Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Will Steffen, Emeritus Professor, Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University

In May 2011, almost precisely a decade ago, the government-appointed Climate Commission released its inaugural report. Titled The Critical Decade, the report’s final section warned that to keep global temperature rises to 2℃ this century, “the decade between now and 2020 is critical”.

As the report noted, if greenhouse gas emissions peaked around 2011, the world’s emissions-reduction trajectory would have been easily manageable: net-zero by around 2060, and a maximum emissions reduction rate of 3.7% each year. Delaying the emissions peak by only a decade would require a trebling of this task – a maximum 9% reduction each year.

But, of course, the decade to 2020 did not mark the beginning of the world’s emissions-reduction journey. Global emissions accelerated before dropping marginally under COVID-19 restrictions, then quickly rebounding.

Our new report, released today, shows the immense cost of this inaction. It is now virtually certain Earth will pass the critical 1.5℃ temperature rise this century – most likely in the 2030s. Now, without delay, humanity must focus on holding warming to well below 2℃. For Australia, that means tripling its emissions reduction goal this decade to 75%.

Aim high, go fast

The Climate Council report is titled Aim High: Go Fast: Why Emissions Need To Plummet This Decade. It acknowledges the multiple lines of evidence showing it will be virtually impossible to keep average global temperature rise to 1.5℃ or below this century, without a period of significant overshoot and “drawdown”. (This refers to a hypothetical period in which warming exceeds 1.5℃ then cools back down due to the removal of carbon dioxide (CO₂) from the atmosphere.)

The increasing rate of climate change, insights from past climates, and a vanishing carbon budget all suggest the 1.5℃ threshold will in fact be crossed very soon, in the 2030s.

There is no safe level of global warming. Already, at a global average temperature rise of 1.1℃, we’re experiencing more powerful storms, destructive marine and land heatwaves, and a new age of megafires.

Read more: Cyclone Seroja just demolished parts of WA – and our warming world will bring more of the same

As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned, the consequences of breaching 1.5℃ warming will be stark. Heatwaves, droughts, bushfires and intense rain events will become even more severe. Sea levels will rise, species will become extinct and crop yields will fall. Coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, will decline by up to 90%.

And perhaps most frighteningly, overshooting 1.5℃ runs a greater risk of crossing “tipping points”, such as the collapse of ice sheets and the release of natural carbon stores in forests and permafrost. Crossing those thresholds may set off irreversible changes to the global climate system, and destroy critical ecosystems on which life on Earth depends.

Every fraction of a degree matters

The outlook may be dire, but every fraction of a degree of avoided warming matters. Its value will be measured in terms of human lives, species and ecosystems saved. We can, and must, limit warming to well below 2℃. The goal is very challenging, but still achievable.

The strategies, technologies and pathways needed to tackle the climate challenge are now emerging as fast as the risks are escalating. And in the lead-up to the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow later this year, there’s widespread momentum for international cooperation and action.

Read more: Seriously ugly: here’s how Australia will look if the world heats by 3°C this century

Many of Australia’s strategic allies and major trading partners – including the United States, Europe, the United Kingdom and China – are starting to move on climate change. But Australia is standing still. This is despite our nation being one of the most vulnerable to climate change – and despite us having some of the world’s best renewable energy resources.

We must urgently grab these opportunities. We propose Australia radically scale up its emissions-reduction targets – to a 75% cut by 2030 from 2005 levels (up from the current 26-28% target). Australia should also aim to reach net-zero emissions by 2035. Doing so by 2050 – a goal Prime Minister Scott Morrison says is his preference – is too late.

A huge but achievable task

Such dramatic action is clearly daunting. There are political, technical and other challenges ahead because action has been delayed. But a 75% emissions-reduction target is a fair and achievable contribution to the global effort.

Australia’s unrivalled potential for renewable energy means it can transform the electricity sector and beyond. Electric vehicles can lead to carbon-free transport and renewably generated electricity and green hydrogen can decarbonise industry.

The emerging new economy is bringing jobs to regional Australia and building cleaner cities by reducing fossil fuel pollution. There is staggering potential for a massive new industry built on the export to Asia of clean energy and products made from clean hydrogen.

Read more: Scott Morrison has embraced net-zero emissions – now it’s time to walk the talk

State, territory and local governments are leading the way in this transformation. The federal government must now join the effort.

The transition will no doubt be disruptive at times, and involve hard decisions. Industries such as coal will disappear and others will emerge. This will bring economic and social change which must be managed sensitively and carefully.

But the long-term benefits of achieving a stable climate far outweigh the short-term disruptions. As our report concludes:

The pathway we choose now will either put us on track for a much brighter future for our children, or lock in escalating risks of dangerous climate change. The decision is ours to make. Failure is not an option.

Climate Council researcher Dr Simon Bradshaw contributed to this article.

– ref. ‘Failure is not an option’: after a lost decade on climate action, the 2020s offer one last chance – https://theconversation.com/failure-is-not-an-option-after-a-lost-decade-on-climate-action-the-2020s-offer-one-last-chance-158913

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tom Hubble, Associate Professor, University of Sydney

Last month’s flood in the Hawkesbury-Nepean River region of western Sydney peaked at a staggering 12.9 metres, with water engulfing road signs and reaching the tops of many houses.

There hasn’t been a major flood on the Hawkesbury-Nepean for more than 30 years, with the last comparable one occurring in 1990. Long-term Sydneysiders, however, will remember that 12 major floods occurred during the 40 years before 1990. Five of these were larger than last month’s flood.

So what’s going on? The long-term rainfall pattern in the region and corresponding river flow is cyclic in nature. This means 40 to 50 years of dry weather with infrequent small floods are followed by 40 to 50 years of wet weather with frequent major floods.

As river and floodplain residents take stock of the recent damage to their homes and plan necessary repairs, it’s vital they recognise more floods are on the way. Large, frequent floods can be expected to occur again within 10 or 20 years if — as expected — the historical pattern of rainfall and flooding repeats itself.

Living in a bathtub

Many of the 18,000 people who were evacuated live in and around a region known as the “Sackville Bathtub”. As the name suggests, this flat, low-lying section of the floodplain region was spectacularly affected.

The Sackville Bathtub is located between Richmond and Sackville. It’s part of the Cumberland Plain area of Western Sydney and formed very slowly over 100 million years due to plate tectonic processes. The bathtub’s mudstone rock layers are folded into a broad, shallow, basin-shaped depression, which is surrounded by steep terrain.

Downstream of Sackville, the Hawkesbury-Nepean River flows through sandstone gorges and narrows in width. This creates a pinch-point that partially blocks the river channel.

Just as a bath plug sitting half-way over a plughole slows an emptying bath, the Sackville pinch-point causes the bathtub to fill during floods.

Will raising the dam wall work?

The NSW state government is planning to raise the wall of the Warragamba Dam to help mitigate catastrophic floods in the region. But this may not be an effective solution.

Typically, somewhere between 40% and 60% of the floodwater that fills up the Sackville Bathtub comes from unimpeded, non-Warragamba sources. So, when the Hawkesbury-Nepean River floods, the bathtub is already quite full and causing significant problems before Warragamba begins to spill. The Warragamba water then raises the flood level, but often by only a couple of metres.

Raising Warragamba Dam’s wall as a mitigation measure will only control about half the floodwater, and won’t prevent major floods delivered by the Nepean and Grose rivers, which also feed into the region. This represents a small potential benefit for a very large cost.

A long flooding period is on our doorstep

The idea of drought-dominated and flood-dominated periods for the Hawkesbury-Nepean River system was proposed in the mid-1970s by the University of Sydney’s Robin Warner. Since the late 1990’s, it hasn’t been the focus of much research.

Read more: What is a 1 in 100 year weather event? And why do they keep happening so often?

He showed a century-long cycle of alternating periods of dry weather and small floods followed by wet weather and big floods is normal for Sydney. This means the March flood may not have come as a surprise to older residents of the Sackville Bathtub, who have a lived experience of the whole 40-50 year flooding cycle.

As a rough average, one major flood occurred every four years during the last wet-weather period between 1950 and 1990. The largest of this period occurred in November 1961. It filled the Sackville Bathtub to a depth of 15 metres and — like the June 1964 (14.6 metres) and March 1978 (14.5 metres) events — caused more widespread flooding than this year’s flood.

We’re currently 30 years into a dry period, which may be about to end. Conditions might stay dry for another 10 or 20 years.

These cycles are likely caused by natural, long-term “climate drivers” — long-term climatic fluctuations such as El Niño and La Niña, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Indian Ocean Dipole, which are driven by oceanic current circulations. These global phenomena bring both benevolent weather and destructive weather to Australia.

Eastern Australia experiences decades-long periods of wetter weather when these climate drivers sync up with each other. When they’re out of sync, we get dry weather periods.

Read more: A rare natural phenomenon brings severe drought to Australia. Climate change is making it more common

These long-term cycles are natural and have been operating for thousands of years, but climate change is amplifying and accelerating them. Dry periods are getting drier, wet periods are getting wetter.

The good news and bad news

The bad news is that 12-plus metre floods at Hawkesbury River (Windsor Bridge) are not all that unusual. There have been 24, 12-plus metre floods at Windsor Bridge since 1799.

The good news is meteorological forecasters are excellent at predicting when the storms that generate moderate, large and catastrophic floods are coming. We can expect several days’ to a week’s notice of the next big flood.

We can also prepare our individual and communal responses for more large and frequent floods on the Hawkesbury-Nepean. Residents of the area need to think about how they might live near the river as individuals. Decide what is precious and what you will fit into a car and trailer. Practice evacuating.

As a community, we must ensure the transport infrastructure and evacuation protocols minimise disruption to river and floodplain residents while maximising their safety. It’s particularly important we set up inclusive infrastructure to ensure disadvantaged people, who are disproportionately affected by disasters, also have a fighting chance to evacuate and survive.

Read more: Not ‘if’, but ‘when’: city planners need to design for flooding. These examples show the way

Upgrading the escape routes that enable people to evacuate efficiently is absolutely vital. As is rethinking whether we should continue urban expansion in the Sackville Bathtub.

So remember, the next major flood is going to occur sooner than we would like. If you live in this region, you must start preparing. Or as a wise elder once said, “Live on a floodplain, own a boat!”

This story is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. Read the rest of the stories here.

– ref. Sydney’s disastrous flood wasn’t unprecedented, and we can expect more major floods in just 10 years – https://theconversation.com/sydneys-disastrous-flood-wasnt-unprecedented-and-we-can-expect-more-major-floods-in-just-10-years-158427

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Ziguras, Professor of Global Studies, RMIT University

Victorian universities recently re-proposed a previously conceived plan to get international students back under a similar model used to fly in tennis players for the Australian Open. Under the proposal, universities would help pay for around 1,000 foreign students to be flown into Melbourne every two to three weeks and placed into special lockdown arrangements.

Similar plans to get international students back have been considered in various states since borders closed in March last year – and then quietly shelved. So far, only the Northern Territory has been able to bring 63 students to Australia.

But 63 students is an almost negligible number compared to how many visa holders are still stranded outside the country — an estimated 30% of 542,106 (or around 160,000) student visa holders were outside Australia as of January 10 2021.

Read more: 2021 is the year Australia’s international student crisis really bites

In February, Phil Honeywood, the CEO of the International Education Association of Australia, expressed uncharacteristic desperation in his monthly email to members. He wrote:

When we directly lobby our federal politicians to promote student return plans, we are told that state/territory governments have full control of quarantine and we have to persuade them first. However, our discussions with state and territory politicians invariably produce the response that because the federal government controls Border Force, the ADF and international airport arrival caps, they are the ones actually in control!

Victorian Acting Premier James Merlino last week also blamed Canberra for the lack of progress to bring students back:

If you don’t get that from the federal government then it doesn’t matter what other ideas, whether it’s the City of Melbourne, SA, NSW or ourselves, doesn’t matter what idea you have to deliver it, if you can’t get people [students] on the flights, it’s a no-goer.

But Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge is on the other side of the blame game, saying, at the end of March:

there is still the opportunity to bring students back in small, phased pilots. This could occur if an institution works with the state or territory government and presents a plan to us for quarantining international students […] I have discussed various plans with government and university leaders but to date have not received any concrete proposal.

This is all very confusing for the international education sector, which has come up with a number of concrete plans. Neither level of government seems to be able to either offer a sufficient explanation for why a plan it was considering was abandoned or, when an explanation is offered, when that plan may be resumed.

This creates the perception, among those working in the sector and international students, that no governments care about their fate.

