Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sally K. May, Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University

The rock art of northwestern Arnhem Land is world-renowned and represents one of the world’s most enduring artistic cultures. Rock art is a continuing tradition. It includes images of “outsiders”: people and objects brought to Australian shores by Macassans from southeast Asia and, later, by Europeans.

Paintings of sailing vessels, smoking pipes, firearms, domesticated animals and other exotic items dot the landscape in Arnhem Land, often overlaying earlier works. Comparatively recent paintings feature more common images too, such as kangaroos, emus, and hand stencils.

While most Australians know about the history of European arrivals, few are familiar with the ongoing visits by people from southeast Asia to the region. Our latest research shows artists depicted early trading sailing vessels less often and differently to European ships — suggesting they viewed these encounters with other cultures in contrasting ways.

Read more:
Friday essay: how Indigenous songs recount deep histories of trade between Australia and Southeast Asia

Visitors to our shores

Far from the generally accepted notion of an isolated shoreline, the north Australian coast was teeming with sailing vessels engaged in trade for hundreds of years before European exploration and settlement.

Most commonly referred to as Macassans (because they’d made the crossing from the port of Makassar in southern Sulawesi) these early traders came in fleets of praus with their signature tripod masts, to harvest trepang (sea cucumber) and for materials such as turtle shell, beeswax, and iron wood.

Working with Aboriginal Traditional Owners, especially members of the Lamilami family, our new research focuses on the Namunidjbuk clan estate within the Wellington Range in the Northern Territory. We looked closely at one particular type of rock art — boats in the form of Macassan praus and European ships.

Sailing vessels are among the most common new subjects in rock art made during the last 500 years in northwest Arnhem Land. Yet, there is a perplexing inconsistency in how Aboriginal artists of this region treated Macassan prau and European ships.

The earliest dated prau depiction is from the first half of the 1600s. No depictions of European ships are thought to be older than the early 1800s.

Yet we counted many more rock art images of European ships: 50 examples in the study area, compared to only six prau (five images feature elements of both).

These extraordinary works illustrate the maritime history of this region. They range in detail from basic outlines of hulls to detailed depictions of European ships. Some even illustrate cargo.

Others reveal ship features found under the waterline such as anchors and propellers. Southeast Asian prau are recognisable because of their unique tripod masts and sails. Some paintings of European ships show the crew smoking pipes and with their hands on their hips.

Read more:
Australian rock art is threatened by a lack of conservation

The missing Macassans

When people are portrayed on or next to watercraft in our study area, it is always in association with European ships, with no depictions associated with prau at all.

So, why did Aboriginal artists feel the need to paint so many European ships, and sometimes their crew — but very few relating to southeast Asian visits?

We argue the proliferation of European-related imagery signals the threat they posed to Indigenous sovereignty. Communicating this threat (via rock art and other means) to family and neighbouring clans was an essential tool for inter-generational education, inter-clan communication, resistance and survival.

The lack of praus does not suggest a lesser cross-cultural relationship between Macassans and Aboriginal people. In fact, nearby in Anuru Bay is one of the largest Macassan trepang processing complexes in the NT.

Read more:
Friday essay: how our new archaeological research investigates Dark Emu’s idea of Aboriginal ‘agriculture’ and villages

But visits by the Macassans were seasonal, while the Europeans came to stay. Cross-cultural contact between Aboriginal people and Macassans in this region is generally thought to be characterised by mutual respect and exchange. Contact with Europeans was more violent, with historically known killings and massacres of Aboriginal people.

Importantly, our findings in northwest Arnhem Land are the opposite of research undertaken in other parts of northern Australia, such as Groote Eylandt, where there are many depictions of Macassan prau and crew. This reminds us that one size does not fit all in the history of invasion and cross-cultural contact in northern Australia.

For decades R. Lamilami (1957-2021) worked to protect his Country and to educate outsiders on the cultural significance of the Namunidjbuk clan estate and, more broadly, the Wellington Range. With this article we pay tribute to his life’s work and his firm belief that rock art is an irreplaceable history book for Australia.

Sally K. May receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Daryl Wesley receives funding from Australian Research Council

Joakim Goldhahn receives funding from the Australian Research Council and Rock Art Australia

Paul S.C.Taçon receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Threat or trading partner? Sailing vessels in northwestern Arnhem Land rock art reveal different attitudes to visitors – https://theconversation.com/threat-or-trading-partner-sailing-vessels-in-northwestern-arnhem-land-rock-art-reveal-different-attitudes-to-visitors-161586

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

All workers in residential aged care facilities will be required to have at least a first COVID vaccination by mid-September under a decision at an emergency national cabinet meeting on Monday night.

And in a major move to speed up the lagging rollout, the AstraZeneca vaccine will be available to anyone who wishes to have it.

This effectively makes vaccinations immediately available to the whole adult population.

At present the Pfizer vaccine, which is in limited supply, is administered on health advice to those aged 40 to 59, while the under 40s are not yet being vaccinated.

To encourage the wider take up of AstraZeneca, the government will bring in a new no-fault indemnity scheme for general practitioners who are providing advice on COVID-19 vaccines.

Scott Morrison, addressing a news conference from The Lodge where he is in quarantine, said the medical advice talked about AstraZeneca being preferred for those over 60. This is because of rare blood clots in younger people.

“But the advice does not preclude persons under 60 from getting the AstraZeneca vaccine. And so if you wish to get the AstraZeneca vaccine, then we would encourage you to go and have that discussion with your GP.”

National cabinet met against the threatening backdrop of outbreaks in five jurisdictions and more than 270 active cases nationally. There is particular worry about NSW, where greater Sydney and certain other areas are in lockdown, and now Western Australian premier Mark McGowan has ordered Perth and Peel into lockdown.

Morrison said it was “important to get feedback from all the states and territories on the measures that they’re putting in place and to essentially get everybody on the same page in terms of their understanding of the situation, the impact particularly of the Delta variant.

“The Delta variant is proving to be a far more difficult element of this virus than we have seen to date,” he said.

The mandatory vaccination of residential aged care workers comes after the latest figures show only a third of this workforce has had a jab, and many fewer are fully vaccinated.

The federal government will partner with the states to ensure compliance, and provide $11 million for facilities to give staff time to get vaccinated or deal with side effects.

“We want to make sure that this won’t have a negative impact on available workforce,” Morrison said.

He said this was the third time the mandating for aged care workers had been before national cabinet.

Previously the proposal has run into resistance from the national cabinet’s health advisers, who have worried that compulsion could lead to people leaving the workforce.

But Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly said the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee had on Monday unanimously supported the decision.

Morrison said there would be a “risk-benefit assessment” in early August.

He said: “This has been a difficult group to get vaccinated, and this is why I have been fairly constant and determined to ensure we got to where we are tonight.

“I would have preferred to have been here a little while ago, but nevertheless, our determination has paid off.”

National cabinet is getting further advice on making vaccination compulsory for disability care workers.

In other decisions, vaccination and testing will be mandatory for all quarantine workers including those involved in the transport of quarantined individuals. Morrison said this would be a state responsibility and there would be no Commonwealth funding program such as with the aged care workers.

This follows an unvaccinated transport worker triggering the Sydney outbreak.

In another response to one of the current outbreaks, it will be mandatory for returned travellers and close contacts to get tested two or three days after the travellers finish quarantine.

National cabinet also agreed to ensure that international quarantine residents and other high risk people should be kept separate from low risk people such as those crossing state borders.

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

– ref. National cabinet makes jabs compulsory for aged care workers and AstraZeneca available for all who want it – https://theconversation.com/national-cabinet-makes-jabs-compulsory-for-aged-care-workers-and-astrazeneca-available-for-all-who-want-it-163541

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

Darren Chester says he can’t explain why Barnaby Joyce sacked him because the Deputy Prime Minister was “incoherent” when he rang on Sunday to tell him he was being dumped from cabinet to the backbench.

There were no harsh words, Chester said on Monday – just a “matter-of-fact conversation. He was sacking me. I didn’t agree with him, and I got on with the walk I was having with my dog.”

“I wouldn’t normally comment on private conversations, but I’m gonna say the conversation I had with Barnaby was so incoherent yesterday, I couldn’t actually explain what he was even saying to me.

“So people of Australia, brace yourself, there will be more conversations like that.”

For Chester, a moderate and a strong supporter of ousted leader Michael McCormack, who has lost the portfolios of veterans’ affairs and defence personnel, there must have been a strong feeling of déjà vu. He’s been here before with Joyce.
As he put it bluntly on Monday, “I’ve been screwed over by the National Party twice in the last three years”.

Or more precisely, by Joyce.

In December 2017, Chester was sacked in a reshuffle from the post of infrastructure and transport. Joyce, who was deputy prime minister to Malcolm Turnbull, took the portfolio himself.

It was reported one factor was Chester’s support for fellow Victorian Bridget McKenzie for deputy leader of the party. She beat Joyce’s candidate, Matt Canavan. Chester argued the Nationals needed a different sort of face.

That time, Chester was offered a very junior role, which he declined. This time, there was no offer.

And, in a bitter irony, his sacking now opened a place for McKenzie – who was forced to resign last year in the sports rorts affair – to return to cabinet.

Chester noted Joyce on Sunday had said “I was a competent minister – well he can explain why a competent minister is no longer in his job”.

As for the future, “the relationship I’ll have with Barnaby Joyce going forward will be completely and utterly business-like.

“I have no personal relationship with Barnaby, I don’t seek a personal relationship with Barnaby. It’ll be completely pragmatic. I will go to him with projects on behalf of Gippslanders, if I don’t get my fair share for Gippsland you’ll hear about it.”

Another loser in the reshuffle, resources and water minister Keith Pitt, who has been pushed from cabinet to the outer ministry, was restrained. “I just do the job I’m given to the best of my ability,” he said on Monday.

The mining sector has every cause to be surprised at being relegated, given Joyce is very close to it.

But the cabinet spot of Pitt, a McCormack vote, was needed to reward Andrew Gee, who went across to Joyce (and gets Chester’s portfolios). And there was also muttering about an old grudge against Pitt, lingering from Joyce’s first challenge.

Pitt on Monday put out a statement reporting Australia’s resource and energy exports are forecast to be a record $310 billion in 2020-21, rising in 2021-22 to $334 billion.

Commenting on the figures, the CEO of the Minerals Council of Australia Tania Constable pointedly said the industry “looks forward to the return of resources to cabinet”.

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

– ref. View from The Hill: Darren Chester on being ‘screwed over’ by Barnaby Joyce – twice – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-darren-chester-on-being-screwed-over-by-barnaby-joyce-twice-163526

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Bennett, Chair in Epidemiology, Deakin University

Last Saturday, the New South Wales government announced a two-week lockdown for Greater Sydney, the Blue Mountains, Central Coast and Wollongong after a spike in new COVID cases.

It’s spawned a lot of commentary about whether NSW delayed going into lockdown, and therefore has caused itself a longer lockdown. Indeed, one modelling study by University of Sydney researchers, published last November, estimated delaying lockdown by three days would extend the lockdown by three weeks.

But it’s not that simple.

This kind of modelling is about using lockdown as a primary intervention where you’re relying on the lockdown itself to snuff out transmission. Even if the cases aren’t tested and recognised, the virus eventually runs out of new susceptible people to infect. This isn’t the case in NSW, which is still relying on a strategy of test, trace and isolate.

If this lockdown is about buying time to allow contact tracers to get in front of the virus by getting all at-risk contacts of cases in quarantine before they’re infectious, then a day’s “delay” is probably not going to add weeks to it. The modelling doesn’t apply in this scenario.

Whenever we’re evaluating a lockdown, there’s always an element of “hindsight being 20/20”. Some of the circuit-breaker lockdowns we’ve had over the past year didn’t change the management of cases and contacts because all community transmission that did occur after lockdown was among known contacts already in quarantine. But we didn’t know that until after the lockdown was called. Circuit-breakers are essentially insurance policies or safety nets (though we should still evaluate them to know when they are justified).

During this pandemic we’re often making decisions in situations of considerable uncertainty.

Things have clearly shifted in our latest outbreaks in Victoria and NSW. Contact tracers have been very effective at finding, linking and documenting the spread of cases. And in NSW’s latest outbreak, health authorities have had the added advantage of discovering the cluster within the first generations of spread. This means they’ve been able to collect data on where the virus was, and how transmission was occurring, in almost real time.

It’s easy to sit here and say locking down earlier would have made a difference. But when should it have been called? When we knew of only ten cases the Saturday before last? While infections among casual contacts were concerning, nobody knew 24 future cases would soon be exposed to a case at private party of 30 held later that same night.

So what works best in situations like this — go early just in case? I would argue go with the data when you are this close to the leading edge of the outbreak. Assess the data in real time and be prepared for a rapid change in response.

The emerging story over last week was of many cases, but almost all linked to the known cluster. By week’s end, it was clear at least one branch of the outbreak was missed with multiple cases infectious in the community over five days or more.

What led to this lockdown?

Rather than relying on high-level modelling of transmission risk and projections, we can also build a detailed picture of the epidemiology of an outbreak as it is playing out.

NSW has had very detailed transmission data on almost all cases, bar a handful, which puts them in a strong position.

A potential risk in relying on contact tracing is how quickly things can escalate if you miss a major chain of infection. This was the case for the cluster involving a seafood wholesaler in Marrickville, which was spreading invisibly and had transmissions going back a week before they caught it. On Sunday, ten of the 30 new cases announced were linked to this cluster.

Another factor was casual transmission. This Delta variant is much more infectious than previous strains, and some of the early cases in this outbreak occurred from merely “fleeting” exposure. Some of these early transmissions happened in places where health authorities couldn’t be confident they could track down all casual contacts, and those who were exposed may have underestimated their risk of having been infected.

Read more:
We’re seeing more casual COVID transmission. But is that because of the variant or better case tracking?

Yes it’s true almost all the cases are “linked” to previously known cases, but some of these were linked via a convoluted, longer path as a contact of earlier missed cases. This meant more people circulating while infectious over a larger number of days.

The distribution of cases also played a role. Even though it seems to still be largely focused around Bondi, cases and potential exposures were now spread beyond.

Should NSW have locked down a few days earlier? It’s hard to say, but will be important to evaluate when things settle

A lot of people forget there were only ten cases in total in this outbreak just over a week ago. There were two new cases per day between June 16 and 20 inclusive, which are numbers we all know are manageable for NSW contact tracers.

Should they have gone into a full lockdown on Sunday, June 20, when they had a total of ten cases? I don’t think you could defend that epidemiologically.

Cumulative cases then went from ten to 25 two days later, to 54 another two days later on June 24, to 112 on Saturday June 26 when lockdown was announced.

It looked like they were right on top of it, and were very close to getting to all contacts before their infectious periods. But they were still probably a day or so behind the virus. Even one infectious day each in the community by a few contacts simultaneously is very risky and adds to exposure sites.

This Delta variant also seems to have reduced the time between cases being exposed to the virus and becoming infectious themselves, according to NSW Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant.

All this painted a very different picture to the week before, and would have contributed to the decision to lock down.

We need to analyse the data

Now we need to evaluate this outbreak response, along with all others in Australia, and learn more about how the virus moves through our communities, our weak points, our most effective containment measures, and the optimal timing of these.

The lockdown won’t yet have played a significant role for new cases. But we also know from the timing of cases that locking down a few days earlier wouldn’t have stopped the seafood wholesaler outbreak, nor would it stop spread in high-risk essential workplaces.

Analysing the outbreak aims to understand any additional cases that might have been prevented with earlier lockdown, or how many cases will be prevented with lockdown in place now. It will allow us to, under various alternate scenarios, use these rich detailed case data to remove some of the uncertainty next time.

Catherine Bennett receives funding from Medical Research Future Fund and National Health and Medical Research Council.

– ref. Did Sydney’s lockdown come too late? Here’s why it’s not that simple – https://theconversation.com/did-sydneys-lockdown-come-too-late-heres-why-its-not-that-simple-163484

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Meru Sheel, Epidemiologist | Senior Research Fellow, Australian National University

The weekend’s news of COVID-19 outbreaks and various lockdowns around Australia reminds us there’s no room for complacency. We need to accelerate Australia’s COVID-19 vaccine roll-out and ensure people are fully vaccinated as soon as possible.

Just over six million Australians (30% of those eligible) have received their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. As of June 17, 3.8 million Australians had one dose of AstraZeneca.

