Michelle Grattan discusses the week in politics with University of Canberra Associate Professor Caroline Fisher.
In the wake of last week’s budget, this week the pair discuss the April unemployment figures, the latest in the vaccine rollout, and the coronavirus situation in India – and the Australian citiziens stranded there.
Also discussed is the government’s plan to build a $600 million gas power plant, and how that accords with Liberal philosophy and the Hunter by-election.
The Lowy Institute believes New Zealand has done better at containing the pandemic, but, like Australia, experienced major economic disruptions and a big increase in government debt as a result of its fight against the pandemic.
Like Australia, New Zealand’s unemployment rate grew rapidly following lockdowns and restrictions but has now fallen to 4.7%, taking it even lower than Australia’s 5.5%. The budget forecasts are strong.
Both countries are investing in a vaccine rollout.
So on the surface there are similarities. The differences emerge in how the budgets are framed and what they try to deliver.
Wellbeing is an explicit goal
New Zealand treasurer Treasurer Grant Robertson on budget day.Nick Perry/AP
This is New Zealand’s third “Wellbeing Budget”, explicitly framed around improving the wellbeing of New Zealanders.
Much of Treasurer Grant Robertson’s budget speech was devoted to this theme.
It has become of central importance to budgeting in New Zealand, required by legislation.
There is plenty of room for debate about whether New Zealand has chosen the best ways to improve wellbeing, whether targets are being met, or whether key priorities such as children’s wellbeing or mental health are being addressed adequately.
What framing the budget around wellbeing does is encourage such conversations.
In Australia there is debate about the economic impact of budget measures.
In New Zealand that happens too, but there is also debate about the impacts of budget measures on wellbeing.
A good case can be made that the increased spending on children and on mental health in New Zealand’s 2021 budget is in part due to public discussion about these aspects of wellbeing following previous budgets.
From goals flow decisions
Both the Australian and New Zealand budgets deliver a large economic stimulus through increased government spending.
The difference is in New Zealand the stimulus comes largely from a massive increase in benefit payments.
By contrast, in Australia the budget resisted calls to increase social security payments above the poverty line, toughened eligibility tests, and confirmed that last year’s increase in JobSeeker would not continue (to be fair to the government, it had always said the increase would be temporary).
To some extent the difference is explained by politics — New Zealand has a Labour government, Australia a conservative-leaning Coalition government.
But it’s not the whole reason — a wellbeing frame for a budget will inevitably lead to a focus on improving social welfare payments, because this is where the greatest gains in wellbeing can be made per dollar of spending.
This is straightforward maths — the same amount of money will deliver a much greater percentage benefit if sent to people in poverty than it will if it is sent to people who are already well off.
Payments matter
Income is not the only driver of wellbeing, but it makes a difference.
As the apocryphal quote attributed to various US entertainers goes “I’ve been rich. I’ve been poor. Rich is better”.
Lifting people out of poverty goes a long way to improving wellbeing.
The same applies to investment in addressing entrenched disadvantage. In a striking contrast to Australia, the New Zealand budget targets Maori disadvantage.
The Australian treasurer’s budget speech did not mention Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. The New Zealand treasurer’s speech not only included numerous references to Maori and Pacific people but in parts incorporated phrases in te reo, the Maori language.
Being First Nation matters
Cross country comparisons are dangerous — mostly differences arise not from politics but history and institutions.
In New Zealand the influence of the Treaty of Waitangi is profound, and New Zealand has a far larger Maori population as a percentage of the total than Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have in Australia.
Nevertheless, if Australia had a New Zealand-style wellbeing approach to budgeting there would be a greater focus on addressing First Nations issues for the simple reason that the needs of First Nations peoples are acute.
As usual, there are programs and announcements about First Nations peoples in Australia’s budget but they have nothing like the centrality that concerns of Maori people have in New Zealand’s Budget.
If we were to take a lead from New Zealand and apply a wellbeing lens to the Australian budget, how would it stack up?
Measured by New Zealand standards…
In many respects Australia would fare well.
Spending on aged care, improving mental health, childcare and preschool were big ticket items. They are all major contributors to improving wellbeing.
Other measures like tax cuts, a gas fired recovery or strengthening mutual obligation requirements; perhaps not so much.
The New Zealand budget identified three goals for the government’s term of office:
keep New Zealanders safe from COVID-19
accelerate recovery and rebuild
tackle “foundational challenges”, in particular, housing affordability, climate change and child wellbeing
The first two would not have looked out of place in Australia’s budget. The third is unfamiliar territory.
The solutions offered will differ considerably depending on the government in power. However, New Zealanders appear to be up for debating them. Earlier this year Australia’s treasurer Josh Frydenberg scoffed at the idea of a wellbeing budget.
In light of the success of New Zealand’s approach in getting on top of fundamental problems and delivering real improvements such as an unemployment rate of a 4.7%, he might want to reflect on the merits of such an approach here.
When policymakers try to fix things, they often mess up because of the way the problem is formulated and the ways that subsequent policies are targeted. A classic example was the Closing the Gaps initiative in the early 2000s.
The problem – albeit simplified – is that some people are ‘advantaged’ and others are ‘disadvantaged’. In New Zealand, one of the groups that were (and presumably still are) disproportionately disadvantaged are Māori. (Another such group was, and is, Pasifika.)
One useful way of approaching the problem is that we can say as stylised facts:
Seventy percent of non-Māori are advantaged, and thirty percent are disadvantaged.
Thirty percent of Māori are advantaged, and seventy percent are disadvantaged.
The socio-economic circumstances of advantaged Māori are comparable with the circumstances of advantaged non-Māori. And the socio-economic circumstances of disadvantaged Māori are comparable with the circumstances of disadvantaged non-Māori.
Closing the Gaps was meant to be about making the disadvantaged less-disadvantaged; or – better still – not disadvantaged at all. But the policymaking didn’t target the disadvantaged as such; rather it targeted Māori as the most prominent disadvantaged group. And it is true that if the median circumstance of Māori could be raised, given that the median Māori is disadvantaged, then the gap between a median disadvantaged person and a median advantaged person would close. Though many disadvantaged people – indeed the majority of disadvantaged people, who in New Zealand are not Māori – would not benefit
Today’s more modest equivalent of Closing the Gaps is the proposed creation of a Māori Health Authority. And, as in 2004, the National Party passionately opposes this as racially targeted policymaking. (I might note that Māori versus Pakeha constitutional issues have no more to do with ‘race’ than do issues in Northern Ireland between ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’. In New Zealand’s case, the point of difference is that Māori are tangata whenua, not that Māori are ‘brown’; of course that doesn’t preclude the possibility that some people may be prejudiced against dark-skinned ethnicities, and thereby – knowingly or unknowingly – hold racist views towards Māori.)
Unintended Consequences
The problem with racially targeted policymaking of this sort is that it doesn’t address the actual problem (‘disadvantage’); instead such policies use ‘Māori’ as a proxy for ‘disadvantage’. (Other groups use other demographic proxies for disadvantage, such as ‘female’ or ‘working-class’ or ‘Muslim’.)
We are not yet clear as to the purpose of the Māori Health Authority.
Some believe that its purpose will be positive discrimination in favour of people with proven indigenous ancestry, especially in their ability to access health services. (Much as a Community Services Card discriminates in favour of cardholders.) If this is intended, it would be clearly problematic. Should a Māori family in Flaxmere or Kaikohe have more favourable access to services than their circumstantially identical Pakeha neighbours? Or should the community of Kaikohe be more favourably resourced than the community of Bluff?
The alternative interpretation is that the Māori Health Authority is an addition to the Health bureaucracy, that could only be justified – like other government bureaucracies – as a means to an overall improvement of health outcomes for all disadvantaged New Zealanders.
This is particularly problematic in today’s zero-sum fiscal environment. In a zero-sum fiscal environment, funding is from a fixed ‘pot of money’. This means that funding for one purpose comes at the expense of funding for other purposes (such as cancer treatment, or research on infectious diseases); and the policy issue becomes the ‘marginal health benefit’ that arises from this use of the money, as opposed to that use.
One of the most important refrains today is that Health is already over-bureaucratised, with far too great a proportion of funding going into ‘prioritisation services’; this being a euphemism for gate-keeping. Is an addition to the bureaucracy a more beneficial use of scarce resources than direct funding to train nurses, or to subsidise a greater range of life-enhancing drugs?
The concern that follows from this is the possibility that the principal benefit of the Māori Health Authority will be to provide enhanced career opportunities for the thirty percent of Māori who are not disadvantaged. And that the main people who will bear the opportunity cost of this benefit will be the presently disadvantaged, the majority of whom are the thirty percent of non-Māori who are disadvantaged.
The irony of this would be an opening of the gaps between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. Indeed, a dispassionate look at socio-economic outcomes in Aotearoa New Zealand since 2017 would be that it has been a period that could be described as an ‘opening of the gaps’.
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Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson called this a recovery budget for “all New Zealanders”. But was it an inclusive budget? Specifically, what did Budget 2021 offer those women who were significantly affected by the job losses resulting from COVID-19?
The budget priorities included an objective to “support into employment those most affected by COVID-19, including women and young people”. Yet in the budget speech, Robertson announced no explicit initiatives for women workers.
Indeed, as was the case in 2020, the focus was on physical infrastructure — building hospitals, schools, houses, roads, rail and a refurbished Scott Base. Around 221,000 jobs are projected to result, some of which are linked to this capital investment of NZ$57.3 billion dollars over four years.
Such spending initiatives are not gender neutral. Our highly gender-segregated labour market means this investment is likely to generate many more jobs for men than women.
Despite the extension of the Training Incentive Allowance to higher qualifications, and targeted programmes such as Tupu Aotearoa for Pacific peoples, there was no mention of support to increase the number of women in trades.
Some initiatives are already in place, but evidence shows desegregating labour markets is no easy task. Often it is a heavily lopsided process. Women are encouraged into male dominated occupations, but not vice versa.
A focus on building need not preclude investment in the care economy. The latter is just as likely as construction to result in economic growth. Research also shows women need child care to support their labour market participation, and increasing child care places increases jobs (usually for women).
Budget 2021 offered little in this regard. It provided funding for just 3,300 additional places in Out of School Care.
Australia is doing better for women
The lack of a gender lens makes New Zealand a laggard compared to the conservative government of Australia. Scott Morrison’s federal budget, handed down two weeks ago, was accompanied by an 81-page Women’s Budget Statement. New spending initiatives focused on women’s economic security, safety and health and well-being.
The statement included a raft of statistical evidence underpinning the government’s decision to invest in social infrastructure. In addition, new money was allocated for women to enter STEM careers and to fund more services for women taking up work in trades.
Alongside this, frontline services for victims of family domestic violence received an injection of money, and A$16.6 million was committed to support a National Women’s Health Strategy (over four years).
Obviously, Morrison’s was an election budget. To go to the polls later this year, and to secure a win, he has to ameliorate an anticipated backlash from women voters horrified by the allegations of sexual assault, bullying and discrimination within his own party.
Women were also critical of the fact they were largely overlooked in the 2020 budget, which focused on growing male-dominated industries.
Morrison may not be comparable to Jacinda Ardern in terms of his feminist leanings, but his minister for women, who is charged with championing the Women’s Budget Statement, is Senator Marise Payne, Australia’s Foreign Minister and a liberal feminist.
Some Australian commentators argue the budget offerings for women have not gone far enough. But it certainly appears to be more gender responsive than what we witnessed in New Zealand on Thursday afternoon.
Gender should be central to planning
So what do Ardern and Robertson need to change to ensure our progressive well-being approach accounts for women?
Mainstreaming gender analysis across all portfolios, so the budget process becomes more responsive to the needs of different groups of women and men, would be a good place to start.
Key international organisations, including the OECD, IMF and the United Nations, promote the economic and social value of gender responsive budgeting. Canada, Iceland and a number of other OECD countries have made significant progress in embedding gender analysis across all aspects of new and existing expenditure.
Three elements are required for successful implementation. First, a high-level strategy to ensure analysts take account of gender in their everyday practice across government (including budgeting).
Second, providing tools, training and disaggregated data to support this analysis (like our own “Bringing Gender In” tool and the Integrated Data Infrastructure). Third, working with parliament and civil society organisations to foster collaboration and accountability.
However, implementation of a gender-responsive budgeting process also requires political will to ensure public servants embrace this work. The adoption of a well-being approach, using Treasury’s Living Standards Framework and He Ara Waiora, represents a good first step. But to ensure budget outcomes are equitable, and resources shared with all New Zealanders, gender analysis is essential throughout the budget process.
International evidence suggests implementation is not always easy. However, without gender-responsive budgeting, the gendered nature of public expenditure will remain invisible. This will be detrimental to the well-being of the economy and to reducing inequality.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joanne Gray, Lecturer in School of Communications, Chief Investigator Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology
The massive digital platform market has until recently been dominated by a handful of US-based companies such as Facebook and Google. However, as foreign governments and competing platforms try to erode this domination, platforms are becoming a new sphere of geopolitical manoeuvring.
The European Union wants to gain more control over international tech companies and achieve more independence in the digital arena. India has banned 177 Chinese apps on the grounds they are “prejudicial to the sovereignty and integrity of India”.
And in 2020, the then US President Donald Trump spent months attempting to ban the Chinese-made video-sharing platform TikTok or force its sale to an American owner. While some claimed Trump was piqued by a supposed prank against him by teenage TikTok users, a look at statements from US government officials over the course of the year shows geopolitical concerns were the main driver.
If governments are continue to be driven by “digital nationalism”, the US-based big tech companies are likely to continue to dominate.
TikTok is the first major non-US platform
TikTok is the first social media platform born outside the United States to become a significant rival to Silicon Valley incumbents such as Facebook and Instagram. The short-form video platform rose to prominence in 2019 and, by early 2020, was the most downloaded app globally.
Since its rise, TikTok has come under intense criticism from governments around the world, who question whether ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, sufficiently protects users’ data against access by the Chinese state.
However, the way TikTok treats user data is not very different from what its US counterparts do. There is little to suggest the platform poses any singular national security threat.
The company releases transparency reports similar to those of Google and Facebook. A CIA assessment reportedly concluded there was no evidence the Chinese government had intercepted TikTok data.
TikTok’s Chinese origins can be used to oversimplify the platform’s actual territorial connection to China. ByteDance was founded in China but it is incorporated in the Cayman Islands and operates as a multinational with subsidiaries in Australia, the US, the UK and Singapore.
Platform geopolitics
The backdrop to Trump’s stance towards TikTok was an intensifying contest between the US and China over the strategic value of the digital environment. Who gets to extract economic value from the platform economy? Who gets to exert ideological influence through vast sociotechnical systems? Who enjoys strategic advantages from control over and access to data and infrastructure?
As today’s global tech platforms have developed, they have largely mirrored the shape of classical geopolitics: the US has dominated. Recently, however, Chinese technology firms have flourished, expanding China’s economic and strategic capacities.
Trump’s TikTok challenge
TikTok teens may have successfully pranked Trump, but his actions and rhetoric fit within a geopolitical agenda articulated by others within the administration.
On June 24, 2020, US national security advisor Robert O’Brien spoke publicly on the topic of the Chinese government’s “ideology and global ambitions”. He warned China posed a threat to US citizens and explicitly implicated TikTok.
Two weeks later, on July 6, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo suggested TikTok should be treated like Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications company that is effectively banned in the US.
On July 31, 2020, Trump announced he was planning to ban TikTok.
Several days later, Microsoft released a statement explaining that its representatives had spoken to Trump directly regarding the acquisition of TikTok. When questioned about his talks with Microsoft, Trump stated:
[…] it can’t be controlled, for security reasons, by China. Too big, too invasive, and it can’t be.
Protesters in America opposed the planned TikTok ban.STRF/STAR MAX/IPx/AP
On August 5, 2020, the US Department of State announced an expansion of its Clean Network program, which has the stated objective of “guarding our citizens’ privacy and our companies’ most sensitive information from aggressive intrusions by malign actors, such as the Chinese Communist Party”.
Expansions to the program included five policies aimed at reducing the presence of China in the US. These policies limited the use of Chinese telecommunication carriers, applications sold in app stores and pre-installed on devices, cloud services and undersea cables.
The following day, Trump issued an executive order forcing the sale of TikTok to a US company on the grounds that TikTok posed a threat to “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States”.
Ultimately Trump’s executive orders were blocked in the courts and the ban and forced sale never implemented.
The rise of digital nationalism
TikTok provides welcomed competition to the platform incumbents. If real competition in the sector were to increase, requiring the incumbent platforms to compete for users, we might see further innovations in the platform market and a less concentrated tech sector.
So far, however, the US government has explicitly focused on the geopolitical implications of the rise of a Chinese platform. Whether the Biden administration will continue this approach remains to be seen.
Both the US and China have a long history of shielding strategically important industries. For those concerned with increasing competition and diluting the concentrated power of the dominant technology firms, the rise of digital nationalism is a new obstacle.
Moving forward, policymakers may need to overcome nationalistic impulses if they are to increase global competition in the international platform market. And both US and Chinese rule must be rejected if we are to decentralise power within the digital environment.
From an ethics perspective, it has been a bad couple of weeks for media coverage of COVID-19.
First, there was a highly questionable story in The Australian about China allegedly weaponising coronavirus, with the headline “‘Virus warfare’ in China files” splashed across the front page.
The author of the article, Sharri Markson, claims a document written by Chinese scientists and Chinese public health officials in 2015 discussed the weaponisation of a SARS coronavirus.
According to the article, the document was headed “The Unnatural Origin of SARS and New Species of Man-Made Viruses as Genetic Bioweapons”.
Markson reported the US State Department had obtained the document in the course of investigating the origin of COVID-19. In her article and others that followed, there was talk of a third world war in which biological weapons would be deployed.
However, Chengxin Pan, an associate professor at Deakin University, offered a different explanation for the document’s origins. He said in a tweet the document Markson cited was in fact a book, the contents of which could be found on the internet or at a Chinese online bookstore.
Dominic Meagher, an economist at the Lowy Institute with an extensive China background, tweeted the book was
pretty clearly an idiotic conspiracy theory about how the US and Japan had introduced SARS to China.
The ABC program Media Watch raised these questions and more about the article’s credibility.