South Australian and ACT plans shelved

The Australian Capital Territory and South Australia were the first jurisdictions to announce plans to bring back international students. In June 2020, they proposed pilots that would bring in 350 and 800 students to Canberra and Adelaide respectively. But both these plans were put on hold after Victoria’s second wave hit at the beginning of July.

The South Australian pilot was resuscitated in November — with preparations reportedly well advanced — before an outbreak later that month sent Adelaide into a snap lockdown and the pilot was again put on ice.

Not to be deterred, ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr announced in December he had requested Commonwealth approval to bring students back by February this year, but this too was quietly shelved with no explanation given.

Victoria and NSW try and try again

In Victoria universities and student accommodation providers have put a series of proposals to the state government, the first of which were scuppered when Victoria went into extended lockdown from July during the second wave.

In December the Victorian government was considering a plan to fly in up to 23,000 international students early in 2021, who would serve out their quarantine in student accommodation. By January the state government was upbeat saying it was “working closely” with the federal government to finalise the plan.

But that all changed in February. In a national cabinet meeting at which an international student return plan was to be agreed, Prime Minister Scott Morrison instead said:

It was agreed once again that the return of Australian residents is the priority in terms of arrivals to Australia. We must remember that our borders are actually shut. No one can just come to Australia.

Within weeks, a small number of cases of community transmission from a Melbourne quarantine hotel caused a snap lockdown and the cessation of incoming international flights, which only resumed in April.

Now that the dust appears to have settled once more, Victorian universities are trying again, with a proposal to fly in 1,000 students each fortnight. The state government’s response so far appears lukewarm at best.

New South Wales has also had its share of pilot announcements. A well-developed scheme to start returning 1,000 international students to Sydney each week was shelved in January after the outbreaks in the northern beaches and Western Sydney.

The NSW government subsequently tried for international NSW university students to quarantine in Tasmania before coming to Sydney. Unsurprisingly the idea was quickly quashed by the Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein.

So, what now?

Only 63 international students have come to Australia through the Northern Territory in November 2020. They were quarantined in the Howard Springs facility. In March 2021, Scott Morrison announced the Howard Springs facility’s capacity would increase to 2,000 people per fortnight. But there is no suggestion any of those places will be available for international students.

A recent study I was involved in identified nearly 12,000 beds in student accommodation facilities in the City of Sydney and nearly 19,000 in the City of Melbourne. Using some of these properties could provide a parallel quarantine pathway for international students – without taking hotel quarantine spaces away from returning Australians.

New South Wales recently launched the International Student Accommodation Quarantine program. The NSW government has invited student accommodation providers to apply to be assessed for eligibility (based on things like location and building layout) to house international students.

Read more: How unis can use student housing to solve international student quarantine issues

This is promising. We all agree bringing Australians home is a priority. But we have the capacity to bring back both. We know costs will be borne by students and education providers, and students will be subject to the same quarantine requirements and testing regimes already in place for returning Australians.

It’s just not good enough for the education minister to keep parroting the line returning Australians “remain the priority” over international students. If the government refuses to continue plans to bring students back, it must show them respect by providing a clear reason.

– ref. The government keeps shelving plans to bring international students back to Australia. It owes them an explanation – https://theconversation.com/the-government-keeps-shelving-plans-to-bring-international-students-back-to-australia-it-owes-them-an-explanation-158778

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary Mortimer, Professor of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour, Queensland University of Technology

When Marilyn Monroe was asked, “What do you wear to bed?”, she famously replied, “Just a few drops of No. 5″.

Monroe was perhaps the most famous fan of the French perfume celebrating its 100th birthday next month. Since it was launched by Coco Chanel on May 5, 1921, Chanel No.5 has endured in popularity. Indeed, in 2019 an estimated 1.92 millon women purchased a bottle in Great Britain alone.

Already a successful fashion designer and businesswoman, Chanel became an icon at a time when women were mostly employed in agricultural or domestic duties. She trained as a seamstress, later working as a shop girl and cafe singer, and in 1910, opened her hat shop Chanel Modes at Number 21 rue Cambon, in the centre of Paris.

By 1913, she had opened stores in the resort towns of Deauville and Biarritz, selling hats and a limited line of garments.

Having been raised by nuns in an orphanage, the perfume she went on to create was inspired by their cleanliness and stark simplicity.

Fresh linens and yellow soap

Chanel was born Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, on August 19, 1883 in Saumur, France. After her mother died, Chanel was sent at the age of 12 to the Abbey of Aubazine Orphanage in Corrèze.

According to her biographers, her company logo, her signature colour of black, her minimalist style and, indeed, the number five (as one story has it, she would cross a series of five paths that led to the cathedral for daily prayer) were all inspired by life in Aubazine.

During the summer of 1920, on holiday on the Cote d’Azur, Chanel learned of a sophisticated perfumer called Ernest Beaux, who had worked for the Russian royal family and lived close by in Grasse, the centre of Europe’s perfume industry.

The fresh linens and the smell of the yellow soap used by girls at the orphanage had left an impression on Chanel. She asked Beaux to create a scent that would make “its wearer smell like a woman, and not a rose”.

Just like the fragrance, Chanel’s perfume bottle was as plain and minimalist “as a laboratory vial”. Since the 1920s, it has only been modified eight times.

Up until the first half of the 20th century, fashion houses were not in the business of creating perfumes, but the launch of Chanel No. 5 inspired many. The English House of Worth launched Dans La Nuit in 1922. In France, Jeanne Lanvin launched My Sin in 1925, and Jean Patou launched Joy in 1930.

Today, couture and fragrances are nearly synonymous, with brands such as Yves Saint Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, Guy Laroche, Pierre Cardin and Paco Rabanne all making perfume.

Iconic No. 5

An iconic brand has five key elements: it is aspirational, with strong visual identity and persona, it is omnipresent throughout society, and consumers feel a personal connection with it. Chanel No. 5 ticks all these boxes.

Such brands transcend simple purchases. Brand charisma has been described as “sophisticated, iconic and magical” – offering consumers a touch of magic simply through owning the item.

It is, of course, not just the power of the brand that makes No. 5 successful, but also the fragrance itself, with floral scents blended over what has been described as a “warm, woody base”.

Read more: Improving the fragrant harvest

Have you ever experienced the fragrance of Chanel No. 5 in a crowded shopping centre, or at a party, and immediately thought of someone who wore it? Studies have determined a clear link between smell and emotions and memories

For iconic brands, such as Chanel No. 5, it isn’t just the perfume being sold: it is also the history — a history enhanced by the bittersweet quality of nostalgia in the ways our brains link scent and memory.

No.5 and tomorrow

Coco Chanel’s focus remained on fashion, running Chanel Couture until her death in 1971. In 1924, she had handed control of the distribution and production of all Chanel cosmetics and fragrances to her business partner, the venture capitalist Pierre Wertheimer.

Wertheimer launched the company’s perfume branch, Les Parfums Chanel in that year. It has created many more scents – but none as enduring or popular as Chanel No. 5.

Chanel and Marilyn Monroe weren’t the only faces of the perfume. Celebrities such as Audrey Tautou and Brad Pitt were paid the promote No.5. In 2004, the brand spent US$33 million on a three-minute ad starring Nicole Kidman and directed by Baz Luhrmann — that’s roughly 300,000 bottles of perfume worth.

Today, the company Chanel started as a small hat shop is ranked 52 in the world on Forbes’ list of most valuable brands, valued at US$12.8 billion.

Through it all, No. 5 has lived on.

– ref. ‘Smell like a woman, not a rose’: Chanel No. 5 100 years on, an iconic fragrance born from an orphanage – https://theconversation.com/smell-like-a-woman-not-a-rose-chanel-no-5-100-years-on-an-iconic-fragrance-born-from-an-orphanage-158870

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

Scott Morrison has defended his intemperate language in parliament against Christine Holgate last year, saying he had to protect taxpayers’ money and Labor was calling for her resignation.

Pressed to respond to the former Australia Post CEO’s accusations of bullying, Morrison said he regretted the distress his strong words had caused her but he did not see the need to apologise, or to contact Holgate personally.

Holgate, after appearing before a Senate inquiry, told the ABC on Tuesday Morrison’s October 22 parliamentary performance was “one of the worst acts of bullying” she’d ever seen. She urged him to call her and apologise.

After she revealed she had given Cartier watches to high performing executives, Morrison told parliament she had been instructed to stand aside pending an inquiry and if she didn’t want to do that, “she can go”. In less than a fortnight she had left her job.

The Prime Minister, who is in Western Australia, said his language on what had been “quite a heated day” in parliament, had been “very strong”.

“And I see that that has caused some very, very strong reactions from Christine. And it hurt her deeply. And that was not my intention. And so I regret that,” he said

“But at the same time, the issue here was how taxpayers’ funds were being used in a government-owned company,” Morrison said.

“And that’s how this issue began. It was about Cartier watches being handed out to well-paid executive for doing their jobs.

“And that was not something that my government supported”.

As prime minister he had to stand up for “standards”, he said.

Morrison rejected Holgate’s claim that gender was a factor in how she was treated. “This was about the issues of taxpayers’ money. And no, I don’t accept that there are any gender-related issues here at all”.

Explaining his unwillingness to actually apologise Morrison said, “I think acknowledging distress has been caused is appropriate”.

He said “any remaining issues sit between Christine Holgate and the chair” of Australia Post, Lucio Di Bartolomeo.

Asked whether he would call Holgate – he did not speak to her on October 22 or afterwards – Morrison said, “ I don’t think there’s a need for that. The chairman and the former chief executive, that’s where the employment relationship existed and that’s where those issues are being addressed”.

Holgate says issues around her contract remain unresolved.

Asked if the chairman should resign – which Holgate has called for – Morrison said, “There’s nothing before me which suggests that”.

Nationals senator Matt Canavan has said Di Bartolomeo should resign. “He has presided over this debacle” . But Di Bartolomeo told Canavan during Tuesday’s hearing he would not resign.

Communications Minister Paul Fletcher told Sky there was no government plan to split off and sell the parcel delivery part of Australia Post.

This followed Holgate’s evidence that the original version of a report to the government from consultants BCG put forward reform paths including divesting the parcels business.

She told the inquiry the executive team “pushed back on the need and the ability to cut back the services and jobs as they proposed and the significant disruption a parcels divestiture would cause”. The final version of the report, which is unreleased, was modified.

On another front, Morrison on Wednesday confirmed he will be meeting former ministerial staffer Brittany Higgins, who alleged she was raped by a colleague in a ministerial office in 2019.

He said he didn’t know where the meeting would take place – Higgins has expressed reservations about meeting in parliament house. “I know there are a range of issues that she’s relayed to my chief of staff that she would like to raise and I look forward to hearing her,” he said.

– ref. Scott Morrison won’t say ‘sorry’ to Holgate but ‘regrets’ the hurt – https://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-wont-say-sorry-to-holgate-but-regrets-the-hurt-158989

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna M. Kotarba-Morley, Lecturer, Archaeology, Flinders University

An almost 3,400-year-old industrial, royal metropolis, “the Dazzling Aten”, has been found on the west bank of the Nile near the modern day city of Luxor.

Announced last week by the famed Egyptian archaeologist Dr Zahi Hawass, the find has been compared in importance to the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb almost a century earlier.

Built by Amenhotep III and then used by his grandson Tutankhamen, the ruins of the city were an accidental discovery. In September last year, Hawass and his team were searching for a mortuary temple of Tutankhamen.

Instead, hidden under the sands for almost three and a half millennia, they found the Dazzling Aten, believed to be the largest city discovered in Egypt and, importantly, dated to the height of Egyptian civilisation. So far, Hawass’ excavations have unearthed rooms filled with tools and objects of daily life such as pottery and jewellery, a large bakery, kitchens and a cemetery.

The city also includes workshops and industrial, administrative and residential areas, as well as, to date, three palaces.

Ancient Egypt has been called the “civilisation without cities”. What we know about it comes mostly from tombs and temples, whilst other great civilisations of the Bronze Age, such as Mesopotamia, are famous for their great cities.

The Dazzling Aten is extraordinary not only for its size and level of prosperity but also its excellent state of preservation, leading many to call it the “Pompeii of Ancient Egypt”.

The rule of Amenhotep III was one of the wealthiest periods in Egyptian history. This city will be of immeasurable importance to the scholarship of archaeologists and Egyptologists, who for centuries have struggled with understanding the specifics of urban, domestic life in the Pharaonic period.

Foundations of urban life

I teach a university subject on the foundations of urban life, and it always comes as a surprise to my students how little we know about urbanism in ancient Egypt.

