare.

We need more research and development to develop vaccines and new treatments.

So far, we have failed to develop any anti-fungal vaccines and there is no chance we could produce and distribute one as we did for COVID.

Although some new anti-fungals have become available, the range is still too small, and some strains of fungi are resistant to all available drugs.

Developing vaccines and drugs is hard because fungal cells are similar to human ones. So basic laboratory research is vital to identify ways we can kill fungal cells without harming our own.

Without giving any spoilers, it’s safe to say the public health interventions in The Last of Us are pretty extreme. So research on how to contain and control fungal pathogens is also vital to avoid such draconian and ineffective measures.

Read more:
Curious Kids: Are zombies real?

Are fungal pandemics possible?

The fungal frog plague, chytrid disease, has killed countless amphibians. Researchers say it has caused the greatest loss of biodiversity from a single disease ever recorded.

Is a fungal zombie apocalypse possible? Not for humans. The fungus in The Last of Us evolved over millennia to infect a specific ant species and influence its behaviour. There is no realistic prospect of this organism crossing over into humans and controlling us.

However, we do face very real threats from fungi if we don’t work hard to understand them better – threats to our health, to biodiversity, even food security. By taking action now, we can prevent a potential public health crisis.

Justin Beardsley receives funding from the NHMRC and has received honoraria from Gilead for hosting education meetings. He was part of a WHO-commissioned study group, but any views expressed here are his alone and do not represent the official views of the WHO.

– ref. Before The Last of Us, I was part of an international team to chart the threat of killer fungi. This is what we found – https://theconversation.com/before-the-last-of-us-i-was-part-of-an-international-team-to-chart-the-threat-of-killer-fungi-this-is-what-we-found-199593

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melissa Tham, Research fellow, Victoria University

About 100 early childhood experts are meeting in Canberra today for a national summit on children who are five and under.

This is part of the Albanese government’s work to develop an early years strategy to ensure Australian kids “have the best start at life in their critical early years of development”. It is also the latest in a flurry of activity around early childhood education and care.

The federal government has just set up two major inquiries. Last week it established a Productivity Commission inquiry into early childhood education. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission began its inquiry into the cost of childcare last month.

Meanwhile, states are also making massive commitments. The Victorian and New South Wales governments have made multibillion-dollar promises to expand preschool for three- and four-year-olds. Former prime minister Julia Gillard is leading a royal commission into early education and care in South Australia, with an interim report due in August.

Universal, affordable and high-quality early education for Australian families is on the horizon. But four key challenges remain.

1. We still have ‘childcare deserts’

Access to early childhood education and care is not equal in Australia, and depends on where families live.

Regional and rural families are more likely to have poorer access, and many live in “childcare deserts”. In these areas, more than three children vie for every childcare place. About one million Australians live in an area with no access to childcare at all.

It is easier to get a childcare place in high socioeconomic and metropolitan areas, suggesting access is not equitable. We need to address this, as research in Australia and overseas highlights the importance of early education and care for children’s social and cognitive development, especially for children from disadvantaged backgrounds.

2. Childcare is really expensive

In recent years, the Coalition government injected significant funds into childcare subsidies. But the cost of early childhood services remains a key issue for many families.

The Albanese government will increase the subsidy again, as of July 2023. This will ease some of the financial strain.

However, subsidy changes provide only temporary relief, as childcare costs often rise again. The Labor government has also said it will investigate the feasibility of a 90% subsidy regardless of income, although it is not clear how this will occur or how it will be funded.

3. Work requirements are not working

A 2022 Impact Economics report showed how the government’s “activity test” is a major barrier to parents working.

Under the current test, families need to do certain amounts of paid work, such as study, training, volunteering or care, to receive certain hours of childcare subsidies. For example, parents doing less than eight hours of work a fortnight only get 24 hours of subsidised care for the same period. Those doing 48 hours of work get 100 hours of subsidised care.

Read more:
The 2018 childcare package was partly designed to help families work more. But the benefits were too modest to matter

If there are two parents in a family, the activity test is based on the parent who works the least.

Impact Economics found the activity test was not encouraging people to work. Rather, it found low-income families were less likely to use childcare because of the restriction to hours of care. So the activity test can lock children from disadvantaged backgrounds out of early learning, despite being the group that would benefit the most.

4. Early childhood educators are overworked and not paid enough

There are also major challenges around retention, pay and professional work conditions for the early education sector.

A 2021 survey by the United Workers Union showed that 73% of educators envisaged leaving the early childhood sector by 2024. Excessive workloads and low pay were the two main reasons cited by more than 4,000 current and former educators who participated in the research.