Despite the benefits of vaccination, some people are concerned about the small but real risk of clotting after receiving their AstraZeneca vaccine. Some have even cancelled their booking for their second dose.

But until you’re fully vaccinated – with two doses of AstraZeneca or two doses of Pfizer, at the recommended time intervals – you’re not optimally protected. After your second AstraZeneca dose, your protection against the Delta variant almost doubles, from 33% to 60%.

Why are 2 doses are better than 1?

When you get the AstraZeneca vaccine, or an mRNA vaccine such as Pfizer, it directs your body to make the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein at the injection site.

This prompts an immune response, which recognises and remembers this spike protein.
But the vaccines don’t make the spike protein for very long, nor do they spread it. This restricts the size of the immune response.

Limiting each dose and delivering it twice generally leads to better and longer-lasting immune responses than a single dose.

Just like your own memory, which improves by repeated viewing or listening with a break in between, our immune memory generally improves with repeated exposure to something it needs to protect us against.

When should you get your second dose?

The recommended interval between doses of AstraZeneca is 12 weeks, while the minimum is four weeks after the first dose.

This is based on clinical trial data which showed around 73% “efficacy” after the first dose. This means in experimental studies, the first dose of the vaccine reduced the risk of getting COVID19 caused by the original strain by 73%.

When people received their second dose after 12 weeks or more, the efficacy reached 81%.

Read more:
Why do we need booster shots, and could we mix and match different COVID vaccines?

In these trials, a longer duration between the first and second doses – 12 weeks, rather than eight or less – resulted in higher levels of antibodies which can stop the virus.

These antibodies will inevitably fall over time, but starting at a higher level after the last dose means it will take longer for them to fall to levels where protection is compromised.

How well does AstraZeneca protect against variants?

When the Alpha variant is dominant, the AstraZeneca vaccine provides 55-70% protection after one dose and 65-90% after two doses. Alpha is the variant associated with the Queensland flight crew outbreak.

For the Delta variant, which is circulating in Sydney, one dose provides 33% protection against symptomatic COVID-19. So after one dose, you’re 33% less likely to get sick with the Delta strain than someone who is unvaccinated.

The level of protection increased to 60% in those who received two doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

This compares to 88% for Pfizer.

Both vaccines offer greater protection against severe disease. Two doses of AstraZeneca reduces your chance of needing to be hospitalised with COVID-19 by 92%, while for Pfizer it’s 96%, compared with someone who wasn’t vaccianted.

Read more:
Which COVID vaccine is best? Here’s why that’s really hard to answer

Overall, contact tracing data shows one dose of either AstraZeneca or Pfizer vaccine can prevent disease from spreading to members in the same household by around 50%.

Today the New South Wales health minister revealed that of the 30 people at a Hoxton Park house party, 24 returned a positive COVID test. While you can still get COVID-19 when you’re vaccinated (generally a milder form), in this case, the six who have so far tested negative had all been vaccinated.

What about blood clots following second dose?

Thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) is a rare clotting condition that can occur after AstraZeneca vaccination because of an abnormal immune response.

The risk of TTS is smaller following the second dose of AstraZeneca than the first dose.

Of the nearly 16 million people who received the second dose of AstraZeneca in the UK, 23 developed TTS, a rate of 1.5 per million people vaccinated. This compares with 14.2 per million for a first dose.

Read more:
Concerned about the latest AstraZeneca news? These 3 graphics help you make sense of the risk

The risk of death from TTS is further reduced. If you received your first dose of AZ vaccine without developing TTS, you are even less likely to get it with the second dose.

That’s why health authorities recommend people who safely received their first dose of AstraZeneca vaccine have their second dose and protect themselves optimally.

Can I get the Pfizer vaccine for my second dose instead?

Some countries, including Canada and some in Europe, have approved mixing and matching different COVID-19 vaccine brands.

This is based on data on antibody responses, which showed a stronger immune response when people get a different type of COVID-19 vaccine for their second dose.

But while this is encouraging, we don’t have clear evidence that mixing vaccines will protect against COVID-19.

Mixing vaccine brands also increased common side effects including reactions such as headaches, fever, body aches and tiredness.

It’s possible that as more information becomes available from ongoing studies using AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Moderna and Novavax vaccines, the advice of mixing vaccines may eventually change.

But until more real-world data on vaccine safety and effectiveness are available, the advice in Australia is for people to receive two doses of the same vaccine.

The goal is full vaccination

The best way out of this pandemic is to ensure everyone is vaccinated as quickly as possible. Full protection kicks in about two weeks after completing vaccination.

While one dose offers some protection, it’s not as high as two doses. And we don’t know how long the protection from one dose will last.

Right now, a second dose of AstraZeneca vaccine is ready and waiting for everyone who had their first dose 12 weeks ago. So if you’re eligible, get both doses of the vaccine brand available to you, rather than settling for second-best and incomplete protection.

Read more:
What if I can’t get in for my second Pfizer dose and the gap is longer than 3 weeks?

Meru Sheel receives funding from Westpac Scholars Trust.

Cyra Patel is an employee at the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance (NCIRS). NCIRS receives service contract funding from the Australian Government Departments of Health, NSW and other state government Departments of Health.

David Tscharke receives funding from the NHMRC, ARC and MS Research Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Society for Microbiology and a member of the Australian and New Zealand Society for Immunology, the Australian Virology Society and the Australian Society for Medical Research.

– ref. Should I get my second AstraZeneca dose? Yes, it almost doubles your protection against Delta – https://theconversation.com/should-i-get-my-second-astrazeneca-dose-yes-it-almost-doubles-your-protection-against-delta-163259

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Meese, Research fellow, RMIT University

Not so long ago, Facebook was a goldmine for Australian news media. News featured prominently in Australians’ Facebook feeds, and newsrooms across the country saw a growing online audience engage with their stories.

People were liking, commenting and, most importantly, sharing stories, delivering new eyeballs to news outlets. This revolution in news distribution encouraged many of Australia’s biggest news media companies to invest time and money into posting on Facebook.

But the relationship between Facebook and news companies has soured. Facebook famously changed its algorithm in January 2018 to reduce “audience exposure to public content from all pages, including news” in favour of posts from family and friends.

Many news media companies (including The Conversation) responded by embracing alternative tactics, such as subscription campaigns, to reach readers directly. But some digital outlets that had lived their entire lives in synergy with Facebook could not adapt to this new environment, and had to lay off staff or reduce their operations.

While commentary during this period, and Facebook’s own updates, suggested that news content was no longer as prominent on Facebook, there was no hard data to see if this was actually true, particularly at the national level. So we decided to investigate how the Australian news sector performed on Facebook during this upheaval.

We began by building a sample of 32 national and metropolitan news organisations. We then used the Facebook-owned CrowdTangle database to collect engagement data from these organisations’ Facebook pages. Our data set included more than 2 million unique posts, from January 1 2014 to December 15 2020.

Next, we constructed a daily performance score for each news organisation’s page during this period. We removed the 25% best and 25% worst-performing posts, and averaged the remaining 50% across 30-day rolling intervals. We did this three times — once for each of the three dominant Facebook metrics: reactions (likes, hearts and so on), comments and shares.

Finally, we divided it by the “baseline average” from January-April 2017, which is in the middle of our data set. This means a score of 1 would represent the baseline average, whereas a score of 2 would mean performing twice as well as the baseline, and 0.5 only half as well.

We wanted to see whether our analysis can explain why Australian news organisations had begun moving away from Facebook. We also wanted to see whether some news organisations have been hit harder than others by the dramatic changes Facebook made to its algorithm in recent years.

A peak and then a collapse?

The first headline finding from our analysis is that in terms of engagement, Australian news content experienced a clear period of success on Facebook before a subsequent reset. This is especially so in the case of the number of user “reactions” to news content, shown below for the entire sector.

Sector-wide reactions to news content

It was a similar story when we looked at “shares” across the whole sector:

Sector-wide shares of news content

Sharing of Australian news content peaked in 2014-16, and then declined towards the end of the decade. Remarkably, the sharing performance score in November 2020 was only 15% of the score measured in November 2014. This is striking, because at one stage news sharing was seen as central to the Facebook experience. Clearly, that no longer seems to be the case.

Comments, however, tell a different story. For the sector as a whole, comments peaked near the end of the decade, in May 2019.

Sector-wide comments on news content

The simple narrative of a peak and then a collapse is clouded still further when we look at specific news outlets. While we identified an overall decline in Facebook engagement with Australian news, there have been winners and losers.

The most dramatic fall afflicted digital-native youth outlets such as Junkee, Pedestrian and BuzzFeed, whose reaction performance scores dropped from 3.9 in January 2016 to 0.18 in late November 2020. The sharing score for these outlets also fell dramatically, from a high of 5.8 in November 2015 to 0.4 at the end of 2020.

In contrast, public service outlets the ABC and SBS rebounded towards the end of the decade. Their comments, reactions and shares rose after Facebook’s 2018 algorithm change and only recently returned to our 2017 baseline in late 2020.

Number of shares, segregated by news category

So what happened?

Our data reveal a clear connection between the overall decline in engagement with Australian news content on Facebook, and Facebook’s gradual move away from news. Social news outlets in particular have suffered a heavy toll from this change.

In contrast, public service outlets have been more resilient, perhaps because of the high levels of trust Australians place in these outlets. People may have turned to them for reliable information during crises such as Australia’s Black Summer bushfires and the COVID pandemic.

Our data cannot point to one factor that has caused this decline. Instead, we suggest there may be several. Facebook’s algorithm changes would obviously have had an impact; another related factor is that companies are adopting different business strategies and are no longer focused on producing compelling content for Facebook.

It’s also possible Facebook users may be sharing less content overall, and there is also anecdotal evidence of a decline in Facebook use among young Australians.

Read more:
Facebook and Google used to be the future of news. But now media companies need more strings to their bow

Whatever the case, it is clear the golden years of Facebook news engagement are over. Indeed, Facebook’s dwindling interest in news was further emphasised by the infamous news blackout in February 2021, during tense negotiations with the federal government over its plan to make tech platforms pay to host news content.

The upshot is that news media outlets can no longer rely on Facebook for easy engagement and audience growth. Whether by choice or necessity, they are already courting readers elsewhere.

Read more:
Facebook has pulled the trigger on news content — and possibly shot itself in the foot

James Meese receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Francesco Bailo has received funding from Facebook.

Edward Hurcombe 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. It’s complicated: Australian media firms were breaking up with Facebook long before the infamous 2021 news blackout – https://theconversation.com/its-complicated-australian-media-firms-were-breaking-up-with-facebook-long-before-the-infamous-2021-news-blackout-162500

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

This week’s Newspoll, conducted June 23-26 from a sample of 1,513, gave Labor a 51-49 lead, a one-point gain for Labor since the previous Newspoll, three weeks ago. Primary votes were 41% Coalition (steady), 37% Labor (up one), 11% Greens (steady) and 3% One Nation (steady). Figures are from The Poll Bludger.

55% were satisfied with Scott Morrison’s performance (up one), and 41% were dissatisfied (down two), for a net approval of +14, up three points. Anthony Albanese’s net approval increased four points to -5. Morrison led Albanese as better prime minister by 53-33 (53-32 previously).

While Morrison’s net approval was up slightly, this followed a fall of nine points in the previous Newspoll. Analyst Kevin Bonham said Morrison’s current net approval is his second lowest since the COVID situation started last year.

The fieldwork for this poll was Wednesday to Saturday. The vast majority of the sample would have been done before NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian put Greater Sydney into a two-week lockdown on Saturday. Further restrictions were announced for the NT and WA on Sunday, with Queensland following on Monday.

Problems with Australia’s vaccination rollout were apparent in April, but did not have an impact on Morrison’s, or the Coalition’s, polling, or the perception of handling of COVID. At the time, most Australians felt secure behind our hard border, and did not see any rush to get vaccinated.

I believe the current lockdowns are a danger to the Coalition, as the slow vaccination rollout may start to bite. The previous Newspoll was taken during the Victorian lockdown, and Morrison’s net approval slid nine points. In an early June Essential poll, the federal government’s handling of COVID dropped to a 53-24 good rating from 58-18 in late May.

Only 25% of Australians have received at least one dose of COVID vaccinations, compared to 48% in France and higher in other comparable countries. Furthermore, under 5% of Australians are fully vaccinated (received two doses), compared to at least 25% in comparable countries.

The head of the Therapeutic Goods Administration recently said that effective protection against the Delta COVID variant that has spread quickly in Sydney requires both vaccination doses.

Barnaby Joyce’s electoral impact

On June 21, Barnaby Joyce won a Nationals leadership spill, and replaced Michael McCormack as Nationals leader and deputy prime minister. Joyce returned as Nationals leader more than three years after he was forced to resign over an affair with a former staffer and sexual harassment allegations (which he denies).

I wrote in May that non-university educated whites have been deserting left-leaning parties in Australia, the US and UK, and that they appear to be voting contrary to elite opinion.

Read more:
Non-university educated white people are deserting left-leaning parties. How can they get them back?

Elite opinion detests Joyce, so by this logic the Coalition should be boosted with non-uni whites. However, the Nationals have little appeal beyond regional electorates that are not based on a large regional city like Geelong or Newcastle.

At the 2019 federal election, The Poll Bludger wrote there were large swings to the Coalition in regional Queensland, taking seats that were Coalition-held by small margins out of range for Labor. The Coalition also gained Herbert by a large margin.

Owing to these swings, there are few seats where the Nationals traditionally do well that Labor could win at the next election. The weakness of Joyce is that non-uni whites outside the Nationals’ heartland don’t care who the Nationals’ leader is, while university-educated people will dislike the Coalition more than they would have had the far less well-known McCormack remained Nationals leader.

Excellent jobs report for government

On June 17, the ABS reported the unemployment rate in May had dropped 0.4% to 5.1%, returning to where it was before COVID. This drop occurred despite a 0.3% increase in the participation rate.

The employment population ratio – the percentage of the eligible population that is employed – jumped 0.5% to 62.8% in May. It is now higher than at any previous point in the ABS chart going back to May 2011; the previous high was 62.7% in September 2019.

With these economic figures, the government is a clear favourite to be re-elected. Provided the current COVID outbreaks do not lead to extended lockdowns, the economy will probably be doing well whenever the next election is held.

Essential climate change and foreign relations questions, and Morgan poll

In last week’s Essential poll, 56% (down two since January) thought climate change is happening and is caused by human activity, while 27% (down five) thought we are just witnessing a normal fluctuation in the earth’s climate.

45% (up three since January, but down seven since June 2020) thought Australia was not doing enough to address climate change. 30% (down five) thought we were doing enough, and 12% (up two) thought we were doing too much.

On foreign relations, 50% thought we should get closer to NZ (up one since December), 44% the UK (up six), 37% the European Union (up four), 32% the US (up four) and 12% China (down three). By 57-14, respondents favoured the US over China as most beneficial for Australia to strengthen our relationship with (42-18 in May 2020, before Joe Biden’s election as US president).

A Morgan poll, conducted June 12-13 and 19-20 from a sample of nearly 2,800, gave Labor a 50.5-49.5 lead, a 0.5% gain for the Coalition since early June. Primary votes were 41.5% Coalition (up 1.5%), 34.5% Labor (down 1%), 12% Greens (up 0.5%) and 3.5% One Nation (up 0.5%).

Victorian state poll and Tasmanian Labor leadership

As reported by The Poll Bludger, a Redbridge Victorian poll for The Herald Sun, conducted June 12-15 from a sample of almost 1,500, gave Labor a 52.4-47.6 lead. Primary votes were 41% Coalition, 37% Labor and 12% Greens.

Incumbent Daniel Andrews led Michael O’Brien as preferred premier by 42-23. I had a recent article about the Victorian June Resolve poll.

David O’Byrne was elected Tasmanian Labor leader on June 15, after defeating Shane Broad by a 74-26 margin of all votes cast.

Adrian Beaumont 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. Labor regains Newspoll lead as COVID crisis escalates; is Barnaby Joyce an electoral asset? – https://theconversation.com/labor-regains-newspoll-lead-as-covid-crisis-escalates-is-barnaby-joyce-an-electoral-asset-163170

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin Mayne, Molecular biologist and bioinformatician, CSIRO

Identifying the age of animals is fundamental to wildlife management. It helps scientists know if a species is at risk of extinction and the rate at which it reproduces, as well as determining what level of fishing is sustainable.