The first great cities, and with them the first great civilisations, emerged along the fertile valleys of great rivers in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), the Indus Valley (modern day India and Pakistan) and China at the beginning of the Bronze Age, at least 5,000 years ago.

Just like cities today, they provided public infrastructure and roads, and often access to sanitation, education, health care and welfare. Their residents specialised in particular professions, paid taxes and had to obey laws.

But the Nile did not support the urban lifestyle in the same way as the rivers of other great civilisations. It had a reliable flood pattern and thus the second longest river in the world could be easily tamed, allowing for simple methods of irrigation that did not require complex engineering and large groups of workers to maintain. This meant the population didn’t necessarily need to cluster in organised cities.

Excavations of Early Dynastic (c. 3150-2680 BCE) Egyptian cities such as Nagada and Hierakonpolis have provided us with a plethora of information regarding urban life in the early Bronze Age . But they are separated from the Dazzling Aten by some 1,600 years — as long as separates us from the Huns of Attila attacking ancient Rome.

One city closer in age to the Dazzling Aten we do know a little more about is the short-lived capital of Amenhotep’s III son, Akhenaten, known as the “Horizon of the Aten”, or Tell el-Amarna. Amarna was functional for only 14 years (1346-1332 BCE) before being abandoned forever. It was first described by a travelling Jesuit monk in 1714 and has been excavated on and off for the last 100 years.

Very few other Egyptian cities from the Early Dynastic Period (3150 BCE) to the Hellenistic period (following Alexander the Great’s conquest of Egypt in 332 BCE), have been excavated. This means that domestic urban life and urban planning have long been contentious research areas in the study of Pharaonic Egypt.

The scientific community is impatiently waiting for more information to draw comparisons between Akhenaten’s city and the newly discovered capital founded by his father.

The magnificent pharaoh

Amenhotep III, also known as Amenhotep the Magnificent, ruled between 1386 and 1349 BCE and was one of the most prosperous rulers in the Egyptian history.

During his reign as the ninth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty, Egypt achieved the height of its international power, climbing to an unprecedented level of economic prosperity and artistic splendour. His vision of greatness was immortalised in his great capital, which is believed to have been later used by at least Tutankhamen and Ay.

In 2008, for the first time in history, the majority of world’s inhabitants lived in the cities. Yet, with globalisation, the differences between the “liveability” of modern cities are striking.

As a society we need to understand where cities come from, how have they formed and how they shaped the development of past urban communities to learn lessons for the future. We look forward to research and findings being published from the ancient city of Amenhotep III to enlighten us about the daily lives of ancient Egyptians at their height.

– ref. The discovery of the lost city of ‘the Dazzling Aten’ will offer vital clues about domestic and urban life in Ancient Egypt – https://theconversation.com/the-discovery-of-the-lost-city-of-the-dazzling-aten-will-offer-vital-clues-about-domestic-and-urban-life-in-ancient-egypt-158874

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kylie Quinn, Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow, School of Health and Biomedical Sciences, RMIT University

This week, US health authorities recommended pausing the rollout of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson/Janssen COVID-19 vaccine while investigations into exceptionally rare blood clots take place.

Six women suffered blood clots out of nearly seven million doses administered.

The J&J vaccine uses broadly similar vaccine technology as the AstraZeneca vaccine, known as adenoviral vectors, which has led some experts to speculate there might be a link between this vaccine platform and the very rare blood clotting condition known as “vaccine-induced immune thrombotic thrombocytopenia” (VITT).

Read more: What is thrombocytopenia, the rare blood condition possibly linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine?

So far, a link between adenovirus technology in general and blood clots is purely speculation — there’s no evidence yet — but it’s worthwhile for health authorities to assess the data and for researchers to try to understand:

• can adenoviral vectors in general cause VITT?

• is VITT specific to the AstraZeneca adenoviral vaccine?

• are certain unlucky individuals pre-disposed to develop VITT?

So what’s an adenovirus, and how are they used in vaccines?

Adenoviruses are a large family of viruses found in humans and other animals. In humans, some of these viruses can cause the common cold.

Scientists can also use these viruses to make vaccines, by using them to make what’s called a “viral vector”. A vector is a virus shell that researchers can use to package up and deliver a target from another virus.

To make an adenoviral vector, scientists take an adenovirus and remove any genetic material that could either allow the virus to replicate and spread, or cause disease. Researchers then take the adenovirus shell and insert genetic instructions for how to make a target on the surface of another virus. For COVID-19, they use the instructions to make the “spike protein” on the surface of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Read more: From adenoviruses to RNA: the pros and cons of different COVID vaccine technologies

To your immune system, an adenoviral vector looks like a serious virus, even though it can’t replicate or cause disease. As a result, your immune system mounts a serious response, which is why people have been reporting more noticeable side-effects like a fever, fatigue and sore arm in the couple of days after the vaccine.

Similar but different

Currently, four COVID-19 vaccines use adenoviral vectors: AstraZeneca, Janssen/Johnson&Johnson, CanSino Biologicals and Sputnik V.

There are many adenoviruses out there to use as a starting point to make different adenoviral vectors. While these vectors can share some characteristics, they can also be biologically pretty different.

Different adenoviruses use different access points, known as receptors, to get into our cells. This can result in a very different size and type of immune response. Also, the adenovirus used in the Sputnik V and CanSino vaccines, called “rAd5”, isn’t very good at setting off the alarms in our immune system, while other adenoviral vectors are better.

The different vaccines also deliver slightly different sets of instructions for the spike protein. The J&J vaccine, called “rAd26”, instructs our cells to make a spike protein that’s locked into a specific shape, to help our immune system recognise it, and it’s delivered to the surface of the cell. The AstraZeneca vaccine, called “chAdOx01” instructs the cell to make a spike protein that isn’t locked in place and it can be secreted from the cell.

Given these differences, if one adenoviral vaccine is linked with a particular effect in our bodies, for example blood clots, it doesn’t mean all vaccines in this family will have that same effect. But regulators should still investigate.

We need to understand more about these blood clots

A number of regulatory bodies have issued notifications of a plausible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and VITT.

This risk is very, very low — around one in 200,000 people that receive the vaccine could develop the condition. But for the rare person that develops VITT, the consequences can be serious, with around one-quarter of those with the condition dying from it. So regulators are taking the situation seriously.

VITT isn’t like other clotting conditions. There are many different types of clotting conditions but it seems VITT is likely to be caused by an unusual immune response.

We don’t know exactly what triggers this immune response. There have been reports of clotting conditions with adenovirus infections or very high doses of adenoviral vectors. However, this occurred very quickly, while VITT is a delayed response, observed 4-20 days after vaccination. It seems more likely at this stage that, in certain very rare patients, some kind of unusual immune response may be triggered.

Read more: How does the Johnson & Johnson vaccine compare to other coronavirus vaccines? 4 questions answered

While researchers try to understand VITT, many regulators are taking a cautious approach — advising their communities, giving guidelines for preferred vaccines with younger age groups and revisiting data for other vaccines to be vigilant.

In doing this, regulators must balance a very rare risk of VITT with the AstraZeneca vaccine, with a very real risk of death and disease that face people with COVID-19. For many people, particularly older people in regions with community transmission of the virus, it still makes clear sense for their health to receive whichever COVID-19 vaccine is available.

These are complex decisions resulting in nuanced information that is hard to communicate. But the fact regulators are engaging with them quickly and transparently has been reassuring to me and, I hope, others in our broader community.

– ref. Is it the adenovirus vaccine technology, used by AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, causing blood clots? There’s no evidence yet – https://theconversation.com/is-it-the-adenovirus-vaccine-technology-used-by-astrazeneca-and-johnson-and-johnson-causing-blood-clots-theres-no-evidence-yet-158944

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sujeet Kumar, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University

India is witnessing a sharp spike in COVID-19 cases after months of declining numbers had given the country hope it had made it through the worst of the pandemic relatively unscathed.

On March 1, India recorded just 12,286 new cases, but since early April this figure has skyrocketed to over 100,000 every day. Earlier this week, it hit a record of 168,912 cases in a day — the highest in the world.

As the health crisis escalates, the poor are once again fearing a return to lockdown and economic hardship. Migrants have started fleeing from cities to their home villages in order to avoid the pain and trauma they went through a year ago when Prime Minister Narendra Modi enacted a nationwide lockdown. Many cities, including Mumbai and Delhi, have already announced nightly curfews.

Read more: What’s the new coronavirus variant in India and how should it change their COVID response?

For now, the Indian government has just asked the states to focus on “stringent containment and public health measures”, including testing, tracing and inoculations. Modi has also appealed to people to get vaccinated during a four-day “Tika Utsav” (special vaccination drive), which began on Sunday.

However, the situation remains grim. Even though India is one of the world’s biggest coronavirus vaccine manufacturers, some states are experiencing vaccine shortages. At the same time, experts fear a lack of social distancing and new variants of the virus are causing infections to potentially spiral out of control.

How the poor suffered during last year’s lockdown

When COVID-19 first appeared in India last year, the Modi government was quick to bring the country together.

In a speech to the nation last March, he announced a 21-day nationwide lockdown of 1.3 billion people with only four hours’ notice. All means of transportation were suspended. The rich and affluent started hoarding food and medicines, while the poor worried about their livelihoods.

A mass migration ensued as hundreds of millions of migrant workers headed from the major cities back to their home villages on foot. This was the most visible face of the humanitarian crisis. Others, however, suffered out of the public eye, such as the street vendors, waste pickers, domestic maids and shopkeepers in slums, who were all forced to stop working.

As part of a study last year, I helped conduct a series of six rounds of telephone surveys in 20 diverse slums in the city of Patna, the capital of the northeastern Bihar state from July to November.

Nearly all slum residents we spoke with — except the rare few with protected formal sector jobs — were cut off suddenly from their sources of income after the lockdown was announced. And more than 80% of slum households in Patna lost their entire primary source of income.

Read more: ‘How will we eat’? India’s coronavirus lockdown threatens millions with severe hardship

Economic recovery since the lockdown has also been slow. By mid-November, one-third of respondents had still not fully recovered their pre-pandemic incomes. Many had been hired back at their old jobs on a part-time basis or at a fraction of their former pay. Many jobs simply disappeared.

The poor survived by cutting back on their food, borrowing money and helping each other.

Given these struggles, there is now a sense of anxiety in these slum communities and a mistrust of the government, especially Modi. Says Ajay, 35, a street vendor who lives in the Kankarbagh slum,

The government finds it is easy to lock us down but not to provide financial and livelihood support. PM is busy campaigning for an election where thousands of people come without masks and are violating social distancing norms.

The government’s failed leadership

Undoubtedly, Modi still remains popular among most ordinary people. When he says something, India listens carefully. It worked well last year, and his appeal compelled people to wear masks and maintain social distancing, helping to flatten the curve and limit the loss of lives.

However, making public speeches will not be enough during this second wave. The prime minister needs to be seen adhering to these practices in his own daily life, but this is not happening on the ground.

In the ongoing elections in West Bengal, Assam, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, as well as the election in Bihar last year, Modi and other party leaders have addressed several rallies without paying much attention to COVID restrictions. Modi himself has addressed more than 20 rallies attended by thousands of unmasked people.

When leaders are seen addressing mass gathering without masks and social distancing, the public will not only assume everything is normal, they will lose their fear of COVID.

Modi has also insisted he would not politicise the pandemic, but he has done exactly that. In states like Maharashtra, Punjab and Chhattisgarh, which are facing a spike in cases, Modi’s party is pointing the finger at the state leaders, who come from opposing parties. The states, meanwhile, are blaming Modi’s government for failed leadership.

Read more: The best hope for fairly distributing COVID-19 vaccines globally is at risk of failing. Here’s how to save it

Another concern is the Modi government’s decision to allow a major festival, Kumbh Mela, to take place in Uttrakhand state, which is ruled by his party, the BJP. Several million people gathered at the Ganges River for an auspicious bathing day this week, flouting social distancing practices.

Uttrakhand’s chief minister said the “faith of devotees will overcome the fear of COVID-19”, at a time when infections are skyrocketing.

Who will help the poor?

As the numbers of COVID-19 cases are rising every day, the fear of a return to lockdown is ever-present, haunting the poor. Many have yet to recover from their previous debts, and COVID-19 is now threatening their livelihoods again.

Last year, several not-for-profit, grassroots organisations came forward to help the migrants and urban poor dwellers, but this is going to be more challenging this year.