Markson has replied that the Chinese Foreign Ministry and Global Times newspaper viewed the document as legitimate and not a conspiracy theory. She said while none of the critics quoted by Media Watch were bioweapons experts, she had interviewed multiple high-level specialists in biological weapons compliance.
The ethical problems here are twofold. First, there are clearly questions about the provenance of the article. Was the document uncovered by a US State Department investigation or is it a book available for public sale?
It is a basic fact that colours the entire article, and the questions are not resolved by Markson’s response.
Second, the way the story is framed as revealing Chinese weaponising of biological material is highly alarmist. This generates further public anxiety about COVID-19 and adds to the climate of Sinophobia in Australia. The justification for doing so is, on the available evidence, highly questionable.
In a pandemic or any other emergency, the first ethical duty of the media is to report accurately and soberly, and specifically not to induce unjustified anxiety or panic.
In another major ethical lapse, the Australian Financial Review ran a story that named and shamed a Sydney man who had tested positive for the virus. To make it worse, the newspaper put his photo on the front page.
This was wrong and irresponsible for several reasons.
The man had visited several barbecue shops across Sydney while unknowingly positive. When this became known as part of the media’s general contact-tracing publicity, he was dubbed “Barbecue Man” by the Sydney media.
So he was already a figure of fun when the Financial Review identified him. Its excuse for naming him? He was a financial analyst doing due diligence on the Barbecues Galore chain. The AFR’s editor-in-chief, Michael Stutchbury, claimed this meant it was in the public interest to identify him as carrying COVID.
That is absolute drivel. There is no rational connection between the man’s health and the health of the barbecue business.
Other media, including the Daily Mail and news.com, jumped on the bandwagon and named him, too. Both outlets even ran a photo grabbed from Facebook of the man and his wife. No moral compass whatever.
If the media go on doing this, it will discourage people from coming forward for testing. Who wants to see themselves plastered over the front page and given names like Barbecue Man? That is where the irresponsibility lies.
The Age was guilty of something similar a couple of months ago when it published a map of the weekend movements of a young man who was unwittingly COVID-positive and wrote an article holding him up to ridicule.
This kind of media behaviour is mediaeval: like putting people in the stocks and chucking rotten tomatoes at them. And it is a gross breach of privacy. A person’s health is among the most private classes of information that exists. To breach it for the sake of a cheap laugh is indefensible.
These weren’t the only problematic reports. On May 13, the Australian Press Council found a subhead in the Herald Sun saying “Six People Died During Pfizer Trial” was misleading because it implied the vaccine caused the deaths, when in fact the deaths were not related to the vaccine.
Four of the six deceased had been given a placebo during the trial, and the other two deaths were not related to the vaccine.
The Herald Sun defended the subhead on the basis the story said the US Food and Drug Administration had been told about these deaths because they occurred during the period of the trial.
That is materially different from implying – as the headline clearly did – that the vaccine caused the deaths.
The press council said that newspapers needed to take more than usual care to avoid misleading the public in the midst of a pandemic. And by failing to do so, the Herald Sun had breached two of the council’s principles — one concerning accuracy and the other concerning fairness and balance.
In an atmosphere where there is already a degree of resistance to being vaccinated, the Herald Sun subhead was clearly a beat-up with the potential to harm the public interest.
So, in the space of a couple of weeks elements of the print media have sought to capitalise without justification on public anxieties about China and the safety of COVID vaccines, and have pilloried an innocent man while at the same time committing a gross breach of his personal privacy.
In an age when the public must rely increasingly on the mass media for reliable and responsible information — since social media has shown itself to be unreliable and irresponsible — these newspapers have abrogated their first duty to the public.
Advances in medical technology have dramatically altered the process of dying. It’s now possible to prolong life, with the frightening reality that this may simply extend our dying process.
Advance care planning is designed to empower us to retain some control over the last stages of our life by communicating our wishes about what we want, or don’t want, in terms of medical treatment. Generally this planning is done in well in advance of a medical crisis, while people are well.
However, evidencesuggests these plans may not work as intended in a crisis, because the message the patient thought to be crystal clear appears unclear to doctors and family.
The following is a mix of several similar real world patients, but names and some specific details have been altered to avoid identifying any particular case.
“Doug Jones” was a 75-year-old man with severe Parkinson’s disease that was making it increasingly difficult for him to manage at home, even with lots of help.
Doug’s swallowing had became progressively more difficult due to his disease, to the extent that Doug’s doctors had advocated for placement of a PEG feeding tube. This would be a tube through his tummy wall directly into his stomach, so he could be fed without swallowing. Doug had declined this on the grounds that eating and drinking were “about the last pleasure I have”. He recognised the risk of choking to death, but didn’t care.
Weeks later Doug was admitted to hospital after choking on a piece of orange. The orange had totally obstructed his airway, resulting in severely low levels of oxygen in the blood and cardiac arrest. It was over 30 minutes before the piece of orange was able to be removed.
On arrival in hospital, tests suggested Doug had suffered profound brain damage due to very low oxygen delivery. However, at this early stage, while it was reasonable to have grave concern, it was not possible for doctors to be certain about the outcome.
Well before all this happened, Doug had written an advanced care directive. This is a document that states Doug’s preferences for future medical care, should he lose the capacity to make decisions. In this he stated:
I do not want to be any worse than I am now; I do not want heroic treatment and I never want to go into a nursing home.
After reading the advance care directive, the doctors explained they could not predict with certainty how things would turn out. They explained Doug would need to be kept on life support for some days, to give him “the best chance” and to “see how things go”.
As days passed it became clear Doug had suffered profound brain injury. He did start to breathe for himself but required hoist transfers and assistance with all activities of living, including turning, bathing and toileting. He remained non-verbal and was fed through a nasogastric tube. Occasionally he appeared to understand what was being said to him.
After six weeks, Doug was discharged from hospital to a high level nursing home.
When we reviewed what happened, the doctors who had looked after Doug agreed this outcome was, in all probability, exactly what Doug feared and wanted to avoid. They felt it was very sad.
It can be very challenging for doctors to interpret and act on advance care directives, often because it’s almost impossible to predict exactly how treatment will affect a patient.Shutterstock
Why didn’t Doug’s advance care directive work?
Like so many, Doug had stated outcomes he didn’t want. He said “I do not want to be any worse than I am now. I would never want to go into a nursing home”.
However, as Doug’s doctors pointed out, they could not be certain when they first saw him exactly what the outcome would be (though it was very likely to be bad).
When asked if, when they first saw Doug, they had thought there was any real chance he would return to his previous level of function, they were unequivocal. None of them thought he would.
So how can we explain these conflicting answers?
The initial thought process the doctors applied focused on whether there was certainty of a particular outcome, but certainly is something that’s impossible to predict with absolute confidence. In contrast, risk is much easier to recognise. Had Doug asked doctors (and family) that he did not want to take the risk of an unacceptable outcome it would have made it much easier for them
A second problem is that, like many patients, Doug stated things he “does not want”. There are lots of things in life we don’t want, but that we endure. The important question is not what we don’t want, but what we won’t accept and wouldn’t consent to.
Doug also wrote his plan a bit like an instruction. A lot of people do this thinking an instruction will be more convincing, but it doesn’t work like that.
Instructions written well in advance of the event, before all the circumstances are known, can be very unreliable. Most doctors can cite many examples of patients who have totally changed their mind when faced with a crisis.
Here are some tips when writing yours
Doctors and family members feel very uncomfortable faced with instructions from someone who is no longer able to explain their reasoning. This disquiet makes them question whether the instructions are well informed, adequately thought through, applicable to the situation, and firmly held. An emotional request generally inspires more confidence.
Doug might have had more success had he written something like:
If my doctors think that it is unlikely that I will be able to return to my current level of health, or that it is likely that I will require full time nursing home care, then I would not want to consent to life-saving or life prolonging treatment.
I know it won’t be easy, but I ask my family and doctors to respect my wishes should they have to decide about treatment for me.
Focusing on unacceptable risk and lack of consent, as well as adding an appeal for wishes to be respected, speaks to the heart and creates the sort of confidence doctors and families need to make difficult decisions.
It’s the smell that hits you first. The scent of urine and decomposing bodies. Then you notice other signs: scuttles and squeaks, small dead bodies leaking blood, tails sticking out of hubcaps.
If you’ve lived through a mouse plague, you’ve seen this, and smelled the stench of mice dying of poison baits.
As a desperate measure to help combat the mouse plague devastating rural communities across New South Wales, the state government yesterday secured 5,000 litres of bromadialone. This is a bait that’s usually illegal to roll out at the proposed scale.
This is a bad idea. While bromadiolone effectively kills mice, it also travels up the food chain to poison predators who eat the mice, and other species. And these predators, from wedge-tailed eagles to goannas, are coming in out in droves to feast on their abundant prey.
When your prey is everywhere
Animal plagues in Australia are fuelled by the “boom and bust” of rainfall.
We have natural, flood-driven population explosions of the native long-haired rat, with accompanying booms of letter-winged kites, their predator. We also have locust plagues when the conditions are right, leading to antechinus or mice plagues which eat the locusts.
Since at least the late 1800s, we’ve had terrible plagues of the introduced house mouse (Mus musculus). But rarely has it been this bad, with conditions currently seeming worse than the last plague in 2011, which caused over A$200 million in crop damage alone.
High numbers of birds of prey — nankeen kestrels, black-shouldered kites and barn owls — are often reported feasting on plague mice.
Snakes, goannas, native carnivores such as quolls, and feral cats and foxes, also take advantage of the abundant food. Pets, especially cats and some dogs, are highly likely to consume mice under these conditions, too.
Poisoning the food web
Laying out poison baits is one way people try to end mouse infestations and plagues. So-called “anticoagulant rodenticides” are divided into first and second generations, based on when they were first synthesised and the differences in potency.
Wedge-tailed eagles are among the predators that take advantage of the house mouse plague.Shutterstock
Second generation anticoagulant rodenticides have higher toxicities than first generation, and are lethal after a single feed. First generation rodenticides, on the other hand, require rodents to feed on them for consecutive days to be lethal.
But mouse-eating predators are highly exposed to second generation rodenticides. For most animal species, the lethal doses of rodenticide aren’t yet known.
A scientific review from 2018 documented the poisoning of 31 bird, five mammal and one reptile species. Second generation aniticoaugulant rodenticides were implicated in the death of these animals.
Our research from 2020 found urban reptiles are highly exposed to second generation rodenticides, too. This includes mouse-eating snakes, called dugites, which had up to five different rodent poisons in them.
We also found poisons in frog-eating tiger snakes, and in omnivorous bobtail skinks which eat fruit, vegetation and snails. This is even more concerning because it shows how second generation rodenticides can saturate the entire foodweb, affecting everything from slugs to fish.
Bobtail skinks don’t eat poisoned mice, but they’ve still been found with poison in their systems.Shutterstock
Bromadiolone is particularly dangerous, even to humans
Five thousand litres of the poison can treat around 95 tonnes of grain, and the government will provide it for free to primary producers once federal authorities approve its use.
Bromadiolone is usually restricted to use in and around buildings. But given the widespread impacts on wildlife, using bromadiolone at the proposed scale will do more harm than good.
Past research on bromadialone has shown residues persist for up to 135 days in the carcasses of voles (another rodent species). In international studies, bromadiolone has been found in the livers of a host of birds of prey, including a range of owl species, red kites, sparrowhawks and golden eagles.
Humans can be exposed, too, by eating the eggs of chickens that ate the mice.Shutterstock
And it’s not just a problem for wildlife, humans are also at risk of exposure. For example, we can get exposed from eating eggs from chickens that feed on poisoned mice, or more directly from eating other animals that may have ingested poisoned mice.
A 2013 study looked at chicken eggs for human consumption, and detected bromadialone in eggs between five and 14 days after the chicken ingested the poison. It’s not yet clear how many of these eggs we’d have to eat for us to get sick.
So what are the alternatives?
There are highly effective first generation rodenticides that provide viable solutions for managing mouse plagues. They may take a little longer to kill mice, but the upshot is they don’t stick around in the environment. A 2020 study found house mice in Perth didn’t have genetic resistance to first generation rodenticides, which suggests they’re effectively lethal.
Another approach has been to use zinc phosphide, a poison which is unlikely to secondarily poison other animals that eat the poisoned mice. However, zinc phosphide is still extremely toxic and will kill sheep, cows, pets and even humans if directly eaten.
Rolling out double-strength zinc phosphide may be the lesser of the evils in causing secondary poisoning, but only if used very carefully.
And another way to help control the mouse plague is to limit food resources for mice on farms. Farmers can minimise grain on ground, and Australia should invest in research for grain storage facilities that are less permeable to mice.
Mouse plagues are a regular cycle in Australia. Natural predators not only help create healthy, natural ecosystems, but also they help with mouse control. Second generation rodenticides will only destroy and weaken the predator populations we need to help us combat the next plague.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Charles Deneen, Senior Lecturer in Higher Education Curriculum & Assessment, The University of Melbourne
With some universities returning to face-to-face teaching this year, ANU Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt noted that, while his university was one of them, lectures would be much less common and not a “crutch for poor pedagogy”. Since then many have discussed the issue of lectures, including the deputy vice chancellor of University of Technology Sydney and the director of the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education in Western Australia, with ideas ranging from embracing the lecture to removing it entirely.
Condemnation of lectures is nothing new. However, the sudden, massive shift to reliance on technology due to COVID has brought increasing calls for ending the venerable lecture. Lectures will, we are told, be replaced by superior, technology-enhanced substitutes.
Underlying these messages are two tacit assumptions: that lectures make for bad teaching and that using technology improves it. But are these reliable assumptions? Rather than simply rejecting lectures and embracing technology, perhaps we should be looking more closely into both, and their relationship to each other.
Discussions about getting rid of lectures follow predictable patterns. The most common complaints centre on lectures as didactic, learner-passive and boring. Accompanying these critiques is the oft-cited rule that students’ attention span has a limit of 10-18 minutes.
While there is little to no evidence for this claim, we can all identify with struggling to remain awake as we are droned at from a lectern. But most of us can also recall times we were spellbound by a lecture. Anyone who has attended a great TED Talk or even watched one on YouTube knows what it’s like to be captivated for that 3-18 minutes.
Can lectures hold people’s attention beyond 18 minutes, though? The late Professor Randy Pausch was well known for the power and quality of his lectures, especially his final one, “Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture”, which he delivered after receiving a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. That lecture comes in at a little over one hour and 15 minutes, and many consider it to be a masterwork of powerful teaching and communication.
Clearly, extended lectures can have great impact. Achieving that impact, however, requires understanding what makes for good lecturing and then committing to improvement.
Pausch challenges the stereotype of what a lecture is. He uses physical props, multimedia and other resources to push the boundaries of the lecture beyond a typical, didactic engagement. The result is a lecture that periodically shifts how the audience is engaged and, in doing so, captures and keeps the audience’s attention.
Lecturing at this level requires more than just experience. We must reflect on our teaching practice, evaluate the quality of our lectures in relation to our intentions, and then commit to developing both our lectures and ourselves.
Professor Eric Mazur describes how, while teaching physics at Harvard in the 1990s, he came to the painful realisation that his lectures were failing to keep his students engaged or serve the educational objectives of the subject. He used this realisation as a springboard to improve his lectures and develop his pedagogical knowledge and skills.
Since then, Mazur has become a recognised expert in improving student engagement. He has created a variety of solutions for academics to keep students actively engaged in lectures, even those that go beyond the apocryphal 18-minute limit. The techniques Mazur advocates range from integrating peer instruction into lectures to using a high-tech, collaborative platform to promote students’ pre-lecture preparation.
So then what about the claim that technology is making the lecture obsolete? This seems doubtful for a couple reasons.
Pausch and Mazur’s methods can be transferred to an online space, even if we don’t label the result a lecture. We see many examples of how this works in well-regarded online learning platforms like Khan Academy or LinkedIn Learning (formerly Lynda). However we label these engagements, it’s obvious technology can actually help lectures rather than just supplant them.
Now let’s turn the question around: does using technology guarantee or even increase the likelihood of good teaching? Technology can make good practices easier, like the use of polls and break-out rooms and timers. Technology can even open new possibilities and paradigms for teaching. But there are no guarantees.
One of these is that adding technology equals enhancing teaching. Technology carries no inherent pedagogical value. Swapping an iPad for a lectern does not, in itself move learning from a boring, didactic experience to interactive, lively engagement.
A didactic, boring lecture is poor teaching whether delivered online or in person.Shutterstock
Just like lectures, our uses of technology and the resulting impact must first come from thoughtful commitment to improving both teaching and teacher.
Technology can never substitute for critically reflecting on the pedagogical value of our practice. And while technology can assist a major transformation, it should never be a requirement for improving how we teach. Whether you’re a high-tech or low-tech teacher, you can give a good lecture or find useful alternatives if you remember to put the pedagogy before the technology.
We need to reject the notion that lectures will sink our students and technology will save them. Instead, let’s dig deeply and critically into both, reflect upon how to improve our practices, and apply sound teaching methods and practices to create learning engagements that are captivating and profound.
This speaks to our own physical and mental well-being, as well as to the health of cities in the broadest sense. For the past century we have been told, and largely accepted, a story that “faster travel will save time and make everyone better off”. This is myth rather than reality.
How do people behave when faster travel becomes possible in cities? We assume they get to destinations faster and “save” time. But the sprawl that comes with speed means more time is spent on travel, and people have to work longer hours to pay for all the costs of speed.
A great paradox of modern times is that the faster we go, the less time we have. More time can be saved by slowing city transport than by speeding it up.
An alternative to trying to go faster is to “slow the city”, as we explain in our book, Slow Cities: Conquering our speed addiction for health and sustainability. Instead of “mobility” (how far you can go in a given time), the goal of the “slow city” is accessibility (how much you can get to in that time).
Planning for speed and mobility focuses on saving time, which is rarely achieved in practice. Planning for accessibility focuses on time well spent.
In accessibility-rich places you don’t need to move fast. Hence walking, cycling and public transport are preferred ways to travel. These slow, active modes are also the healthiest and most sustainable modes.
A “slow city” strategy draws on many strands of planning policy, including:
lowering speed limits as part of holistic approaches such as Vision Zero – which aims for no road deaths or serious injuries
land-use planning to shorten distances to destinations
street re-organisation to promote the “slower” travel modes and create slow spaces.