Determining the age of fish has been difficult in the past — primarily involving extracting the inner ear bone, also known as the “otolith”. Layers of growth in the otolith are counted like rings on a tree to reveal an individual’s age. Unless a dead specimen is available, this method requires killing a fish, making it unsuitable for use on endangered populations.

However a non-lethal DNA test developed by the CSIRO enables researchers to determine fish age for three iconic and threatened Australian freshwater species: the Australian lungfish, the Murray cod and the Mary River cod. We outline the technological breakthrough in our research just published.

Our fast, accurate and cost-effective test can be adapted for other fish species. We now hope to share this method to improve the protection of wild fish populations and help promote sustainable fisheries around the world.

Iconic species at risk

Human activity has led to the population declines of the three Australian fish species at the centre of our research.

The threatened Australian lungfish is found in rivers and lakes in southeast Queensland. It’s often referred to as a “living fossil” because its extraordinary evolutionary history stretches back more than 100 million years, before all land animals including dinosaurs.

Man-made barriers in rivers reduce the movement of water, which lowers lungfish breeding rates.

Older lungfish do not have hard otolith structures, which makes determining their age difficult. Bomb radiocarbon, which analyses carbon levels in organic matter, has been used to age Australian lungfish, but this method is too expensive to be widely used.

The threatened Murray cod is Australia’s largest freshwater fish. The Mary River cod is one of Australia’s most endangered fish, found in less than 30% of its former range in Queensland’s Mary River.

Habitat destruction and overfishing are major threats to Murray cod and Mary river cod populations.

Otoliths can be used to determine age for both these cod species, however this has only been done on a population-wide scale for the more prevalent Murray cod.

Read more:
Australia’s smallest fish among 22 at risk of extinction within two decades

Our DNA breakthrough

When cells divide to make new cells, DNA is replicated. This can lead to DNA methylation, which involves the addition or the loss of a “methyl group” molecule at places along the DNA strand.

Research has found the level of DNA methylation is a reliable predictor of age, particularly in mammals, including humans.

To develop our test, we first worked with zebrafish. This species is useful when studying fish biology because it has a short lifespan and high reproductive rates. We took zebrafish whose ages were known, then removed a tiny clip of their fin. We then examined DNA methylation levels in the fin sample to identify the fish’s age.

Following this successful step, we transferred the method to Australian lungfish, Murray cod and Mary River cod. Again, we used fish of known ages, as well as bomb radiocarbon dating of scales and ages determined from otoliths.

We found despite the zebrafish and the study fish species being separated by millions of years of evolution, our method worked in all four species. This suggests the test can be used to predict age in many other fish species.

Read more:
Good news from the River Murray: these 2 fish species have bounced back from the Millennium Drought in record numbers

A conservation management boom?

In the same way human population demographers use census data to understand and model human populations, we now have the tools to do this with animals.

We are looking to expand this DNA-based method to determine the age of the endangered eastern freshwater cod and trout cod. We will also continue to test the method across other species including reptiles and crustaceans.

This work is part of CSIRO’s ongoing efforts to use DNA to measure and monitor the environment. This includes estimating the lifespan of vertebrate species such as long-lived fish and surveying biodiversity in seawater using DNA extracted from the environment.

We envisage that in the not too distant future, these methods may be used by other researchers to better understand and manage wild animal populations.

Read more:
A new study shows an animal’s lifespan is written in the DNA. For humans, it’s 38 years

Benjamin Mayne 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. Breakthrough allows scientists to determine the age of endangered native fish using DNA – https://theconversation.com/breakthrough-allows-scientists-to-determine-the-age-of-endangered-native-fish-using-dna-162084

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Patricia A. O’Brien, Visiting Fellow, School of History, Australian National University, and Adjunct Professor, Asian Studies Program, Georgetown University

Samoa’s constitutional crisis has entered yet another phase, just over a month after the nation’s first woman prime minister-elect, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, was locked out of parliament and sworn into office in a tent.

Samoa’s Supreme Court has today found the May 24 swearing in was unconstitutional — on the face of it a win for caretaker prime minister Tuilaepa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi.

However, the court also ordered that parliament convene within seven days from June 28. This is a win for Fiame’s Fa’atuatua I Le Atua Samoa Ua Tasi (FAST) Party, which has been pushing for this outcome for some time.

The much anticipated decision came with a clear warning for Tuilaepa and those who have acted on his behalf to disrupt democracy’s course. If they act to prevent parliament convening by July 5, the oaths of office taken on May 24 will be reinstated “so that the business of the nation can proceed”.

This is just the latest of many rounds in the legal fight that erupted after Samoa’s April 9 general election.

Fiame secured a one seat majority with the help of independent candidate, Tuala Tevaga Iosefo Ponifasio, who will formally join the FAST Party once parliament is convened. He was named Fiame’s deputy on May 24.

But when Tuilaepa (Samoa’s political leader since 1998) refused to concede, the Pacific’s oldest democracy was plunged into dangerous waters.

Power games

In the following weeks, an erratic Tuilaepa, with the critical assistance of key officials, pushed Samoa to the brink of autocracy. In stark contrast, an unflappable Fiame has repeatedly asked Samoa’s people for patience as the courts worked through the deluge of cases caused by the election stalemate.

The Supreme Court’s caseload since April 9 has included 28 petitions disputing electoral results. These are gradually being heard, and on June 18 the court awarded an additional seat to Fiame’s FAST Party (the HRPP candidate’s election was voided when he was found guilty of breaching election rules).

A great deal of the court’s time, however, has been spent working through the repercussions of an extraordinary chain of events that began on April 20.

Read more:
Despite a veneer of democracy, Samoa is sliding into autocracy

In order to cancel FAST’s one seat majority, Head of State Afioga Tuimalealiifano Vaaletoa Sualauvi and Samoa’s Electoral Commission announced on social media that a 52nd parliamentary seat had been created.

The move was justified on the grounds that a constitutionally mandated 10% minimum of parliamentary seats reserved for women had not been met.

Five women had won seats, and heading into the election it had been agreed the 10% threshold equated to five seats. Now the Electoral Commissioner was saying six women should have seats, and a candidate from Tuilaepa’s Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP) was appointed.

Gender politics

It is one of many ironies in this political saga that Tuilaepa was using the gender quota to prevent Samoa’s first female prime minister from assuming office. With this move, the election results were again deadlocked.

The manoeuvre was one of the tactics designed to run down the clock on the constitutionally designated 45 days for a new government to be sworn in. If the May 24 deadline was broken it would trigger another election.

Then, as the courts considered the merits of the sixth seat for women, the head of state revoked the April 9 election results on the basis of the tied parliament and called for a fresh election to be held on May 21.

Read more:
Samoan democracy hangs in the balance as a constitutional arm wrestle plays out — with the world watching

But a week before the May 24 deadline, the Supreme Court found the head of state did not have the powers to void the April 9 election results and the appointment of the HRPP member to the 52nd seat was illegal.

Those decisions gave Fiame back her one seat majority and plans were on track for parliament to be sworn in by Monday May 24. (The court did subsequently decide that a sixth seat for women was required, but that parliament must sit before the seat is filled by election.)

Stronger democracy

In another twist, on the evening of Saturday May 22 the head of state suspended parliament until further notice and left Apia for his home village some distance away.

Although the Supreme Court ordered on May 23 that parliament sit the next day, the parliament building was locked by order of Tuilaepa. The FAST Party resorted to the unofficial swearing in ceremony in a tent erected on the parliament lawns, presided over by FAST lawyers in what they argued was the “principle of necessity”.

As it stands now, FAST holds a two seat majority in Samoa’s Legislative Assembly, which will increase by one when Tuala formalises his move.

Read more:
Samoa’s stunning election result: on the verge of a new ruling party for the first time in 40 years

If the Supreme Court’s latest ruling is complied with, all 51 members will be sworn into office and Fiame will be Samoa’s next prime minister within seven days. The question is, will Tuilaepa abandon the power play that has tested Samoa’s democracy like never before in its 59 years since independence in 1962?

Australia has called for the convening of parliament in its first robust statement on the crisis. Other democracies are now likely to quickly follow suit.

So far, Samoa’s own democracy has been tempered and strengthened in the fires of this crisis. But it remains to be seen whether a political leader who embodies tomorrow’s woman has finally made Tuilaepa yesterday’s man.

Patricia A. O’Brien received funding from the Australian Research Council and New Zealand’s JD Stout Trust.

– ref. Has the door finally opened for Samoa’s first female prime minister, after weeks of constitutional crisis? – https://theconversation.com/has-the-door-finally-opened-for-samoas-first-female-prime-minister-after-weeks-of-constitutional-crisis-163263

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karen Malone, Professor, Environmental Sustainability and Childhood Studies, Swinburne University of Technology

To remember things, you need to give them your full attention.

American neuroscientist and bestselling author of Still Alice, Lisa Genova’s key findings on preventing Alzheimer’s disease show how to enhance memory to retain information. This research can be adapted to children.

Children can be supported to exercise their mind muscles. They can learn the best ways to get information efficiently into their heads and access it effectively when they need to.

In her book Remember: the science of memory and the art of forgetting Genova points out to enhance memory we don’t need to play “computer brain games” or “read books on recall strategies”, what we simply need to do is improve our skills of noticing.

She writes that “noticing requires two things: perception (seeing, hearing, smelling, feeling) and attention”.

You can use a trip to the playground to help your children strengthen memory muscles and become better learners.

This can be done by paying attention, slowing down, mind mapping, rehearsing, enhancing the senses and mixing things up up.

Getting there

Fill your child’s backpack with snacks and drinks, and small figurines such as fairies, lions, tigers, koalas, dinosaurs or favourite small cars and trucks for storytelling and mud play.

Kid’s binoculars and magnifying glasses are great for noticing and spying on birds and bugs.

Pack watercolour paints, brushes and recycled paper for painting, and chalk and brown baking paper for tracing bark, leaves, rocks, hands and play equipment. Play dough is great for natural sculptures.

Then you’re on your way.

Creating a mind map

Like all animals humans use mind mapping to create maps of our immediate environment to navigate our surroundings. Our brain is wired to recall where things are located in space.

For wild animals this is critical for survival and for children, it helps them to feel safe. You can’t do mind mapping in a car – it requires walking.

Walking to the playground, run your hands across fence palings and smell rosemary twigs. Encourage your children to do this too.

Collect eucalypt leaves, gum nuts, acorns and other natural loose objects and pop them in the bag to be used later in potions or paintings at the park.

You could make chalk drawings of rivers and fish on the pavement as a way of finding your path back home.

This pace may seem slow but to really notice, you need to slow down. A lot of neural work is happening as children construct a mind map. The more time adds detail to the memory.

Exercising the mind

Once at the park, decrease distractions by not multitasking (turning off devices). This allows space for noticing.

Let your children explore playground equipment until they are out of breath and their bodies are tired.

Now it is time to exercise their minds. Take a pause to consider the layers of the playgrounds, the earth, grasses, tree roots, ants and bugs, plants and trees, leaves, birds and the sky.

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

You can lie on your back with your children and all close your eyes. Quietening the mind, through mindfulness, allows children to be dreamy. Relaxing in a meditative state can lower anxiety and tension. Research on children in nature reveals it alleviates hyperactivity and depression. The mind can be “trained to become less reactive, to put the brakes on the runaway stress response”.

You can now unpack the figurines. These can be used for children to tell stories adding twigs, and leaves for the stage. They could mix petals and water into magic potions.

Children often tuck away strong emotional responses to events or information until quiet moments. Reactivating the neural circuits through retelling or externalising experiences helps children forge positive memories and process conflicting emotions.

Re-enacting stories using figurines or other objects can help children revisit positive and negative experiences they have encountered.

Read more:
Why make-believe play is an important part of childhood development

You can encourage your child to make fairy lands or sand pit dinosaur worlds and play out past events. In this way, children can project emotions through the objects as they play out narratives.

Positive emotions like happiness and joy actually enhance children’s recall to re-activate past positive emotions. By focusing on individual senses or emotional responses children learn to connect cues with association. This builds significant new repertoires to retrieve from later.

Multi-sensory and meaningful encounters, enhance our perceptions and recall by creating multi-neural pathways. This can be done by using a range of senses: smell, touch, sound etc.

You can encourage your children to pause and smell the scents, listen to birds, run a feather through fingers, collect stones. and touch rough bark and trace it on baking paper.

Set up the pencils and paints for drawing flowers or sculptures of piled up stones.

Mix it up and revisit

Genova writes “sameness is the kiss of death to memory”. If you want children to remember more of what has happened, step out of set routines and mix things up.

Read more:
Nature detectives in the backyard: 3 science activities for curious kids this summer

Go somewhere new, do something different. Look for ways to make the playground experience unusual.

You could eat food that is only green, make short digital stories, print photographs, revisit paintings, drawings and tracings, mark your journey on a map, then retell and reactivate children’s experiences as they drift to sleep.

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

– ref. How to use a trip to the playground to help your children strengthen their memory – https://theconversation.com/how-to-use-a-trip-to-the-playground-to-help-your-children-strengthen-their-memory-163424

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark David Ryan, Associate Professor Film, Screen, Animation, Queensland University of Technology

The Australian screen industry is booming.

Russell Crowe recently announced his support for a A$438 million film studio — complete with accommodation — in Coffs Harbour, New South Wales.

In the lead up to the state election, the Western Australian government announced their own $100 million film studio to be located in Fremantle.

This would be the first film studio in the state, and is intended to compete for Hollywood productions with existing major studios in Adelaide, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne and the Gold Coast.

These existing studios have all been fully booked for some time, and film production in Australia shows no sign of slowing down. With effective management of the COVID-19 pandemic and government production incentives, Australian studios are an attractive location.

Indeed, global juggernaut Marvel Studios has relocated its productions to Sydney for the “foreseeable future”.

It may seem the current boom is led by the strong growth of “Aussiewood”, or locally-filmed international productions. But more than 80% of the productions currently being made in Australia are Australian.

The rise of Australian cinema

Arts policy expert Jo Caust has cautioned that, while the government’s $400 million production incentive is predicted to attract billions in foreign expenditure and create thousands of jobs, it is a fund for foreign filmmakers, not for Australian films.

Read more:
$400 million in government funding for Hollywood, but only scraps for Australian film

There are currently more than 90 screen projects in pre-production, production or post-production in Australia.

These include international television productions, like Amazon’s Nine Perfect Strangers and blockbuster films like Marvel’s Thor: Love and Thunder. But more than 80% of current productions are Australian: films where the intellectual property is owned, or jointly owned, and controlled by an Australian production company.

And those Australian productions are increasingly focused on quirky, popular films, telling local stories in new ways.

Historically, Australian cinema was dominated by movies emphasising the representation of our cultural identity: Australia’s stories, history, characters and the unique landscape.

Government-funded Australian films were typically informed by a national identity agenda, which emphasised cultural prestige and middle-class respectability over commercialism or pure entertainment.

The films of the 1970s and 1980s’ “New Wave” are some of our most iconic. Think Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), My Brilliant Career (1979) and Breaker Morant (1980).

During this period, popular genres were often dismissed by the local industry and screen funders. Action, gangster films, fantasy, horror and science-fiction films were viewed as “too American”.

In the 1990s, Australian cinema was dominated by art films, dramas and comedies. Many of these films followed quirky characters — think Muriel’s Wedding (1994) or Shine (1996) — that were difficult to compare to US films of the same period.

These trends of both the New Wave and the 1990s reflected attempts by government funding agencies to prioritise “Australian” content in a global and national market dominated by Hollywood.

But since the 2008 founding of Screen Australia and its explicit remit to prioritise audiences and commercial filmmaking, we are seeing a much broader range of films being made.

Read more:
Netflix is opening its first Australian HQ. What does this mean for the local screen industry?

In the last decade, we have seen action films like Occupation Rainfall (2020), musicals like The Sapphires (2012), Westerns like Mystery Road (2013), horror films like The Babadook (2014) and sci-fi films like I Am Mother (2019).

And audiences are also responding to these popular genre films: crime drama The Dry (2021) made over $20 million at the local box-office.

There are no signs that demand for Australian films is slowing down: the Mad Max prequel, Furiosa, is “expected to become the biggest film ever to be made in Australia”, with filming scheduled to begin next year.

Traversing the pandemic

The boom in both international and local productions, however, creates competition for scarce resources.

Large film productions typically need studio space, but the major studios have been solidly booked for some time. The new proposals in Coffs Harbour and Fremantle will go some way to remedy these issues, but there are associated issues, such as the limited pool of film crews for the increasing number of productions.