Read more:
How a Canadian program that helps educators ‘thrive’ not just ‘survive’ could help address Australia’s childcare staff shortage

Job vacancy rates are at historically high levels and the lack of qualified staff is a major restraint on increasing access to childcare services. To enhance efforts to attract and retain staff, educators are calling for a pay increase of between 13% and 30% over the next four years.

The Australian Education Union is also negotiating for other changes to the early childhood profession, such as increased participation in professional development and changes to the structure of education and training.

The good news … and the reality check

A noticeable feature of the Albanese government’s approach to early learning is a greater emphasis on children’s development and wellbeing.

The summit has an explicit focus on making sure children are “thriving”. Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth has stressed how the most significant stages of brain development happen before children turn five.

By getting it right in the early years of a child’s life, we can help set the foundations for a happy, healthy, and successful future.

This marks a shift in government language, which previously talked about childcare in terms of boosting female workforce participation.

Nevertheless, huge challenges remain in the sector. Addressing them will be a major task for the government if is going to progress beyond summits and strategies to deliver real change.

Melissa Tham works for the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University who receive funding from Minderoo’s Thrive by Five initiative to undertake research into early childhood education and care.

Cynthia Leung is affiliated with Parenting and Family Research Alliance. She is an adjunct professor at the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University who receive funding from Minderoo’s Thrive by Five initiative to undertake research into early childhood education and care. She received consultancy fees for evaluation of a parent training program from Tung Wah Group of Hospitals, Hong Kong.

Peter Hurley works for the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University who receive funding from Minderoo’s Thrive by Five initiative to undertake research into early childhood education and care.

– ref. Better, cheaper childcare is on the horizon in Australia, but 4 key challenges remain – https://theconversation.com/better-cheaper-childcare-is-on-the-horizon-in-australia-but-4-key-challenges-remain-199864

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ recent essay in The Monthly, “Capitalism after the crises”, tells us a lot about economic predicament faced by the Albanese government and governments around the world.

Arguably, the reaction to the essay tells us even more.

The essay reflects two unpalatable facts. The first is that the model of capitalism that became dominant in the late 20th century – variously referred to as “neoliberalism”, “the Washington Consensus”, or in Australia as “economic rationalism” – has failed to meet the challenges of the 21st century, beginning with the global financial crisis of 2008.

The second is that no one, including our federal government, has a clear idea of what to do about it.

Rather than spelling out the economic failures in detail, Chalmers spends a fair bit of his essay talking about the “polycrisis”: the overlapping onset of climate disaster, symbolised by the bushfires of 2019 and early 2020, with the COVID pandemic, energy shocks and the assault on global democracy.

However we decide to deal with these problems, Chalmers correctly observes that most of us don’t want to go back to pre-crisis “normal”.

No mention of falling real wages

For the average Australian, the most tangible manifestation of the failure of neoliberalism has been the stagnation of real wages.

In 2021, then Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese pointed out real wages had “flatlined” in the eight years of Coalition government.

Chalmers mentions that the current government inherited “stagnant” real wages, but does not develop this point; indeed, “wages” are mentioned only four times in the essay. There’s no mention at all of falling buying real wages.

The reason, it may be assumed, is that real wages are now falling under Labor and are expected to keep falling until 2024 at the earliest.

The failure of wages to keep pace with inflation will more than wipe out the minimal gains in buying power achieved under the Coalition government, and also reverse some of those achieved under the previous Labor government. This failure isn’t confined to Australia. It is as bad or worse in the UK and the US.

The problem isn’t whether or not to recognise that wage stagnation is a problem. The problem is what to do about it.

Silent on unions and bargaining power

The furious reactions to Labor’s modest steps towards multi-employer bargaining are an indication of what would happen if the government tried to reverse the decades of anti-worker legislation, beginning in the late 1970s, which have driven wages down.

In his 6,000 words, Chalmers finds no room to mention “unions”. He refers once to “employers”, in the context of COVID jobs subsidies, while “workers” are mentioned only twice in passing.

The same is true of chronic problems of underfunding in education, health and aged care. Not only has Labor offered little or nothing in the way of increased funding, it has actually let programs inherited from the previous government – such as increased access to mental health consultations – expire when temporary funding ran out.

Read more:
Stand by for the oddly designed Stage 3 tax cut that will send middle earners backwards and give high earners thousands

The reason is straightforward. Labor went to the election promising to keep in place the lavish tax cuts for high-income Australians, due to hit wallets next year, as part of “Stage 3” of the tax cuts leglislated by the Morrison and Turnbull governments.