Achieving these goals requires a new vision for the city. As Carlos Pardo asked in his presentation at UN Habitat in 2017:
“Why don’t we start thinking about speed as a problem rather than as a solution?”
Many cities are doing just that.
Elements of slow cities have been implemented successfully throughout the world. Examples include Oslo and Helsinki, Paris and Bogotá. These cities, and many others, have lowered motorised traffic speeds and increased active travel.
Before and after the transformation of Pontevedra, Spain, from traffic-choked streets to liveable city centre.Photos: Concello de Pontevedra, Author provided (No reuse)
Pontevedra in Spain demonstrates how slowing transport across an entire city benefits all types of health. After the city reduced speed limits to 30km/h, physical activity and social connection improved as more people walked. From 2011 to 2018, there was not a single traffic death.
CO₂ emissions fell by 70%. A 30% increase in business revenues in the city centre presents a strong economic case for slow cities.
Increases in walking and cycling deliver the twin benefits of physical activity and social connection, as seen here in Brescia, Italy.Photo: Rodney Tolley, Author provided
Does this mean we all need to live in higher-density inner-city “European” environments, with narrow streets and nearby destinations, to reap the benefits of slowness? No it doesn’t. There are already suburbs – in Japan, for example – that work in a “slow city” way, with plentiful walking, cycling and public transport, and relatively low traffic speeds.
Slowing cities does not mean turning our backs on suburbia. “Sprawl repair”, “play streets” and “slow streets” can produce benefits even in car-dominated cities such as in North America and Australasia.
Residents enjoy the benefits of a slow street in Oakland, California.Photo: City of Oakland, Author provided (No reuse)
The slow city dividend
In the 21st century various “slow movements” – “slow food”, “slow parenting”, “slow tourism” – have gained traction. Hence “slowing the city” may be a more feasible and appealing concept to planners and city residents than “encouraging active travel” or “curbing car use”.
While our cultural obsession with speed might prompt some to question or even ridicule “slowness”, it is worth considering the slow city dividend. Slow cities have less inequality, less air pollution, less road trauma and lower greenhouse gas emissions. They are more competitive in the global economy, with higher tax yields and GDPs.
Our new Manifesto for 21st Century Slow Cities is intended to guide progressive politicians, practitioners and citizens in efforts to end the damaging culture of speed in the city. Slowing the city may be an effective treatment for many debilitating urban conditions. If you want your city to be healthier, happier, safer, wealthier, less unequal and more child-friendly and resilient, just slow it down.
The key narrative in Josh Frydenberg’s 2021 budget was the need to use more aggressive fiscal policy to drive unemployment down and wages up.
Two key pieces of data this week indicate how things are tracking.
On Wednesday the Australian Bureau of Statistics published wages data. The Wage Price Index grew 0.6% for the March quarter, or 1.5% over the past year.
This is not a fast enough rate of wages growth to outstrip inflation by much, if at all, on a consistent basis. That’s a problem but not a surprise. The economy in general, and the labour market in particular, is still recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.
On Thursday the bureau published its labour force data for April. These were more of a surprise. The unemployment rate fell from 5.7% in March to 5.5%.
The unemployment rate had been hotly awaited by economists and politicians alike. It gave the first glimpse of what is happening with employment with the end of the JobKeeper wage-subsidy scheme in March.
A stunning unemployment result
The prevailing wisdom among economists was that JobKeeper’s end would see the unemployment rate rise. Treasury had warned it might cost 100,000 to 150,000 jobs. Australia’s leading labour economist, Jeff Borland, feared it could be as high as 250,000.
But as University of Melbourne economist Roger Wilkins pointed out, JobKeeper wasn’t the only labour-market program that changed at the end of March.
JobSeeker for singles dropped from $715 to $620 a fortnight (and from $660 to $565 for those with partners).
Moreover, income tests were tightened along with so-called “mutual obligation” provisions (requiring people on such benefits to apply for 20, rather than 15, jobs a month).
So the actual unemployment rate falling marginally rather than rising sharply could even be considered stunning.
The only real negative news in the April labour force data was that the total number of people employed fell by 30,600 – or 0.2%.
But as the ABS’ head of labour statistics, Bjorn Jarvis, said, this might be due to the end of JobKeeper or simply down to “the usual month-to-month variation in the labour market”.
The same might be said of my favourite labour market statistic – total hours worked. That fell by 13 million hours in April, from 1.806 billion to 1.793 billion hours.
In sum, these figures are enough to make a treasurer want to dance. The single biggest threat to employment bouncing back from COVID-19 – the end of JobKeeper – seems to have been navigated without incident.
More to the point, this was exactly as Frydenberg said would be the case.
Maybe he got lucky, maybe he was just right all along, but it hardly matters.
The labour-market recovery in Australia marches on, and the significant spending in the budget means fiscal policy will not be a handbrake on continued recovery.
When will wages start to rise?
We shouldn’t get carried away. These new numbers reflect just one month without JobKeeper.
There are always time lags in the labour market. The statistics reported over the next two months will be important and instructive.
A 5.5% unemployment rate is still too high to lead to the tight labour-market conditions needed to drive up wages.
How low unemployment needs to get before wages start rising faster than inflation is still an open question.
It might be 4.5%, it might be 4%. Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe has hinted it might well be below 4%.
What seems clear is it will need to be significantly lower than the pre-pandemic level of 5.2%.
Australian Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has reason to be satisfied with the latest employment figures.Lukas Coch/AAP
Another note of caution is what happens if, as the Reserve Bank and Treasury have predicted, unemployment gets down low enough to put upward pressure on wages.
If this goes as planned it will be good news. If it leads to a general rise in inflation back to the central bank’s 2-3% target range, it will be excellent news.
But if inflation genuinely picks up in a sustained way – as there are hints it will do the United States – the RBA will eventually need to lift interest rates.
It is good for the central bank to have that policy option, but using it will come with costs.
If higher interest rates are need to dampen inflationary pressures in the next year – or even two – then the jobs recovery will be halted or reversed, and the RBA’s credibility severely damaged.
As Philip Lowe is fond of saying, “time will tell”.
When town planners mapped Byron Bay in 1884 they mistakenly believed Captain James Cook had named Cape Byron after the English poet Lord Byron — when in fact it was named after the poet’s grandfather, a navy admiral.
From that mistaken belief, say local historians, many of Byron’s streets were given the names of famous English poets or literary figures such as Wordsworth, Browning, Milton, Marvel, Jonson, Kingsley, Carlyle Tennyson and Keats.
“It is more than a little ironic,” they note, “that the streets of Byron Bay, a very industrial seaport town until the 1970’s, were named after men who were far from working class”.
Now, with television turning its lens on Byron Bay, we can add another layer of irony to this story. A town mistakenly thought to be named after a rich European poet and his contemporaries is today synonymous with a new breed of image-conscious wordsmiths — the influencers.
From streets in the 19th century to cyberspace in the 21st, the point is not whether the connection to Byron (the man or the town) is true, but that the conjuring is enough to fire imaginations — for the purposes of colonisation then and chasing profit today.
Because hype doesn’t stand in for the real, there is still something very special about Byron Bay.
When streaming giant Netflix issued a press release in early April announcing production was imminent on the doco-soap Byron Baes, negative reaction from the local community was fast and fierce.
Surfers paddled out to protest and locals brandished handmade signs reading: “Give Netflix the Flick” and “Byron’s Soul is not for Sale”. Meanwhile famous neo-locals, actor Chris Hemsworth and wife Elsa Pataky, threw a “white party” with A-list friends including Matt Damon (visiting from Hollywood) and some musos (visiting from Melbourne).
Netflix’s Byron Baes press release promised a bevy of “hot instagrammers living their best lives, being their best selves, creating the best drama content #no filter guaranteed”.
The tone was vacuous: “This is our love letter to Byron Bay, this is not just Chris and Zac’s backyard, it’s the playground of more celebrity-adjacent-adjacent influencers, than you can poke a selfie-stick at”.
In any other town this misreading of place and lack of community consultation might have gone unnoticed. But not in Byron. This is a community that ran Club Med out of town in the early 1990s (though a luxury “place sensitive” resort has since opened on the proposed site,). This is a town that has consistently fought off McDonalds, KFC and other mega-franchises. The building limit is two storeys in the township and the local council has three Greens representatives, including the mayor.
In 1994 the Arakwal people, one of the tribes of the Bundjalung nation, lodged the first of three native title claims over the region. On 28th December 2000 the Arakwal signed the first Indigenous Land Use Agreement in the country, which stands internationally as a benchmark for Indigenous communities negotiating Native Title.
But the Bay is still bruised from a 2019 Vanity Fair article on local “murfers” (mum surfers) and Instagram stars. Many readers took pleasure in the way it skewered a group of privileged, linen-clad influencers with revelations about sponsorship and duplicity. Others felt the piece was a nasty smear job.
So, Byron Baes was always going to be divisive. At the recent protests, filmmaker Tess Hall summed up local sentiment saying, “Trash TV equals trash town”. Many have suggested this ruckus was all part of Netflix’s plan — that the continuing coverage will only serve to provide free publicity. Despite a 9500-strong petition and an emergency motion from council, filming has reportedly commenced.
What’s happening in Byron Bay highlights the gap between constructed content and reality, between what happens on “the Gram” and people’s actual lives.
I want to see if recent events have dented the spirit of the Byron I know — whether, despite its battles, it still retains its restorative powers. I spend my first night with a friend in a treehouse-style whiskey bar, trying to reactivate my Insta account after a break of several years. We request and wait — my university firewall not playing ball. My friend, much younger than me, keeps refreshing my email as if this delay is an affront to humanity.
It turns out our national broadcaster has already beaten Netflix to the punch and interviewed Byron Bay influencers for an upcoming Compass program Byron Bay: Australia’s Instagram Utopia. I chat with a couple of those featured during my visit.
When I tell Sarah Royall, adventurer and travel influencer with an eco-agenda that I’m not on Insta she looks at me like I’m an alien. But her bright-eyed positivity about the network potential of Instagram, what she categorises as a “new and emerging industry” is convincing. When travel restrictions ease, she plans to hold a sustainability retreat in French Polynesia involving coral reef and shark experts, scientists and marine biologists from around the world, all connected by social media.
Like the other women featured on the ABC program, Sarah deviates from the blatant objectification and product placement usually rife on Instagram. There’s Angel Phoenix, a self-described radical astrologist who lives in a caravan. Jade Couldwell and Sophie Pearce, two friends and mummy influencers, who pose in various relaxed tree and sand tableaux with their golden-haired husbands and children. Emica Penklis, an ex-model who now runs a successful organic chocolate company and Bunjalung woman Ella Noah Bancroft, a queer activist. Still, this is Instagram. They are all beautiful.
Ella Noah Bancroft harnesses her beauty for influence.ABC TV
Because Instagram demands beauty in whatever form it comes, beauty is the unspoken currency. Ella Noah Bancroft is uncomfortable about this aspect, smiling wryly when she says her words are linked to, “an often pretty egotistical photo … but it’s not about the photo for me, it’s about the caption”.
She recognises the power the platform provides her, but earns more money from her various roles in the community than she does from her social media presence — though the two are vitally interconnected. Instagram appears to operate in this way for many — a nexus around which other opportunities, entrepreneurial ventures and side hustles occur. People becoming brands with faces and voices. What’s contained in the messaging is key.
The women talk about the importance of cultivating “relationships” with their “communities”, steering talk away from the machinations of the monetary value of influence. Progressive narratives underpin or offset the images and commercialism — mental health, environmentalism, feminism, LGBTQI rights. While none of this could be read as altruistic, surely the ethical lean is positive.
That said, Penklis’ view is pragmatic. Her product is organic with a high price point. So her social media feed is designed to attract a particular clientele, rather than highlight an agenda. She’s also refreshingly honest and tapped into the essential fact of Instagram influence: envy sells.
While Byron Bay might offer the promise of this enviable work life balance — pristine surf beaches, spa and wellness retreats, national parks — the business of influence can be hard work and switching off isn’t easy.
Royall has suffered from burnout and Bancroft is conscious about cultivating time away from technology. In the Compass program we see her working with other women in a communal garden. She tells me she often visits her mother on their nearby ancestral lands but does not document it.
“How many people can say that — that they can sit and talk with their mother for hours without looking at their phone?”
Some say Byron is the site of a spiritual energy vortex. Others see development opportunities.Unsplash/Patrick Mcgregor, CC BY
Being there
Byron Bay is a strange attractor — the Insta-driven celebrity wave, just the latest to roll in after the colonialists, whalers, hippies and the wealthy.
Sure, some young wannabes are lining up at sunset at the redeveloped Beach Hotel hoping to run into a Hemsworth brother and real estate is skyrocketing. But the roll call of visitors and locals remains eclectic. There are still old rockers holding up the bar at The Rails, glitter fairies busking on stilts in the main street while the well-heeled stroll by in their boat shoes.
Some spiritualists believe Byron and the surrounding area is a portal or energy vortex. The Arakwal believe it is a healing place where Indigenous women would birth in the ti-tree lakes. There’s definitely something in the water. Wave after wave, the same “cheer up, slow down, chill out” vibe washes over everyone.
On my final morning in Byron I head up to the Pass where another paddle out protest is scheduled — not against Byron Baes but PEP11, a major oil and gas venture threatening the precious marine ecosystem on the east coast. The bright blue day and the gathered crowd are impressive.
Locals at the paddle out protest, this time against an offshore gas venture rather than a reality television series.Author, Author provided
I don’t see any influencers or famous Hollywood actors, or even many people on their phones. Everyone radiates casual ease and community, standing about, or pooled under the eucalypts, boards strewn all over the place. Jaded radio hosts like Mick Molloy may have paid out on the Byron community for going surfing as a form of protest (he suggests burning a wicker Hemsworth effigy instead). But when you’re here the gesture is powerful and symbiotic with a lifestyle tuned in to consciousness raising.
Musician Billy Otto, a guy Byron Baes’s producers reportedly tried to recruit for the reality show, takes to the microphone. After his song and the speeches, the crowd flows down to the beach, surf warriors paddling out a model of a giant gas rig which they dismantle and bring back to shore.
Beyond them, further out to sea, my eye is drawn to Nguthungulli (Julian Rocks) where the Arakwal people say, their grandfather creator is resting. As the surfers form a circle, I’d wager it’s not the influencers, but Nguthungulli who draws so many people to Byron Bay. The most easterly point of the country. A place originally named Cavanbah, the “meeting place”.
On the way home my phone dies. I guess refreshing my Instagram self is going to have to wait.
WHEN Nanaia Mahuta was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, there were hopes for a change in government thinking towards the struggles of indigenous people. The minister said she hoped to bring her experience and cultural identity as an indigenous woman to her role on international issues.
Palestine, West Papua and Western Sahara are places where the indigenous people are struggling for freedom and human rights and early on there was hope New Zealand would join the 138 member states of the United Nations that recognise Palestine.
However the hope has faded and Mahuta finally spoke on Tuesday, via a tweet, saying she was “deeply concerned” about the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem and Gaza. She called for a “rapid de-escalation” from Israel and the Palestinians, for Israel to “cease demolitions and evictions” and for “both sides to halt steps which undermine prospects for a two-state solution”.
Speaking with reporters later she said she did not want to apportion blame and in a further statement on Thursday said New Zealand officials had raised Israel’s “continued violation of international law and forced evictions occurring in East Jerusalem” with the Israeli ambassador.
Mahuta speaks as though there was some kind of political or military equality between Israel and Palestinians. But there isn’t.
In reality, it means the minister is appeasing the highly militarised state of Israel, with which we have extensive bilateral relations, against a largely defenceless indigenous Palestinian population that lives under Israeli occupation and/or control.
She is addressing only the symptoms of the problem. The heart of the problem is that for the past 53 years Israel has run what the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation Human Rights Watch has called “crimes of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians.
Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta speaks as though there was some
kind of political or military equality between Israel and Palestinians.
But there isn’t. IMAGE: APR/RNZ
With tensions rising, Israel this month mounted an extraordinary brutal attack on Muslim worshippers as they were praying in the Al Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. This mosque is the third holiest site for Muslims and this was seen around the world as an outrage against all of Islam.
The heart of the problem is that for the past 53 years Israel has run
what the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation
Human Rights Watch has called “crimes of apartheid and persecution”
against Palestinians. IMAGE: APR screenshot HRW
From there the Hamas leadership in Gaza, after issuing an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw security forces from Al Aqsa, began firing rockets into Israel, which has responded with heavy bombing of the densely populated Gaza strip.
I have a T-shirt that says “The first casualty of war is truth, the rest are mostly civilians” and so it has been this past week, with Palestinians bearing the brunt of casualties with many dozens killed, including at least 60 children.
Despite all this, anyone reading the minister’s comments would think both sides are equally to blame when the problem lies with Israel’s denial of human rights to Palestinians over as many decades as the issue has remained unresolved.
So what should a small country at the bottom of the world do to influence events in the Middle East? The answer is simple. New Zealand should implement its existing policy on the Middle East and give it some teeth.
It is a policy based on respect for international law and United Nations resolutions. These should be at the heart of our response and direct what we say, how we say it and what we do.
This means the government should demand the following:
An end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land (UN Security Council resolution 242) and the right of return for Palestinian refugees expelled by Israeli militias (UN General Assembly resolution 194 – reaffirmed every year since 1949).
The end of the more than 65 laws discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel (These are illegal under the crime of apartheid as defined by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court).
Israel stop building Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land (UN Security Council resolution 2334 which was co-sponsored by New Zealand under John Key’s National Government). These settlements are illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Initially Israel will take not a blind bit of notice and these calls will need to be followed by escalating sanctions.
It’s time for the minister to speak up unequivocally for Palestinian human rights and bring Aotearoa New Zealand on to the right side of history.
John Minto is the national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published byThe New Zealand Heraldand is republished by Cafe Pacific with permission.
In the New Zealand 2021 Budget, a big investment of NZ$108 million has been signalled to support the wellbeing of the Pacific population through the rebuild and recovery from the covid-19 pandemic.