It is also a tricky time for the industry to forward plan.

While Australia could be expected to maintain its pull as an attractive production destination because of world-class facilities, locations and competitive financial incentives, the pandemic-advantage is dissipating.

After being an early leader in COVID management, Australia’s vaccine rollout now lags woefully behind the United States. How long will Hollywood studios continue to privilege Australia?

An increasing focus on popular films also raises potential issues for the local industry. Many of these films require substantial special effects and large crews, so remain considerably more expensive to produce.

In order to continue this boom time, Australian film makers must be supported to sustain production and supported in accessing larger international markets, to justify these additional expenses.

These are arguably good problems to have, but they are ones we’ll need to address if the current upswings in both Aussiewood and Australian popular films are to continue.

Mark David Ryan has in the past received Australian Research Council funding to research Australian screen media and Australian Film Institute Research Collection funding to research Australian horror movies in 2018.

Kelly McWilliam has received past Australian Research Council funding to research screen media.

– ref. International franchises love filming in ‘Aussiewood’ — but the local industry is booming too – https://theconversation.com/international-franchises-love-filming-in-aussiewood-but-the-local-industry-is-booming-too-162861

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Dodd, Tutor, The University of Queensland

A report from the US task force dedicated to investigating UFOs — or, in the official jargon, UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) — has neither confirmed nor rejected the idea such sightings could indicate alien visits to Earth.

On Friday June 25, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) released its eagerly awaited unclassified intelligence report, titled “Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena”.

The document is a brief nine-page version of a larger classified report provided to the Congressional Services and Armed Services Committees. It assesses “the threat posed by unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) and the progress the Department of Defence Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force has made in understanding this threat”.

The report certainly does not, as many were hoping, conclude UFOs are alien spacecraft. Rather, it shows the task force hasn’t made much progress since first being set up ten months ago. Perhaps this is unsurprising, given its task.

However, the task force’s very existence would have been unthinkable to many people just one year ago. It’s unprecedented to see the broader policy shift towards the acknowledgement of UFOs as real, anomalous physical phenomena that are worthy of extended scientific and military analysis.

Seemingly advanced technologies

The report withholds specific details of its data sample, which consists of 144 UFO reports made mostly by military aviators between 2004 and 2021. Its bombshell finding is that “a handful of UAP appear to demonstrate advanced technology”.

This “handful” — 21 of the 144 reports — represents classic UFO enigmas. These objects:

appeared to remain stationary in winds aloft, move against the wind, manoeuvre abruptly, or move at considerable speed, without discernible means of propulsion. In a small number of cases, military aircraft systems processed radio frequency (RF) energy associated with UAP sightings.

These characteristics indicate some UAP may be intelligently controlled (because they aren’t blown around by the wind) and electromagnetic (as they emit radio frequencies).

In March, Former Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told Fox News some reports describe objects “travelling at speeds that exceed the sound barrier without a sonic boom”. Sonic booms are sound waves generated by objects breaking the sound barrier.

No known aircraft can travel faster than sound without creating a sonic boom. NASA is currently developing “quiet supersonic technology”, which may allow planes to break the sound barrier while issuing a subdued “sonic thump”.

Read more:
Do aliens exist? We asked five experts

Some have claimed the objects are probably secret, advanced Russian or Chinese aircraft. However, global aerospace development has failed to match the flight characteristics of objects reported since the late 1940s. And it seems counterproductive to repeatedly fly secret aircraft into an adversary’s airspace where they can be documented.

How did we get here?

The report’s release is a profoundly important moment in the history of the UFO mystery, largely because of its institutional context. To fully appreciate what this moment might mean for the future of UFO studies, we have to understand how the UFO problem has been historically “institutionalised”.

In 1966, the US Air Force was facing increasing public pressure to resolve the UFO problem. Its effort to do so, then known as Project Blue Book, had become an organisational burden and a public relations problem.

It funded a two-year scientific study of UFOs based at the University of Colorado, headed by prominent physicist Edward Condon. The findings, published in 1969 as the Final Report on the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects, allowed the Air Force to end its UFO investigations.

Condon concluded nothing had come from the study of UFOs in the past 21 years that added to scientific knowledge. He also said “further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby”.

Nature, one of the world’s most reputable scientific journals, described the Condon Report as a “sledgehammer for nuts”. But by then the Air Force had collected 12,618 reports as part of Project Blue Book, of which 701 sightings were categorised as “unidentified”.

Unlike the new Pentagon report, the Condon Report didn’t find any UFOs that appeared to demonstrate advanced technology. The most problematic cases were resolved by being categorised ambiguously. Here’s one example:

This unusual sighting should therefore be assigned to the category of some almost certainly natural phenomenon which is so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since.

With this strategic category in the toolkit, there was no need to acknowledge seemingly advanced technology exhibited by UAPs. Indeed, they were deliberately filtered from institutional knowledge.

Read more:
The US military has officially published three UFO videos. Why doesn’t anybody seem to care?

Recovering from ‘institutional forgetting’

For most of their postwar history, UFO reports have been regarded by state institutions as knowledge out of place, or “information pollution” — something to be excluded, ignored or forgotten.

The Pentagon’s UAP task force represents an abrupt reversal of this longstanding organisational policy. UFO reports, made primarily by military personnel, are no longer pollutants. They are now important data with national security implications.

That said, they do still represent “uncomfortable knowledge”. As the late Oxford University anthropologist Steve Rayner observed, knowledge can be “uncomfortable” for institutions in two ways.

First, Rayner said, “acknowledging potential information by admitting it to the realm of what is ‘known’ may undermine the organisational principles of a society or organisation”.

Meanwhile, he said “not admitting such information may also have serious deleterious effects on institutions, either directly or by making them prone to criticism from other parts of society that they ‘ought’ to have known”. Both aspects describe the institutional context of UFO information.

The US Department of Defence has confirmed UFOs threaten flight safety, and potentially, national security. In doing so, it has exposed a weakness in its organisational principles. It has admitted it’s not very good at knowing what UFOs are.

It also faces the criticism that seven decades after UFOs first appeared on the radar, it ought to know what they are. The new Pentagon report doesn’t compel us to accept the reality of alien visitation. But it does compel us to take UFOs seriously.

Adam Dodd 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. Pentagon report says UFOs can’t be explained, and this admission is a big deal – https://theconversation.com/pentagon-report-says-ufos-cant-be-explained-and-this-admission-is-a-big-deal-161806

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Duffy, Associate Professor, Queensland University of Technology

Despite the excitement of the Australian swimming trials to determine which athletes will go to the Tokyo Olympics, it was still hard to overlook the absence of swimmer Shayna Jack.

Jack is a 22-year-old Australian swimming star. She has represented Australia at the world championships and the 2018 Commonwealth Games, where she was part of the women’s 4x100m freestyle relay team that won gold and set a new world record.

Jack tested positive for the banned substance Ligandrol before the 2019 World Aquatics Championships. Her four-year ban was reduced to two years, but the World Anti-Doping Agency and Sports Integrity Australia have appealed that decision and are seeking to have the four-year ban reinstated.

The appeal hearing begins today. Even if Jack successfully defends the appeal, her two-year period of ineligibility ends in July. This is before the Olympics begin, but just after the Australian swimming trials.

This means no matter what happens, Jack cannot compete in Tokyo.

Background of the case

Much has been written in the media about Jack’s doping ban. This reporting is seldom incorrect, though it often omits key details that make her case difficult to fully appreciate.

Here’s the background. In June 2019, Jack participated in an out-of-competition drug test. A month later, she was informed she had returned a positive result for Ligandrol, which works in a similar way to testosterone and anabolic steroids, but with fewer side effects.

Read more:
What is Ligandrol, the drug swimmer Shayna Jack had in her system?

In December 2019, the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority (now Sports Integrity Australia) issued an infraction notice, informing Jack she would be ineligible to compete and train with other swimmers for four years.

Last November, Alan Sullivan QC, an arbitrator for the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), ruled a four-year ban was not the appropriate sanction, on the basis that Jack’s violation was not intentionally committed.

Jack has been unwavering in her assertion she would never take a performance enhancing drug knowingly. The difficulty for her is that she has never been able to show how the Ligandrol entered her system.

Negligent versus unintentional rule violations

We believe Jack will be successful in having the appeal dismissed. Our conclusion is based on our belief she is telling the truth about her inadvertent ingestion of Ligandrol, combined with Sullivan’s legally sound arbitral decision in the CAS.

In the original CAS hearing, Jack’s lawyer argued her four-year ban should be overturned on the basis there was “no fault or negligence” on her behalf.

Establishing “no fault or negligence” is very hard to do. According to the Swimming Australia Policy, this requires athletes to prove they “could not reasonably have known or suspected even with the exercise of utmost caution” they violated an anti-doping rule.

In addition, when a prohibited substance is detected, athletes must establish how it entered their bodies. As Jack could not establish how the Ligandrol entered her system, she was not able to overturn her ban on this ground.

However, athletes can have a ban reduced from four to two years if they can establish the anti-doping rule violation was not intentional. This is what Jack’s lawyer argued, and her sanction was ultimately reduced.

The complication in Jack’s case was whether she had to establish how the Ligandrol entered her body in order to prove (on the balance of probabilities) that she did not take the substance intentionally.

The precise wording of the Swimming Australia Policy was key here: it does not explicitly require an athlete to establish the source of a prohibited substance when proving the violation was not intentional. This is a requirement only when proving “no fault or negligence” with respect to an anti-doping violation.

Key points in the appeal

Previous CAS panels have produced conflicting decisions on this point.

The arbitrator in the Jack case relied on two previous decisions to rule in her favour.

In the first case — filed by Peruvian swimmer Mauricio Fiol Villanueva — the CAS panel made clear that when an athlete cannot establish the source of a prohibited substance, it leaves the “narrowest of corridors” through which he or she could argue the violation was not intentional. According to the panel, such cases would be extremely rare.

Read more:
Sun Yang ban shows world swimming body must establish an integrity commission

The outcome of Jack’s CAS appeal rests on whether her case is one of these rare instances. Therefore, the factors that convinced Sullivan to reduce her ban will likely be key:

1) Jack was considered to be an articulate and impressive witness. She did not manufacture a story as to how the Ligandrol entered her system. She simply claimed she did not know. Sullivan described her as one of the most impressive witnesses he had seen in 40 years of legal practice.

2) Her testimony also showed she was a diligent athlete who followed all protocols from the swimming governing body and anti-doping authorities.

3) Numerous character witnesses were also persuasive, including coaches, doctors, officials, and other athletes. These included statements from Cate and Bronte Campbell, who were teammates of Jack’s in the freestyle relay event and her competitors in individual events.

4) Jack had never received a positive drug result before. She was tested on ten previous occasions between February 2018 and June 2019.

5) Jack spent considerable money and time attempting to ascertain the source of the Ligandrol.

6) The amount of Ligandrol found in her sample was classified as “low”, and considered to be pharmacologically irrelevant. It would have no performance enhancing effects at this level.

7) There was no evidence of any long-term use of a prohibited substance.

The World Anti-Doping Agency and Sports Integrity Australia have brought their appeal, based on the need for clarity in applying anti-doping principles to cases of inadvertent doping. It is unfortunate for Jack that the facts of her case represent an excellent opportunity to test some of these legal principles.

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

– ref. Why Shayna Jack is likely to successfully defend her doping ban appeal — but still won’t be at the Tokyo Olympics – https://theconversation.com/why-shayna-jack-is-likely-to-successfully-defend-her-doping-ban-appeal-but-still-wont-be-at-the-tokyo-olympics-162427

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Evans, ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow, The University of Queensland

Imagine you sit down and pick up your favourite book. You look at the image on the front cover, run your fingers across the smooth book sleeve, and smell that familiar book smell as you flick through the pages. To you, the book is made up of a range of sensory appearances.

But you also expect the book has its own independent existence behind those appearances. So when you put the book down on the coffee table and walk into the kitchen, or leave your house to go to work, you expect the book still looks, feels, and smells just as it did when you were holding it.

Expecting objects to have their own independent existence – independent of us, and any other objects – is actually a deep-seated assumption we make about the world. This assumption has its origin in the scientific revolution of the 17th century, and is part of what we call the mechanistic worldview. According to this view, the world is like a giant clockwork machine whose parts are governed by set laws of motion.

This view of the world is responsible for much of our scientific advancement since the 17th century. But as Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli argues in his new book Helgoland, quantum theory – the physical theory that describes the universe at the smallest scales – almost certainly shows this worldview to be false. Instead, Rovelli argues we should adopt a “relational” worldview.

What does it mean to be relational?

During the scientific revolution, the English physics pioneer Isaac Newton and his German counterpart Gottfried Leibniz disagreed on the nature of space and time.

Newton claimed space and time acted like a “container” for the contents of the universe. That is, if we could remove the contents of the universe – all the planets, stars, and galaxies – we would be left with empty space and time. This is the “absolute” view of space and time.

Leibniz, on the other hand, claimed that space and time were nothing more than the sum total of distances and durations between all the objects and events of the world. If we removed the contents of the universe, we would remove space and time also. This is the “relational” view of space and time: they are only the spatial and temporal relations between objects and events. The relational view of space and time was a key inspiration for Einstein when he developed general relativity.

Rovelli makes use of this idea to understand quantum mechanics. He claims the objects of quantum theory, such as a photon, electron, or other fundamental particle, are nothing more than the properties they exhibit when interacting with – in relation to – other objects.

These properties of a quantum object are determined through experiment, and include things like the object’s position, momentum, and energy. Together they make up an object’s state.

According to Rovelli’s relational interpretation, these properties are all there is to the object: there is no underlying individual substance that “has” the properties.

So how does this help us understand quantum theory?

Consider the well-known quantum puzzle of Schrödinger’s cat. We put a cat in a box with some lethal agent (like a vial of poison gas) triggered by a quantum process (like the decay of a radioactive atom), and we close the lid.

The quantum process is a chance event. There is no way to predict it, but we can describe it in a way that tells us the different chances of the atom decaying or not in some period of time. Because the decay will trigger the opening of the vial of poison gas and hence the death of the cat, the cat’s life or death is also a purely chance event.

According to orthodox quantum theory, the cat is neither dead nor alive until we open the box and observe the system. A puzzle remains concerning what it would be like for the cat, exactly, to be neither dead nor alive.

Read more:
Quantum philosophy: 4 ways physics will challenge your reality

But according to the relational interpretation, the state of any system is always in relation to some other system. So the quantum process in the box might have an indefinite outcome in relation to us, but have a definite outcome for the cat.

So it is perfectly reasonable for the cat to be neither dead nor alive for us, and at the same time to be definitely dead or alive itself. One fact of the matter is real for us, and one fact of the matter is real for the cat. When we open the box, the state of the cat becomes definite for us, but the cat was never in an indefinite state for itself.

In the relational interpretation there is no global, “God’s eye” view of reality.

What does this tell us about reality?

Rovelli argues that, since our world is ultimately quantum, we should heed these lessons. In particular, objects such as your favourite book may only have their properties in relation to other objects, including you.

Thankfully, that also includes all other objects, such as your coffee table. So when you do go to work, your favourite book continues to appear is it does when you were holding it. Even so, this is a dramatic rethinking of the nature of reality.

Read more:
A new quantum paradox throws the foundations of observed reality into question

On this view, the world is an intricate web of interrelations, such that objects no longer have their own individual existence independent from other objects – like an endless game of quantum mirrors. Moreover, there may well be no independent “metaphysical” substance constituting our reality that underlies this web.

As Rovelli puts it:

We are nothing but images of images. Reality, including ourselves, is nothing but a thin and fragile veil, beyond which … there is nothing.

Peter Evans receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi).

– ref. Is reality a game of quantum mirrors? A new theory suggests it might be – https://theconversation.com/is-reality-a-game-of-quantum-mirrors-a-new-theory-suggests-it-might-be-162936

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Fougerouse, Research Fellow, School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Curtin University

The mineral pyrite was historically nicknamed fool’s gold because of its deceptive resemblance to the precious metal. The term was often used during the California gold rush in the 1840s because inexperienced prospectors would claim discoveries of gold, but in reality it would be pyrite, composed of worthless iron disulfide (FeS₂).

Ironically, pyrite crystals can contain small amounts of real gold, although it is notoriously hard to extract. Gold hiding within pyrite is sometimes referred to as “invisible gold”, because it is not observable with standard microscopes, but instead requires sophisticated scientific instruments.