In the lead-up to the Coalition’s October 2022 budget, Chalmers floated the idea of scrapping or modifying the cuts, and gathered considerable support. But the idea was slapped down by his leader Anthony Albanese.

Solely because of those tax cuts, Australia’s public-debt-to-GDP ratio is projected to climb. And, despite his denunciations of neoliberalism, Chalmers is fully committed to the neoliberal dogma that public debt is an unsustainable burden, even when interest rates are below the rate of inflation.

Chalmers offers ‘values-based capitalism’

Having ruled out both increased tax revenue and government debt as sources of finance, the government can do little to address Australia’s economic problems. And this brings us to the second part of Chalmers’ essay, on “values based capitalism”, which embodies the hope that we can pursue social goals with a combination of public initiative and private investment.

The explanation starts off reasonably well, with a focus on clean energy.

Given the reality of Australia’s largely privatised energy system, it is obvious that getting the right kinds of private investments is crucial. And with the most effective policy tool – a carbon price – ruled out, this necessarily entails a big role for bodies like the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and programs like Rewiring the Nation, which provide public finance for transmission projects.

But things go downhill when Chalmers turns to “impact investing”. He says:

across the social purpose economy, in areas such as aged care, education and disability, effective organisations with high-quality talent can offer decent returns and demonstrate a social dividend.

Surely he is aware that aged care is a disaster area, the subject of a Royal Commission, even before its failings were brutally exposed by COVID.

As for education, the disaster of VET-FEE Help, in which provide providers offered students inducements including free laptops to sign up for programs that loaded them with debt and provided little education, shows what can happen when investors want dividends, and aren’t too choosy about how they get them.

The market-based design of the National Disability Insurance Scheme has also proved problematic, even if the NDIS is a big improvement on what went before.

‘Place-based solutions’

Then there’s the suggestion of “place-based” solutions. Chalmers says he can see in his own community in Logan, Queensland, that people who live on the outskirts of cities and in regional areas experience more inequality than others.

In the injustice he sees an opportunity:

to focus our attention on place-based initiatives where communities have the genuine input, local leadership, resources and authority to define a new and better future, especially for kids.

But this is getting things back to front. People who experience inequality live in the outskirts of cities because they can’t afford to live closer in. The median house price in Logan is about A$480,000. Go a few kilometres closer to the city, in suburbs like Underwood or Sunnybank, and it’s twice as much.

For all practical purposes, Brisbane is a single labour market. If people in Logan don’t have good jobs or good educational opportunities, it’s not because they live too far away; it’s because of structural inequalities in Australian society.

The way to help low-income families who live in Logan isn’t to fix Logan, it’s to increase their incomes.

Boosting incomes means boosting wages (that again), strengthening workers’ bargaining power, and making the tax-welfare system more progressive.

That’s not to say that there aren’t ways to improve life in low-income communities. Among the most cost-effective, if not the most glamorous, is improved bus services.

And there are doubtless a variety of initiatives that can benefit from local leadership. But most are best left to local and state governments.

The tools available to the national government are better suited to helping people than improving places.

What we really need is more tax

Overall, “values-based capitalism” can’t make more than a marginal contribution to fixing the problems left behind by the failure of neoliberalism.

The real solution is simple but politically unpalatable. We need governments to do more, commanding more resources, which necessarily entails the private sector commanding fewer.

This can only be achieved by increasing tax revenue, starting with measures like those put forward by Labor (unsuccessfully) in the 2019 election.

Unfortunately, the massive high-income tax cuts on their way with the support of Labor will make this difficult.

Read more:
Humanising capitalism: Chalmers new version of an old Labor project

John Quiggin 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. 6,000 words but silent on falling real wages: what Chalmers got wrong on ‘values-based capitalism’ and fixing our economic woes – https://theconversation.com/6-000-words-but-silent-on-falling-real-wages-what-chalmers-got-wrong-on-values-based-capitalism-and-fixing-our-economic-woes-199270

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

If Peter Dutton is caught in a classic rock-and-hard-place dilemma over the Voice to Parliament, the same could be said for Greens leader Adam Bandt on the safeguard legislation to underpin the government’s climate policy.

The Greens are putting as a condition of supporting the bill – now before parliament – that the government commits to a ban on new coal and gas projects.

They pitched for the ban when parliament was considering legislation for the 43% emissions reduction target, but the government stared them down and they ended up backing that bill.

Now, the stakes are much higher – for both government and Greens.

The 43% target didn’t have to be law. That was just icing on the cake. In contrast, the government needs the safeguard legislation – which forces the biggest polluters to reduce their emissions – to implement its policy.