Pacific Peoples Minister ‘Aupito William Sio said this was a significant investment for Pacific communities who have been hard-hit by the pandemic in the past year.
“With the Pacific Aotearoa Lalanga Fou Goals as a guide, the Pacific package puts a strong focus on Pacific wellbeing and continues the government’s commitment to ensuring that Pacific peoples are leading this work to achieve confident, thriving, prosperous and resilient communities,” he said.
“Budget 2021 makes this possible through tailored business, health and education initiatives that bolster the vital holistic work Pacific communities are already doing across the country.”
The $108 million Pacific package is made up of the following:
$99.6 million new operating funding
$660,000 new capital funding from the Budget 2021 allowances and the Covid-19 Response and Recovery Fund (CRRF).
$7.8 million in operating funding is repurposed from existing funding in Vote Education.
Pacific Peoples Minister ‘Aupito William Sio … initiatives that bolster the vital holistic work Pacific communities. Image: Samuel Rillstone/RNZ
The package includes:
$30.3 million boost to assist the Tupu Aotearoa programme to support approximately 7500 Pacific peoples into employment, training, and education across Aotearoa New Zealand, funded from the CRRF.
Investing $6.6 million to support establishing the Pacific Wellbeing Strategy – a cross-government initiative that will develop ways to measure Pacific wellbeing across government work programmes and initiatives.
Supporting Pacific businesses through the impacts of covid-19 with $16.2 million for business support services, funded from the CRRF.
$20.8 million supporting Pacific bilingual and immersion education in the schooling system, made up of $12.4 million of new operating funding and $644,000 of new capital funding from Budget 2021 allowances, with $7.8 million of repurposed funding from Vote Education.
$5 million operating funding and $16,000 capital funding to deliver sustained professional learning and development to embed Tapasā as a tool to address social inclusion in the education sector.
$5.1 million for the development of two new Pacific language subjects, gagana Tokelau and vagahau Niue as NCEA Achievement Standards subjects.
Lynfield College on the Niue stage at Polyfest 2021 … Budget funding for development of two new NCEA Pacific languages, gagana Tokelau and vagahau Niue. Image: Mabel Muller/RNZ
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Australians of Indian heritage are not just trying to get back home — many are attempting to go to India.
Scott Morrison revealed on Wednesday that since April 23, more more than 1,000 people had sought to travel there. “Now we haven’t let them go — for obvious reasons,” he said.
The government declined to provide a breakdown of the reasons given for wanting to travel. Officials will be quizzed at Senate estimates early next week.
We can presume, however, that a significant proportion sought to leave on compassionate grounds — family illnesses and funerals. This week we received news of two more Australian deaths in India – middle-aged men who were there for compassionate reasons.
These are absolutely legitimate reasons for people trying to travel. They aren’t some indulgence. And our system should be up to dealing with people caught in family crises.
As things stand, those facing such situations don’t have a hope. The only exemptions currently being considered for travel to India are in three categories: critical workers providing assistance in the pandemic there; people travelling in Australia’s national interest (diplomats and the like); and anyone seeking urgent medical treatment that’s not available here (which would be no one, you’d think).
Morrison and his ministers display less emotion than you might expect in their comments about those Australians desperate to cope with illnesses or deaths of loved ones far away. They do not seem able to walk in their shoes.
It’s a similar story with the children stranded in India.
A Senate committee recently heard there were some 173 minors who were not in a family group.
Surely some children could be flown to Australia in a charter, accompanied by Australian officials. An Australian-based parent could then be taken into quarantine with them.
Such an emergency arrangement could be put in place by Foreign Affairs Department officials and Australia’s High Commissioner in India, Barry O’Farrell, who as a former NSW premier has plenty of experience in organising things.
The India issue is just one of the sharp edges of the increasing debate about Australia’s international border. Attention was focused on returnees from India when the government imposed its controversial temporary ban (now lifted). The wider issue of when the border should be opened flared after last week’s budget assumed it would stay basically closed until mid-next year.
What’s dubbed “Fortress Australia” is objectively driven by the slowness of the vaccination rollout, which has Morrison under pressure, not least because it holds back the economy. But politically, the shut gate suits Morrison, because polling and premiers’ electoral experience tell him the public strongly support closed borders.
This week’s Newspoll showed 73% agreeing “international borders should remain largely closed until at least mid-2022, or the pandemic is under control globally”, and this included 78% of Coalition voters.
Only 21% agreed “international borders should open as soon as all Australians who want to be are vaccinated”.
This mightn’t be an unexpected result, but it is a remarkable one. Australians are saying they are willing to be cut off from the world even when we can expect the COVID risk to be much reduced.
Unsurprisingly, in the vanguard of those pressing for the border to open sooner rather than later are the business groups and individual companies.
Virgin CEO Jayne Hrdlicka was criticised by Morrison for an “insensitive” comment after she said this week: “COVID will be part of the community. We will become sick with COVID and it won’t put us in hospital, and it won’t put people into dire straits because we’ll have a vaccine. Some people may die, but it will be way smaller than with the flu.”
Obviously businesses, especially airlines, have commercial interests at stake in the border opening (although this isn’t across the board – some businesses are advantaged by the present situation).
But, more significantly, the health experts are now talking about the transition to a more open Australia.
Nick Coatsworth, a former Commonwealth deputy chief medical officer and a specialist in infectious diseases, said in an address last week to the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons: “At a point in the future when a significant majority of our community is vaccinated, there will be pressure to open our borders. We must not resist that. In fact, when the time is right, we should be leading the calls for it.”
Coatsworth isn’t saying the border should be open tomorrow but that the conversation needs to shift to how we live with some COVID circulating.
This is back to the days when Morrison used to talk a lot about “living with the virus”.
But at that time Morrison did not expect Australia would go beyond “suppressing” community transmission to more or less eliminating it. And this success has changed community expectations.
What medicos like Coatsworth are saying is that you can’t forever have the gold standard we have now.
Morrison not only wants this until the election – at the moment he does not want to jump the conversation forward.
His message is the government has plans – such as for vaccinated people to have guaranteed interstate travel (vaccine passport) and for selective arrivals – but he doesn’t want to go into detail yet.
It’s a stark contrast to those detailed colour-coded spreadsheets for lifting lockdown restrictions he flourished last year.
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian is anxious for more ambition, urging both a faster vaccination rollout and an earlier international opening.
At the centre of the issue is the shambles with the vaccine program. The rollout has two central problems: its tardiness from the start (with supply shortages and implementation glitches), and then the big hiccup of “vaccine hesitancy”. People became wary of the AstraZeneca vaccine following advice that in rare cases it caused blood clots.
Morrison dismissed a poll published in Nine newspapers this week that showed about three in ten people said they were unlikely to get vaccinated. He said he preferred to focus on the other seven in ten and “get on with them”.
But the hesitancy could remain a major difficulty at least until people can access more choice of vaccine later in the year, and it hampers returning to normality and increases the danger of outbreaks. The president of the Australian Medical Association, Omar Khorshid, has argued giving people a date for opening the international border would encourage more to get vaccinated.
Khorshid is blunt, telling the ABC: “When we open those borders, we’re going to get both of those viruses [flu and COVID]. … We’re going to get a bad flu season. Plus, we’ll get a certain number of people who get sick from COVID. And we’ve got to make sure our [hospital] system is ready to cope with that and our public understand that this is part of our pathway towards getting back to normal.”
A few months ago there was much haste in federal circles to map out Australia’s international reopening and announce it. The AstraZeneca issue derailed that plan. Now there’s not even an effective communication strategy, just a bland information push for eligible people to get the jab.
Australia’s dilemma is that it has effectively achieved local elimination and (so far) maintained it, but it is stumbling in the vital follow-up — rapid mass vaccination. Morrison seeks to turn this weakness into a political strength but is running into headwinds, albeit not from the public.
Timor-Leste today registered 172 more cases of covid-19 infection with the majority in Dili – passing the barrier of 5000 cases since the beginning of the pandemic.
On the day that the country celebrated 19 years of the restoration of independence, the Integrated Crisis Management Center (CIGC) announced 126 more cases in Dili, 11 in Manatuto, 10 in Bobonaro, eight in Baucau, five in Viqueque, three in Ermera and one in Ainaro.
With the recovery of 76, the country now has 2398 active cases and 5121 cases accumulated since the beginning of the pandemic.
About 10 percent of the cases recorded in the last 24 hours had symptoms of covid-19, with positive cases in Dili representing 13.1 percent of the 964 tests performed in the capital and almost 7 percent of the 662 tests recorded outside the capital.
The infection incidence rate is set at 13.4/100,000 inhabitants outside Dili and at 40.6/100,000 inhabitants in Dili.
The number of cases in the Vera Cruz isolation center has increased to 37, of which four are in serious condition.
Antonio Sampaio is the Lusa News Agency correspondent in Dili and this article is republished in community partnership.
Amid uncertainty and a court battle over the University of Goroka’s vice-chancellor seat, Higher Education Minister Wesley Raminai surprised staff and students by leading the university’s interim council members onto the campus to be “sworn in”.
The usually quiet study-friendly Humilaveka campus atmosphere was disrupted by a chanting group of Huli wigmen until the delegation arrived about noon, reports The National.
The majority of staff and students, gripped by confusion, were not present to provide a traditional university reception.
Goroka chancellor Joseph Sukwianomb … legal battle over university leadership. Image: LoopPNG
Only a handful of senior staff members received the delegation.
Raminai led them to the Mark Solon Auditorium board room.
The members were sworn in by Goroka District Court Senior Magistrate Josephine Nindue.
They were Joe Wemin (chairman), Dr Goru Hane Nou, Takale Tuna, Johnson Kent, Nelson Auwo, Rose Koyama, John Sari, Steven Nujuitu, Robin Guebianbazzynu, Wayne Joseph and Lavert Ganimo.
Raminai congratulated the interim council members, describing the council as balanced with members from all regions of Papua New Guinea.
Police serve court order The new council members were then ushered out of the campus to a luncheon when police served a National Court order on Raminai, Wemin and acting vice-chancellor Dr Teng Waninga.
The order dismissed a motion Dr Waninga had filed in court to restrain chancellor Dr Joseph Sukwianomb and vice-chancellor Professor Musawe Sinebare and their agents from interfering with Waninga’s management of the unversity.
Dr Sukwianomb is a former vice-chancellor of the University of Papua New Guinea and a onetime manager of the Prime Minister’s Department.
Lawyers Hebert Wally and Tony Waisi for Sukwianomb and Sinebare advised that the order had weakened Dr Waninga and Wemin’s position at the university with any activity following the service being deemed legally “in contempt”.
The service of the document was received and acknowledged by Raminai, Wemin and Dr Waninga through their lawyers.
However, Raminai then allowed Wemin to chair his first council meeting as “chancellor”.
Wemin appointed as the disputed officers Dr Waninga as vice-chancellor, Dr Steven Potek (pro-vice chancellor policy and planning), Dr Mathew Landu (pro-vice chancellor academic, research and innovation), Naomi Kouse (registrar) and Jim Mek (bursar).
The appointments were for a short term of six months.
Prosecution of perpetrators of gender-based violence around the country still remains a massive problem for Papua New Guinea, says National Capital District Governor Powes Parkop.
He said while the issue of GBV continued to escalate in the country, perpetrators were not being brought to account and this gave them a “licence to continue”.
Parkop said this while addressing a workshop conducted by United Nations Women in Lae last week.
NCD Governor Powes Parkop … “hard to get justice” for PNG’s women. Image: EMTV News
“We need to fix this referral pathway, because we cannot let perpetrators of GBV [avoid] the law for their actions.
“It is simply hard for women who are victims and survivors of GBV to go and get the support they need in terms of counselling, medical support and court, and for some it is hard to get justice,” Parkop said.
“Most are not able to get justice due to lack of financial support and other factors.
“There must be a support system established so that victims of GBV cannot go back to abusive relationships where some of them end up losing their lives.
Dynamics ‘unchanged’ “It is important that we fix this referral pathway and allocate money and resources to effectively address this…..because despite work done over the years to address GBV issues in the country, this has not changed the dynamics.”
He said all stakeholders, including the government and political leaders, must ensure that this issue was dealt with and must not be something that the future generation could continue to do.
A participant in the gathering and an advocate of GBV in Lae, Nellie McLay, said there was a serious need for the government to look at recommendations made some years ago and implement these to help address the issue of GBV.
McLay said women were important, equal to men and were bearers of human beings, the most important resources in the world.
But many women in PNG continued to be abused, tortured and some killed at the hand of their partners, she said.
Several participants said that when there was not much support given to victims of GBV, women continued to stay in abusive relationship and this needed to change.
When Nanaia Mahuta was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, there were hopes for a change in government thinking towards the struggles of indigenous people. The minister said she hoped to bring her experience and cultural identity as an indigenous woman to her role on international issues.
Palestine, West Papua and Western Sahara are places where the indigenous people are struggling for freedom and human rights and early on there was hope New Zealand would join the 138 member states of the United Nations that recognise Palestine.
However the hope has faded and Mahuta finally spoke on Tuesday, via a tweet, saying she was “deeply concerned” about the deteriorating situation in Jerusalem and Gaza. She called for a “rapid de-escalation” from Israel and the Palestinians, for Israel to “cease demolitions and evictions” and for “both sides to halt steps which undermine prospects for a two-state solution”.
Speaking with reporters later she said she did not want to apportion blame and in a further statement on Thursday said New Zealand officials had raised Israel’s “continued violation of international law and forced evictions occurring in East Jerusalem” with the Israeli ambassador.
Mahuta speaks as though there was some kind of political or military equality between Israel and Palestinians. But there isn’t.
In reality, it means the minister is appeasing the highly militarised state of Israel, with which we have extensive bilateral relations, against a largely defenceless indigenous Palestinian population that lives under Israeli occupation and/or control.
She is addressing only the symptoms of the problem. The heart of the problem is that for the past 53 years Israel has run what the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation Human Rights Watch has called “crimes of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians.
NZ Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta speaks as though there was some kind of political or military equality between Israel and Palestinians. But there isn’t. Image: Dom Thomas/RNZ
With tensions rising, Israel this month mounted an extraordinary brutal attack on Muslim worshippers as they were praying in the Al Aqsa mosque in occupied East Jerusalem. This mosque is the third holiest site for Muslims and this was seen around the world as an outrage against all of Islam.
The heart of the problem is that for the past 53 years Israel has run what the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organisation Human Rights Watch has called “crimes of apartheid and persecution” against Palestinians. Image: APR screenshot HRW
From there the Hamas leadership in Gaza, after issuing an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw security forces from Al Aqsa, began firing rockets into Israel, which has responded with heavy bombing of the densely populated Gaza strip.
I have a T-shirt that says “The first casualty of war is truth, the rest are mostly civilians” and so it has been this past week, with Palestinians bearing the brunt of casualties with many dozens killed, including at least 60 children.
Despite all this, anyone reading the minister’s comments would think both sides are equally to blame when the problem lies with Israel’s denial of human rights to Palestinians over as many decades as the issue has remained unresolved.
So what should a small country at the bottom of the world do to influence events in the Middle East? The answer is simple. New Zealand should implement its existing policy on the Middle East and give it some teeth.
It is a policy based on respect for international law and United Nations resolutions. These should be at the heart of our response and direct what we say, how we say it and what we do.
This means the government should demand the following:
An end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land (UN Security Council resolution 242) and the right of return for Palestinian refugees expelled by Israeli militias (UN General Assembly resolution 194 – reaffirmed every year since 1949).
The end of the more than 65 laws discriminating against Palestinian citizens of Israel (These are illegal under the crime of apartheid as defined by the 2002 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court).
Israel stop building Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian land (UN Security Council resolution 2334 which was co-sponsored by New Zealand under John Key’s National Government). These settlements are illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and a war crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Initially Israel will take not a blind bit of notice and these calls will need to be followed by escalating sanctions.
It’s time for the minister to speak up unequivocally for Palestinian human rights and bring Aotearoa New Zealand on to the right side of history.
John Minto is the national chair of the Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA). This article was first published byThe New Zealand Heraldand is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
[Following an attack on the Islam’s third most holy shrine by Israel security forces] the Hamas leadership in Gaza, after issuing an ultimatum to Israel to withdraw security forces from Al Aqsa, began firing rockets into Israel, which has responded with heavy bombing of the densely populated Gaza strip. Image: Said Khatib/AFP/Al Jazeera
The chair of the board of French Polynesia’s social security agency CPS has called on the French state to pay for the medical costs caused by its nuclear weapons tests.
Patrick Galenon, who is also a leading trade unionist, has written to the French Overseas Minister Sebastien Lecornu as France plans a high-level roundtable in Paris next month on the legacy of the nuclear weapons tests in the South Pacific.
Galenon said that since 1995 the CPS had paid out US$800 million to treat a total of 10,000 people suffering from any of the 23 cancers recognised by law as being the result of radiation.
Patrick Galenon, chair of the board of French Polynesia’s social security agency CPS … France’s liability needs to be anchored in law. Image: Tahiti Infos
A 2010 French law recognised for the first time that the nuclear tests were not clean but compensation to successful claimants was only made on the basis of national solidarity, not because the French state recognised any liability.
Galenon said France’s liability had to be anchored in law as the rest was just sentimentality and politics.
He said France should also assume paying for ongoing oncology services, which cost the CPS more than US$50 million a year.
Between 1966 and 1996, France carried out 193 nuclear weapons tests in French Polynesia.
The test sites of Moruroa and Fangataufa remain excised from French Polynesia and are French no-go zones.
More than 2000 nuclear tests have been conducted since the first American test, Trinity, in 1945, according to the Swedish Physicians against Nuclear Weapons. More than 500 tests have been done in the atmosphere, under water or in space. The rest have been tested underground.The US is responsible for around 1000 of these tests, the Soviet Union conducted about 700, France 210 (including 17 in Algeria), China 35 and the UK about 30 tests. India has conducted six tests, Pakistan five and North Korea one nuclear test.
Major global nuclear testing nations. Graphic: Laromkarnvapen
Papua New Guinea’s Communications Minister, Timothy Masiu, recently told a news conference to mark World Press Freedom Day that the state of journalism and broadcasting in the country has seen a general decline.