It wasn’t until the 1980s when researchers discovered that gold in pyrite can come in different forms – either as particles of gold, or as an alloy, in which the pyrite and gold are finely mixed.

In our new research, published in Geology, my colleagues and I discovered a third, previously unrecognised way that gold can lurk inside pyrite. When the pyrite crystal is forming under extreme temperature or pressure, it can develop tiny imperfections in its crystal structure that can be “decorated” with gold atoms.

What are these ‘crystal defects’?

The atoms within a crystal are arranged in a characteristic pattern called an atomic lattice. But when a mineral crystal such as pyrite is growing inside a rock, this lattice pattern can develop imperfections. Like many minerals, pyrite is tough and hard at Earth’s surface, but can become more twisty and stretchy when forming deep in the Earth, which is also where gold deposits form.

When crystals stretch or twist, the bonds between neighbouring atoms are broken and remade, forming billions of tiny imperfections called “dislocations”, each roughly 100,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, or 100 times smaller than a virus particle.

The chemistry of these atomic-scale imperfections is notoriously difficult to study because they are so small, so any impurities are present in absolutely minuscule quantities. Detecting them requires a specialised instrument called an atom probe.

An atom probe can analyse materials at extremely high resolution, but its main advantage over other methods is that it allows us to build a 3D map showing the precise locations of impurities within a crystal — something that was never possible before.

Our research reveals that dislocations within pyrite crystals can be “decorated” with gold atoms. This is particularly common where the crystals have been twisted during their history; here, gold can be present at concentrations several times higher than in the rest of the crystal.

A potential goldmine

Why should anyone care about something so tiny? Well, it gives interesting insights into how mineral deposits form, and is also a potential boon for the gold mining industry.

Previously, it was suspected that gold in anomalously rich pyrite crystals was in fact made of gold particles formed during a multi-step process, suggesting the pyrite and gold crystallised at different times and then became clumped together. But our discovery that gold can decorate these crystal imperfections suggests that even pyrite crystals with relatively high gold content can form in a single process.

Read more:
Eureka! X-ray vision can find hidden gold

Our discovery may also help gold miners more efficiently extract gold from pyrite, potentially reducing greenhouse emissions. To extract the gold, the mineral is usually oxidised in large reactors, which uses considerable amounts of energy.

Dislocation sites within crystals could potentially offer an enhanced partial leaching or a target for bacteria to attack and break down the crystal, releasing the gold in a process known as “bio-leaching”, thus potentially reducing energy consumption necessary for extraction. This idea is still untested, but definitely merits investigation.

If it helps pave the way for more sustainable gold-mining methods, then perhaps fool’s gold isn’t so foolish after all.

Perhaps pyrite still lives up to its historic reputation of “fool’s gold” until better, more environmentally sustainable ore processing techniques are developed.

Read more:
How gold rushes helped make the modern world

Denis Fougerouse is affiliated with the School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and The Institute for Geoscience Research at Curtin University. He receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. Not so foolish after all: ‘fool’s gold’ contains a newly discovered type of real gold – https://theconversation.com/not-so-foolish-after-all-fools-gold-contains-a-newly-discovered-type-of-real-gold-161819

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Narelle Miragliotta, Senior Lecturer in Australian Politics, Monash University

There has been a mixed reaction to Barnaby Joyce’s return to leader of the federal National Party and deputy prime minister. Even some within his own party have expressed concern at his return to centre stage.

There are multiple reasons why Joyce’s restoration has failed to garner greater enthusiasm.

One concern relates to the optics of a leadership change. These events are rarely well received by the public and often lead to in-fighting and instability. They also tend to further strain public trust in the political class, particularly when the politicians involved have issued full-throated denials that a spill is imminent.

A second reason is linked to Joyce’s populist leadership style and more strident policy rhetoric on coal and climate change. Here the concern is that Joyce’s presence will exacerbate tensions within the party room, and also scramble relations with its coalition partner, the Liberals.

The third reason is the circumstances that occasioned Joyce’s resignation from the National’s leadership in 2018.

Joyce stood down voluntarily owing to a credible, but unresolved, sexual harassment allegation (which Joyce denies), and over serious concerns about the propriety of his conduct with his now partner but then staffer, Vikki Campion.

Read more:
Grattan on Friday: Blowin’ in the wind with Barnaby

The male culture of politics

Joyce’s (re)ascension signals that the Nationals are somewhat inured to growing public concerns over the unhealthy gender dynamics in parliament, even when the voices raising these uncomfortable truths are from within the party.

One of the most strikingly apparent and longstanding gender inequities in politics is the under-representation of women in Australian parliaments. Despite Australia’s strong democratic credentials, it remains one of the great laggards on achieving gender parity in parliament.

In recent decades, the problem has been especially pronounced among parties of the mainstream political right. They have consistently rejected the implementation of pre-selection quotas in favour of training programs targeted at aspiring women candidates. Although these programs can be of some help, research shows they are a less effective way of redressing under-representation.

The effects of the reliance on so-called merit-based pre-selection is especially striking in relation to the Nationals. Its record on electing women to Australian parliaments is particularly poor, a situation that academic Marian Sawer – three decades ago – attributed to the greater persistence of “sex-role conservatism” in rural Australia. Sawer proposed that the National Country Party (as the Nationals was known then) reflected this conservatism.

Data compiled by Anna Hough from the Australian Parliamentary Library shows the extent to which the party’s conservatism continues to reveal itself with the under-representation of women in Australian lower houses.

Federally, only 13% of Nationals in the House of Representatives are women. This compares to 22% for the Liberals and 43% for ALP.

A similar pattern is apparent in the states where the Nationals have a legislative presence.

In the NSW lower house, only 16.7% of the party’s contingent are women, which is much lower than for the Liberals (32%) and Labor (45.5%).

In Western Australia, while the Nationals are led by a woman (Mia Davies), she is the sole National woman in the Western Australian parliament.

In Victoria, 33% of the party’s number in the Legislative Assembly are women, and it also selected a female deputy leader (Steph Ryan).

The situation in Queensland (LNP) and the Northern Territory (CLP) is complicated because these parties are affiliated to the National and Liberal parties and not strictly divisions of the Nationals. Nevertheless, both the LNP and CLP are kindred National parties.

In the case of the LNP, only 18% of its members in the Legislative Assembly are women, compared to 40% in Labor.

The situation for the CLP is healthier but is still not a record to be admired. While the CLP’s parliamentary party is led by a woman (Lia Finocchiaro), only 38% of its MPs are female.

As Jennifer Curtin and Katrine Beauregard note, women have been “active as ordinary and executive members of the party”. Notwithstanding this achievement, low levels of women in party rooms, and in lower houses particularly – which are practically and symbolically important as the chamber of government – does seriously limit the diversity of perspectives that are represented in policy and law making.

Read more:
Barnaby Joyce’s return, and John Anderson’s loss, is symbolic of a political culture gone awry

Why Joyce’s return makes this situation worse

Joyce has not done much to instil confidence that he has learned anything in his years returned to the backbench.

While acknowledging his faults and remarking that he “hopes” he has “come back a better person”, it is not clear what new insights Joyce gained about the events that caused him to resign, especially given he has no appetite to “dwell on the personal”.

His lack of introspection is perhaps not surprising given how he managed the situation in 2018.

At the time, Joyce was quick to declare that none of the “litany of allegations” levelled against him had been “sustained”. He emphasised that he was stepping aside for the “person in the weatherboard and iron”, and not because it was warranted by his conduct.

The Nationals have calculated they will not pay much of an electoral price for their decision to return him as leader. As the federal president of the National Party, Kay Hull, reasoned:

“[s]ome women may be disappointed but […] the only women that will be voting or not voting for Barnaby Joyce will be the women of New England.

Hull may be right, but there are potentially other costs associated with the party’s actions.

As the smaller party in the coalition, the Nationals have not had to defend their record on gender in the same way as their Liberal counterpart. Joyce’s return will make it increasingly difficult for the Nationals to fly under the radar on this issue. At least, let’s hope that it does.

Narelle Miragliotta 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. What is Barnaby Joyce’s ‘women’ problem? And why does it matter? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-barnaby-joyces-women-problem-and-why-does-it-matter-163255

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben White, Professor of End-of-Life Law and Regulation, Australian Centre for Health Law Research, Queensland University of Technology

Voluntary assisted dying laws, which allow terminally ill people who meet strict eligibility criteria to end their life, have been operating in Victoria for two years. The laws are underpinned by two central pillars: safety and access.

Safety means the only patients who can access assistance to die are those who meet the eligibility criteria set out in the legislation. This means terminally ill adults who are suffering and expected to die within six months (12 months for neurodegenerative conditions).

Access refers to the ability of patients who meet the eligibility criteria, and want voluntary assisted dying, to actually use the laws. This depends on the process not taking too long or being so challenging that a patient just gives up, or dies before access is granted.

Our research papers, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia and recently in BMJ Supportive and Palliative Care, found doctors involved with the Victorian scheme have concerns about access, but not about safety.

Read more:
Without more detail, it’s premature to say voluntary assisted dying laws in Victoria are ‘working well’

A major barrier to patients’ access is the requirement for the doctor to obtain a permit from the government. This is a key component of the system’s oversight. It involves a formal application to a government official who decides within three business days whether the legislation’s processes have been followed and certain criteria met.

The government permit is a feature of the Victorian law, and one which Tasmania and South Australia have copied.

But not all Australian states have followed suit. The Western Australian law, which comes into effect this week, does not include a permit process, nor does Queensland’s bill. We prefer the WA and Queensland model.

Read more:
Voluntary assisted dying could soon be legal in Queensland. Here’s how its bill differs from other states

Barriers to access

To understand how the Victorian system is operating, we interviewed 32 doctors who had provided voluntary assisted dying services to patients, to hear about their experience of the system in its first year.

When talking about the prior oversight and approval process, most said they were concerned about navigating the system, including the layers of approval required, the “bureaucracy” involved in the process, and challenges with the mandatory online system for submitting forms. This led to delays in patients accessing the system.

The doctors we interviewed also raised concerns about prior oversight and approval being a barrier to very sick patients accessing the scheme. One described “people dying going through this process”. Another said: “if you’re unwell and you really need it, it doesn’t work”.

Another doctor said:

Of the patients that I’ve been working with, only four have been able to get through to the completion of the process. It’s been one of our issues […] it is complicated and because there’s a lot of bureaucracy to encounter and a lot of hurdles to jump […]

Despite concerns about the system, some doctors in our study considered having prior oversight and approval protected them and ensured the system’s safety.

Read more:
One year of voluntary assisted dying in Victoria: 400 have registered, despite obstacles

Seeking government approval isn’t the norm

Requiring prior approval of voluntary assisted dying is very unusual. Around the world, only the Victorian and Colombian systems require external prior approval.

However, other places are now considering or implementing this model, such as Tasmania and SA, whose laws which are yet to come into force.

Currently, all other voluntary assisted dying systems internationally use retrospective review of cases to ensure the system remains safe. With retrospective review, doctors can approve access to the scheme, and their decisions are later examined by review committees.

If voluntary assisted dying has been inappropriately granted, the doctor may face possible sanctions or criminal prosecution. But the doctors don’t need to get government permission first.

Access must be a priority too

Parliaments debating new voluntary assisted dying laws and governments implementing existing ones must keep in mind the people who are intended to use it, who by virtue of the eligibility criteria, are terminally ill and suffering.

They must ensure the design and implementation of the system meets these patients’ needs. This includes thinking critically about the potential cost to access of some safeguards.

Given that prior oversight and approval is rare internationally and the difficult Victorian experience with it, we consider this is not desirable, or needed.

However, where laws require such prior approval, system design must ensure this is done efficiently. This includes avoiding bureaucracy that doesn’t directly improve patient safety, and an optimal information technology system. This will help to at least minimise delays that could preclude dying patients accessing the system.

Ben White receives funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council and Commonwealth and State Governments for research and training about the law, policy and practice relating to end-of-life care. In relation to voluntary assisted dying, he (with colleagues) has been engaged by the Victorian and Western Australian Governments to design and provide the legislatively-mandated training for doctors involved in voluntary assisted dying in those States. He (with Lindy Willmott) has also developed a model Bill for voluntary assisted dying for parliaments to consider. Ben White is a recipient of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (project number FT190100410: Enhancing End-of-Life Decision-Making: Optimal Regulation of Voluntary Assisted Dying) funded by the Australian Government.

Lindy Willmott has received funding from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council and Commonwealth and State Governments for research and training about the law, policy and practice relating to end-of-life care. In relation to voluntary assisted dying, she (with colleagues) has been engaged by the Victorian and Western Australian Governments to design and provide the legislatively-mandated training for doctors involved in voluntary assisted dying in those States. She (with Ben White) has also developed a model Bill for voluntary assisted dying for parliaments to consider. Lindy Willmott is a former member of the board of Palliative Care Australia.

Marcus Sellars 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. Victoria’s voluntary assisted dying scheme is challenging and complicated. Some people die while they wait – https://theconversation.com/victorias-voluntary-assisted-dying-scheme-is-challenging-and-complicated-some-people-die-while-they-wait-162094

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniel Tan, Professor of Agronomy (Agriculture), University of Sydney

On July 1, the New South Wales government will lift a ban on genetically modified (GM) crops after an 18-year moratorium. It will mean GM crops can now be grown in every Australian state except Tasmania.

Major farming groups have welcomed the move. GM proponents say the biotechnology leads to better crop yields and may solve food shortages and reduce infestations of weeds and pests.

But opponents say GM crops are a potential threat to the environment and human health. They fear the technology will encourage superweeds, increase antibiotic resistance and food allergies in humans and may have other unintended effects.

So where does the truth lie? Academic research suggests GM crops are generally safe for humans and the environment, and so I believe the NSW government’s decision should be welcomed.

What is genetic modification?

Genetic modification is the use of technology to change the genes of living things. It involves scientists injecting one organism’s DNA with genes from another, to give it a desirable trait such as resistance to drought, extreme temperature or pests.

Genetically modified crops were introduced commercially in the 1990s. The NSW moratorium began in 2003 following concerns from some importers and manufacturers. For example, countries in the Middle East and Southeast Asia had been refusing GM grain, and Canada and Saudi Arabia had indicated they did not want GM-fed livestock.

Announcing the lifting of the ban in March, NSW Agriculture Minister Adam Marshall said his government had been working to ensure trade and marketing issues surrounding GM food were well managed. He said the Commonwealth Gene Technology Regulator will assess all applications to grow GM crops, ensuring they are safe for people and the environment.

The NSW decision follows similar moves by other mainland states in recent years, including South Australia, which lifted the GM ban in 2020 (with an exemption for Kangaroo Island). A moratorium remains in the ACT.

The NSW government says allowing cultivation of GM crops will increase agricultural competitiveness and productivity, and bring up to A$4.8 billion in benefits over the next decade.

Read more:
Battling misinformation wars in Africa: applying lessons from GMOs to COVID-19

Benefits of lifting of the GM ban

So are the benefits of GM crops real? To answer this question, we can look to three precedents: GM canola, cotton and safflower, which have been grown in Australia for many years. These crops were exempt from the moratoria in NSW and other states, and evidence suggests their cultivation has been a success.

GM cotton has been modified with insecticidal genes, which research shows makes it more resistant to pests. The modified cotton also requires less insecticide use.

GM canola has been transformed to make it resistant to herbicides, which enables better weed control.

State moratoria delayed the introduction of GM canola, including in NSW. Research in 2018 found, across Australia, the environmental costs of the delay included an extra 6.5 million kilograms of active ingredients applied to canola land, and an extra 24.2 million kg of greenhouse gas and other emissions released. Economic costs included a net loss to canola farmers of A$485.6 million.

In recent years, Australian regulators allowed cultivation of canola modified to contain long-chain omega-3 fatty acids, prized for their health benefits. The canola variety was hailed as the world’s first plant-based source of omega-3 and may reduce reliance on fish stocks.

Safflower has been genetically modified to contain higher amounts of oleic acid. These renewable oils can be used in place of petroleum, a finite resource, in products such as fuels, plastics and cosmetics.

Read more:
The quest for delicious decaf coffee could change the appetite for GMOs

What are the risks?

Experts concede there are limits to what can be known about the health effects of any food over the long term. However, scientists broadly agree the evidence so far suggests GM crops are safe to eat. This view is backed by the World Health Organization.

Foods derived from GM plants are consumed by millions of people in many countries. And in Australia, authorities rigorously assess all GM foods before they’re sold to consumers.