Not only have their funds been depleted, but recent changes brought by the government have stopped the flow of foreign aid money to many organisations. Amnesty International announced in September it would halt its operations in India after its bank accounts had been frozen.

One NGO volunteer, Prabhakar, who works with slum dwellers in Patna, told us,

if the government is going to announce the complete lockdown like last year, many people will run out of food, as parent NGOs have stopped sponsoring the small organisations which work with the slum dwellers.

This is the time for Modi to show decisive leadership in not only controlling the surge of the virus, but also providing financial assistance to millions of urban poor and helping them reach their home villages with their dignity intact. This is what is needed to instill trust in the prime minister again.

Binod Kumar, a senior project officer in the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India, contributed to this article.

– ref. As India’s COVID crisis worsens, leaders play the blame game while the poor suffer once again – https://theconversation.com/as-indias-covid-crisis-worsens-leaders-play-the-blame-game-while-the-poor-suffer-once-again-158531

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By David Tuffley, Senior Lecturer in Applied Ethics & CyberSecurity, Griffith University

Some weeks ago, a nine-year-old macaque monkey called Pager successfully played a game of Pong with its mind.

While it may sound like science fiction, the demonstration by Elon Musk’s neurotechnology company Neuralink is an example of a brain-machine interface in action (and has been done before).

A coin-sized disc called a “Link” was implanted by a precision surgical robot into Pager’s brain, connecting thousands of micro threads from the chip to neurons responsible for controlling motion.

Brain-machine interfaces could bring tremendous benefit to humanity. But to enjoy the benefits, we’ll need to manage the risks down to an acceptable level.

A perplexing game of Pong

Pager was first shown how to play Pong in the conventional way, using a joystick. When he made a correct move, he’d receive a sip of banana smoothie. As he played, the Neuralink implant recorded the patterns of electrical activity in his brain. This identified which neurons controlled which movements.

The joystick could then be disconnected, after which Pager played the game using only his mind — doing so like a boss.

This Neuralink demo built on an earlier one from 2020, which involved Gertrude the Pig. Gertrude had the Link installed and output recorded, but no specific task was assessed.

Read more: Neuralink put a chip in Gertrude the pig’s brain. It might be useful one day

Helping people with brain injury

According to Neuralink, its technology could help people who are paralysed with spinal or brain injuries, by giving them the ability to control computerised devices with their minds. This would provide paraplegics, quadriplegics and stroke victims the liberating experience of doing things by themselves again.

Prosthetic limbs might also be controlled by signals from the Link chip. And the technology would be able to send signals back, making a prosthetic limb feel real.

Cochlear implants already do this, converting external acoustic signals into neuronal information, which the brain translates into sound for the wearer to “hear”.

Neuralink has also claimed its technology could remedy depression, addiction, blindness, deafness and a range of other neurological disorders. This would be done by using the implant to stimulate areas of the brain associated with these conditions.

A game-changer

Brain-machine interfaces could also have applications beyond the therapeutic. For a start, they could offer a much faster way of interacting with computers, compared to methods that involve using hands or voice.

A user could type a message at the speed of thought and not be limited by thumb dexterity. They’d only have to think the message and the implant could convert it to text. The text could then be played through software that converts it to speech.

Perhaps more exciting is a brain-machine interface’s ability to connect brains to the cloud and all its resources. In theory, a person’s own “native” intelligence could then be augmented on demand by accessing cloud-based artificial intelligence (AI).

Human intelligence could be greatly multiplied by this. Consider for a moment if two or more people wirelessly connected their implants. This would facilitate a high-bandwidth exchange of images and ideas from one to the other.

In doing so they could potentially exchange more information in a few seconds than would take minutes, or hours, to convey verbally.

But some experts remain sceptical about how well the technology will work, once it’s applied to humans for more complex tasks than a game of Pong. Regarding Neuralink, Anna Wexler, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said:

neuroscience is far from understanding how the mind works, much less having the ability to decode it.

Can Neuralink be hacked?

At the same time, concerns about such technology’s potential harm continue to occupy brain-machine interface researchers.

Without bulletproof security, it’s possible hackers could access implanted chips and cause a malfunction or misdirection of its actions. The consequences could be fatal for the victim.

Some may worry powerful artificial AI working through a brain-machine interface could overwhelm and take control of the host brain.

The AI could then impose a master-slave relationship and, the next thing you know, humans could become an army of drones. Elon Musk himself is on record saying artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to humanity.

He says humans will need to eventually merge with AI, to remove the “existential threat” advanced AI could present:

My assessment about why AI is overlooked by very smart people is that very smart people do not think a computer can ever be as smart as they are. And this is hubris and obviously false.

Musk has famously compared AI research and development with “summoning the demon”. But what can we reasonably make of this statement? It could be interpreted as an attempt to scare the public and, in so doing, pressure governments to legislate strict controls over AI development.

Musk himself has had to negotiate government regulations governing the operations of autonomous and aerial vehicles such as his SpaceX rockets.

Hasten slowly

The crucial challenge with any potentially volatile technology is to devote enough time and effort into building safeguards. We’ve managed to do this for a range of pioneering technologies, including atomic energy and genetic engineering.

Autonomous vehicles are a more recent example. While research has shown the vast majority of road accidents are attributed to driver behaviour, there are still situations in which AI controlling a car won’t know what to do and could cause an accident.

Read more: Are autonomous cars really safer than human drivers?

Years of effort and billions of dollars have gone into making autonomous vehicles safe, but we’re still not quite there. And the travelling public won’t be using autonomous cars until the desired safety levels have been reached. The same standards must apply to brain-machine interface technology.

It is possible to devise reliable security to prevent implants from being hacked. Neuralink (and similar companies such as NextMind and Kernel) have every reason to put in this effort. Public perception aside, they would be unlikely to get government approval without it.

Last year the US Food and Drug Administration granted Neuralink approval for “breakthrough device” testing, in recognition of the technology’s therapeutic potential.

Moving forward, Neuralink’s implants must be easy to repair, replace and remove in the event of malfunction, or if the wearer wants it removed for any reason. There must also be no harm caused, at any point, to the brain.

While brain surgery sounds scary, it has been around for several decades and can be done safely.

When will human trials start?

According to Musk, Neuralink’s human trials are set to begin towards the end of this year. Although details haven’t been released, one would imagine these trials will build on previous progress. Perhaps they will aim to help someone with spinal injuries walk again.

The neuroscience research needed for such a brain-machine interface has been advancing for several decades. What was lacking was an engineering solution that solved some persistent limitations, such as having a wireless connection to the implant, rather than physically connecting with wires.

On the question of whether Neuralink overstates the potential of its technology, one can look to Musk’s record of delivering results in other enterprises (albeit after delays).

The path seems clear for Neuralink’s therapeutic trials to go ahead. More grandiose predictions, however, should stay on the backburner for now.

A human-AI partnership could have a positive future as long as humans remain in control. The best chess player on Earth is not an AI, nor a human. It’s a human-AI team known as a Centaur.

And this principle extends to every field of human endeavour AI is making inroads into.

– ref. Neuralink’s monkey can play Pong with its mind. Imagine what humans could do with the same technology – https://theconversation.com/neuralinks-monkey-can-play-pong-with-its-mind-imagine-what-humans-could-do-with-the-same-technology-158787

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cameron Stewart, Professor at Sydney Law School, University of Sydney

Last week, the federal government changed its recommendation for COVID-19 vaccines. The Pfizer vaccine is now the “preferred” jab for adults under 50.

Amid the political fallout and worries about what it means for Australia’s COVID recovery, doctors have expressed concern about their liability. Some said they would even stop giving the AstraZeneca jab until they were more certain of their position.

Read more: New AstraZeneca advice is a safer path, but it’s damaged vaccine confidence. The government must urgently restore it

Are they at greater legal risk if they give AstraZeneca to younger Australians? The government insists they are not. This is correct — here’s why.

Proving fault

In Australia, medical liability is, for the most part, fault-based. This means patients who are injured by medicines, medical devices and medical interventions must prove the doctors who used them were to blame for any injury they suffered before any compensation will be paid.

Australian liability laws are state-based, but generally speaking, fault can only be proven when the doctor has acted outside of the professional standard of care in a way that is not supported widely in Australia by professional peers.

What is the standard of care?

The standard of care for diagnosis and treatment is effectively set by the medical profession. In cases — such as COVID vaccines — where the treatment is new and knowledge about the treatment is emerging, the standard of care is also developing.

Importantly, doctors are judged by measuring their behaviour against the standard of care at the time the treatment was given. This means that if, in 2020 a doctor administers a COVID vaccine in a way that was supported by their peers at that time, they will not be found to have breached the standard of care if, years later, other side effects become known.

We should also be careful not to automatically equate the government’s advice concerning the AstraZeneca vaccine with what the standard of care should be at the individual level.

The government’s advice is concerned with the big picture and with risks across a population. Doctors have the task of treating individuals. So, the government’s advice should be considered by doctors when working out which vaccines to offer to patients, but there may well be situations where the AstraZeneca is the best option for individual adult patients under 50.

Giving advice and accepting risks

Doctors also have a duty to inform individual patients about material risks of the treatments they provide. Every intervention comes with a set of risks but only the material ones need to be disclosed.

Material risks include those the profession would usually notify patients of (objective material risks), as well as risks the individual patient may have a particular concern about (subjective material risks).

The classic example of this is the 1993 case of Rogers v Whitaker where a woman who was blind in one eye was considering cosmetic surgery on that eye. She was concerned about any risk (no matter how remote) of going blind in her “good eye”. Later, she became blind from a complication of her treatment, which was known but very rare. The doctor’s failure to inform her was considered a breach of the duty to inform — even though it was not a risk normally disclosed — because the risk was subjectively material to her.

Again, the doctor will always be judged by what the profession knew at the time regarding these risks. If a patient is told about the material risks of the treatment and decides to go ahead with the treatment, the doctor has satisfied their legal duty to advise and cannot be held liable for subsequent injuries.

What now for GPs and AstraZeneca?

As long as doctors consider the government advice, keep up with professional news about best practice and communicate material risks to patients, they face no greater liability for providing COVID vaccines than they do for any other treatment.

The reality is the risks of people being injured by vaccines, and of doctors being sued for vaccine-related injury, is incredibly low.

At the weekend, the Australian Medical Association also said if a patient makes an informed decision to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, GPs are protected under professional indemnity insurance.

Of course, the reality of low risk may not match the fear practitioners experience. So, are there things we can do to reduce the anxiety practitioners feel regarding liability?

Read more: Bad reactions to the COVID vaccine will be rare, but Australians deserve a proper compensation scheme

One obvious measure is to move to no-fault systems of compensation. Many countries including the United States and New Zealand have no-fault compensation schemes for vaccine-related injury. Putting such a scheme in place may very well help doctors get over the fear of being sued. It might also give patients confidence knowing that in an extremely rare case of injury, they will be covered.

This could be done either with a one-off scheme or by expanding the National Injury Insurance Scheme, which covers personal injuries from motor vehicle accidents.

Without such schemes, Australian patients will only have access to compensation for vaccine-related injury if they can prove it was caused by a failure to act according to medical standards of care or a failure to properly inform the patient of material risks.

– ref. Doctors do not face a greater legal risk if they give AstraZeneca to younger Australians — here’s why – https://theconversation.com/doctors-do-not-face-a-greater-legal-risk-if-they-give-astrazeneca-to-younger-australians-heres-why-158789

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eric Jorden Raes, Postdoctoral researcher Ocean Frontier Institute, Dalhousie University

Aboard an Australian research vessel, the RV Investigator, we sailed for 63 days from Antarctica’s ice edge to the warm equator in the South Pacific and collected 387 water samples.

Our goal? To determine how the genetic code of thousands of different micro-organisms can provide insights into the ocean’s functional diversity — the range of tasks performed by bacteria in the ocean.

Our research was published yesterday in Nature Communications. It showed how bacteria can help us measure shifts in energy production at the base of the food web. These results are important, as they highlight an emerging opportunity to use genetic data for large-scale ecosystem assessments in different marine environments.

In light of our rapidly changing climate, this kind of information is critical, as it will allow us to unpack the complexity of nature step by step. Ultimately, it will help us mitigate human pressures to protect and restore our precious marine ecosystems.

Why should we care about marine bacteria?

The oceans cover 71% of our planet and sustain life on Earth. In the upper 100 meters, the sunlit part of the oceans, microscopic life is abundant. In fact, it’s responsible for producing up to 50% of all the oxygen in the world.

Much like the link recently established between human health and the human microbiome (“gut flora”), ocean health is largely controlled by its bacterial inhabitants.