He was critical of the quality and the content of the media in general. The former NBC journalist and broadcaster had reported on Bougainville during the decade-long crisis. He had served with former NBC head and senior journalist Joseph Ealedona.
I agreed with him. But I couldn’t let the statement go without challenge. While many have been critical of the state of “investigative” journalism in the country and the apparent lack of impact the media has had on the corruption and abuse, there has been very little investment in Papua New Guinea’s journalism schools over 25 years.
Back then, the university produced journalists who were a force to be reckoned with. They shaped the politics, rubbed shoulders with the political and business heavies and were were unafraid to be openly critical of the government abuses.
At Divine Word University, the people focused approach to journalism and development shaped how rural communities were given a voice.
Their former students provided a vital link between the people and their government.
Quality training That generation reported on the various constitutional impasses, Bougainville, the Sandline crisis and the inquiries that followed all of the above. The quality of training prepared them to be active participants in a growing country.
Both schools are now struggling. The lack of investment from government is evident. Both universities have tried their best, with the little resources they have, to produce the best they can.
So I issued a challenge to the Communications Minister: If you are going to be critical of the training, I want you, through the Communications Ministry, to invest in training in our universities.
He was kind enough to listen. We began a discussion immediately after the conference which I sincerely hope will lead to some progress.
The same challenge goes to every other politician who is critical of the quality of journalism training. Students have to be taught well. Schools have to be given the ability to improve, build, innovate and grow. That means spending money to help achieve this.
The same challenge goes to the government for investment in our teachers’ colleges and our biggest engineering university, UNITECH. If our foundations are flawed, the outcome will be disastrous.
Asia Pacific Report republishes articles from Lae-based Papua New Guinean television journalist Scott Waide’s blog, My Land, My Country, with permission.
The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is considering rescheduling psilocybin and MDMA from their current classification as Schedule 9 prohibited substances to Schedule 8 controlled substances.
This would allow psychiatrists to use these drugs in combination with psychotherapy for the treatment of conditions such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The TGA cited limited evidence of therapeutic benefit, safety concerns, potential for abuse, and lack of suitably trained psychiatrists.
But the final ruling, which was expected on April 22, has now been delayed while the TGA seek independent expert advice on the “therapeutic value, risks, and benefits to public health” of the change.
If MDMA and psilocybin are reclassified, they would be administered in a supervised environment.Shutterstock
The results of completed studies are very promising.
For example, last month, a study of 59 patients with major depression showed just two sessions of psilocybin-assisted therapy was as effective as a six-week course of the antidepressant escitalopram. The proportion of patients who no longer qualified for a major depression diagnosis after treatment was twice as high in the psilocybin group.
This month saw results of one of the largest trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD published. The phase 3 study used MDMA-assisted psychotherapy to treat 90 patients with severe, chronic PTSD. After three sessions, 67% of participants no longer qualified for a PTSD diagnosis, compared to just 32% of participants undergoing therapy alone.
Studies are showing MDMA and psilocybin can be effective in treating a variety of mental health problems.Shutterstock
Are MDMA and psilocybin safe?
Unlike many Schedule 8 medicines, psilocybin- or MDMA-assisted psychotherapy treatments are not taken regularly. The substance is usually used just two or three times with trained specialists as part of a psychotherapy program.
Despite the safety concerns cited by the TGA, there haven’t been any serious adverse reported events due to psilocybin or MDMA from dozens of clinical trials. Less serious effects can include temporary anxiety, paranoia, fear, nausea, post-treatment headaches, or mild increases in blood pressure and heart rate.
Of course, these trials use pharmaceutical-grade drugs administered by a doctor.
However, one of the most comprehensive studies of the harms of commonly used illegal drugs found even illicit forms of psilocybin and MDMA are among the least harmful. In fact, “mushrooms” containing psilocybin had the lowest overall harm score, while illicit forms of clinically-used Schedule 8 substances like cocaine, cannabis and ketamine were all more harmful than psilocybin or MDMA.
We don’t know what dose of psilocybin would be lethal to humans, but it’s estimated to be about 1,000 times greater than the therapeutic dose. No overdose deaths due to psilocybin toxicity alone have ever been reported.
Use of illicitly manufactured MDMA — which often contains other drugs or impurities — has occasionally caused deaths. An estimated 600,000 Australians use illegal MDMA each year, and an average of about three deaths per year since 2000 have been associated with MDMA toxicity alone.
But illicit use of MDMA of unknown dose and purity is much more dangerous than administration of pharmaceutical MDMA under medical supervision in a clinical environment.
A growing field
In recent years, respected academic and medical institutions around the world have launched dedicated centres for psychedelic and MDMA research, including Johns Hopkins University and Imperial College London.
And research into the therapeutic effects of psilocybin and MDMA has recently started in Australia. St Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne is conducting a clinical trial using psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy to treat anxiety and depression in terminally ill patients. A clinical trial at Monash University is looking at psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy for generalised anxiety disorder and MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD.
The Australian government recently announced A$15 million in funding for research into the medical potential of psychedelics and MDMA.
It’s hard to reconcile the TGA’s interim decision to retain Schedule 9 for substances with demonstrated benefit in several mental health conditions and fewer safety concerns than many existing Schedule 8 medicines.
The US medicines regulator recently granted MDMA and psilocybin “breakthrough therapy” designation; a special status for highly promising drugs that speeds up their path to the clinic.
The down-scheduling of psilocybin and MDMA could have enormous medical benefit for Australian patients, especially when Australia spent A$10.6 billion on mental health between 2018-2019.
Victoria’s budget shows a Treasurer engaged in a high-wire balancing act: ensuring a job-rich economic ‘soft landing’ on one hand, while trying to improve the state’s long-term fiscal position on the other.
The budget partly delivers on both goals but, like any difficult circus act, it is part hard work and skill, part luck, and part optical illusion.
The balancing act
Last year, the brief for federal and state budgets alike was simple: spend to support the economy.
Australia was in the grip of the COVID recession, and nowhere was this more acute than in Victoria.
The economic conditions required targeted and effective stimulus, and Victoria delivered in spades.
This year’s test is a little more complicated.
The recovery is going well – Victoria’s jobs have returned to pre-crisis levels, a remarkable turnaround given the hit to the employment from the second lockdown – but unemployment is still elevated.
The challenge for fiscal policy is now to “stick the landing” by quickly getting unemployment as low as possible so wages can grow again.
The federal government made a reasonable attempt at meeting this challenge last week when it delivered a budget focused on creating jobs, particularly in the care sector — even if the quality of its spending fell short and the outlook for wages growth remains poor in the short-term.
But the federal government has one big advantage: for the time being at least, the low cost of debt has given it breathing space on the fiscal position.
Victoria’s cost of borrowing is still low – the government can borrow for 10 years at an interest rate of less than 2%, only slightly higher than the Commonwealth’s.
But credit ratings agency Moody’s recently downgraded the state’s credit rating from AAA to AA1 and cut its outlook to “negative”.
That brings the health of the balance sheet into slightly sharper focus.
And this means a treasurer walking the tightrope of more spending to support the economy while at the same time making sure that he reins in future deficits.
The hard work: taxes and spending are up
For the budget balance, the Victorian government has made some difficult decisions to raise more revenue. The budget includes more than $5 billion in new taxes over the next four years.
Tim Pallas cuts the deficit while supporting the economy.JAMES ROSS/AAP
The new property “windfall profits levy” and the increase in land tax are two significant steps forward in building a more efficient tax base, even if the accompanying increase to inefficient stamp duties is a step backward.
And the significant extra spending on mental health is partially offset by a new Mental Health Levy on payroll tax for businesses – 0.5% for payrolls over $10 million and another 0.5% for payrolls over $100 million, raising $2.7 billion over four years.
This will slightly increase the inefficiency of the progressive payroll tax base, but should not be a major drag on growth.
But the overall focus on revenue is warranted.
It carves out a point of difference between Victoria and the federal government, which studiously avoided the “revenue question” in last week’s budget.
To support the economy, the additional revenue from these measures is more than offset by new spending – more than $12 billion over four years.
The centrepiece of the Victorian budget is the mental health package. The government claims it will create 3,000 jobs in the sector in addition to improving the quality and availability of care.
There are also additional skills initiatives and spending on health and child protection services.
The good luck and illusions
The housing market has done its bit for the treasurer’s success delivering a windfall $5 billion over the three forward years, primarily driven by big uplifts in stamp duty and land tax.
The other very helpful change, this time to accounting practices, delivers $6.5 billion over three years in “other administrative variations”.
The removal of the “capital assets charge” is consistent with other states, but it’s a one-off sweetener for the bottom line.
Landing the trick
On the key indicators of performance, things are heading in the right direction, although not as fast as we might hope.
Unemployment is coming down and the numbers look much rosier than the treasury’s previous estimates in November. However, it is still expected to be elevated over the next four years.
Whereas the federal government is forecasting nationwide unemployment of 4.5% in 2024-25, Victoria projects 5.25% by that date, and unemployment above the 2019-20 level of 5.4% for at least two years.
And wages growth for Victorians is expected to be subdued, and will go backwards in real terms in the next financial year.
Budget balances have improved by several billion over the next four years, although the government still expects a deficit of $2.5 billion in 2024-25.
Net debt is expected to reach 26.8% of gross state product by 2024-25, with interest costs estimated at 0.8% of gross state product by that date.
The result by the end of the four year projections period is a return to the size of government before the crisis – albeit a level that was high by historical standards.
There’s no playbook for state treasurers coming out of a pandemic recession.
Victoria’s treasurer Tim Pallas is trying to walk the tightrope of strong recovery and fiscal responsibility.
It looks as if he’s pulled it off without too many major stumbles, with a bit of help from the stronger than expected recovery, the housing market, and a change in accounting standards.
New Zealand has now had three “Wellbeing Budgets”: the prototype in 2019, the COVID-19 “Rebuilding Together” version in 2020, and today Finance Minister Grant Robertson announced the Labour government is “Securing our Recovery”.
With Labour governing with an absolute majority, projected debt levels lower than initially forecast and nearly NZ$1 billion from last year’s COVID-19 recovery fund unspent, expectations for housing, health, climate change and welfare have been heightened.
Here, our three experts respond to today’s budget and assess its implications in various crucial areas for the year ahead.
A budget for middle New Zealand
Jennifer Curtin, Public Policy Institute, University of Auckland
Finance Minister Grant Robertson opened his budget speech by taking voters old enough to remember back to 1991. This was the year Ruth Richardson’s first budget as finance minister was handed down. She described it as the “Mother of all Budgets” and it is remembered for considerable cuts and fundamental changes to social expenditure in New Zealand.
It was savage for low socioeconomic groups and set the scene for New Zealand cementing itself as a neoliberal leader. Today, many advocacy groups seeking increased social spending argue 1991 was the start of what has become intergenerational poverty and inequality.
Invoking the Mother of all Budgets — before announcing spending increases in benefits, student allowances, Māori health, housing and education, and more money for capital expenditure on hospitals and schools — allowed Grant Robertson to once again align his government with the halcyon days associated with Michael Joseph Savage’s first Labour government.
Certainly it was a budget that will warm the hearts of Labour’s base. Judging by much of the early reaction from the Greens and Māori Party, it might also appeal to those who vote for the cross-benchers. All this while emphasising the importance of ensuring debt did not reach 50% of GDP and being fiscally prudent.
There are also critics on both sides (other than the National and ACT parties). Economist Cameron Bagrie and Susan St John from the Child Poverty Action Group both rued the absence of transformation, albeit from different perspectives.
Benefit increases were welcomed but are not yet sufficient to cope with increased housing costs, to relieve debt, and make up for intergenerational asset loss.
Meanwhile, there is still no clear pathway to opening the borders to help with the supply of goods, skilled workers and international students to support the government’s new and existing infrastructure projects, and to revive our connections with the world.
These criticisms will not worry the government. Robertson had dampened expectations in advance of budget and then surpassed them on delivery. This is a budget for Labour’s base and the centre, meaning the polls will remain favourable, and there will be little of substance for the opposition to rail against. At least for a while.
A welcome welfare boost but still not enough
Michael Fletcher, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
The Budget 2021 welfare increases are to be welcomed. From July this year all main benefits will rise by $20 per adult. From April next year there will be a further increase of $15 per adult for beneficiaries with children, plus an additional top-up to bring rates to at least those recommended by the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) in 2019.
Overall, these changes mean increases of between $32 and $55 per week, depending on family type, and come on top of the $25 increase last year. To illustrate, the single adult rate will rise from $258.50 per week now to $315 per week by April next year. For a sole parent the rate will go from $387 to $435, and for a couple with children from $441 to $566.
These are big increases and go a long way towards reversing the 1991 welfare cuts and subsequent long decline in the level of benefits compared to wages. In that respect, Finance Minister Grant Robertson is justified in describing today’s announcement as historic.
But, sizeable as they are, are these increases big enough? Do they provide those reliant on benefits — the poorest in society — with an adequate minimum standard of living, sufficient that they can fully participate in their communities?
The answer is almost certainly no, at least for many people on benefits. Notably, the budget goal of meeting the WEAG recommendations for core rates by 2022 takes no account of price increases in the three years since WEAG reported.
Nor has the budget addressed the Working for Families tax credits or the Accommodation Supplement, despite the rapid increases in rents many beneficiaries have been facing in recent years.
More analysis is needed, but it appears unlikely the Budget 2021 increases are enough to meet the incomes WEAG calculated families and individuals need to get by on.
Robertson also announced the government, in concert with Business New Zealand and the Council of Trade Unions, is looking to develop a social unemployment insurance scheme. It would be unfortunate, however, if today’s announcements were seen as the last word on benefits and attention then turned to supporting those more advantaged New Zealanders with a scheme that pays considerably more than a benefit.
A shadow carbon price, but nothing transformative
David Hall and Nina Ives, Social Sciences and Public Policy, AUT University
We were warned this was not going to be a climate budget. But the government seems to have learned lessons from its previous term, and has under-promised to allow for positive surprises.
The biggest surprise was that, from Budget 2022 onwards, the government will hypothecate (or recycle) the revenue generated from the auctioning of Emissions Trading Scheme allowances into emissions reductions programmes. Doing so is international best practice, yet it comes up against Treasury’s longstanding aversion to hypothecation. This is a major policy win, and ensures ongoing revenue for climate change issues.
Rail enjoys a major boost of $1.3 billion in operating and capital expenditure and New Zealand Green Investment Finance is being recapitalised with an extra $300 million, essentially quadrupling in size, with a focus on decarbonising public transport, waste and plastics.
There are sprinkles of climate-related investment elsewhere, including $302 million for incentivising low-emission vehicles, $120 million for home insulation and heating retrofits, $17 million to build regulatory capacity for climate risk reporting by large financial institutions, $6 million to implement a sustainable biofuels mandate, $14 million to better enable just transitions for communities, $14 million to scale up business support by the Energy Efficiency & Conservation Authority, and $41 million to improve diffusion of low-emission technologies in the transport sector.
The agricultural sector received $37 million for the delivery of a national integrated farm planning system and a long overdue $24 million boost to accelerate research to mitigate agricultural greenhouse gases. Allocations for climate-related policy workstreams include $300 million to reform water services (drinking, waste and stormwater) and $131 million to replace 30-year-old resource management legislation. Both are critical to climate adaptation.
The programme to make the public sector carbon neutral by 2025 receives $67.4 million and the Climate Change Commission gets a $10 million top-up to address “critical cost pressures […] related to an underestimation of the complexity and scope” of its activities.
Overall, New Zealand still isn’t making the transformative investments on the scale of this week’s International Energy Agency report. Perhaps, with its emissions reduction plan in hand by the end of this year, the government will fulfil that ambition next year.
But it is also important to keep in mind what the budget leaves out. The low-emissions transition requires not only investment in clean infrastructure, but also harm avoidance by avoiding investments that lock in fossil fuel dependence.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Zylstra, Adjunct Associate Professor at Curtin University, Honorary Fellow at University of Wollongong, University of Wollongong
The Black Summer bushfires burned far more temperate forest than any other fire season recorded in Australia. The disaster was clearly a climate change event; however, other human activities also had consequences.
Taking timber from forests dramatically changes their structure, making them more vulnerable to bushfires. And, crucially for the Black Summer bushfires, logged forests are more likely to burn out of control.
Naturally, the drivers of the fires were widely debated during and after the disaster. Research published earlier this month, for example, claimed native forest logging did not make the fires worse.
We believe these findings are too narrowly focused and in fact, misleading. They overlook a vast body of evidence that crown fire – the most extreme type of bushfire behaviour, in which tree canopies burn – is more likely in logged native forests.
The authors say logging increases the risk of intense crown fires.Australian National University
Crown fires vs scorch
The Black Summer fires occurred in the 2019-20 bushfire season and burned vast swathes of Australia’s southeast. In some cases, fire spread through forests with no recorded fire, including some of the last remnants of ancient Gondwanan rainforests.
Much of the forest that burned during Black Summer experienced crown fires. These fires burn through the canopies of trees, as well as the undergrowth. They are the most extreme form of fire behaviour and are virtually impossible to control.
Crown fires pulse with such intense heat they can form thunderstorms which generate lightning and destructive winds. This sends burning bark streamers tens of kilometres ahead of the fire, spreading it further. The Black Summer bushfires included at least 18 such storms.
Various forest industry reports have recognised logging makes bushfires harder to control.
And to our knowledge, every empirical analysis so far shows logging eucalypt forests makes them far more likely to experience crown fire. The studies include:
A 2009 paper suggesting changes in forest structure and moisture make severe fire more likely in logging regrowth compared to undisturbed forest
2012 research concluding the probability of crown fires was higher in recently logged areas than in areas logged decades before
A 2013 study that showed the likelihood of crown fire halved as forests aged after a certain point
2014 findings that crown fire in the Black Saturday fires likely peaked in regrowth and fell in mature forests
2018 research into the 2003 Australian Alps fires, which found the same increase in the likelihood of crown fire during regrowth as was measured following logging.
The combined findings of these studies are represented in the image below:
Author supplied
Crown fires take lives
The presence of crown fire is a key consideration in fire supression, because crown fires are very hard to control.
However, the study released last week – which argued that logging did not worsen the Black Summer fires – focused on crown “scorch”. Crown scorch is very different to crown fire. It is not a measure of how difficult it is to contain the fire, because even quite small flames can scorch a drought-stressed canopy.