Reform of Australia’s emissions reduction regime is at the heart of Labor’s agenda. To be stymied on implementation would be a major setback.

From the Greens’ point of view, to have failed once to force the government’s hand can be brushed over. To fail twice risks making the party look impotent in the eyes of its supporters.

It should be noted the Greens say they are not issuing an “ultimatum”, leaving themselves wriggle room for retreat. But their words are strong, and stepping back would be seen as precisely that.

Just like the Liberals, the Greens have a base that is split between hardliners and moderates. At the radical end, their activists don’t want the party to compromise on core issues; in contrast, its mainstream voters want outcomes.

The Greens have history on standing in the way of progress on climate policy, and the government is rubbing their noses in their past. Greens opposition killed the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (when their vote suddenly became significant after a leadership upheaval in the Liberals). Their explanation is that it “was bad policy that would have locked in failure to take action on climate change”.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek on Thursday said, in answer to a Greens questioner in parliament, “when you lined up with the Liberals last time to block the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, what we saw was more emissions for longer because you voted with them”.

Of course given that, on an ordinary interpretation of “mandates”, Labor has one for its climate policy, the Coalition should let the legislation through – which would make the Greens irrelevant.

But the opposition is spurning any recognition of Labor mandates for core election policies, contesting its $15 billion National Reconstruction Fund and the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund as well as the safeguard bill. This deals the Greens (and non-Greens Senate crossbenchers) into the centre of things.

But while holding a whip hand, the Greens are also wedged on the safeguard legislation.

It’s hard to see that, at the end of the day, they have anywhere else else to go than to vote with the government. Do they really want to line up with the Coalition (again) to reject a major initiative – to be accused (again) of making “the perfect the enemy of the good”?

Bandt rejected that line on the Voice. Senator Lidia Thorpe defected from the Greens to sit on the crossbench because she thought the party wasn’t being pure enough on Indigenous policy.

Read more:
Lidia Thorpe’s defection from the Greens will make passing legislation harder for Labor

Thorpe argued a Treaty should be given priority over the Voice. But Bandt, while noting the Greens still think a Treaty should come first, said he didn’t believe a “no” vote on the referendum would bring a Treaty closer. It was sensible pragmatism.

Neither would a no vote on the safeguard mechanism be likely to bring closer a ban on new coal and gas ventures.

The market is increasingly cooling on new coal projects. Gas is another matter. Ukraine and the debate about its role in the transition to cleaner energy are driving mixed market messages and investment.

Labor, already facing deepening economic problems, would trash its credibility with investors, business generally and voters if it agreed to the Greens’ ban.

Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen says he is open to negotiation on the safeguard legislation, within the policy Labor took to the election. That provided for new fossil fuel projects to be considered on their merits.

Apart from the issue of project bans, the safeguards bill itself – due for a Senate vote in March for a July 1 start – is coming under fire, especially for being too generous on carbon credit offsets.

The head of The Australia Institute, Richard Denniss, wrote in the Guardian: “The reality is the safeguard mechanism does more to safeguard the fossil fuel industry than it does to safeguard the climate. It hides its support for fossil fuel expansion behind a fig leaf of dodgy carbon credits and offsets.”

In contrast, Carbon Market Institute CEO John Connor argues the safeguard mechanism reforms, reducing pollution limits by 5% a year, are significant.

Read more:
Labor’s scheme to cut industrial emissions is worryingly flexible

“They will send a multi-billion-dollar and growing signal to our largest emitters to drive at source decarbonisation, while requiring investments in emission reductions elsewhere in the economy when they can’t do so immediately at the relevant facility,” he says.

“With our high-carbon political economy and historic policy convolutions, it would be a major setback to lose the safeguard mechanism reforms,” Connor says, although adding there should be some amendments to the legislation.

As he tries to chart his course for exercising the Greens’ share of the balance of power in the Senate, Bandt might at times mull on the now-extinct Australian Democrats and their one-time leader Meg Lees.

Lees negotiated a deal with the Howard government for the introduction of the goods and services tax. She extracted concessions for the Democrats’ support, and she did the right thing facilitating the legislation. It was a change to the tax system the country needed.

But Lees paid a high price in a party that was divided over the issue, with many of its supporters abhorring compromise. Ultimately, it cost her the leadership.

This is not an argument against Bandt compromising, which he should and almost certainly will have to. It’s just a reminder that sensible decisions can impose great pressures on the leaders of minor parties when those parties exercise real make-or-break power.

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. Grattan on Friday: Adam Bandt is wedged by Greens’ overreach on emissions legislation – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-adam-bandt-is-wedged-by-greens-overreach-on-emissions-legislation-200083