But the role of bacteria go beyond oxygen production. Bacteria sustain, inject and control the fluxes of energy, nutrients and organic matter in our oceans. They provide the energy and food for the entire marine food web, from tiny crustaceans to fish larvae, whales and the fish we eat.

These micro-organisms also execute key roles in numerous biogeochemical cycles (the carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulphur and iron cycles, to name a few).

So, it’s important to quantify their various tasks and understand how the different bacterial species and their functions respond to environmental changes.

Fundamental questions

Global ocean research initiatives — such as GO-SHIP and GEOTRACES — have been measuring the state of oceans in expeditions like ours for decades. They survey temperature, salinity, nutrients, trace metals (iron, cobalt and more) and other essential ocean variables.

Only recently, however, have these programs begun measuring biological variables, such as bacterial gene data, in their global sampling expeditions.

Including bacterial gene data to measure the state of the ocean means we can try to fill critical knowledge gaps about how the diversity of bacteria impacts their various tasks. One hypothesis is whether a greater diversity of bacteria leads to a better resilience in an ecosystem, allowing it to withstand the effects of climate change.

In our paper, we addressed a fundamental question in this global field of marine microbial ecology: what is the relationship between bacterial identity and function? In other words, who is doing what?

What we found

We showed it’s possible to link the genetic code of marine bacteria to the various functions and tasks they execute, and to quantify how these functions changed from Antarctica to the equator.

The functions that changed include taking in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, bacterial growth, strategies to cope with limited nutrients, and breaking down organic matter.

Read more: Marine life is fleeing the equator to cooler waters. History tells us this could trigger a mass extinction event

Another key finding is that “oceanographic fronts” can act as boundaries within a seemingly uniform ocean, resulting in unique assemblages of bacteria with specific tasks. Oceanographic fronts are distinct water masses defined by, for instance, sharp changes in temperature and salinity. Where the waters meet and mix, there’s high turbulence.

The change we recorded in energy production across the subtropical front, which separates the colder waters from the Southern Ocean from the warmer waters in the tropics, was a clear example of how oceanographic fronts influenced bacterial functions in the ocean.

Tracking changes in our ecosystems

As a result of our research, scientists may start using the functional diversity of bacteria as an indicator to track changes in our ecosystems, like canaries in a coal mine.

Read more: Half of global methane emissions come from aquatic ecosystems – much of this is human-made

So the functional diversity of bacteria can be used to measure how human growth and urbanisation impact coastal areas and estuaries.

For example, we can more accurately and holistically measure the environmental footprint of aquaculture pens, which are known to affect water quality by increasing concentrations of nutrients such as carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus – all favourite elements utilised by bacteria.

Likewise, we can track changes in the environmental services rendered by estuaries, such as their important role in removing excessive nitrogen that enters the waterways due to agriculture run-off and urban waste.

With 44% of the world’s population living along coastlines, the input of nitrogen to marine ecosystems, including estuaries, is predicted to increase, putting a strain on the marine life there.

Ultimately, interrogating the bacterial diversity using gene data, along with the opportunity to predict what this microscopic life is or will be doing in future, will help us better understand nature’s complex interactions that sustain life in our oceans.

Read more: Humans are polluting the environment with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and I’m finding them everywhere

– ref. Like the ocean’s ‘gut flora’: we sailed from Antarctica to the equator to learn how bacteria affect ocean health – https://theconversation.com/like-the-oceans-gut-flora-we-sailed-from-antarctica-to-the-equator-to-learn-how-bacteria-affect-ocean-health-155478

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya Notley, Senior Lecturer in Digital Media, Western Sydney University

For most of us, it’s hard to imagine a media-free day.

Understanding what’s happening in the world, maintaining our social media profiles, staying in touch with family, being entertained, making new friends, engaging with governments, and with our democracy, are all activities that usually require media participation.

To do these activities regularly and effectively, we need to have at least a moderate level of media literacy.

Media literacy is about more than having a set of technical skills and knowledge about media. It is also about the ability to critically engage with media: to discern fact from fiction, decide which digital technologies and platforms to use and which to avoid, and to critique the power and influence media and technology companies have.

We carried out a national survey of 3,510 Australian adults to investigate their media literacy. We believe this is the first nationally representative survey to investigate the media literacy needs, attitudes and experiences of adult Australians.

We found most Australian adults have a low level of confidence in their media abilities including in areas such as checking if information online is true and checking if a website can be trusted.

Read more: There’s no such thing as ‘alternative facts’. 5 ways to spot misinformation and stop sharing it online

This is a problem because people who are less adept at critically engaging with media are more vulnerable to influence from manipulative actors. Lower levels of media ability will result in fewer opportunities to participate in society socially and economically.

Lack of confidence for basic media tasks

Overall, we found Australian adult media literacy is low. Most adults had either no or a low level of confidence in ten out of 12 media abilities we listed.

While most people felt confident in their ability to perform a basic online search, far fewer were confident they could verify if information is true or not. And even fewer were confident they could create or edit media such as videos and photos.

Our survey also showed many people lacked the ability to safely navigate online environments: less than half (45%) of Australian adults had a high level of confidence in their ability to change the privacy settings on social media. And only 39% said they were confident they knew how to identify misinformation.

Even fewer adults (35%) were confident they knew what to do when they were harassed online and only a quarter (26%) were confident they could make sense of the terms and conditions of social media platforms.

Older Australians, people who have a lower level of education and people living in a low income household were far more likely to have a lower media ability. This is also true for people living with a disability or in a regional area.

Limited sources of support

We also found 30% of adults had received no help from any of the eight sources of support we listed which would help them analyse, use or create media. This included help from schools, friends, family and libraries.

Read more: 3 ways to help children think critically about the news

Among those who have access to support, the most common source they turned to was online resources (45%) followed by friends (42%) and family (41%).

Those with a low level of education were the least likely to have had any support to help them with media participation.

Strong support for media literacy education in schools

Four out of five Australians (81%) said children should receive media literacy education in school.

This significant level of support indicates people believe formal education should play a more central role in the development of media literacy.

But we found schools are not currently fulfilling this need. Only 14% of adults said they had received media literacy support in primary school, 22% received support in secondary schools and 25% received support via tertiary education.

Even for younger adults aged 18-24, schools were far from being a consistent source of media literacy support. Slightly more than half of this group (57%) reported having received media literacy support in high school, while 32% received support in primary school.

Thriving in a digital world

Misinformation has become one of the great challenges of our time. We have witnessed misinformation influence elections, threaten public health and safety and hamper democratic processes.

Most Australians (67%) said knowing how to recognise and prevent the flow of misinformation was extremely important or very important to them.

Yet our findings suggest some Australians are more likely to be vulnerable to the harms associated with misinformation.

Read more: Fake news was a thing long before Donald Trump — just ask the ancient Greeks

While most Australians said it was important to think critically about the media they consumed, those with lower educational attainment and lower household income were less likely to believe this was important.

Those who have had access to more sources of media literacy support over their lifetime tended to place greater importance on critical thinking skills when using media (78% for those with two or more sources of support) compared with those who didn’t receive any support (55%).

A lack of media literacy will contribute to increasing levels of social, cultural and economic exclusion for individuals, families and groups. In addition, a lack of media literacy may exacerbate the potential for broader social divisions and threats to our democracy due to the influence of misinformation.

Despite this, there is no federal funding or a national policy to advance media literacy in Australia. Given what is at stake, the responsibility for being media literate should no longer be simply left for people to work out for themselves.

– ref. Less than half of Australian adults know how to identify misinformation online – https://theconversation.com/less-than-half-of-australian-adults-know-how-to-identify-misinformation-online-156124

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Bagnall, Senior Lecturer in Humanities, University of Tasmania

Chinese Australian history is primarily told as a history of men. Population figures suggest why — in 1901, there were almost 30,000 Chinese men in Australia, yet fewer than 500 women.

But despite their small numbers, emerging research reveals surprising and inspiring stories of Chinese Australian women’s lives.

Have you ever heard, for example, of Darwin-born Lena Lee — teacher, book-keeper and vice-president of the Chinese Nationalist Party in Darwin in the late 1920s? Or of Gwen Fong — activist, student Communist and doctor, who graduated from Medicine at Melbourne University in 1947?

What happens to our understanding of Australian history when we look at the lives of women like these?

By the turn of the 20th century, the Chinese community was an established, although marginalised, part of Australian society. For more than half a century, migrants from southern China had come to the Australian colonies in pursuit of new opportunities to support themselves and their families.

Almost all of the Chinese who came to colonial Australia were men. Most were labour migrants who came to the colonies to work and send money home — often known as “sojourners”. Over time some established lives and livelihoods in Australia and saw a future for themselves there.

A comparatively small number of wives and children came out to join their husbands, while other men formed local families with white women or Aboriginal women.

Read more: Twelve charts on race and racism in Australia

Barriers to migration

From the earliest days of Chinese immigration to Australia, Chinese men noted how the difficulties they faced meant that they would not, for the most part, contemplate relocating their families. As well as laws and policies that restricted the rights of Chinese, the day-to-day living conditions in the colonies could be harsh and isolating, particularly in goldmining settlements and rural districts.

“Can it be wondered at?”, asked Louis Ah Mouy, Cheok Hong Cheong and Lowe Kong Meng in their famous 1879 treatise on The Chinese Question in Australia. Since Chinese were treated as “outcasts and pariahs” and “subject to be insulted and assaulted by the ‘larrikins’ of Australia”, why would they bring out their wives and families too?

From the Chinese perspective, there were also strong reasons for women to stay put.

Most Chinese in Australia came from the rural Pearl River Delta region in the southern province of Guangdong. In their home communities, life was centred around the ancestral home and village, and married women took on the role of caring for their parents-in-law, bearing and raising their husband’s children, and tending to the ancestral shrines of their husband’s family.

Few women had the autonomy to migrate overseas except as wife or daughter, or perhaps as a maid servant. The migration of women and girls to Australia mostly therefore took place within the context of the family.

Overlooked, not absent

Population figures show the comparatively small numbers of Chinese women in Australia over the 19th and early 20th centuries — but they also show that Chinese women and girls were, in fact, present.

The numbers of Chinese women and girls in Australia grew as the decades passed, through migration and, more significantly, through the birth of daughters on Australian soil.

This was despite 19th-century anti-Chinese immigration laws and the continuation of discriminatory measures under the White Australia Policy after 1901. Keeping Chinese women out was central to the maintenance of White Australia. As Prime Minister Alfred Deakin remarked in parliament in 1905:

If we were to throw open the door to an influx of Chinese women and children we should reverse the policy […] and undo all the good we have accomplished.

Read more: Australian politics explainer: the White Australia policy

Researching the lives of Chinese Australian women in the past poses particular challenges, from the seemingly simple task of identifying their names to locating historical sources that tell us about their lives. The fragmentary traces of Chinese Australian women’s lives — particularly those in the 19th century — necessitate a creative approach. We need to use a diverse range of sources — from birth certificates to wedding photographs to interviews with descendants.

Locating women in the past

Our new book reveals the surprising, engaging and inspiring stories that emerge when we take the time to look for evidence of Chinese Australian women’s lives.

Ham Hop and Mary Chong are two examples.

Ham Hop was born in c. 1883 and came to Australia as the wife of a Geelong businessman in 1910. The couple had married a decade earlier in China but had lived apart ever since.

Arriving on a temporary permit under the Immigration Restriction Act, Ham Hop became a cause célèbre as her husband fought for her to be allowed to remain in the country permanently.

Despite widespread public support, particularly from the Christian churches, Ham Hop and her two Australian-born daughters left Australia in 1913 on the threat of deportation. Ham Hop was reported to have said on her departure:

It is your Government I don’t like. The people would let us stay. The people are very nice. But your Government makes us go.

Mary Chong, like Ham Hop’s two daughters, was born Australia, in Dubbo in 1908. Mary became the first Chinese woman to graduate from an Australian university (USyd, BA 1929, DipEd 1930). Fluent in English and Cantonese, after graduating she became English Secretary for the Consul General of China in Australia.

Mary’s career then took her to China, where she learnt Mandarin and worked in government and the media in the 1930s and 1940s. Later in life she returned to Australia with her Chinese American husband and their children.

By looking closely at the stories of Chinese Australia women and girls — like Mary Chong, Ham Hop, Gwen Fong and Lena Lee — we learn new things about our nation’s history and about its long connections with China.

We also see how, growing up in and between countries and cultures, Chinese Australian women’s lives were shaped — but not necessarily defined – by social, familial and political forces around them.