Forestry studies tend to focus more on crown scorch, which damages timber and is far more common than crown fires.
But the question of whether logging made crown scorch worse is not relevant to whether a fire was uncontrollable, and thus was able to destroy homes and lives.
Importantly, when the study said logging had a very small influence on scorch, this was referring to the average scorch over the whole fire area, not just places that had been logged. That’s like asking how a drought in the small town of Mudgee affects the national rainfall total: it may not play a large role overall, but it’s pretty important to Mudgee.
The study examined trees in previously logged areas, or areas that had been logged and burned by fires of any source. It found they were as likely to scorch on the mildest bushfire days as trees in undisturbed forests on bad days. These results simply add to the body of evidence that logging increases fire damage.
For example during the Black Saturday fires in 2009, the Kilmore East fire north of Melbourne consumed all before it as a crown fire. Then it reached the old, unlogged mountain ash forests on Mount Disappointment and dropped to the ground, spreading as a slow surface fire.
The trees were scorched. But they were too tall to ignite, and instead blocked the high winds and slowed the fire down. Meanwhile, logged ash forests drove flames high into the canopy.
Despite decades of opportunity to show otherwise, the only story for eucalypt forests remains this: logging increases the impact of bushfires. This fact should inform forest management decisions on how to reduce future fire risk.
We need timber, but it must be produced in ways that don’t endanger human lives or the environment.
Both the origins of the work and its composer are, however, much less known. Born in Munich in 1895, Orff’s lasting musical contribution outside composition was in the field of music education.
What we know today as Orff Schulwerk is an approach to teaching music that encourages children to explore and develop their musical creativity through singing, improvisation, movement, and rhythmic play.
Orff Schulwerk became influential across the West in the years after the second world war (and helped make percussion instruments in particular part of the standard kit of the school music room) but Carmina Burana — the sound of which reflects some of the vocal and percussive interests of the Schulwerk approach — dates from just before the onset of that war.
Premiering in June 1937 at the Frankfurt Opera, its compositional history therefore also intersects with aspects of the racial, cultural and aesthetic cultural policies the Nazi Party introduced across Germany after its rise to power in 1933.
An earthy manuscript
The title simply means “Songs from Beuern” in Latin. Beuern is a variant of the German word for Bavaria, Bayern, but here it specifically refers to a village south of Munich at the foothills of the Bavarian Alps.
The village was home to a Benedictine monastery founded in 733. When it was dissolved in 1083, its library was transferred to the Court Library at Munich.
There, in 1847, a modern edition was made of perhaps the most remarkable work in the collection: a beautifully illuminated manuscript of secular poems in both Latin and Middle High German. These “Carmina Burana” soon became well-known across Europe.
In the mid 1930s Orff asked the German poet and jurist Michel Hofmann to organise 24 of those poems into a libretto for what he envisioned as a kind of secular oratorio with staging elements. The original poems had been preserved with their own melodies, but Orff was not aware of their existence when composing his own settings.
The full title — Songs of Beuern: Secular songs for singers and choruses to be sung together with instruments and magical images — reminds us the original performances were more than concerts. They were envisioned as theatrical events.
Codex Buranus (Carmina Burana) with the Wheel of Fortune, Bavarian State Library, Munich. Circa 1230.Wikimedia Commons
The famous opening chorus, O Fortuna, velut Luna (O Fortune, like the moon) refers to the Wheel of Fortune and the vagaries of fate. Returning in full at the end, the chorus gives the work a dramatic and musical frame.
Inside that frame, Orff and his librettist placed three groups of poems that deal with, respectively, the transient joys of springtime (Primo Vera), the tavern (In Taberna), and erotic love (Cour d’amours).
Much of the pleasure I suspect we receive from Carmina Burana comes not just from the high literary quality of these poems but also from the fact they concern themselves with topics far from what we might imagine were the usual interests of a benedictine monastery. They can be punchy, earthy, funny — and sometimes surprisingly confronting.
A Roasting Swan laments its fate to those who are about to consume it.
I would challenge any carnivore to hear the extraordinary twelfth movement Olim Lacus Colueram (“Once I lived on lakes”) which gives voice to a roasting swan, and not be drawn to contemplate – if only for a moment – vegetarianism.
But is it fascist?
In his book The Twisted Muse (1997), musicologist Michael Kater asserts that Orff was a central figure in what he describes as a “School of Nazi modernism” which also included composers Werner Egk, Boris Blacher, Gottfried von Einem and Rudolf Wagner-Régeny.
A popular and critical success from its first performance, Carmina Burana was performed regularly in Germany throughout the second world war. The subject matter certainly appealed to Nazi sensibilities that sought to legitimise the Third Reich through association with past empires, particularly the Germany of the medieval era.
But what about the music?
Being approved by a fascist regime does not in and of itself make something fascist. And, in any case, it is notoriously difficult to try and define what a fascist music might be as we are more wont to do in the case of, say, architecture.
As I have suggested elsewhere, we could be forgiven in fact for concluding that Nazism (and fascism more generally) is something which happens to music and musicians, and not something with which a musical work can be complicit in a uniquely musical way.
Yet I do think it is possible to explore such a possibility — albeit with due caution. Hannah Arendt, who spent a great deal of her later life trying understand how Germany had descended into fascism, described in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism one tell-tale characteristic of fascism as being the “emancipation of thought from experience”: a kind of willed stupidity.
Can a piece of music encourage or mimic such thinking? Can it foster a kind of of “stupid” listening? Well, as far as Carmina Burana is concerned, we might note its heavy reliance on the repetition of small musical motives does lend the work a sense of unquestioned (or, at worst, unquestionable) ritualistic force which might lead us to think something similar.
André Rieu conducts the opening chorus O Fortuna.
A visual parallel might be Albert Speer’s infamous Cathedrals of Light, the array of spotlights he used to monumentalise the Nazi Party rallies in Nuremberg around the same time as Orff was composing Carmina Burana. Here we are certainly presented with an effect without just cause – the awe-inspiring vista (also achieved in no small part by the sheer blunt force of repetition) overwhelms us without encouraging us to reflect on whether that response is actually merited by what the spotlights accompany.
The deployment of artistic effects without legitimate justification is, however, not just a property of fascist aesthetics. It is also a commonly asserted property of kitsch. Should we be surprised, then, to find that the opening chorus of Carmina Burana also now pops up in concerts by the so-called King of Classical kitsch, André Rieu?
The frequent use of this opening chorus as an advertising jingle is also, I think, revealing. A famous Carlton and United advertisement for draught beer declared to its audience that they were watching, simply, “a big ad.”
Here, the ad-makers themselves seem to have recognised, named, and exploited the empty grandiosity some would say indeed lies at the heart of the music.
A Big Ad, indeed.
That opening chorus has also made an appearance in the soundtracks of numerous feature films, most notably 1981’s Excalibur, where the shared medieval fantasy elements no doubt made some dramatic sense. But it has also been frequently applied to subject matter far removed from medieval topics; and often for comic and ironic effect.
In a 2001 essay for the New York Times the renowned musicologist Richard Taruskin went as far as to suggest that Orff’s music “can channel any diabolical message that text or context may suggest, and no music does it better”.
He continued “it is just because we like it that we ought to resist it”.
‘Behold Excalibur!’ Carmina Burana adds oomph to an already powerful narrative.
Nevertheless, as another commentator subsequently noted, Taruskin’s description of the work’s effect is also “almost the definition of a guilty pleasure.”
Maybe that’s the best place for us to start our engagement with the work today. Let’s continue to enjoy and be impressed by Carmina Burana — but also let’s not forget to ask ourselves why we might find it so enjoyable and impressive in the first place.
Geoffrey Robertson is one of Australia’s most acclaimed international jurists and human rights advocates. His latest book, Bad People – and How to Be Rid of Them, explains the history of international human rights law and acknowledges its failings.
Bad People is not a textbook; it is aimed at anyone with an interest in the international human rights framework and its enforcement mechanisms.
Most importantly, it is a call to action for Australians and others in democracies to demand the introduction of “Magnitsky laws”.
Magnitsky laws are named after a Russian whistleblower, Sergei Magnitsky, who was tortured and died after exposing a massive tax fraud scheme involving Russian officials. These laws seek to combat human rights abuses by naming, blaming and shaming individuals, denying them the right to enter democratic nations, stripping them of ill-gotten funds, and barring them and their families from local schools and hospitals.
Magnitsky was a Moscow lawyer and tax auditor who died in custody in Russia at the age of 37.Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP
The US was the first country to pass such laws in 2012 to sanction Russian officials and Chechen warlords, sending a strong signal to the Kremlin that action could and would be taken for human rights breaches.
Since then, the US has used the Global Magnitsky Act to impose sanctions on more than 200 individuals and entities from two dozen countries, including Saudi Arabia, China, South Sudan, Myanmar, Iraq and Cambodia.
Robertson’s response to the failure of the international human rights framework is to promote powerful Magnitsky laws as a “plan B” to coordinated international action.
Bad People – and How to Be Rid of Them, by Geoffrey Robertson.Penguin Books Australia
How international courts have been weakened
Robertson charts the rise of human rights immediately after the horrors of the second world war, and then despairs of the growing trend of nations retreating from the jurisdiction of international courts or refusing to comply with their rulings.
Robertson describes how the United Nations succeeded in establishing a coherent human rights regime, but failed to carve out effective accountability mechanisms to enforce breaches. Instead, enforcement relies on individual nations’ leaders being motivated to legislate human rights into their domestic laws.
Although the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been broadly accepted, punishment for war crimes and crimes against humanity has been inconsistent and complex.
Consequently, Robertson argues the International Criminal Court (ICC) does not serve as a deterrent to perpetrators of most human rights abuses.
Eroded confidence in international law
The book provides a useful history of the ICC and the way the US, China and Russia have limited its operations by using their veto powers when legal action is proposed against them or their allies.
In the past four years, for instance, Russia has vetoed ICC action 14 times, China five times and the US twice. Robertson suggests the mere threat of a veto by superpowers behind the scenes have seen other initiatives withdrawn.
As a result, Robertson laments the once-powerful ICC is now confined to punishing rebel warlords and leaders of pariah countries.
More than 70 years after the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the growing threats of isolationist foreign policies and anti-democratic regimes are pulling at the threads of our international human rights framework. Shifting geopolitical balances and the populist politics of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign have eroded confidence in a global system of law and order.
Australia is not immune from this trend. In February 2020, the ICC prosecutor described Australia’s offshore detention regime as “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment”.
But, the ICC decided not to prosecute the Australian government, despite saying its actions appeared “to constitute the underlying act of imprisonment or other severe deprivations of physical liberty” forbidden under international law.
A protest against the continued detention of asylum seekers in Australia.Darren England/AAP
The problem with Magnitsky laws
Robertson’s solution is to impose sanctions against individuals, corporations and other entities.
He argues Magnitsky laws are not an alternative to coordinated international criminal justice, but an assertion of the fundamental values that countries insist should be respected by other nations.
The problem is these types of sanctions can be abused for political reasons. We have already seen the tit-for-tat actions of nations that bring sanctions against the citizens of their enemies, such as the Russian counter-sanctions against US citizens in 2013, including former Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.
Among democratic nations, it is unlikely Magnitsky laws would ever be used against friendly allies. Can you imagine any of Australia’s allies sanctioning an Australian official for a First Nations’ death in custody or for the over-representation of First Nations people in the country’s criminal justice system?
If enforcement of human rights breaches is seen as political or inconsistent, then Magnitsky laws may not be the universal panacea Robertson suggests. However, this doesn’t mean the push for individual accountability is not justified. As he writes,
human rights are not rights in any meaningful sense unless they are capable of enforcement.
Robertson leaves us with a sensible pathway to a better world through laws that hold individuals accountable for their evil deeds. Magnitsky sanctions might, at least, make murderers, crooks and abusers think twice before implementing their plans.
Geoffrey Robertson will be speaking across Australia in the coming weeks, with engagements in Melbourne on May 22 and Sydney on May 25 and 26, to be followed by Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth.
Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage
By Patricio Zamorano From Washington DC
What happened in Chile this past weekend seems to be one of those historic events that cannot but follow its inexorable course. It is like an enormous, powerful tsunami wave whose size cannot be appreciated on the high seas, until it comes crashing into the coast, stunning everyone with its massive strength. This happens with processes of change from the left and the right, in times of democracy and times of dictatorship.
Could any human force have stopped the inexorable onslaught of that immoral showman Donald Trump on his path to the U.S. presidency? Who would have believed that someone so dysfunctional on so many levels could have governed the most powerful country on the planet for four years? He got more than 70 million U.S. votes, making him the Republican to win the most votes in history, legitimizing his political and pseudo-ideological platform, whether we like it or not. His rise to power was unstoppable.
Fidel had the same telluric force of history behind him when 12 disciples of José Martí, decimated by the disastrous landing of the Granma, carried out an impossible revolution from the Sierra Maestra in just three years. This feat has stirred the passions of revolutionaries and reactionaries alike for some 60 years now.
Some political processes are simply unstoppable.
What just happened on May 15 and 16, 2021 in Chile has the same air of the refounding of an entire nation. It means the end of traditional party politics and the establishment of collectives with diverse origins. These collectives are focused on contemporary issues such as the environment, gender equality, a focus on local issues against capital centralism (Santiago), and the demands of other sectors.
An historic constitutional assembly
First, the numbers. Intense social unrest that raised demands in the streets was met by bloody repression by the security forces which deployed tear gas and rubber bullets, destroying the eyes of dozens of Chileans. The path was opened to something people had thought impossible within formal government institutions: 155 delegates have been elected to draft a new constitution for Chile. These are people from the political class, social movements, grass roots organizations, and many independents. Out of those 155, according to data from the Electoral Service of Chile (SERVEL), 77% identify with left-leaning values, are against Pinochet’s legacy, and reject the neoliberal model founded in the military repression of September 11, 1973.
The right-wing parties banding together in “Vamos Chile” needed 54 delegates to the constituent assembly to break the two-thirds majority and wield veto power. They only obtained 37 seats, which in practice means that they will only have limited power from the political margins.
These results are completely logical. The right-wing parties in Congress, in Sebastián Piñera’s Executive Branch, and in the media have spent all these years systematically blocking all efforts by the country’s majority to reform the healthcare system and make it more just; to reform the education system and make it more accessible to the entire population; and to reform the tax system to make it more equitable. The actual truth is that with an agenda so disconnected from the despair of the overwhelming majority of the Chilean people, the great leaders of the right and of Chilean capital cannot escape their own responsibility for the defeat that befell them last weekend.
The neoliberal ideology pretended to champion markets that would be free from state intervention. Yet as the Chilean experiment demonstrates, it took massive social control by the state with no check and balances (no Congress, no political parties, no social movements), and a harsh reign of terror, to enforce the structural adjustment packages that imposed austerity to facilitate the economic exploitation of human and natural resources. In fact, corporate interests have politically captured the state, putting its institutions at the service of capital, for all governments after Pinochet, both center-left and center-right ones. Furthermore, the promises of “accumulation of capital” for all Chileans that would be created by “trickle-down economics” was a complete failure, except for a minority of those with the highest incomes.
Today’s Chile is advocating with the language of “sexual diversity,” “gender parity,” “equal rights and opportunities,” “inclusion,” “tolerance,” and “social dignity.” Some of the most conservative right-wing Chileans appear disconnected, reactive, and very uncomfortable with this new reality that they have yet to comprehend.
Mayor of Santiago from the Communist Party
The historic gestures are impressive for a conservative country such as Chile. Along with representatives to the constituent assembly, mayors and city council members were also elected.
Santiago, the capital, will now be led by Iraci Hassler as mayor. She is an economist from the University of Chile and notably a member of the Communist Party. After a 50-year-long policy of extermination and torture imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship on the Communist Party of Chile (the party of Pablo Neruda, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great singer-songwriter Víctor Jara), there is no doubt that this electoral victory is a hard symbolic blow to the most conservative, militaristic, and anti-communist sectors of the country. Social media has revealed their ideological anxiety: dozens of memes painting the electoral districts with the symbol of the CP (the hammer and sickle) and words in Russian. This is a reminder of the irrational politics that still run strong among this radical minority in a country undergoing a profound transformation.
There was also an explicit effort to inject gender and cultural parity into the election for the Constitutional Convention, ensuring that at least 45% of the seats went to women and reserving 17 seats for indigenous communities. This is vital to reflect the wishes of the Chilean people when 80% of them voted for a new constitution in the plebiscite of October 2020. The objective of this popular outpouring is to eliminate all anti-democratic provisions inherited from the 1980 militaristic constitution inspired by the Chicago Boys.
Delegates have an opportunity to remove capitalist equations from areas such as health, education, and pensions, returning those key aspects of Chilean life to the category of fundamental social rights. Broadly speaking, delegates can now establish a more just constitutional framework in order to better distribute wealth and income among the whole population and neutralize the country’s tremendous inequality—one of the worst on the planet.
The numbers reflect a seismic shift
In electoral terms, it is a scenario of major change. Valparaíso, the second largest city in the country, was kept by independent leftist Mayor Jorge Sharpo. Viña del Mar, another major urban center near Valparaíso, was carried by Macarena Ripamonti, a member of the new leftist collective Frente Amplio. Frente Amplio is not one of the traditional parties, and has wrested from the right wing a city that normally votes conservative. And in Concepción, independent leftist Camilo Rifo came in second place, leaving the right wing in third.
In Santiago, the right lost large municipalities, including Maipú, Ñuñoa, Estación Central, and San Bernardo, to name a few.
In sum, the entire region around greater Santiago, home to one third of the population (about 6 out of 19 million people), according to SERVEL reports as of today, gave the center-left 27 mayoral offices, while the right only won 14 (of course, including many of the wealthy neighborhoods of eastern Santiago). Add to that total 11 independents.
What’s next
The next steps include the launching of the new Constitutional Convention between June and July of this year. It will have nine to 12 months to draft the new Charter. Approximately 60 days after this task is completed, a new and final plebiscite will be held to approve or reject the new constitution. That is, 2022 should usher in a new constitution for Chile.