However many countries still ban the the cultivation of GM foods. And some people remain worried about the effects on human health. Concerns include that antibiotic resistance may be transferred from plants to humans, or that GM foods will trigger allergic reactions.

Read more:
GM crops: to ban or not to ban? That’s not the question

Experts have concluded the risk of antibiotic resistance is not substantial. There is some evidence of a small number of GM crops being allergenic. But since GM crops undergo extensive allergen testing, they should not be riskier than conventional crops once cleared for market release.

Other GM opponents say the technology poses environmental risks – for example that herbicide-resistant GM crops can become “superweeds”.

Research has found weed resistance to the herbicide glyphosate is a problem, and there is some evidence of glyphosate-resistant canola persisting outside farms in Australia. Management strategies can reduce the chance of superweeds developing, but more research is needed.

And it should be noted that while the use of herbicide-resistant crops sometimes leads to less herbicide use, the decrease is often not sustained. Researchers also say a reduction in the kilograms of pesticides used does not necessarily predict environmental or health effects.

Some critics oppose GM crops on the basis that they allow a few large companies – which breed and commercialise seeds – to control food supplies. For example, in 2015 it was reported the GM maize seed sector in South Africa was owned by just two companies, which meant small farmers could not compete.

Researchers have proposed measures to counter this corporate concentration of power, by strengthening competition policies, boosting public sector support for diverse food systems and curbing corporate influence in the policy process.

The issue of cross-contamination is also a concern for organic farmers and consumers. In a well-known case from Western Australia, organic farmer Steve Marsh’s crop was contaminated in 2010 with GM canola, causing him to lose his organic certification.

Looking ahead

The lifting of the NSW ban on GM crops means Australian mainland states have a consistent approach, and provides new opportunities for Australian growers and consumers.

There are still issues with GM crops to be ironed out, and there’s a need for continued stringent regulation to ensure human and environmental safety. Opposition to the practice will no doubt remain in some quarters. However this may lessen over time as the technology develops and long-term outcomes become clearer.

Daniel Tan receives funding from the Cotton Research and Development Corporation, the Grain Research and Development Corporation and the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research. He is Fellow of Ag Institute Australia and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, UK.

– ref. From this week, every mainland Australian state will allow genetically modified crops. Here’s why that’s nothing to fear – https://theconversation.com/from-this-week-every-mainland-australian-state-will-allow-genetically-modified-crops-heres-why-thats-nothing-to-fear-159976

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Giuseppe Carabetta, Senior Lecturer, Sydney University Business School, University of Sydney

Airlines want you vaccinated. They want as many people as possible vaccinated. The sooner that happens, the sooner borders open and they can get back to profitability.

They also have reasons to want to protect both customers and staff from COVID-19. Qantas staff, for example, have been considering legal action over workplace transmissions.

Qantas has dangled the carrot of extra frequent flyer points for fully vaccinated passengers, plus ten “mega prizes” of a year’s free travel for familes. Virgin Australia has similar plans. It also has a scheme to encourage its workers to get vaccinated. This will reportedly include the chance to win extra annual leave.

Could they go further and mandate vaccines? This is something Cathay Pacific is doing, telling its Hong Kong-based flight crews they must be vaccinated by August or their employmnet will be reviewed.

Qantas chief Alan Joyce signalled in November that once vaccines are widely available it will require international travellers to be vaccinated. This implicitly suggests it will require the same from international flight staff.

But the legal ground in Australia for employers to insist that employees be vaccinated remains murky.

Whether Qantas or Virgin – or indeed any other company – do so may depend on the case of Queensland regional carrier Alliance Airlines, the first employer in Australia to insist all employees be immunised.

Read more:
The airline industry hasn’t collapsed, but that’s the only good news for overseas travel

A question of common law

Alliance Airlines specialises in flights to and from mining sites. It is 19.9% owned by Qantas, and collaborates with both Qantas and Virgin Australia.

It announced its mandatory policy for both influenza and COVID-19 vaccinations in late May. Its stated reason is to fulfil its duty to employees and passengers. But unions have questioned the policy’s lawfulness, arguing it is beyond the airline’s powers.

In Australia, there has been no general government guidance on whether employers can insist on employees getting COVID-19 vaccinations.

This differs to the United States, where the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in December 2020 that employers could (with some exemptions for medical and religious reasons) require employees to be vaccinated.

The Queensland and Western Australian governments have passed legislation mandating workers be vaccinated, but only in certain health and quarantine workplaces.

Whether Alliance Airlines’ policy is lawful therefore depends on a general common law “test” for determining the validity of workplace policies.

This test asks if a policy or direction is “lawful and reasonable” given the circumstances. These include:

• the nature of the job, especially where it requires regular interactions with colleagues, clients and suppliers

• if the work can be done remotely, or other reasonably practical precautions exist

• the effectiveness or success rates of the vaccine

• any guidance or directives from government and medical experts

• the circumstances of individuals employee, such as whether they have reasonable grounds to refuse vaccination.

Unfair dismissal cases

Australia’s Fair Work Commission has demonstrated the balancing act needed to apply these factors in its most recent ruling in an unfair dismissal case involving a refusal to get an influenza vaccination.

The claim was brought by Maria Corazon Glover, a 64-year-old community care assistant, against Queensland aged and disability care provider Ozcare, her employer since 2009.

In May 2020, public health orders in Queensland required influenza vaccinations for entry into aged care facilities. Ozcare went “above and beyond” those requirements, mandating the flu vaccine for all its aged care workers, even those who did not work in facilities. Glover, a home-care provider, refused. She said she believed she would suffer an allergic reaction, based on what she understood had happened to her as a child. She was ultimately dismissed.

Commissioner Jennifer Hunt upheld her dismissal despite Ozcare’s policy exceeding the relevant public health orders and Glover’s concerns. Hunt ruled those factors were outweighed by the vulnerability of Ozcare’s clients, the frequency with which care workers visited clients’ homes (and their potential to become “super-spreaders”), and the employer’s “prerogative” to make a decision considered necessary to safeguard its clients and employees “so far is practicable to do so”.

Individual circumstances do count

Perhaps the most important takeaway from Glover v Ozcare is that it was decided on its particular facts. Employers must carefully assess employees’ situations to decide if a mandatory vaccination policy is justifiable.

An airline might reason that cabin crew interact with people in environments with a higher risk of COVID-19 transmission and where social distancing is impossible.

But an employee might counter that, unlike aged or disability care workers, they have much less close contact with high-risk, vulnerable individuals.

The case-by-case nature of the reasonableness test means any generalised “all in” vaccination policy is problematic. Even more so if there is employee resistance.

Discrimination may be valid

Employees who are dismissed for refusing to vaccinate might also argue it amounts to discrimination on prohibited grounds such as disability or pregnancy, where COVID-19 vaccination may be unsafe or pose medical risks.

Under the Fair Work Act, however, employers have a valid defence for discriminatory action if a policy or decision is based on the “inherent requirements” of the job.

In November 2020, Fair Work Deputy president Ingrid Asbury noted that vaccination against influenza was likely to be an inherent requirement for a position involving caring for young children, and so could be justified for child-care employees.

However, outside high-risk contexts such as child and health care, this defence may be limited and will turn on the employee’s role and the organisational context.

Read more:
Can my boss make me get a COVID vaccination? Yes, but it depends on the job

Looking for safe ground

The Fair Work Commission’s rulings on influenza vaccines give a fair indication of the principles it will apply to any case involving COVID-19 vaccines.

But given the different circumstances, whether it will give a green light to a general policy like that of Alliance Airlines remains up in the air.

Qantas and Virgin might be on safer ground because of their international operations, if proof of vaccination becomes mandatory for other destinations.
However, I think the issue of employee vaccinations for the airline industry will ultimately be resolved via government intervention.

In other sectors, owing to the complexities in determining whether mandatory policies are “legal”, many employers will likely stick with the safer route of voluntary “incentive schemes” to encourage vaccinations.

Giuseppe Carabetta 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. Airline policies mandating vaccines will be a turbulent test of workplace rights – https://theconversation.com/airline-policies-mandating-vaccines-will-be-a-turbulent-test-of-workplace-rights-162241

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Speck, Professorial Fellow (Honorary), The University of Melbourne

Surrealism — famously defined by Andre Breton in his 1924 Manifesto Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism” — first emerged in Australian art in the 1930s when local artists saw selected paintings by Salvador Dali and Paul Nash in the Herald exhibition, which opened in Adelaide in 1939 before touring to Sydney and Melbourne.

Painter James Gleeson wrote about surrealism for Art in Australia in 1940 and, in the hands of James Cant and Ivor Francis, it became a form of protest in the war years. Gleeson produced an unceasing stream of surrealist paintings and drawings, but he had few fellow travellers.

For many years, surrealism in Australia was seen as a French import. It was not until the emergence in the 1990s of ideas of multiple modernisms — rather than a singular version emanating from a cultural centre such as Paris — that credence was given to a homegrown Australian surrealism.

Read more:
Explainer: Surrealism

Within that new framework, suddenly a host of Australian artists were swept up under the surrealist umbrella: Sydney Nolan, Robert Klippel, Joy Hester, Max Dupain, Adrian Feint and Sam Atyeo, to name a few. For many of these artists, though, surrealism was not their major thrust, instead working across a range of modern styles such as expressionism or abstraction.

The touchstone of surrealism — the unity of opposites to create new knowledge — takes on an oceanic inflection in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s new exhibition exploring the work of two Czech-born Australian artists, the brothers Dušan and Voitre Marek.

They are not an addendum to Australian surrealism: their Czech-nurtured variant, with its deep roots in poetry, differs from the mainstream in this country. Its full incorporation into Australian art requires a recalibration of our national narrative along the lines that recently occurred with émigré Bauhaus practitioners in this country.

The world of the sea

While Dušan, and Voitre to a lesser extent, were included in survey exhibitions such as Lurid Beauty over the past few decades, examination of their work has been cursory and mostly confined to early-career paintings.

Surrealists at Sea explores their work in depth, dwelling on their ideas and work in diverse media, especially Dušan’s stunning mid-century films, and how they sustained their surrealist practice across their entire careers.

Read more:
Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes – reviewed

Viewers enter the exhibition through a series of columns that display their early paintings such as Voitre’s My Gibraltar, as well as those that are double-sided, and signal a non-linear and relational pathway through the art.

The double-sided paintings produced on board the ship SS Charlton Sovereign that carried the two avant-garde émigrés to Australia in 1948, such as Dusan’s Perpetuum Mobile, are brilliantly displayed in the open portals of the columns. Seeing the front and back of the image, in simultaneous vision, sets the scene for a surrealist journey through the exhibition: their first joint one since 1949.

The sea is a familiar trope in surrealism, as in the other-worldly paintings of French artist Yves Tanguy. But for curator Elle Freak, the sea is a wholly apt metaphor to frame the Mareks.

The brothers’ journey across the ocean was to liberty and freedom, a key surrealist dictum, and the ship was the site of production of major paintings such as Equator, complete with its telling text: “Break the mirror to see what I am”.

The ocean continued to be a source of spiritual renewal throughout their careers, for Voitre as lighthouse-keeper at remote Cape du Couedic on Kangaroo Island; for Dušan in New Guinea, the so-called centre of the Pacific (and the world) in the 1929 Surrealist World Map; and later in the Coorong.

Poetry in art

This is a large exhibition, 200 works across all media, including surrealist jewellery, film and sculptural paintings, and a very elegant restaging of Dušan’s 1953 solo exhibition at the avant-garde Mack Gallery in Sydney, complete with the original ticking clocks and music box.

A profound sense of poetry infuses the exhibition: the Czech variant of surrealism was deeply literary and some paintings read like poetry. Automatic drawing — a surrealist device to access subconscious imagery — came easily to the brothers. Voitre’s free-flowing drawings such as Victim of the world, 1952, seems like an image that has come from deep within.

A clue lies in his Adelaide notebook:

artist is turned inside out – accepting with his inside and expressing with his outside.

The artists’ notebooks have been recently translated and key phrases such as “seeing not only with eye in eyeholes but opening new eyes in knees, in throat, in palms” are reproduced as bite-sized wall text to give viewers an insight into how the artists viewed art-making.

Other works, true to surrealist style, are but fragments of thought, with Dušan challenging complacency:

people search vainly for symbols and meaning, nothing is there, everything is present.

Voitre Marek segued into ecclesiastical sculpture and a number are on show, such as his very modern and finely distilled Crucifix of 1960.

The spell of the slow music playing in each gallery space leads to contemplation of other worlds and to new insights intrinsic to surrealism.

This exhibition is a homage to the brothers Marek and their world view. The pair are important Australian surrealists whose pathway to surrealism was via Prague, rather than Paris: an emigre variant which has stood somewhat outside the home-grown Australian surrealists.

Australian art is a malleable feast which moves and shakes to embrace new arrivals to this country. This repositioning is in fact a revisionary one to more fully include two important émigrés in the canon of Australian surrealism.

Dušan and Voitre Marek: Surrealists at Sea is at the Art Gallery of South Australia until September 12.

Catherine Speck received ARC funding for large project on Australian art exhibitions (2011-13) with Joanna Mendelssohn, Catherine De Lorenzo and Alison Inglis.

– ref. Surrealists at Sea: Dušan and Voitre Marek finally receive their place in the pantheon of Australian surrealism – https://theconversation.com/surrealists-at-sea-dusan-and-voitre-marek-finally-receive-their-place-in-the-pantheon-of-australian-surrealism-163249

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicola Creagh, Research Assistant in Evaluation and Implementation Science, Centre for Health Policy, Melbourne School of Population and Global Health, The University of Melbourne

Cervical cancer is a preventable cancer — most cases are caused by long-term infection with high-risk types of human papillomavirus (HPV).

Screening aims to detect types of HPV associated with cervical abnormalities and cancer. Early detection allows preventative treatment, so cancer doesn’t develop.

Cervical screening is a reasonably invasive procedure, which requires a doctor or nurse to do a pelvic examination and insert a speculum, a medical tool used to help examine the cervix.

Since 2017, many Australian women have had access to “self-collection”, whereby they can collect their own vaginal sample using a small, soft swab (similar to the ones used to collect a COVID test). But many women who are eligible don’t know it’s an option.

Read more:
Never had a Pap smear? Now there’s a DIY option for you

Our new study, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia, found many women prefer this option, and doctors and nurses like having it available.

However, it’s significantly underused in Australia. Between 2017 and 2019, only 6,000 of these tests were conducted, out of an estimated one million women eligible.

To prevent as many cases of cervical cancer as possible, we need to find out why this option is being used so rarely, and how can we increase access.

Wait, what’s cervical screening again?

In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) called on countries to progress towards the elimination of cervical cancer as a public health problem.

Australia is considered a global leader in preventing cervical cancer. We have an effective HPV vaccination program delivered through schools, and a longstanding cervical screening program.

Having HPV won’t necessarily cause cancer. There are more than 100 types of HPV, and only 14 are associated with it. Having HPV at some point in your life is quite normal. We just need to make sure we pick up any types of HPV associated with cervical cancer.

In Australia, women (and people with a cervix) aged 25-74 are invited to have a cervical screening test every five years. This more accurate test replaced the “Pap” test in December 2017, which used to be recommended every two years.

We know women find the test uncomfortable. For many, other barriers — such as past trauma or cultural sensitivity — prevent them having the test.

In Australia, 72% of cervical cancer cases occur in women who are overdue for screening, or who have never been screened. This is concerning, considering only 55% of 35-year-old women have been screened at least once with an HPV test. This is below the WHO’s elimination target of 70% by 2030.

How does self-collection work?

In December 2017, Australia introduced a new screening option where women could take their own samples. This option is only available to women who:

• are over 30 years old

• are more than two years overdue (so four or more years since their last Pap test)

• or who have never been screened

• and decline a traditional test.

A self-collected test still requires a consultation with a doctor or nurse. But in this supported environment, a woman can collect her own sample.

Self-collection is as accurate as the sample collected by a doctor or nurse. Australian modelling studies suggest self-collection can save lives.

About 6% of people who test positive for some types of HPV need to return to their doctor or nurse for a traditional test to look for cell changes. So the main downside is a small percentage of people who’ve done self-collection will also need to return for a traditional test. Another roughly 2% of women will require referral to a specialist for further assessment.

Both women and health-care providers support self-collection

Data from overseas suggest self-collection is an effective way to screen women who traditionally haven’t been screened enough (or at all).