– ref. ‘Your government makes us go’: the hidden history of Chinese Australian women at a time of anti-Asian immigration laws – https://theconversation.com/your-government-makes-us-go-the-hidden-history-of-chinese-australian-women-at-a-time-of-anti-asian-immigration-laws-154821

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Scofield, Adjunct professor, University of Canterbury

The flightless kiwi is an iconic bird for New Zealanders, but all five species are threatened by habitat loss and introduced predators.

Recent genomic analysis focused on one species, the South Island brown kiwi or tokoeka, suggests several as yet undescribed lineages. Before these can be fully described and treated as genetically distinct, it is necessary to determine where the first tokoeka specimen was collected.

Any plant or animal specimen used for the first scientific description is called a holotype. Until now, it was a mystery where the kiwi holotype was collected, but our research, using digitised ship logs and modern forensic techniques, shows there is little doubt the first bird seen by European scientists came from Rakiura/Stewart Island.

This discovery could have repercussions for kiwi conservation.

There are four distinct populations of the South Island brown kiwi today: one in the mountains behind Haast, two in Fiordland and one on Rakiura/Stewart Island. In the past, separate tokoeka populations were found in other parts of the country, but have become extinct since human arrival.

Māori treasure the kiwi and its feathers are valued in weaving kahukiwi (kiwi feather cloak) for people of high rank. But the bird’s first description by European scientists is relatively recent, based on a specimen that made its way to London in 1812.

Following the strict conventions of taxonomy, this first kiwi was named Apteryx australis — belonging to a group of birds “with no wing” (Apteryx) and representing a southern (australis) branch.

What we knew about the original kiwi

In 1813, George Shaw, the zoology keeper at the British Museum, published a description of the kiwi in his series of encyclopaedias called Vivarium naturae, or the Naturalist’s Miscellany.

Drawings by Richard and Elizabeth Nodder were made from the original specimen skin and suggest a penguin was used as a model.

Shaw mentioned he received the kiwi skin from his friend, Mr W. Evans (possibly a William Evans, a draughtsman and engraver of natural history plates active 1797–1856) who had passed it on from “captain Barclay”.

We know this was captain Andrew Barclay, of the convict transport ship and privateer Providence. He had obtained the specimen during the austral winter of 1811 on a visit to Port Jackson.

New Zealand’s European history is considerable shorter than Australia’s. Even in the early 19th century, Europeans had not visited large parts of Te Wai Pounamu (South Island) and the southernmost island Rakiura was virtually unknown.

It was even uncertain to many cartographers whether Rakiura was actually an island or part of the South Island, as captain James Cook had believed.

Sealing brought Europeans to southern parts of New Zealand from the 1790s. Most of the early sealing voyages were made out of Port Jackson (Sydney). Between 1792 and 1803, most sealing activity was confined to Fiordland, but seal numbers were so low by 1810 that sealing gangs turned their attention to subantarctic islands and Rakiura.

Records show the Providence moored at Port Jackson throughout the winter of 1811, before departing for China and England on October 20 1811. The ship carried a cargo of seal pelts bound for the Chinese market, and we now know the kiwi specimen was probably sold to Barclay by a sealer who had recently returned from southern New Zealand.

Read more: Dead as the moa: oral traditions show that early Māori recognised extinction

Enter modern forensics

After Shaw’s death in 1813, his collections were sold at auction. Much of his collection, including this skin, made its way to Edward Smith-Stanley, styled Lord Stanley. It was bequeathed along with his entire collection to the City of Liverpool in 1851 and is now deposited in the World Museum Liverpool.

In 2019, we visited the museum and were given permission to take a tiny sample of skin for DNA analysis to determine once and for all where European science’s first kiwi was collected.

We used DNA amplification techniques developed for modern police forensics and sequenced both the complete mitochondrial genome and part of the nucleic genome. We then compared our results with data from a study published in 2016.

There is little doubt this kiwi came from Rakiura, and we may be able to pinpoint who collected it. Official records for New South Wales indicate two ships arrived in Port Jackson from the sealing grounds of Foveaux Strait in 1811: the Boyd and the Sydney Cove. Either could be the source of the holotype, but the Sydney Cove was sealing close to the South Cape on Rakiura, which seems the most likely type of location.

Why this matters

In order to get money and public attention for endangered species, it is necessary to show that when two populations exist and one is under threat, the threatened one is truly unique. Distinct populations are generally given scientific names.

Recent genetic work shows each separate living kiwi population in southern New Zealand is indeed distinct and belongs to one of four distinct lineages.

Read more: Scientists used ‘fake news’ to stop predators killing endangered birds — and the result was remarkable

As a consequence of our conclusion that the first kiwi collected by Europeans and named Apteryx australis came from Rakiura, we suggest a revision to call the Rakiura tokoeka Apteryx australis australis.

This also has implications for the naming of other southern brown kiwi populations. We are working in consultation with Ngāi Tahu, the Māori guardians of this area, to develop a scientific framework to describe the genetic diversity of the South Island brown kiwi they call tokoeka.

– ref. Forensics and ship logs solve a 200-year mystery about where the first kiwi specimen was collected – https://theconversation.com/forensics-and-ship-logs-solve-a-200-year-mystery-about-where-the-first-kiwi-specimen-was-collected-158410

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

Scott Morrison will hold twice-weekly meetings of the national cabinet for the “foreseeable future”, as the government battles to get its slow and problem-laden vaccine rollout back on course.

The Prime Minister says he has asked national cabinet and health ministers to “move back to an operational footing” to tackle the program’s challenges.

This comes as the rollout is being recalibrated following the medical advice restricting the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine to people over 50. Morrison has refused to set a target date for having all those eligible and willing vaccinated, after abandoning the government’s previous October target.

Morison’s action on the national cabinet and his comments are his bluntest admission so far of the program’s difficulties, which started from its beginning and have multiplied ever since.

“There are serious challenges we need to overcome caused by patchy international vaccine supplies, changing medical advice and a global environment of need caused by millions of COVID-19 cases and deaths,” he said in a statement.

“This is a complex task and there are problems with the programme that we need to solve to ensure more Australians can be vaccinated safely and more quickly.”

He said the federal government was trying to deal with its issues “and I have been upfront about those”.

But states and territories were also tackling their own issues, he said.

“Working together we are all going to be in a better position to find the best solutions.”

The federal government has taken the main responsibility for the rollout, but it does not have the states’ experience at service delivery and this has added to the problems.

The new regime for national cabinet meetings will start on Monday and continue “until we solve the problems and get the programme back on track”. It has been recently meeting only about monthly.

Meanwhile, a second person has suffered a blood clot after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine.

A woman in her 40s is recovering in the Darwin Hospital after being transferred from a regional hospital in northern Western Australia. The Western Australian Health Minister, Roger Cook, said the woman was in a stable condition in ICU.

Earlier a man in his 40s in Melbourne developed a clot after receiving the vaccine.

Last week Morrison announced the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation had advised against giving AstraZeneca vaccine to people aged under 50.

On Monday more than 56,000 doses of Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines were administered.

– ref. National cabinet to meet twice weekly in Morrison’s effort to get vaccination rollout ‘back on track’ – https://theconversation.com/national-cabinet-to-meet-twice-weekly-in-morrisons-effort-to-get-vaccination-rollout-back-on-track-158911

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

A wronged woman with a razor-sharp mind and meticulous records is a dangerous creature.

Especially when delivering a counter punch to a prime minister who’d denounced her in the bully pit of parliament when he was ill-informed, angry and driven by short-term politics rather than balanced judgement.

Former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate, appearing before a Senate inquiry on Tuesday, inflicted serious a blow on Scott Morrison and left Australia Post chair Lucio Di Bartolomeo badly wounded.

She followed this with a Tuesday night interview on the ABC’s 7.30 in which she gave Morrison another blast, describing his attack on her as an “utter disgrace” and “one of the worst acts of bullying” she’d ever seen. She urged him to call her and apologise.

Holgate’s evidence, and that of Di Bartolomeo who followed her, revealed a chain of events in which she was not accorded any reasonable degree of fairness.

What happened after Holgate’s October 22 revelation (responding to a Labor question) at a Senate estimates hearing that four Post employees received Cartier watches as rewards for a big deal was a combination of over-reaction and weakness.

Morrison that afternoon raged in question time that Holgate had been instructed to stand aside, saying if she didn’t wish to, “she can go”.

Before and after his rant, two men – Communications Minister Paul Fletcher and Di Bartolomeo – lacked the spine to stand up for her or, indeed, to follow a formal process.

Holgate told the Senate inquiry she had lost her job “because I was humiliated by our prime minister for committing no offence and then bullied by my own chairman”, who “unlawfully stood me down at the public direction of the prime minister. This made my leadership at Australia Post untenable and seriously threatened my health.” She said she became suicidal.

She was in a land of political and media hell not unfamiliar to some politicians but foreign to most business leaders.

The senators’ forensic examination of her downfall is coinciding with debates about both workplace behaviour and sexism, and Holgate is putting her experiences in those contexts.

“I do not want what happened to me to happen to any individual ever again in any workplace,” she said.

Asked by Labor’s Kim Carr to what extent her treatment was a question of gender and to what extent one of politics, she said:

Senator, it’s a very hard question for me to answer […] but I think it would be fair to say I’ve never seen a media article comment about a male politician’s watch [there was much interest in the extremely expensive watch she wore at Senate estimates], and yet I was depicted as a prostitute for making those comments, humiliated.

I have never seen any male public servant depicted in that way. So do I believe it’s partially a gender issue? You’re absolutely right I do.

But do I believe the real problem here is bullying and harassment and abuse of power? You’re absolutely right I do.

That abuse of power started in the early afternoon of October 22, after the watches revelation and before Morrison’s outburst in question time.

Fletcher spoke twice to Di Bartolomeo. Fletcher told him there would be a review and “he wanted us to look at standing Christine down”.

Di Bartolomeo, by his own account, initially questioned whether standing her aside was necessary, but Fletcher insisted.

“I queried whether that was what he really wanted. He said, ‘Look, I am going to come back to you,’” which he did in the second call.

Holgate resisted standing aside, wanting instead to go on leave briefly. Di Bartolomeo took the matter to a hastily convened late afternoon meeting of the Australia Post Board. The board said she should stand aside, and made threatening noises about the consequences if she did not do so.

While Morrison told parliament Holgate had been “instructed” to stand aside, Di Bartolomeo said he had not taken Fletcher’s words as a “direction”.

Why would that be? Because if Fletcher, as one of the two shareholder ministers in Australia Post, had issued a “direction”, he would have had to go through a set process.

Fletcher, in his two pre-question time conversations with Di Bartolomeo, apparently didn’t mention whatever Morrison had said to him. We can presume the PM already had steam coming out of his ears.

A tough minister would have said to his PM, “Let’s say we will have the watches affair looked into and leave it at that for the moment.”

A Post chairman with gumption would have pushed back hard on the standing aside issue, either warning it would invite trouble or, if necessary, saying he wanted the minister to issue a formal direction.

Di Bartolomeo on Tuesday praised Holgate’s record as CEO and said she was “treated abysmally”, although he insisted “the board and management did the right thing by her”.

Yet, he handled the situation poorly on the first day, and no better in later days. His behaviour may not have been as black as Holgate paints it, but at every point he took the line of least resistance to government pressure.

A board that had backbone would have said, “Let’s all sleep on it, and assess the ‘stand aside’ demand when we’ve got the facts in perspective”.

None of them – minister, chairman, board – did these things.

The part played by one board member, however, did show concern for Holgate.

As she drove back to Sydney, increasingly upset and agitated, she had conversations with Tony Nutt, who advised her on her handling of the situation and on a potential statement.

Speaking about what happened to her, Holgate said in her evidence that Nutt, a former adviser to John Howard and a former Liberal party director, told her, “Christine, you need to understand it was the prime minister”.

While the full context of the reference is not entirely clear, Nutt had summed it up in one line.

– ref. View from The Hill: Christine Holgate presents a compelling story of Morrison’s bullying – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-christine-holgate-presents-a-compelling-story-of-morrisons-bullying-158895

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jamie Triccas, Professor of Medical Microbiology, University of Sydney

As AstraZeneca is no longer the preferred vaccine for Australian adults under 50, attention is turning to what other COVID-19 vaccine options are in our arsenal.

The federal government has ordered 40 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which will become the mainstay of the rollout, while AstraZeneca will continue to be administered for people over 50 in the current phase 1B.

The federal government also this week ruled out using Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot vaccine.