Beyond the numbers and electoral engineering, what happened last weekend lends immense legitimacy to what the people have been demanding in the streets, from the grass roots of society. It has left no doubt of the need for the country’s business and financial sectors to take a hard look at the imperious need to support a process of reconstruction, which at the end of the day, their own representative at La Moneda, Sebastián Piñera, was unable to do. Six points of negative growth in 2020, amplified by the pandemic, the social explosion, and chronic inequality in the country have left no room for ideological protectionism among Conservatives.
Either they join the process of change, trying to influence it as much as they can with the seats they have won at the polls, or they remain alienated from millions of families’ longing for recovery—expectations that cannot be held back. The other path is the strategy of failure that they have been implementing throughout Chile’s history: launch a plan to boycott the country’s political and social development, using their de facto power to keep hindering the reforms the country needs. The obstructionist path would hurt their own pocket books, keep the streets in flames, and betray the essential value of “homeland” that supposedly is their most cherished value.
For Chile’s right wing, the popular vote has made it brutally clear: it is time to get on the right side of history.
Patricio Zamorano is a political science academic, journalist and Director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, COHA
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. Click here to subscribe to Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup and New Zealand Politics Daily.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Whyte, Deputy Director, Centre for Behavioural Economics, Society and Technology, Queensland University of Technology
As behavioural scientists, we have a keen interest in how people make decisions, and particularly how these decisions incorporate a range of emotional, cognitive and psychological factors.
Choosing a life partner is arguably one of the most important decisions a person can make. And researchhas shown the most common way to do this these days is to go online.
John Gray’s famous 1992 book purports that men and women have innately different natures.Wiki
As increasing numbers of people wade cautiously through the digital dating market, many still subscribe to stereotypical ideas about what men and women find attractive in a partner.
Our latest research, published today in PLOS One shows the truth, as ever, is more nuanced.
Using survey data from 7,325 heterosexual users of dating websites, aged 18 to 65, we show there is no absolute difference between the preferences of men and women when it comes to choosing a mate. Both essentially desire the same qualities, but prioritise them slightly differently.
The democratisation of dating?
Dating in the 21st century is a truly unique experience. For millennia, the human search for companionship had been constrained by access, distance and resources. Most people had to find a partner through close or extended family, or religious, cultural or social organisations.
Today, online dating allows seemingly unrestrained and “nonsequential” decision-making.
Imagine if you met someone at a bar and told them to wait around for two hours, just in case you managed to find someone better. It sounds bizarre, but that’s what online dating allows. You can search through thousands of people and never have to make a decision.
This is good news for researchers of human behaviour. With such a vast and growing pool of data, we can study mating choices in a way we never could before.
Pressure to play the evolutionary game
Obviously, a huge part of sexual attraction comes down to personal preference regarding what makes someone “sexy”. That said, there are many stereotypes relating to what heterosexual men and women find sexy.
It’s often assumed women favour more emotional, personality, intelligence and commitment-based traits in men, while men are often said to prefer physical attractiveness.
From an evolutionary psychology angle, these stereotypes aren’t unfounded. In the game of life, the main aim is to pass on your genes — and once you do, to ensure your offspring achieve the same success.
Naturally, men and women play different roles in the reproduction process. From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes sense for women to seek a man with traits that will benefit her offspring in both the short and long term, as women bear a bigger reproductive cost than men.
They have internal gestation for nine months and then must successfully give birth, all while facing discomfort and risk. They will then continue to nurse and care for the child.
Throughout the evolution of our species, mothers on average have had a far greater parenting responsibility across their offspring’s lives.Shutterstock
Men, at its simplest, need only to invest time into copulation to have offspring. Theoretically, then, the specific selection pressures on men and women to pass on their genes should be observable in the characteristics of the mates they choose.
Many of these assumptions fall under a school of thought called “parental investment theory”, developed in the early 1970s by evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers.
More recent theories in gender studies and social and evolutionary psychology have countered the notion of absolute differences. They demonstrate men and women are far more similar in their preferences than previously thought.
Our research reinforces one such theory, referred to as “mutual mate choice”. We found both men and women essentially desire the same qualities in a partner, differing only in the relative emphasis placed on each trait at different life stages.
We asked survey participants to rate from 0 to 100 the importance they placed on nine traits when looking for a mate. They fell into three categories:
aesthetics, such as age, attractiveness and physical features
resources, such as intelligence, education and income
and personality, such as trust, openness and emotional connection.
Both genders rated aesthetics as highly important, along with all three personality traits, while income was much less important.
Women, however, rated factors including age, education, intelligence, income, trust and emotional connection about 9 to 14 points higher than men. Men placed relatively more emphasis on attractiveness and physical build.
Importantly, the way both genders prioritised traits changed with age. Both cared less about physical attractiveness as they got older, whereas emphasis on personality increased. This makes sense, considering we require different things from a partner at different life stages.
Our findings reinforce that both men and women tend to give similar emphasis to certain traits, depending on their individual needs at a particular stage in life.
On dating apps, users can at times be spoilt for choice. This may result in us not placing as much emphasis on the actual search for a partner that older generations historically did.Shutterstock
Men and women can both be very picky
One interesting revelation came when we grouped participants’ preference data together.
Of those individuals who said one specific trait was very important to them, it turned out the majority of traits were very important to them. On the other hand were respondents who said they didn’t have a strong preference for any particular trait at all.
So while some people were happy to go with the flow, many of the participants actually cared a lot about a lot of different factors. For men, the likelihood of having such stringent preferences was most common between ages 20 and 40. Among women it was more likely between the ages of 35 and 50.
Personal circumstance and preference is key
The bottom line is there is no single unified theory of mate choice. Attractiveness matters to everyone to some extent. Resources and intelligence matter to everyone to some extent.
Beyond human biology and evolution, it’s likely our individual personal constraints — such as employment, education, family and social circle — still have a huge impact on how we choose a mate, even if we are dating online.
While dating apps and websites may come with an element of “cognitive overload”, they are ultimately just conduits for human communication. They let people search far and wide for a mate who will help them achieve their own relationship goals.
And our relationship goals, just as is the case with the importance we place on our preferences, change over time.
As lethal violence kills ordinary people in Gaza and Israel, news outlets across the globe are constructing versions of events that will keep eyeballs on their content.
After all, war is the most compelling news story of all. And given many people who care about this situation have no direct experience of it, they depend on media reports to form a view.
But when reporting on something as terrible as political violence, journalists face an impossible choice.
While professional ethics of journalism demand “objectivity”, language just won’t come to the party. This is because language has no neutral mode. Once you step into the process of saying anything about the violence in Gaza, language makes you take a side.
There are essentially two main modes for reporting on geopolitical violence. The first and dominant mode is typical of mainstream news reporting. It strives for objectivity by presenting selective factual events devoid of context. It briefly summarises complex events, while not allocating blame or responsibility.
While the effects of events on ordinary people can be reported on, these are typically presented as an unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of something otherwise official, rational and purposeful.
This style is susceptible to the favoured tropes of militaries and, therefore, to inadvertently reproducing official narratives. Destructive and lethal violence becomes obscured by terminology like “operations”, “campaigns”, “offensives”, “strategies”, “targets” and “phases”.
This language construes the violence as if it has a higher purpose. The particularly eager journalist will report the official name of an “operation”, as in this example, where the BBC’s diplomatic correspondent tells readers Israel has named its operation “Guardian of the Walls”.
And they will expound on the types of weapons technology being employed, as if the make and model of the plane and the bombs it unleashes have any real bearing on these events.
The problem with this mode of reporting is that violence is objectified and dehumanised. Objectifying violence means it is construed as if it happens by itself, without reference to either the political masters who order it, or those tasked with enacting it.
And dehumanised, because it fails to put front and centre the most important perspective of these events: those killed, injured, bereaved and traumatised by the actions of (usually male) leaders, who refuse alternative means of resolving differences.
Here’s an example of this “objective” style from a recent report on the BBC’s website. The violence, referred to as a “conflict”, as “rockets and air strikes” continuing, as a “concentration of militant rocket fire”, as “Israeli air strikes”, is all divorced from the human agents of this violence.
And the dead Israelis are killed “in rocket attacks”, while the scores of dead Palestinians are simply a “death toll”.
BBC news report.
An obvious and often conscious effect of this style is to treat two sides as if they are equal participants in this violence. This is the effect of journalistic shorthand, such as the “Israel Gaza conflict”, or the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”.
These formulations avoid allocating blame to one side or the other. The BBC report shows a scrupulous formulation so that “rockets and air strikes” appear side by side, even when the syntax of this formulation doesn’t make sense. In their phrase “rockets and air strikes have continued”, while “airstrikes” can continue, “rockets” themselves can’t.
And the “they said while the others said” structure keeps up the illusion that this violence is symmetrical.
I don’t want to minimise the horror for ordinary Israelis of suffering rockets fired by Hamas foot soldiers. I can’t begin to imagine the fear that I could lose a child to this kind of horrendous violence.
Herein lies the alternative mode of reporting this violence. When the violence you are reporting on is illegitimate, you naturally strive for language that fails the “objectivity” test.
You will focus on the brutal and inhumane consequences of the violence. You will make the perpetrators of the violence visible, and you will demonise them. You will emphasise the scale of the violence and its devastating effects on families and communities.
The style goes against everything in the standard journalism textbook. But its crowning, remarkable achievement is that, of everything that is going on, the killing of children is at the heart of this news report.
News report from The Electronic Intifada.
While we like to believe that what we politely call “war” is used as a last resort, this quantitative history of war shows that, as time goes on, human societies have been more addicted to war, that what we think of “civilisation” appears to correlate with more and more lethal wars.
For the journalists who report this violence on our behalf, there is nowhere to hide. There is no neutral, objective mode. Your choice is to stand so far back from the “conflict” that you obscure its brutal irrationality and, in so doing, unwittingly or otherwise, put your support behind the most powerful belligerents.
Or you can come in close and show mutilated and traumatised children, and suffer the journalistic ignominy of “biased” reporting.
It has been a confusing couple of weeks for public sector employees. They started with the government announcing what looked like a three-year pay freeze for public servants but ended up with a “lift/adjust/hold” approach to public sector pay.
Employees earning under NZ$60,000 a year can now expect a pay increase, while those earning more will see an adjustment only in “exceptional circumstances”, or not at all.
The government took the chill off its pay restraint policy by agreeing to index pay against the cost of living and to review the system after one year rather than three.
The stated aim of the policy is to improve the relative lot of the least well paid. But the furore over pay restraint has obscured the deeper problem of gender and ethnicity pay gaps in the public sector.
Women are still paid less
In the background sits the government’s wider Public Sector Workforce Policy. This prioritises fair and equitable employment within a diverse workforce, while also calling for pay expectations and other increases to be balanced against the cost of the COVID response and recovery.
It’s true progress on those fronts has been made, but public service employment statistics – as a subset of public sector employment – reveal some stubborn disparities.
As of 2020, women made up 61.7% of public service employees, a record high. While the overall average annual salary was $84,500, the average for men was $89,900 but $81,200 for women.
At 9.6%, this gap between what men and women earn is at its smallest since 2000. But this is complicated by the fact that gender pay gaps within the public service vary greatly due in large part to occupational segregation — meaning women are more likely to be working in lower-paid jobs.
Pay rates still reflect ethnicity
Similar dynamics are at work in the ethnic pay gap. European public service employees are, on average, paid more than other ethnicities.
Only male Europeans exceed the average annual salary. European women, on average, earn just under that amount. The salaries of Māori, Asian and Pacific workers, on average, fall well short of the overall average annual salary.
The Māori pay gap (the difference between average pay for Māori and non-Māori employees) was 9.3% in 2020, a decrease from 9.9% in 2019. Similarly, the Pacific pay gap was 19.5%, a drop from 20.1% in 2020. Again, ethnic pay gaps are influenced by Māori, Pacific and Asian public servants being more likely to be working in lower-paid jobs.
Compounding this, women within those ethnic groups earn less, on average, than their male counterparts. Wāhine Māori earn more than Pacific men but less than European men and women, and Māori and Asian men.
Pacific women have the lowest average salaries in the public service, despite having had the largest increase in average salaries over the past year (5.6% or around $3,600). What we see here are gender and ethnic disparities working in combination.
Can discrimination be justified?
Clearly, there is much to be done. But if we are going to talk about COVID response and recovery, pay restraints and inequality all in the same breath, we also need to include wage subsidy payments.
The bulk of those payments went to private sector male employees. Breaking the payments down by ethnic group, Asian workers were the highest recipients, European workers were second, with Pacific and Māori workers third and fourth respectively.
Ideally, then, public sector “pay restraint” needs to take the gender and ethnic make-up of the workforce into account. This is a tricky balancing act, underpinned by New Zealand employees’ right to be free from discrimination on grounds of sex, race and ethnicity, even where there is no discriminatory intention.
Unpalatable as it might be, the government could argue that any discriminatory fallout from pay restraint is justifiable or there is a good reason for any unintentional discrimination, such as on the grounds of helping the COVID recovery.
Similarly, New Zealand’s international legal obligations under the prohibition of employment discrimination require any justification for differential treatment to be reasonable and objective on the grounds it is:
legitimate
compatible with the obligation to ensure women in particular are guaranteed equal pay for equal work
solely for the purpose of promoting the general welfare in a democratic society.
The aim of the measure must be proportionate, in a “clear and reasonable” way, to its effect. A country’s lack of available resources is not an objective and reasonable justification unless every effort has been made to address and eliminate the discrimination as a matter of priority.
The immediate controversy over pay restraint may have passed but the question of inequality remains. Any pay increase for the public sector’s lowest-paid workers is to be welcomed, but it’s only a partial solution to the over-representation of women and ethnic minorities in those roles.
Yesterday, we heard from a nurse at one of Victoria’s mass vaccination clinics who said she’d administered just one vaccine in an eight-hour shift. She said vaccine hesitancy was a factor in people not turning up to be vaccinated.
So how do we handle people’s questions or concerns about the COVID-19 vaccines, to address vaccine hesitancy? How do we do this and boost the vaccine rollout, beyond the almost 3.2 million doses delivered in Australia to date?
GPs and practice nurses are ideally placed to answer specific questions about people’s personal health and vaccine eligibility. However, not everyone has a regular GP or wants to get vaccinated at a GP clinic. GPs are also being swamped with questions to address in limited time.
That’s why it’s essential to encourage other people in the community to be vaccine advocates.
Why is this a good idea?
People’s willingness to have a vaccine is influenced by social norms — what they think others are doing, and what they think trusted or influential people want them to do.
We have been regularly delivering vaccine communication training seminars, based on communication and behavioural science, to people in all kinds of roles. These include cultural, faith and First Nations community leaders; health-care support staff, such as medical receptionists; and office and industrial workers.
These people don’t need all the answers. But if they have a role where people know and trust them, and might come to them with vaccine-related questions, these people can provide reputable information to increase vaccine acceptance or even help people book in to get the vaccine.
Here are a few strategies for these vaccine champions to help build vaccine confidence in their organisations or communities.
1. Share your story
When everyone knows a few people who have been vaccinated, vaccination starts to become the norm. Countries that had high hesitancy at the start of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout have generally seen hesitancy go down as vaccination rates go up.
If you’ve decided to get vaccinated, or if you’ve already received your vaccine, talk about your experience. Share your reasons for deciding to get vaccinated. For instance, what are the good things you think will come with vaccination? Post photos on social media (but avoid scary needles) to normalise the experience.
We know from our current research many people are concerned about side-effects. Talk about how you manage side-effects, if you get them, or if you needed some time off work to give people a sense of what to expect.
Find other people in your organisation who are willing to share their vaccination stories and work with them to brainstorm vaccine promotion strategies. For example, you can discuss what’s worked to promote flu vaccines in the past.
If you work in an office, make sure there are vaccine champions representing all levels of your organisation, not just managers. If you’re working in a diverse community, try to find and highlight vaccine champions of different genders, disability status and cultural background.
It can be difficult for people to find answers to their questions about the vaccines and the vaccine rollout process.
We know people with lower levels of health literacy often have poorer health and say they are less likely to get vaccinated.
Amid the whirlwind of information the pandemic has unleashed, people with lower levels of education and those who speak languages other than English are often left behind. These groups are also less likely to plan to get vaccinated.
So if you feel confident finding reliable information, you can offer to help other people findanswers. Understanding risk is hard; visual elements, such as pictograms, may help. Another option is to organise to bring in an expert to your work or place of worship for a live question and answer session.
You can also help people understand where to go to find out if they’re eligible for the vaccine, or how to book an appointment.
Misinformation and conspiracy theories flourish in times of uncertainty, like the pandemic.
But before you jump in to correct every myth you hear someone share, it’s a good idea to consider if this myth is being shared widely, or if it is affecting behaviour. If it is, there are some strategies you can use to address misinformation without getting into a debate.
First, try and talk privately. Ask questions and acknowledge the emotions driving a person’s belief in misinformation. Offer to look for the truth together. And before you share information yourself, make sure it’s reliable: “verify before you amplify”.
Not everyone will be comfortable or able to take a leadership role in building vaccine confidence. But even everyday conversations with friends and family can have an impact. So can recommending vaccination.
A recommendation to vaccinate from a health-care professional is particularly powerful. Encouraging people in your network to vaccinate is also likely to have an influence. But this needs to be handled with respect and not done in a coercive or domineering way.
A simple phrase like “I hope you will get vaccinated” can make a big difference.
I was making small talk with a medical technician during a health check a few months ago. After hearing I was a senior lecturer teaching Chinese politics at the University of Sydney, she commented: “It must be very hard for you.” My first thought was that she meant it must have been hard to teach online during the pandemic lockdown. But then she asked: “How do you manage to overcome your bias?”
I am an academic of Chinese background in Australia. So am I necessarily biased in my approach to Chinese politics? Is it indeed possible that my upbringing in China has made me a blind supporter of the Chinese system? Or has my embrace of liberal values turned me into a militant “China basher”?
These questions had occurred to me before, of course. But against the background of the recent souring of China-Australia relations, they have become more acute than ever before.
In November 2020, for the first time in ten years of teaching, a student who described themselves as a “Chinese patriot” accused me of being a “Taiwan independence supporter”. The reason was my comment in class that, after the election of Joe Biden as US president, issues such as Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan were likely to cause tensions between China and the United States. On the same day in the same class, a non-Chinese student protested that, while wishing to avoid turning academic analysis into a moral judgment, I should have remembered that “authoritarianism is evil”.