One Australian study demonstrated 85% of under-screened women who were offered self-collection opted to screen.

Our work with Victorian Aboriginal women indicates self-collection is key to improving the accessibility and acceptability of cervical screening. A review assessing progress towards elimination of cervical cancer for Indigenous people in high-income countries highlighted the critical role that self-collection is likely to play in increasing participation in cervical screening.

Read more:
Five myths about the new cervical screening program that refuse to die

Our new study was done in collaboration with cervical cancer prevention organisation the VCS Foundation and the Victorian government. It provides the first insight into what women and doctors and nurses thought about their experience of using self-collection.

Women appreciated the availability of an alternative option — one that addressed many of their barriers. Doctors and nurses regarded self-collection as a “progressive” change, and thought self-collection was effective at re-engaging those who decline a traditional test.

Why is self-collection being used so rarely?

Our study also identified barriers making it difficult for doctors and nurses to use or offer the option of self-collection.

Doctors and nurses found it difficult and time-consuming to determine whether women fit the eligibility criteria. They said it took too long for them to work out who was eligible.

Some doctors and nurses were uncertain about the process. For example, many were unclear whether women could take the test home to complete (they can). This reduced some doctors’ and nurses’ confidence in offering self-collection.

This lack of confidence is consistent with another Australian study, which found only 59% of doctors and nurses were confident in discussing self-collection and only 36% believed the test was reliable.

4 ways to increase access

It’s important we increase access to self-collection. This can be achieved through addressing four main points.

First, we need to remove the restrictive eligibility criteria. We’re encouraged the Medical Services Advisory Council recently recommended giving all women the choice of collecting their own sample. We eagerly await the federal government’s decision regarding this recommendation.

Second, we need more education for doctors and nurses to increase their confidence in offering self-collection. This should include clearer guidelines for them.

Third, more HPV tests need to be approved for use with self-collection samples, enabling more pathology labs to process them.

Fourth, we need the National Cervical Screening Program, general practitioners, and nurses and community health organisations to more widely communicate and promote the self-collection option. Women who are hesitant to be screened should know there’s another option.

Increasing access to self-collection is critical to increasing equity in Australia’s screening program. We have the tools to create equity and eliminate cervical cancer as a public health problem in Australia. We need to use them.

Nicola Creagh works for the University of Melbourne. She receives funding from the Commonwealth Department of Health.

Claire Nightingale works for the University of Melbourne. She receives funding from the Victorian Cancer Agency, and the Commonwealth Department of Health

Claire Zammit works for the University of Melbourne.

– ref. Self-collected cervical screening is a great way to prevent cervical cancer. How can we get more people doing it? – https://theconversation.com/self-collected-cervical-screening-is-a-great-way-to-prevent-cervical-cancer-how-can-we-get-more-people-doing-it-163360

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Davern, Associate Professor, Director Australian Urban Observatory, Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University

Research commercialisation in Australia has been getting more attention recently, but researchers face major obstacles to achieving this. If Australia wants to get serious about commercialising research knowledge, then we have to look seriously at the obstacles and incentives for researchers.

Australia’s gross spending on research and development (R&D) funding has been in the lower half of OECD nations for the past 20 years. It peaked in 2008 and has been declining since then. This is the important context of recent federal budget announcements encouraging research commercialisation.

Read more:
Our unis are far behind the world’s best at commercialising research. Here are 3 ways to catch up

Universities and quality research production are suffering as part of this decline. It also helps to explain why international student income has been so important to modern day Australian universities and 27% of all university revenue in 2019 before COVID.

What are the obstacles for academics?

Research commercialisation can’t occur without research being completed first. Universities are now at increased risk of losing critical research capacity. They are facing a compounded COVID-induced crisis of falling international student revenue, sliding research funding, increased competition for available funding and insecure employment.

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

Universities are no longer treated as valuable public institutions of public good despite legislation enshrining this status. Academia today, particularly in research focused positions, is like being self-employed in a large institution. The current senior academic is unlikely to have tenured secure employment. The workforce is increasingly comprised of casual and fixed-term appointments.

The majority of their time is now spent writing grant applications and applying for research funding at the cost of actually producing innovative, high quality research. The largest source of industry-focused federal funding, through Australian Research Council linkage grants, don’t even support the salaries of chief or partner investigators.

This is in sharp contrast to other OECD nations. It’s no coincidence that Israel, with the highest proportion of research and development funding in the world, has one of the most successful research commercialisation models. Sales of products based on research by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem alone exceeds A$2 billion a year. Coincidentally, over 50% of the population of Israel has also been vaccinated for COVID-19 and the country is one of the first to approach herd immunity.

Read more:
Chief Scientist: science will drive a post-pandemic manufacturing boom

It is critical to understand good research is the foundation for any future patent development. “Patent box” tax incentives with reduced tax rates are too far downstream to support development of research innovation and commercialisation.

Provide more direct support for commercialisation

There is currently no direct federal research funding to support research commercialisation in Australia. Universities must direct their own funding into start-up support or research commercialisation activity. That’s on top of funding teaching and internal research grants.

Uniquest’s record of commercialising research at the University of Queensland shows all research (not just biomedical or STEM) can be successfully commercialised with proper support. It’s a research commercialisation company specialising in global technology transfer. Supporting this activity are professional staff with expertise in business, legal, copyright, intellectual property and partnership development.

This sort of expertise is critical for connecting research knowledge to industry. In the case of UQ, it might also have influenced the Australian government’s decision to invest in the COVID vaccine trial.

Technology transfer offices are common in universities across North America and Europe but are rare in Australia. However, they must be linked to effective organisational practices to be successful.

Better incentives are needed to connect industry to research development beyond the basic tax incentives that are more attractive to large companies. Small and medium businesses have struggled to survive through COVID. They have no time to come looking for research innovation at universities or battle through complex negotiations over intellectual property.

Read more:
To become an innovation nation, we really need to think smaller

This is why new research funding schemes are needed. These would provide direct funding to support the co-production of research with industry. This research would be designed to solve problems of society and industry and be customised to produce commercialised solutions.

Improve incentives for researchers

Academic career progression is still dominated by outcomes in research funding and peer-reviewed publications. Only recently has the importance of engagement with industry been acknowledged. This is in stark contrast to research commercialisation activities and partnerships which are time-consuming, not supported by national funding schemes and not measured by current academic KPIs.

Research translation (let alone research impact or research commercialisation) isn’t even officially recognised as research activity in the Commonwealth Higher Education Research Data Collection of research activities and income. It’s not surprising, then, that only 2.3% of publications from Australia have industry co-authors.

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

National change is needed to create a pipeline of research commercialisation. More research and development tax incentives won’t drive this change.

Australia still lacks a coherent framework of research impact. Knowledge translation remains focused on traditional academic publications and conference presentations. Current definitions of research impact provide the bare minimum outcome of research contributing to economic, social, environmental or cultural benefit outside the academy and we have to do better. Trials of a research impact framework have stalled since 2018. Universities and research knowledge are of benefit to all in society not just those who work in the institutions and epidemiology partnering with government through COVID-19 has been a great example of research impact at work.

Universities must change their approach too

Universities also need to change their financial operation models to support research commercialisation. Most institutions collect a higher proportion of income researchers bring to a university when research activity is deemed commercial. These indirect costs of research are used to fund infrastructure costs at universities like building costs and higher in commercial funding arrangements compared to competitive national research grants. Financial overheads cannot be collected from category 1 research funding sources such as the Australian Research Council and National Health and Medical Research Council, but Australian institutions can collect up to 50% of commercial research income. This relates to the broader problem of low research and development investment in Australia and the failure to adequately fund indirect costs of university research.

So where is the incentive for research commercialisation in our universities? It’s definitely not supported by current national funding arrangements or the majority of institutional policies.

Academic research needs R&D support for quality research and direct funding for research commercialisation if the nation is serious about harvesting the value of university research and innovation for industry.

We also need to better equip future researchers. This means training all PhD students to develop a deeper understanding and direct training in how to engage and develop their research with industry and government. It also means a clear national framework of research impact students learn early in their careers.

All PhD students need training in communication and partnership development skills. This is because developing research expertise is one part of the problem, but learning to develop partnerships, communicate and share knowledge with industry requires a very different set of soft skills that don’t come easily to many researchers.

This professional commercialisation expertise must be fostered and better supported in universities to recognise and seize commercial opportunities as they arise.

Melanie Davern receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council.

– ref. Want more research commercialisation? Then remove the barriers and give academics real incentives to do it – https://theconversation.com/want-more-research-commercialisation-then-remove-the-barriers-and-give-academics-real-incentives-to-do-it-161355

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

The argument Scott Morrison has consistently put – that NSW has a better way of dealing with COVID, by avoiding comprehensive closures – has been blown away by Gladys Berejiklian’s reluctant resort to a lockdown of greater Sydney and other places.

In the end, the disease dictates the response, at least if a community wants maximum safety. And it will find the inevitable holes in even a strong defensive fence.

In NSW, the Sunday update recorded 30 new cases. New cases have also emerged in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, as well as in Queensland. The NT, with a large indigenous population, is a potential worry, although up to now, the protection of the indigenous population has been very effective.

In a video on the NSW lockdown Morrison – himself still in quarantine after his overseas trip – said NSW had “the best contact tracing system” in the country, indeed the world.

Regardless, NSW is on a knife edge – the coming days will show whether this will be a nasty but brief pause on activity, like the recent Victorian one, or something much more serious.

Despite Australia being largely COVID-free compared with so many other countries, thanks to geography, strong actions by federal and state governments, and some luck, mistakes have been the cause of a string of outbreaks.

Many breaches of hotel quarantine have occurred – although given the number of people passing through and the fact hotels are not ideal for the purpose, perhaps the surprise is there haven’t been more.

In NSW most recently, an unvaccinated driver who transported international airline crew was at the centre of the outbreak.

Read more:
View from The Hill: New ‘expert’ advice is in – don’t say ‘it’s not a race’

The regulations didn’t require these drivers to be vaccinated or wear masks, a clear gap in the NSW system.

Even if the Morrison government’s performance had been better this year, we’d still have outbreaks. But we would feel in a safer position dealing with them than we are now.

The federal government took responsibility for the vaccination rollout – the states have a significant role but are subsidiary.

How the federal government has fallen short has become well known. The rollout has been slow and beset by problems. On quarantine, there has also been tardiness: the government did expand the Howard Springs centre (from which there have been no leaks) but it has only just given the tick to a purpose-built centre in Victoria, and even more recently moved on centres to be built in Queensland and WA.

It first put faith in the University of Queensland vaccine which fell over, and then relied too much on AstraZeneca, failing last year to secure a broad enough basket of vaccines, scheduled to arrive early enough.

It boasted about CSL’s capacity to produce AstraZeneca, but then when the rare blood clot trouble arose with that vaccine, the Pfizer supplies couldn’t come fast enough – which will be the case for some months yet.

So now there is an impasse. People need to be vaccinated ASAP but there are shortages, or potential shortages, of Pfizer for those for whom it is recommended, and those who are now demanding it because they don’t trust AstraZeneca. The staged-by-age rollout has to be maintained because of the supply issue, although desirably anyone who wanted to be should be vaccinated at once.

The government is much criticised for the inadequacy of its communications campaign, which is limited and weak. But it is also caught – changes of medical advice about AstraZeneca (and who knows if or when it may alter again?) and limited supplies of Pfizer complicate things.

On issues of distribution logistics and the like, the arrival of Lieutenant General “JJ” Frewen to oversee the rollout will help.

But some problems are not easily solved, especially where they involve differences between the politicians and the health advisers.

Federal and state governments have had the constant mantra of following what the experts say. But now there is some questioning of that.

One example is mandating vaccination for aged care workers. National cabinet a few weeks ago leaned to requiring this, but the health advisers were reluctant. They feared an exodus from the workforce.

They were asked to go back and look at a timetable anyway. So far, there is still no mandating. A spokesperson for Health Minister Greg Hunt said on Sunday: “They are expected to provide advice ahead of the next National Cabinet meeting”.

The health department said on Sunday that as of June 25, 2,665 of 2,869 services had reported on workforce COVID-19 vaccination. “The data shows that 88,287 of 262,876 residential aged care workers, equating to 33.6%, have reported receiving a COVID-19 vaccination. Of these, 42,794 workers have reported receiving a second dose,” the department said.

The chair of the Council on the Ageing (COTA) Australia, Jane Halton, says “from a council perspective we remain perplexed and frustrated that the requirement to be vaccinated has not been mandated nationally [for these workers]”.

Halton points out that some residents in aged care facilities will remain, by choice or for medical reasons, unvaccinated and so vulnerable.

Read more:
Learning from COVID: how to improve future supplies of medical equipment and vaccines

Most of Australia’s COVID deaths have been among residents from aged care facilities. These facilities are a federal government responsibility and while we’d expect they are better prepared now, unvaccinated workers remain a high risk.

The issue of compulsory vaccinations for these workers is only one among many instances of the slowness that has beset the federal government this year, just as it needs – for health, economic and, not least, electoral reasons – to have the running shoes on.

All this as the virus becomes much more infectious.

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

– ref. View from the Hill: COVID battle on a knife edge – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-covid-battle-on-a-knife-edge-163476

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

Australia will be smaller and older than previously expected in 40 years time after the first downward revision of official projections in an intergenerational report in 20 years.

The much lower projections in Monday’s fifth five-yearly intergenerational report will mean indefinite budget deficits with no surplus projected for 40 years, only 2.7 Australians of traditional working age for each Australian over 65 (down from four) and average annual economic growth of 2.6%, down from 3%.

“Intergenerational reports always deliver sobering news, that is their role,” Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will say launching the report Monday morning. “The economic impact of COVID-19 is not short lived.”

The report says the pandemic has slowed both Australia’s birth rate and inflow of migrants.

The 2015 intergenerational report projected an Australian population of almost 40 million by 2054-55. The 2021 update projects 38.8 million by 2060-61.

As a result in 2060-61, about 23% of the population is projected to be over 65, up from 16% at present and 13% in 2002.

Although in the future increased superannuation would take pressure off the age pension, superannuation attracts favourable tax treatment which cuts government revenue.

The combined total of age pension spending and superannuation tax concessions was projected to grow from around 4.5% of gross domestic product to 5% by 2061.

Health, aged care spending to soar

Real per person health spending is projected to more than double over the next 40 years, largely due to the costs of new health technologies.

By 2060-61 health is expected to be the largest component of government spending, eclipsing social security and accounting for 26% of all spending.

Aged care spending is projected to nearly double as a share of the economy, largely due to population ageing.

Read more:
No Barnaby, 2050 isn’t far away. Next week’s intergenerational report deals with 2061

Mr Frydenberg will say that even in the face of these demands the government remains committed to its promise to limit the tax take to 23.9% of GDP. Tax receipts are not expected to reach this level until 2035-36.

“Growing the economy is Australia’s pathway to budget repair, not austerity or higher taxes. This is why we remain committed to our tax to GDP cap, ensuring our COVID support is temporary and persuing productivity-enhancing reforms.”

Net debt is projected to peak at 40.9% of GDP in 2024-25, before falling to 28.2% in 2044-45 and then climbing again to 34.4% by 2060-61.

While Australia’s population will be smaller and older, and debt levels higher as a result of the pandemic, had the government not spent at unprecedented levels to support the economy a generation of Australians might have been condemned to long term unemployment, seriously damaging the budget longer-term.

Other projections have real GDP per person a measure of living standards, growing at an annual average of 1.5%, down from an earlier-projected 1.6%

The result will still be a near-doubling of real GDP per person, from $76,700 in today’s dollars to $140,900 in today’s dollars in 2060-61.

Behind that projection lies an assumed lift in annual labour productivity growth to 1.5%. In the decades before the pandemic, annual productivity growth had been averaging 1.2% and had slumped to 0.4% in the year during the pandemic?

Read more:
Why productivity growth stalled in 2005 (and isn’t about to improve)

The lift in productivity assisted by government policies that will help individuals and businesses “take advantage of new innovations and technologies” is expected to take ten years.

Not included in the extracts from Monday’s report released by the treasurer late Sunday are the closely-watched projections for net overseas migration and for spending on the national disability insurance scheme.

Peter Martin 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. Intergenerational report to show Australia older, smaller and more in debt – https://theconversation.com/intergenerational-report-to-show-australia-older-smaller-and-more-in-debt-163474

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

The Nationals Senate leader Bridget McKenzie has been restored to cabinet and Darren Chester has been dropped to the backbench in a reshuffle of blatant reward and punishment following Barnaby Joyce’s elevation.