But Australia does have a deal for a third vaccine, by US biotech company Novavax. The government has ordered 51 million doses of this vaccine, though it’s yet to be approved by Australia’s drug regulator, the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), which is expected to make a decision in the third quarter of the year.

At this stage, Novavax would be made offshore and imported, although Melbourne-based biotech CSL can make the vaccine if requested by the federal government.

How does the Novavax vaccine work?

The Novavax vaccine is given as two doses, similar to the Pfizer and AstraZeneca shots already being used in Australia.

It can be stored for up to three months at fridge temperature, which differs from the Pfizer mRNA vaccine which needs to be kept at ultra-low temperatures. In saying that, the TGA said last week the Pfizer vaccine can be stored at normal freezer temperatures for two weeks during transport, and at fridge temperatures for five days — though must still be kept ultra-cold after transport and in the long-term.

The vaccine also uses a different technology to the Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccines. It’s a “protein subunit” vaccine; these are vaccines that introduce a part of the virus to the immune system, but don’t contain any live components of the virus.

The protein part of the vaccine is the coronavirus’ “spike protein”. This is part of the other COVID-19 vaccines in use but in a different form.

Read more: New coronavirus variant: what is the spike protein and why are mutations on it important?

The Novavax vaccine uses a version of the spike protein made in the lab. The spike proteins are assembled into tiny particles called “nanoparticles” which aim to resemble the structure of the coronavirus, however they cannot replicate once injected and the vaccine cannot cause you to get COVID-19.

In order for these subunit vaccines to generate strong protective responses, they need to include molecules that boost your immune system, called “adjuvants”. The goal of these adjuvants is to mimic the way the real virus would activate the immune system, to generate maximum protective immunity.

Novavax includes an adjuvant based on a natural product known as saponin, an extract from the bark of the Chilean soapbark tree.

How effective is the vaccine compared to those already in use in Australia?

The interim data from phase 3 testing, released in March, was very encouraging. When tested in the UK in a clinical trial including more that 15,000 people, the vaccine was 96% effective at preventing COVID-19 disease for those infected with the original strain of the coronavirus.

This compares well to the Pfizer vaccine, with an efficacy of 95%, and recent data from AstraZeneca demonstrating 76% efficacy against COVID-19.

The Novavax vaccine is also safe. In early clinical testing the vaccine caused mainly mild adverse events such as pain and tenderness at the injection site, and no serious adverse reactions were recorded. In the larger trials, adverse events occurred at low levels and were similar between the vaccine and placebo groups.

What about protection against variants?

In the UK trial, the vaccine maintained strong protection against disease in people infected with the B.1.1.7 “UK variant”, demonstrating 86% efficacy.

This is good news because the B.1.1.7 variant is now dominant in many European countries, is more transmissible and deadly than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, and is responsible for most of the cases that have arisen recently in Australia.

Read more: The UK variant is likely deadlier, more infectious and becoming dominant. But the vaccines still work well against it

Less encouraging is protection against the B.1.351 variant first identified in South Africa, which can evade immunity that developed in response to earlier versions of the virus. The efficacy of Novavax’s shot dropped to 55% in protecting against COVID-19 symptoms from this variant. Protection against severe disease however was 100%, indicating the vaccine will still be important in reducing hospitalisation and death due to this variant.

Novavax, along with the other major vaccine companies, are developing booster vaccines to target the B.1.351 variant. Novavax are planning to test a “bivalent” vaccine, which targets two different strains, using the spike protein from both the original Wuhan strain and the B.1.351 variant.

Read more: Why we’ll get COVID booster vaccines quickly and how we know they’re safe

– ref. What is Novavax, Australia’s third COVID vaccine option? And when will we get it? – https://theconversation.com/what-is-novavax-australias-third-covid-vaccine-option-and-when-will-we-get-it-157227

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Scully, Senior Meteorologist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Across most of Australia this week, people have woken up and thought “Goodness, it’s cold.” Summer doonas are being changed to winter doonas. Heaters are being switched on. Ugg boots are being dug out of storage.

Yes, some of this is normal seasonal transition. But at least a portion of it is due to a particularly vigorous cold front that swept across southeast Australia over the weekend, dragging with it an unusually cold air mass.

Canberra on Monday night got to -2.6℃, which is a new record low for this monitoring station for April (the previous lowest for April was -1.9℃ in April 2013).

Another strong cold front is forecast to move across the area on Thursday into Friday with snowfall to 800 metres for Tasmania, and about the Alpine peaks of New South Wales and Victoria.

For any families making the most of the last weekend of school holidays by camping or being outdoors — pack the thermals, because the mornings are going to be cold!

Frost is forecast across many parts southeast inland, away from the coast — but the days will milder, with blue skies and light winds. In other words, a beautiful Autumn day. Coastal campers can expect a bit more cloud around and even the chance of a shower.

Read more: Here’s how a complex low-pressure system sent temperatures plummeting

What is a cold front?

Cold fronts are a common feature we see on weather maps through southern parts of Australia. They’re often marked by cloud, a sudden change of wind direction, rainfall and (usually) a sharp drop in temperature; it’s a change in air mass from warmer conditions to colder conditions.

A lot of cold fronts develop over Antarctica and come pushing up over Australia, although sometimes they form due to the dynamics of the upper atmosphere interacting with the lower levels.

Interestingly, this cold front sweeping across parts of Australia at the moment actually engulfed the topical cyclone Seroja that moved very quickly across Western Australia in the last few days.

That cyclone is no longer visible at all from the radar.

Chilly in Victoria and NSW

It was the coldest start to the year across many parts of eastern Victoria on Monday night and into the morning.

That was partly due to the cold air mass in the wake of this weekend’s cold front, combined with clear skies, which means there was no cloud acting as a blanket to lock in warmth.

Light winds also helped to keep conditions particularly cold overnight, as windy conditions generally mix and warm the lower levels of the atmosphere.

Tuesday saw a temporary lull in the cooler weather, with warmer northerly winds developing ahead of another approaching cold front. These northerly winds are forecast to be strong and gusty, elevating fire dangers throughout parts of South Australia (where a fire weather warning is currently in place).

There is also a severe weather warning currently in place for locally damaging winds for central South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania.

The damaging winds are forecast to contract eastwards and clear during Wednesday.

Dust storms are also forecast to move from South Australia into northwest Victoria with these windy conditions, as dust and dirt from inland Australia is whipped up and brought over the area.

More cold on the way

A second, even colder front is forecast to move through southeast Australia on Thursday and/or Friday. Temperatures will drop again, with snow forecast about elevated and alpine areas of Tasmania, Victoria and NSW.

Inland parts of the mainland across southeast Australia are forecast to be particularly chilly and frosty during the mornings this weekend, with clear skies and light winds on the forecast, with milder days to follow.

– ref. ‘A vigorous cold front’: why it’s been so cold this week, with more on the way – https://theconversation.com/a-vigorous-cold-front-why-its-been-so-cold-this-week-with-more-on-the-way-158876

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Scully, Senior Meteorologist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology

Across most of Australia this week, people have woken up and thought “Goodness, it’s cold.” Summer doonas are being changed to winter doonas. Heaters are being switched on. Ugg boots are being dug out of storage.

Yes, some of this is normal seasonal transition. But at least a portion of it is due to a particularly vigorous cold front that swept across southeast Australia over the weekend, dragging with it an unusually cold air mass.

Canberra on Monday night got to -2.6℃, which is a new record low for this monitoring station for April (the previous lowest for April was -1.9℃ in April 2013).

Another strong cold front is forecast to move across the area on Thursday into Friday with snowfall to 800 metres for Tasmania, and about the Alpine peaks of New South Wales and Victoria.

For any families making the most of the last weekend of school holidays by camping or being outdoors — pack the thermals, because the mornings are going to be cold!

Frost is forecast across many parts southeast inland, away from the coast — but the days will milder, with blue skies and light winds. In other words, a beautiful Autumn day. Coastal campers can expect a bit more cloud around and even the chance of a shower.

Read more: Here’s how a complex low-pressure system sent temperatures plummeting

What is a cold front?

Cold fronts are common feature we see on weather maps through southern parts of Australia. They’re often marked by cloud, a sudden change of wind direction, rainfall and (usually) a sharp drop in temperature; it’s a change in air mass from warmer conditions to colder conditions.

A lot of cold fronts develop over Antarctica and come pushing up over Australia, although sometimes they form due to the dynamics of the upper atmosphere interacting with the lower levels.

Interestingly, this cold front sweeping across parts of Australia at the moment actually engulfed the topical cyclone Seroja that moved very quickly across Western Australia in the last few days.

That cyclone is no longer visible at all from the radar.

Chilly in Victoria and NSW

It was the coldest start to the year across many parts of eastern Victoria on Monday night and into the morning.

That was partly due to the cold air mass in the wake of this weekend’s cold front, combined with clear skies, which means there was no cloud acting as a blanket to lock in warmth.

Light winds also helped to keep conditions particularly cold overnight, as windy conditions generally mix and warm the lower levels of the atmosphere.

Tuesday saw a temporary lull in the cooler weather, with warmer northerly winds developing ahead of another approaching cold front. These northerly winds are forecast to be strong and gusty, elevating fire dangers throughout parts of South Australia (where a fire weather warning is currently in place).

There is also a severe weather warning currently in place for locally damaging winds for central South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania.

The damaging winds are forecast to contract eastwards and clear during Wednesday.

Dust storms are also forecast to move from South Australia into northwest Victoria with these windy conditions, as dust and dirt from inland Australia is whipped up and brought over the area.

More cold on the way

A second, even colder front is forecast to move through southeast Australia on Thursday and/or Friday. Temperatures will drop again, with snow forecast about elevated and alpine areas of Tasmania, Victoria and NSW.

Inland parts of the mainland across southeast Australia are forecast to be particularly chilly and frosty during the mornings this weekend, with clear skies and light winds on the forecast, with milder days to follow.

– ref. ‘A vigorous cold front’: why it’s been so cold this week, with a chilly weekend on the way – https://theconversation.com/a-vigorous-cold-front-why-its-been-so-cold-this-week-with-a-chilly-weekend-on-the-way-158876

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Daniel Palmer, Professor, RMIT University

Review: Small Business, published by M.33, Melbourne, 2021

David Wadelton understands that photography is a form of time travel. Small Business, his new book of photographs, transports us to Melbourne’s vanishing architecture of interior workplaces created by largely working-class, post-war immigrants from Europe. It forms a natural complement to his first book, Suburban Baroque (2019), which paid homage to their domestic interiors.

Both books are the product of years of wandering, especially in the rapidly gentrifying inner north of Melbourne.

Wadelton has lived in Northcote since 1975, and has long shared his massive archive of initially black-and-white photos of his beloved suburb through his Facebook moniker Northcote Hysterical Society. Social media has proved an ideal vehicle for such obsessive localism, extending to the crowd-funding campaigns he uses to underwrite the publications.

In some ways, what was once hysterical or obsessive has become the norm. As people spend more time in their local neighbourhoods, interest in their character and the history of the city seems to be flourishing. This is reflected in the popularity of Instagram accounts like @oldvintageMelbourne, with its nostalgic photos from the State Library’s archives.

Small Business apparently started with the decline of local fish and chip shops in Northcote. Over the course of the past decade, Wadelton photographed more than 600 small businesses, with over 140 featured in the book. The businesses are organised into groupings: milk bars, cafes, laundrettes, tailors, shoe shops and repairers, barbers, VHS shops, and so on.

Wadelton’s photographs are carefully composed and depict the spaces in all their fluoro-lit, chaotic detail. They are far from iPhone snapshots. But their significance is as a collection rather than individual images.

Collected together in this book, they form an extraordinary record and a compelling artistic project. Paradoxically, the effect of the typological approach is to reveal how, in spite of superficially similarities, each business is unique.

Each image tells its own story, aided by all-too brief captions that offer a note about the owner or history of the business. From this book I learnt that Kosovo TV Repairs, which sat vacant for a decade around the corner from my house in North Fitzroy, opened in 1956, the year TV was first broadcast in Melbourne.

Wadelton photographed Monarch Cakes, the legendary cake shop in Acland St, St Kilda, in 2019. But it could be much earlier, because Monarch Cakes have been baking the same cakes from the same recipes since the 1930s.

On the wall behind the counter of Polish cheesecakes are a series of other time capsules — framed photographs of visiting celebrities and a signed copy of Aboriginal St Kilda footballer Nicky Winmar’s defiant anti-racist gesture from 1993.