Teaching the topic of Chinese politics is becoming more challenging in a world increasingly divided by ideas, beliefs and interests. Of course, our own values and experiences always influence and even drive inquiry and the extension of knowledge. But if students come to class with pre-existing rigid mindsets and refuse to engage with different opinions and viewpoints, then education simply fails in its purpose.
“We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports,” Chinese leader Mao Zedong said in a 1939 interview. Taken out of context (Mao was describing the rivalry between the Chinese Communist Party and the Japanese puppet government in Nanjing) this sounds one-sided and superficial. But if we succumb to nationalistic emotions, moral values and political ideology, then this perspective is exactly how we see the world.
Attitudes to China have hardened dramatically since 2014 when President Xi Jingping addressed the Australian Parliament.Lukas Coch/AAP
In the study of politics in China, I have endeavoured to teach students that things are often not as clear-cut and absolute as many expect. In other words, nuance is the key to understanding China.
It is valid to question the legitimacy and stability of any system, particularly if the system may rely on censorship and coercion. But over the years, all the predictions of the system’s collapse have proved wrong. China’s one-party rule has been firm and strong to this day.
We need to consider the question of what explains the resilience and prosperity of the Chinese system. Before we criticise it for its lack of liberal democratic values, it is important to first understand what the system is and how it operates – that includes its economic drivers, its sources of legitimacy, its historical legacy and its developmental trajectory.
Why is it important? Such understanding will help us better cope with a world where China is a significant power and will likely remain so in the foreseeable future.
We have seen the rise of a new generation of patriotic Chinese “wolf warriors” who aggressively defend the state’s positions. But it is equally important for them to engage with different opinions and perspectives.
For one thing, when defending China against Western countries’ frequent “attacks” on “sensitive issues”, they need to understand that such issues might reflect the inherent problems of China’s system. These problems include economic inequality, ethnic tensions, vulnerable property rights, lack of individual freedom, and many more. Moreover, they could benefit from a self-recognition of the origins of their own strong feelings of pride and loyalty to the Chinese nation as a result of how it constructs their identity and sense of belonging.
Research versus parroting the official line
Returning to the question of how I manage my bias when teaching Chinese politics, I guess my identity as a Chinese immigrant will always have an impact on my understanding of the Chinese system. For all of us, our perceptions of the world reflect the values and beliefs associated with our identities and experiences.
Just like my students, some readers of this article might think I am too critical of China. In the eyes of others I might appear not critical enough. This is understandable: my opinions have been informed by my own experiences, as well as by my analysis of primary sources, engagement with many academic thinkers and communications with researchers, policymakers and business owners.
I try to expose students to the complexity of Chinese politics through such a research-driven approach. This approach is largely missing in public debate about China in Australia. Yet it is a difficult but important task.
If we fail in this task, in the quest for knowledge and understanding based on careful evaluation of opinions and facts, our discussions would be reduced to nothing more than an indiscriminate acceptance and simple repetition of official discourses or media coverage, whatever their source. My students in the class reflect the views of their home societies. In the current environment, that’s making it more difficult than ever to engage in productive analysis and discussion.
Research shows 30km/h speed limits on local residential streets could reduce the Australian road death toll by 13%. The economic benefit would be about A$3.5 billion every year.
Learning from other countries, it will be important to run public education campaigns to inform communities and opinion leaders. Another key to success is finding a strong political champion of lower speeds in residential streets.
Leadership is needed to counter myths about 30km/h speed limits that are misinforming public and political opinion. As part of the Streets for Life campaign for Global Road Safety Week, the United Nations has busted international myths surrounding 30km/h. In support of domesticdemands for 30km/h speed limits, in this article we bust five common myths about 30km/h speed limits in Australia.
Matthew Mclaughlin, Author provided
Myth #1: 30km/h limits don’t make a difference
Road trauma is the number one cause of death in school-aged children. More than 1,100 Australians die on our roads each year.
Data source: NSW Transport Metropolitan Roads (2019), Author provided
The evidence is very clear: the chance of a pedestrian surviving when hit by a car skyrockets when the car’s speed is reduced. The chance of survival jumps from just 10% at 50km/h to 90% at 30km/h.
Speed is the most common contributor to road trauma – more common than alcohol, drugs and fatigue.
To reduce serious injury risk, 40km/h speed limits aren’t low enough. The chance of survival when hit by a car improves from 60% at 40km/h to 90% at 30km/h. Reducing speed limits to 30km/h in urban areas such as high pedestrian zones, school zones and local traffic areas is urgently needed to reduce deaths and severe injuries.
Two-thirds of all crashes in New South Wales occur in metro areas. In these areas, 60% of fatal crashes are on local and collector streets (leading to arterial roads) with 50-60km/h speed limits. To achieve road safety targets and goals of zero road deaths, a 30km/h speed limit is crucial.
How supportive would you be of reducing speed limits in neighbourhood streets to help create safer and more liveable streets for people? Well, according to a recent nationally representative poll, about two-thirds of Australians say they want lower speed limits on local streets.
The introduction of 30km/h speed limits around the world shows the popularity of these limits grows rapidly after they take effect and local residents begin to appreciate the multitude of benefits from safer streets.
In urban areas, journey times are affected by more than the speed limit. Key factors include traffic congestion and time spent waiting at traffic signals. One study that considered a reasonably typical 26-minute journey to work calculated the difference between a 50km/h and 30km/h speed limit is less than a minute.
Safer and more liveable streets can decrease our reliance on the private car. By shifting private car trips to active and sustainable forms of transport, such as cycling and walking, we can reduce congestion and improve population and environmental health.
Reduced speed limits are not anti-motorist and are not about banning cars or the ability to drive. A 30km/h limit is a win-win-win for street users, businesses and motorists – and major motoring groups agree.
Lower speed limits can lead to fewer car crashes, in turn reducing insurance costs and time delayed in traffic by those crashes.
Main road speed limits will remain faster. However, residential streets, shopping streets and streets close to public transport will be slower, to create a more economically vibrant and safer city. That’s because children, older people and people living with disabilities feel safer when going to local schools, shops, services and parks.
Myth #5: 30km/h limits are about revenue-raising
Speed limits are a low-cost tool in the governments’ toolbox against road deaths. Of course, not everyone obeys speed limits – two-thirds of Australians admit to speeding. Speed enforcement and street design changes may be needed in some cases to reduce driver speed and improve conditions for all street users.
Introducing 30km/h limits is one of a suite of measures available to governments to bring about six compelling co-benefits to society: road safety, physical activity, air quality, liveability, equity and economic benefits.
All Australian states and territories should urgently introduce 30km/h speed limits to create streets that are safe, accessible and enjoyable for all.
Success in the Olympic Games is usually focused on medals, especially gold ones, and countries are usually ranked in terms of the number of medals won, and sometimes as medals per million of population or gross domestic product.
Examining individual countries this way yields some clues as to what is associated with success, but other striking insights emerge when the countries that won medals are divided into groups.
I’ve divided the 88 countries that won medals in the 2016 Rio Games into four large groups ranked by population (one group contains the 22 most populous nations, the next group 22 which are the next largest bloc, and so on) and also into four large groups ranked by total wealth.
Looking at the results this way, as if there were four and not 88 medal-winning participants, reveals that the least populous bloc won far more medals per 100 million population, by a factor of about 12, both gold and total, than the most populous bloc.
On its face, this is surprising. The group of countries with the largest populations have the largest number of potential athletes to choose from and win the largest overall numbers of medals.
Just as strikingly, and just as surprisingly, the least-wealthy bloc of countries won far more medals per US$ trillion of wealth than the wealthiest bloc.
Similar patterns emerged in the results of the 2016 Paralympics, the 2018 Commonwealth Games at the Gold Coast and the 2012 London Olympics.
If these results are driven by wealth rather than population (the two move together) they might flow from the things that tend to be associated with wealth, among them less exercise, more labour-saving devices and a less-healthy diet.
People in smaller and less-affluent countries might be more physically active and perhaps in better shape to become elite athletes.
Per dollar, the richest nations do the worst
Whatever the reasons, it seems clear that on an aggregate basis (not an individual basis) the ability to spend more money winning medals doesn’t translate into more medals per capita or more medals per unit of wealth. It does the reverse.
Other things matter. In 2004 Imad Moosa and Lee Smith from La Trobe University analysed the Sydney 2000 medal count and found it positively related to both expenditure on health as a proportion of GDP and the number of athletes representing each country (which is only loosely related to its population).
On an individual basis, the medal count may well be related to the amount of resources actually invested in winning medals (as opposed to the country’s total resources) and we often talk as if it is.
Is Australia’s disastrous Olympic campaign really $340 million well spent?
Another Australian newspaper report about Rio went as far as purporting to calculate the average cost to taxpayers per medal, which it said was A$20 million, “a price most of us seem prepared to pay”.
The medal count appears to matter for national pride, and arguably for broader participation in sport and wider health benefits (although an independent review for the Australian government failed to find such a link) but the path to getting medals appears to depend on more than what we are able to spend to get them.
Which makes the results of the games surprising, as they should be.
Now for the Tokyo Games, hopefully to be held later this year!
Since 2015, the share of younger people (aged 20 to 39) with private health insurance has dropped from 24% to 22%.
People in this age group contribute more in insurance premiums than they claim in pay-outs. So this decline ends up pushing prices up for the 44% of Australians with private insurance.
Our latest Grattan report outlines a four-step plan to stop this trajectory and fix the private health insurance system. The first step is preventing insurers increasing premiums if they cannot demonstrate the policy offers value for money.
What’s the private health insurance ‘death spiral’?
An ageing population, increased use of health services, and rising health-care costs are driving up the benefits insurers have to pay out each year.
As pay-outs increase, insurers raise premiums, to recoup these costs.
Rising premiums make health insurance less affordable and less attractive — particularly to younger and healthier people.
As younger, healthier people drop their insurance, the insurance “risk pool” gets worse; people who hold insurance are older and more likely to use their benefits and use them to a greater value.
This increases the cost of premiums, younger people drop out, and the death spiral starts again.
What does the data say?
The chart shows the overall trends in private health insurance over the past six years.
Over this time period, the number of people with private health insurance over 65 — who are likely to draw on their health insurance, receiving more in benefit pay-outs than they pay in premiums — has increased dramatically.
At the same time, the numbers in all other age groups is declining, albeit with a slight uptick in the September quarter of 2020, possibly associated with people being allowed to defer premium payments during the COVID crisis.
The picture is particularly stark for 20 to 39-year-olds. People in this group make the pool of people insured less risky overall.
So far, policy tweaks have failed
In 2017 the federal government announced several rearrangements of private health insurance deckchairs to make the product more affordable or to encourage young people into insurance.
1. Address premium increases, which are currently too great and too frequent.
Over the past 20 years, private health insurance premiums have grown faster than inflation, faster than health-specific inflation, and faster than wages. If people want to keep their same level of insurance, they have to fork out more and more.
Insurers that won’t or can’t offer their customers value for money should not be allowed to raise their premiums.
Private health insurance premiums have been rising faster than inflation.Shutterstock
A new private health industry plan could reinforce the incentives for insurers to improve their claims ratios. This is the proportion of premium revenue returned to members in the form of benefits.
The health minister could also require funds to provide additional justification for a proposed increase if the proportion of their premiums returned to members is worse than the average claims ratio.
2. Reduce private hospital costs.
Unnecessarily long stays and examples of low- or no-value care are more common in private hospitals than in public ones. This drives up the cost of private hospital care.
A new private health industry plan should create incentives for private hospitals to become more efficient. One way to do this would be for insurers to pay private hospitals in a similar way to how government funds public hospitals. This would mean insurers pay private hospitals for the patients they treat, not for how long patients stay in hospital or the other services hospitals provide.
Improving private hospital efficiency and reducing low- or no-value care could reduce premiums by 5%.
3. Reduce out-of-pocket costs.
Out-of-pocket costs on medical bills are often in the hundreds of dollars, and sometimes in the thousands. In 2019-20, the average medical out-of-pocket cost was $544, and the average hospital out-of-pocket cost was $411.
Out-of-pocket costs are a major source of people’s dissatisfaction with private health insurance, and astonishingly high billing by a minority of doctors is a major cause of these costs.
Comprehensive, public information on fees and costs would help. But even that is unlikely to significantly reduce the size and prevalence of out-of-pocket costs, because patients face an inherent power imbalance when dealing with doctors.
A new private health industry plan should include the structural reform required to reduce surprise out-of-pocket payments. This may come about through downward pressure on medical bills, or with more deals between doctors and insurers to bridge the gap.
Patients pace a power imbalance when dealing with doctors.Shutterstock
4. Reduce the price private insurers pay for medical devices.
Surgically implanted medical devices include hip and knee replacement devices, cardiac stents and pacemakers. Currently, medical device manufacturers and importers, and private hospitals charge more than twice as much for these as public hospitals, a nice gravy train which they lobbied health minister Greg Hunt to retain.
This year’s budget revealed the minister backed down on a plan to reduce the cost of health insurance premiums by stopping medical device rorts. The budget announced yet another process of investigation and analysis, rather than making the tough decisions to end the excess charging, which would allow cuts in private health insurance premiums.
Samoa’s Head of State has agreed to convene Parliament in order to swear in the members elected in April’s general election after weeks of political deadlock.
Leaders of the majority FAST party – which won 26 of 51 seats – met with Tuimaleali’ifano Va’aleto’a Sualauvi II today to request that Parliament be called on Friday.
The caretaker Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP) government that has been in power for four decades is attempting to delay Parliament, claiming electoral legal challenges need to be settled first.
Samoa’s Head of State Tuimaleali’ifano Va’aleto’a Sualauvi II. Image: Tipi Autagavaia/RNZ Pacific
However, FAST leader Fiame Naomi Mata’afa said the Head of State had agreed to convene Parliament, although he has yet to confirm a date.
Fiame acknowledged Tuimaleali’ifano’s critical role in calling Parliament together, which would then allow elected representatives to get on with their roles to govern.
A Green Party motion asking New Zealand MPs to recognise Palestine as a state has failed in the House, with opposition National and ACT MPs objecting to the effort.
Green Party MP Golriz Ghahraman, who arrived in New Zealand at an early age with her family as an Iranian-born refugee, today sought leave of the House to debate a motion asking MPs to recognise “the state of Palestine among our community of nations”, reports Stuff.
New Zealand does not recognise Palestine as a state but supports a two-state solution to the conflict, which would mean the creation of a Palestinian state.
RNZ News reports that Ghahraman said it was about recognising “the humanity and dignity of Palestinians at a time when they are facing extreme violence and degradation, once again, at the hands of Israeli occupying forces”.
National’s Foreign Affairs spokesperson Gerry Brownlee said the party had consistently been in favour of a two-state system.
“Despite the failure of talks over many years to achieve this, we are firmly of the view that it is the best solution to the extraordinary violence that has for a long time and currently is afflicting both Israelis and Arabs on the two sides of the argument,” Brownlee said.
There had been “administrative signs” that discussions had started to evolve, he said.
‘Get back to the table’ “What we need now is for those parties to desist from their current conflict and to get back to the table, working out how they can co-exist in what is a very, very small part of the world.”
— Golriz Ghahraman (@golrizghahraman) May 19, 2021
A letter sent by the party’s Deputy Leader Brooke Van Velden to Ghahraman said ACT supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Van Velden said the primary reason it was opposing the motion was because of a tweet sent by Green MP Ricardo Menendez last week that said “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”
“This phrase is used by Hamas, a ‘terrorist’ organisation that calls for the elimination of Israel,” van Velden said. It is actually a phrase widely used by activists across the world in support of Palestinian self-determination.
Without Labour’s support, the Green Party motion failed.
Te Paati Māori was the only other party to support the motion.
The Speaker said it was “disorderly” of Ghahraman to try and move the motion, given she knew it was going to be voted down.
Misinformation ‘deliberately spread’ Palestine Solidarity Network Aotearoa (PSNA) national chair John Minto sent a message to van Velden, saying he had read online that she was objecting to the Green Party parliamentary motion by claiming the expression “From the river to the sea – Palestine will be free” was used by Hamas and also by a Green Party MP on Saturday.
“This is NOT a Hamas slogan. It is used in demonstrations the world over because Israel now occupies and/or controls ALL of historic Palestine (one of the longest occupations in modern history) and the saying simply says that every Palestinian living between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea deserves their freedom – something I’m sure you will agree with,” Minto said.
“It’s also important to note that Hamas itself supports a two-state solution based on 1967 borders – as does New Zealand, the US and most other countries we like to compare ourselves with.
“There is a lot of misinformation deliberately spread by the pro-Israeli lobby here and around the world to derail pressure on Israel. Please don’t be dissuaded from supporting this motion by mischievous misinformation.”
The five reserved seats for women being put forward by Papua New Guinea’s special parliamentary committee on gender-based violence has been rejected by women and a petition is on its way to demand different proposal.
The women will petition the parliamentary committee to voice their disapproval about the five reserved seats idea and raise other related concerns.
Women in Politics president Maria Hayes told the Post-Courier that women represented half the population of the country and women leaders took offence that an attempt was being made to sideline them.
“Talk about gender-based violence!” Hayes said. “It is an insult.
“Women represent 50 percent of the country’s population; we do not have to stand on the side to be considered whether we are good or not.
“Parliament is mixing up gender-based violence with women in leadership which are two different issues.
“There is no structure in place so it is a farce; an election gimmick to lure women’s votes in next year’s national general election.”
The women are firm over their demand for 22 reserved seats and expressed disappointment that women in leadership was being narrowed down to gender-based violence.
They envisaged women’s decision-making in Parliament to be of much broader scope, encompassing all other areas of law-making and implementation.
They point to previous work done on temporary special measures in which women advocates believed being elected rather than having appointed seats to be the best way forward.
Under such a scheme, which they supported, 22 seats would be reserved for women.
This, they said, was the demand for women in PNG and they stood by it.
The idea currently being mooted is five reserved seats for women on the basis of region.
But PNG has four regions – the Highlands, Mamose, Southern and the Islands – which means there is a proposal to split Southern in half.
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