Andrew Gee, whose switch to Joyce was important in his victory, goes from the outer ministry into Chester’s cabinet spot, and his portfolios of veterans affairs and defence personnel. Chester had been an outspoken supporter of ousted leader Michael McCormack.

McKenzie becomes minister for regionalisation, regional communications and regional education, as well as minister for drought and emergency management. It had been speculated that she wanted responsibility for agriculture.

Deputy leader David Littleproud retains agriculture but loses emergency management while gaining responsibility for northern Australia. He will retain a stake in the policy side of drought, which he previously had responsibility for, through his agriculture job.

It is something of a slap for Littleproud – who would have run for leader if McCormack had not stood – given his deputy position. Emergency management has a high profile.

Keith Pitt keeps resources and water but is dropped to the outer ministry and loses responsibility for northern Australia.

The very political nature of the changes, with their paybacks, risks reinforcing the divisions that have plagued the Nationals.

In the Coalition, the Nationals leader chooses their team but has to negotiate with the prime minister on portfolios. In this reshuffle the Nationals have not been able to encroach on any portfolios held by Liberals.

The changes were announced by Scott Morrison.

Morrison forced McKenzie’s resignation in early 2020 in the wake of the sports rorts affair.

Morrison said McKenzie would have “a clear focus on service delivery in regional Australia and be responsible for the continued work developing Australia’s disaster management capability”.

David Gillespie joins the ministry as minister for regional health, and will be deputy leader of the House, a post Chester held. Mark Coulton is relegated from the junior ministry to the backbench.

Kevin Hogan will be assistant minister to Joyce, as he was to McCormack, and becomes assistant minister for local government.

Michelle Landry continues as assistant minister for children and families, but loses her previous post of assistant minister for northern Australia.

Outside the formal executive senator Susan McDonald, from Queensland, another Joyce supporter, has been given the role of “envoy for northern Australia”.

Morrison said: “These changes will provide the strongest female representation in an Australian government cabinet on record, building on the previous record also achieved under my government”.

One of Joyce’s political problems is seen to be the opposition from significant women in the rural community, as well as the doubts about him from some within his party given that a claim (which he rejects) of sexual harassment was key to his resignation from the leadership in 2018.

Chester said in a statement: “I will continue to advocate strongly for Australians to understand that the majority of veterans will transition successfully to civilian life. The myth that all veterans are broken is damaging to their well-being and creates a vicious circle of despondency and desperation.

“As a grateful nation, we must support those who need our help but at the same time promote the many achievements of our veteran community.”

The limit of Joyce’s clout was shown at the weekend when one of his supporters, Northern Territory senator Sam McMahon was defeated for preselection by Jacinta Price.

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. Joyce repays supporters and demotes opponents in a ‘reward and punishment’ reshuffle – https://theconversation.com/joyce-repays-supporters-and-demotes-opponents-in-a-reward-and-punishment-reshuffle-163475

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Zora Simic, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities, UNSW

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

“Well-behaved women seldom make history” is a phrase frequently trotted out around International Women’s Day, and just as frequently attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt.
It doesn’t matter that the former First Lady of the United States never actually said this – in fact, it was Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in an obscure academic article in the 1970s – the misattributed quote endures, further cementing Roosevelt’s reputation as one of the most inspiring women of all time.

2021 has also seen the unveiling of the Eleanor Roosevelt Barbie Doll, another marker of her iconic status. In this she has joined the “Inspirational Women” series — following, among others, Maya Angelou, Florence Nightingale, Frida Kahlo and her friend, aviator Amelia Earhart. (Whether she would have approved is another matter.)

Despite her 1.8-metre fame, or perhaps because of it, ER – as she was colloquially known – was not one to draw extra attention to herself. However, she came to excel at using her platform to uplift others or promote her favourite causes, including women’s rights and racial equality.

Read more:
Why politics today can’t give us the heroes we need

Two days after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s inauguration as the 32nd president of the US in March 1933, the new First Lady held her first White House press conference for women reporters only. This was the first of 378 such events, offering unprecedented access for women journalists over the 12 years, or three terms, FDR was in power.

In another historic first, Eleanor Roosevelt twice invited African American contralto opera singer Marian Anderson to perform at the White House – including for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during their US tour in 1939. In the same year, behind the scenes, she lobbied for Anderson to perform an open-air concert in front of the Lincoln Memorial in the then racially segregated capital – a performance since described as a “watershed moment in civil rights history”.

Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the Democrats’ “New Deal” and the second world war, ER transformed the First Lady role from largely ceremonial to much more publicly and politically engaged one.

As well as opening the White House to new constituencies, she extended her duties far beyond the official residence. With the president’s mobility compromised by his paralysis, ER was frequently dispatched to gather evidence, inspect government works and assess public opinion within the US and sometimes internationally. Her extensive travel made her an easy target for media satire – “Mrs Roosevelt Spends Night at White House” ran one headline – and earned her the nickname “Eleanor Everywhere” (now the name of one of several children’s books about her).

Her most famous overseas trip was the five-week South Pacific tour of 1943. Travelling as an ambassador for the American Red Cross, she was flown 25,000 miles on a four-engine military plane, the Liberator, from San Francisco to Hawaii, on to the Pacific Islands, New Zealand and Australia, and back again.

In Australia, thousands lined the streets of Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane to greet her. In Canberra, she became the first woman ever to be an official guest at a luncheon at Parliament House. Prime Minister John Curtin toasted her by saying “you are one of the most distinguished figures of our age”.

The First Lady dutifully reported interesting observations about Australia in her widely syndicated My Day column. Privately, however, she found the official engagements exhausting and trivial compared with her core mission of visiting US service personnel. In her 1949 memoir This I Remember, it was the impact of meeting American GIs in military hospitals that lingered with her. She wrote:

The Pacific trip left a mark from which I think I shall never be free.

Roosevelt’s My Day column ran six days a week from 1935 to mere weeks before her death in 1962. In that time, she only ever missed four days – when her husband collapsed and died, just months into his historic fourth term in office in April 1945.

Not long after, the next phase of her life began when FDR’s successor Harry Truman appointed her US delegate to the United Nations, declaring her “First Lady of the World”. As Chairperson of the Commission on Human Rights (1946-51), she was a driving force in the drafting and adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 – although not the only one.

As First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt was admired, but controversial. Now, she frequently tops US polls as the most popular First Lady in history. Fascination with her life and character has only increased, indexed by a steady stream of books focused on her private life — her marriage to womaniser FDR, her passionate friendships with women and men, who may or may not have been lovers – as well her public achievements.

Amy Bloom’s 2018 novel White Houses, fictionalising Eleanor’s relationship with journalist Lorena “Hick” Hickock, was a bestseller, as is the most recent biography by David Michaelis, Eleanor, released late last year.

Read more:
Remembering Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the theatre of war

In 1968, Eleanor Roosevelt was posthumously awarded the UN Human Rights Prize and in 1998, the United Nations Association of the USA inaugurated the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Award.

For Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady most often compared to Roosevelt, Eleanor was so inspirational she is rumoured to have held imaginary conversations with her at crossroads in her political career.

Finally, inspirational quotes that Eleanor Roosevelt actually said or wrote continue to circulate. To end with one that captures how she herself redefined the possibilities of leadership:

A good leader inspires people to have confidence in the leader. A great leader inspires people to have confidence in themselves.

Zora Simic receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. How Eleanor Roosevelt reshaped the role of First Lady and became a feminist icon – https://theconversation.com/how-eleanor-roosevelt-reshaped-the-role-of-first-lady-and-became-a-feminist-icon-156295

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Trivess Moore, Senior Lecturer, School of Property, Construction and Project Management, RMIT University

Just before 2am US Eastern Daylight Time on June 24, the Champlain Towers South Tower in Surfside, South Florida, partially collapsed.

The 12-storey building with 136 apartments was built in 1981 on reclaimed wetlands. More than 55 apartments have been destroyed. At least one person is confirmed dead — with some reports claiming three — and about 100 people remain unaccounted for. Many others have been injured.

It’s unclear at this stage why the building collapsed, but it has been speculated that it had been sinking over time, which may have contributed to the collapse. It’s likely the actual cause of the collapse won’t be known for months, if ever.

However, it is important to find out exactly what happened, and what it might mean for similar buildings in Miami and around the world.

A domino effect

Surfside Mayor Charles Burkett said:

There’s no reason for this building to go down like that unless someone literally pulls out the supports from underneath or they get washed out or there’s a sinkhole or something like that, because it just went down.

Video footage suggests the building experienced a progressive collapse. This happens when there is failure of a primary structural element, which then causes failure of adjoining members. For example, if one floor can’t support the floors above it, those floors collapse and “pancake” the floors below.

While such apartment buildings are designed to carry heavy loads under normal static conditions, they provide little resistance against dynamic moving masses — such as an upper section pancaking a section below.

The Miami building’s progressive collapse is a similar effect to that witnessed on September 11, 2001, when fires inside the World Trade Centre twin towers weakened the buildings’ structure and triggered a progressive collapse. However, in the case of the recent collapse, there was no evidence of a fire.

Potential causes

While the cause of the disaster isn’t immediately clear, some explanations are more likely than others for this type of collapse.

It has been reported the building, which was constructed on reclaimed wetlands, was sinking. Building on unstable land could have caused damage to the foundations over time. When buildings experience lots of ground movement, large cracking can occur, causing structural damage.

There was also construction work ongoing nearby, and investigators will need to consider whether this could have disturbed the foundations. This nearby construction work could have created ground movement under nearby buildings due to vibrations or deep excavations work.

The recent work on the building’s roof will also have to be investigated, although it’s less likely this extra load would have caused the collapse. The building was also undergoing a 40-year recertification, as is required in Florida, and early media reports are that this process had not identified any major issue with the building.

Others may be at risk

The building foundation for such high-rises will typically rely on a type of “pile” foundation. Piles are essentially long, slender columns, made of materials such as concrete and steel, which transfer the load from the building deep into the ground.

If there was a reduction in the capacity of the soil to support these loads, such as in the event of a sinkhole, there would be nothing underpinning the building. Given the information that has emerged so far, it’s likely the sinking of the building over time may have been a key factor in its ultimate collapse.

Once the initial emergency search for survivors is completed, and the remaining part of the structure is deemed safe, attention will turn to what exactly caused the collapse. A range of experts (such as structural engineers) will be involved in this review.

In previous similar building collapses in the United States, the causes have typically been identified following investigations. For instance, in the case of one 2013 Philadelphia building accident, the catastrophe was attributed to the reckless and unsafe removal of structural supports during demolition work on a vacant building.
This caused the vacant building to collapse onto a store, causing multiple deaths.

In the case of the Miami building, however, the exact cause may not be as easy to identify. The building had undergone several inspections during the ongoing recertification process, yet it appears imminent danger was not detected.

Investigating a building collapse typically takes months, and a full answer is sometimes never found. Right now in Miami, this process should be as rapid as possible, as nearby buildings may also be in danger.

For residents’ sake, the question of whether this incident was an isolated freak event will need to be answered quickly and comprehensively.

Trivess Moore has received funding from various organisations including the Australian Research Council, Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, Victorian Government and various industry partners. He is a trustee of the Fuel Poverty Research Network.

David Oswald has received funding from various organisations including the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute and the Association of Researchers in Construction Management. He is the lead guest editor for a special issue in the journal Construction, Management and Economics, titled: ‘Construction defects, danger, disruption and disputes: A systemic view of the construction industry post-Grenfell.’

– ref. Why did the Miami apartment building collapse? And are others in danger? – https://theconversation.com/why-did-the-miami-apartment-building-collapse-and-are-others-in-danger-163425

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mathew Aitchison, Professor of Architecture and CEO of Building 4.0 CRC, Monash University

The announcement that the Victorian and federal governments will build a 1,000-bed COVID quarantine hub at Mickleham in Melbourne’s north marks a welcome end, or at least a fresh chapter, to the finger-pointing over Australia’s quarantine saga.

Time is of the essence when protecting Australians from COVID, so hats off to both governments for setting an ambitious timeline that could see the facility up and running by the end of this year.

But in their haste to deliver an alternative to hotel quarantine, we believe the governments haven’t taken advantage of the newest available innovations.

The plan for the proposed quarantine facility produced by the Victorian government is, by its own admission, little more than a specced-up version of a mining camp, similar to the Howard Springs facility already in use in the Northern Territory. In turn, this type of construction harks back to the postwar quarantine facilities built from the 1950s onwards.

Part of the problem with the current proposal is the focus on the “hardware”, with almost no discussion of the “software”. By hardware, we mean buildings, physical structures, road layouts and infrastructure; by software, we mean how it will be used, the operational patterns and processes, and “softer” operational modes of use and their technologies.

This hardware-centric approach would be more reassuring if the hardware were the best and fittest for use, but unfortunately the proposal has reached for what it knows, and what it knows is around 70 years old.

A smarter way

We and our colleagues at the Building 4.0 Cooperative Research Centre, funded jointly by the federal government and a consortium of industry, are developing a state-of-the-art design, called Q_Smart, which we submitted to the Victorian government in March 2021.

In our proposal, building services, controls, sensors and management systems (alongside well-designed and efficiently produced buildings) all play a role in preventing the transmission of COVID-19. We might think of this as a correction towards a more “software-driven” approach, as it seeks to use a range of processes, techniques and technologies already available from our collaborators at Siemens to augment the work done by the physical structures.

In terms of the physical layout, our design avoids the large common corridors, inadequate air-tightness controls for rooms, or unhygienic air handling systems that have emerged as problems with current hotel stock.

As leading infection control experts have already pointed out, mining dongas may have worked well so far for quarantine at the repurposed Howard Springs facility in the Northern Territory. But from an epidemiological point of view, the current design is concerning for the proximity of neighbouring verandahs, especially in cases where more than one group of quarantine residents is housed in a unit.

The government’s provisional staffing patterns for the new facility suggests that separation between residents will rely on strict protocols around staff movements and quarantine measures intended to slow and limit the spread of disease, should a breach occur.

Read more:
This is how we should build and staff Victoria’s new quarantine facility, say two infection control experts

In contrast, the smart building management system we are developing would not “wait” for a breach to occur, but would aim to stop such contact ever being made. A door would not open, an airlock would have its contents automatically evacuated, and UV light would cleanse contaminated surfaces or air in ducting.

Some of these features, such as proximity authentication, are innovations that we routinely expect from our 20-year-old cars. If we turn to our now ubiquitous smartphones, there are yet further possibilities to safely and conveniently track and control movement in more humane way that would not need to reach for punitive ankle bracelets and the like. And, yes, should a breach occur, such systems could ultimately carry out near-instantaneous contact-tracing.

But such a system could only work if the “hardware” and “software” are fully integrated and planned together from the start.

An eye on the future

There are many ways to deal with quarantine, and although it may be too late to integrate our designs into the proposed Victorian facility, perhaps other states and territories embarking on building ventures might yet consider this advice.

In viewing the current proposed plan of closely spaced mining dongas, arranged in “mini-districts”, it is nigh-on impossible to imagine it being used for anything other than a quarantine facility, or perhaps a correctional centre.

Read more:
Hotel quarantine causes 1 outbreak for every 204 infected travellers. It’s far from ‘fit for purpose’

Q_Smart, on the other hand, was designed to be flexible, reusable and adaptable to different sites, which, for example, may not necessarily have large amounts of flat open space. This would potentially allow facilities built for quarantine to be reused for other purposes after the pandemic. Transforming the building’s operational pattern would be a matter of simply flipping a few (virtual) switches. Depending on the use case, certain controls could be activated or deactivated, new patterns of movement through the buildings could be enabled or disabled almost instantaneously.

With more thinking and development, perhaps such buildings could also be used as affordable housing, or disaster relief accommodation or — how’s this for ironic — future hotels.

This article was coauthored by Dr Bronwyn Evans AM, chair of Building 4.0 CRC and chief executive of Engineers Australia.

Mathew Aitchison is CEO of Building 4.0 CRC, a Commonwealth Government funded R&D centre. The Q_Smart initiative was carried out in collaboration with Siemens.

– ref. A mining camp won’t cut it: Australia’s quarantine system needs a smarter design – https://theconversation.com/a-mining-camp-wont-cut-it-australias-quarantine-system-needs-a-smarter-design-163012