In her introductory essay, Natalie King OAM, Enterprise Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Melbourne, evokes the lost European Melbourne of Jewish coffee shops. As she puts it “Wadelton apprehends the idea of the city as a cosmopolis and small businesses as repositories of family stories”.

The families themselves are almost never pictured directly (a cobbler on the front cover of the book is misleading). But they appear regularly in the form of family photographs stuck behind the counter.

Wadelton makes portraits of dated interior décor, not to sneer but to honour the well lived-in spaces of people’s labour. His camera pays homage to all the bits and pieces used to provide retail services and repairs, and the various traces of social and retail exchange.

Nevertheless, the absence of actual people is critical. These are businesses on the verge of extinction. By the artist’s count, around a third of them have already closed.

These spaces belong to a different era — when things were made here, and TVs were worth repairing. They represent the life’s work of a former generation of migrants who made Melbourne the city it is today. As long-running establishments, often in family-owned buildings, they became part of the fabric of the city.

It’s all the more poignant that Small Business was completed during Melbourne’s long lockdown last year. For a variety of reasons, including the health of the owners, Wadelton tells me that some of those featured in the book have not re-opened since.

Perhaps conveniently, given Wadelton’s preferred aesthetic, normally busy places were deserted during COVID-19. In some of the more recent images you can see tape markings on the floor and other signs of virus-induced social distancing measures. Photography revels in details.

By documenting businesses as they disappear — building on precedents such as Eugène Atget’s documentation of Old Paris a hundred years earlier — Wadelton is doing Melbourne, and history, a great service.

Above all, this book of photographs is a reminder of a slower and simpler way of living. Before chain stores, throwaway clothing and online retail. Before inner-city gentrification, and before wood panelling became fashionably ironic.

– ref. Shoeshops, tailors, TV repairs: a photographic homage to Melbourne’s vanishing small businesses is a form of time travel – https://theconversation.com/shoeshops-tailors-tv-repairs-a-photographic-homage-to-melbournes-vanishing-small-businesses-is-a-form-of-time-travel-158612

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

It’s tempting to think home prices are soaring because there aren’t enough homes.

But that can’t explain the sudden takeoff from about the year 2000, the sudden takeoff from about 2013, and again now – against expectations – the stratospheric takeoff in the wake of the COVID recession.

Broadly, we’ve enough homes. The 2016 census found we had 12% more dwellings than households, up from 10% in 2001.

That’s 12% of our houses and apartments empty – used as holiday homes and second homes, or waiting for tenants.

If there really weren’t enough homes for people who wanted them, it would be more than property prices soaring; it would be rents.

Instead, overall rents have been barely moving – growing even more slowly than wages – for half a decade.

Rent price index versus wage price index

For the half-decade from 2016, a half-decade in which Australia’s population grew by more than one million, Australian rents barely moved.

The supply of places to live in has kept pace with the demand for places to live in, but the supply of places to own has not.

More landlords, more tenants

If that sounds odd, remember people want to own houses for reasons other than living in.

Since about the year 2000, big numbers of Australians (and foreigners) have wanted to buy them to rent them out. They’ve wanted to become landlords.

Read more: Rents, not prices, are best to assess housing supply and demand

Twenty years ago only one in 15 of us were landlords. It’s now one in ten – more than two million of us.

To get those properties (other than where they’ve built them) they’ve had to outbid at auction the people who would have bought them to live in.

They’ve been helping create their own tennants, while pushing up prices.

We’re chipping away at Menzies’ legacy

From when Robert Menzies stepped down as prime minister in 1966 until the end of the 20th century, about 71% of Australian households owned the home they lived in – one of the highest rates in the world.

Since about 2000, owner-occupation has been sliding. The latest figures (themselves some years old) put it at 66%.

Among those aged 35 to 44, it has fallen to 63%

Over that time the cost of buying a home has shot up from two to three years’ household after-tax income to three to four years’ income.

Housing prices as proportion of household disposable income

What appeared to set things off was a decision by Prime Minister John Howard in 1999 to halve the headline rate of capital gains tax. Not that the committee he asked to investigate the idea recognised the possibility at the time.

The Ralph Review recommended that half, rather than all, of each capital gain be taxed, rather than the portion above inflation as had been the case since capital gains were taxed.

The rationale was that this would “encourage a greater level of investment, particularly in innovative, high growth companies”.

A rush into property rather than high-tech companies

The review was right about the change encouraging investment, but wrong about the sort of investment.

Rather than buy shares in innovative companies, Australians bought rental properties like they never had before.

If they bid enough, they could borrow enough to negatively gear; to make sure their interest charges exceeded their income from rent, giving them annual losses they could offset against wages that would otherwise be taxed at high rates.

Read more: When houses earn more than jobs: how we lost control of Australian house prices and how to get it back

There was nothing new about negative gearing. It had been permitted from the beginning. What was new was the opportunity to later sell the property at a profit, knowing only half of the profit would be taxed.

Investors could offset all of their losses and be taxed only half their eventual gain.

Pretty soon, more than a third of the money lent for housing each month went to landlords. For several dizzying months during 2015 it was 45%. First home buyers struggled to compete.

In 2016 then treasurer Scott Morrison raised the prospect of winding things back, saying negative gearing had led to “excesses”.

APRA cleared up what our leaders could not

Labor went to two elections promising to do just that and the Coalition came out in support of the practice in public.

Behind the scenes, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority was using its power over lenders to force lending to landlords down, getting it down ahead of COVID to 27% of new housing loans.

APRA succeeded in taking the pressure off prices where politicians couldn’t.

But that’s far from the whole story. There are other more deep-seated reasons why house prices are climbing, and they too have little to do with demand for accommodation.

Read more: Zoning isn’t to blame for Australia’s soaring house prices

Prices took off again from about 2014, shifting up from three to four years’ household income to between four and five years. That time it was Australians getting richer after years of mining booms and being able to borrow more cheaply.

Houses in general mightn’t be a good investment (there being a regularly increasing supply) but houses in prime positions were in fixed supply, there being only so many good locations.

And then it fed on itself. The father of modern economics John Maynard Keynes described investing as game in which the best strategy is not to put money into what you think is worthwhile, but to put money into what you think other people will think is worthwhile.

It’s happening again

He spoke of a third degree, where “we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be”, and added there might be fourth, fifth and higher degrees.

It’s happening again. With mortgage rates at new extreme lows and wealthier Australians having come out of the crisis with their wealth intact, it makes sense to do what others are doing and push up prices to buy before others push them up further.

It’s nothing to do with a shortage of housing, but for many it will push home prices further out of reach. That’s because in Australia housing is two things: accommodation and a form of speculation.

– ref. Home prices are climbing alright, but not for the reason you might think – https://theconversation.com/home-prices-are-climbing-alright-but-not-for-the-reason-you-might-think-158776

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael O’Neil, Executive Director, SA Centre for Economic Studies, University of Adelaide

Wiping off Whyalla has become something of a macabre sport.

All manner of things have been said to be about to destroy the steelworks town, including (briefly) the 2012-2014 carbon price.

BHP abandoned the steelworks, the harbour and the nearly Middleback Range iron ore mine in 2000 floating it off as a separate company it called OneSteel.

Renamed Arrium, the company collapsed in 2016, in circumstances that are still being fought out in court.

Bought in July 2017 by Dubai-based British industrialist Sanjeev Gupta, the steelworks enjoyed a revival until this month, with an exclusive contract to supply steel for the planned eastern inland rail line and plans to make 100% “green steel” from renewable energy sources.

Two of Gupta’s companies, including OneSteel Manufacturing which runs Whyalla’s steelworks, were hit with windup applications last week, following the collapse of their major financier Greensill Capital.

The withdrawal of finance has once more thrown into doubt the future of South Australia’s fourth-biggest town and its 22,0000 residents, including the 1,800 directly employed in the steelworks and the thousands more who depend on it.

Also in jeopardy is a planned A$6 billion upgrade to the steelworks along with a related A$350 million investment in the nearby Cultana Solar Farm that was estimated to create 350 jobs in the construction phase and 10 to 15 ongoing jobs.

Gupta says he has been working tirelessly to secure refinancing for the $US5 billion he owes Greensill, and in an open letter has described Whyalla as his “spiritual home”.

Read more: Looking good. Why Whyalla, of all places, has a sustainable future

The Morrison Government is said to be considering a “back-up plan” (presumably some form of bridging finance). The South Australian government is offering A$50 million on the condition it is used to pay down debt.

The steelworks appears to be profitable following a turnaround in the past 18 months. The contract for the inland rail project is worth $10 billion.

The impact of COVID-19 on demand for steel has been a negative, but at the same time the pandemic has shone light on Australia’s weak supply chains and stimulated rethinking about the need for local manufacturing using local steel.

Steel won’t be enough to save Whyalla

But steel can’t be the only key to Whyalla’s future. That locals are still talking as if it could be, reflects a deep-seated inertia.

Unlike the larger steel cities of Newcastle, Port Kembla and Wollongong, Whyalla has been very slow to respond to the need for change.

Fortunately, the opportunity remains open. Whyalla has open space, 300 days of sunshine well suited to solar energy (potentially lowering costs for new and existing businesses) and a new A$100 secondary school situated between a university campus and a TAFE Technical Institute.

Whyalla already has a regional health precinct along with plans for a A$45 million foreshore hotel; a A$12 million airport upgrade, a A$6 million organic recycling project and a A$145 million state-of-the-art solar-powered greenhouse business.

And it will benefit from a new A$300 million investment in Eyre Peninsula’s electricity grid and its proximity to mining developments and port facilities.

Local contractors are potential suppliers to the new A$80 million desalination plant to be located near Port Lincoln and a planned rocket launching facility at Whalers Bay near Port Lincoln which will allow access to polar earth orbits.

And it’s the “gateway to the Eyre Peninsula”, a region with world-class tourism potential.

No-one disputes that Whyalla is heavily dependent on the fortunes of the steelworks, but over the past decade it has shown little interest in diversifying.

Its council appears to lack the skills and leadership needed to transform the economy.

Read more: Diminishing city: hope, despair and Whyalla

Whyalla has another chance to get it right. But it will require an early display of confidence in the form of a successful refinancing of GFC Alliance and a bold switch to other drivers of growth, by the government, the private sector or both.

It will need more strategic thinking and local action than we have seen to date.

– ref. Not wiped out. Even after the collapse of Greensill, there’s time to save Whyalla – https://theconversation.com/not-wiped-out-even-after-the-collapse-of-greensill-theres-time-to-save-whyalla-158761

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Quigley, Associate Professor of Earthquake Science, The University of Melbourne

Timor-Leste is reeling after heavy rain caused severe floods and landslides over the Easter weekend, killing at least 42 people. Rates of COVID-19 in Timor-Leste are also on the rise. Together, these hazards threaten to interact with deadly consequences.

Our research has assessed the likelihood of natural hazards coinciding with, and influencing, the COVID-19 pandemic. Unsurprisingly, we found temporary relaxations of COVID-19 restrictions during natural disasters are likely to cause large spikes in infection rates.

In Timor-Leste’s capital Dili, the floods and the pandemic have combined to form a dangerous dynamic. Flood damage prompted authorities to temporarily lift COVID-19 restrictions. Evacuees are gathered in group shelters where social distancing may be challenging. Flooding cut power to some COVID treatment centres and put extra pressure on Timor-Leste’s health system.

The situation offers lessons for other populated, flood-prone cites battling the COVID-19 pandemic. Natural hazards will, of course, persist throughout the pandemic. Better understanding the complex interactions between double disasters will help societies and systems become more resilient.

Dili: a recipe for disaster

On April 3 and 4, more than 400mm of rain was recorded in Dili. Floodwater and debris washed into populated areas. Recent reports indicate at least 42 people died and 13,554 were displaced. Nearby Indonesian islands were also hit and at least 130 deaths were reported.

Several natural and human factors combine to make Timor Leste vulnerable to flooding.

The country’s mountainous topography (see image below) encourages rainfall and creates steep stream systems that rapidly transfer floodwater into adjacent populated areas. Weak rocks and steep catchments are highly susceptible to landslides.

Read more: Cyclone Seroja just demolished parts of WA – and our warming world will bring more of the same

Flowing water interacts with the mountains, causing sediment to accumulate in the shape of a fan or cone. This directs flood waters and sediment into central Dili. Also, rampant deforestation and development has increased soil erosion and stream discharge during heavy rain.

Rapid and largely uncoordinated population growth, particularly in Dili, has concentrated vulnerable populations into flood plains and low-elevation coastal areas highly exposed to flooding.

Other factors increasing the flood risk in Dili include:

• concrete structures that don’t allow water to sink into the ground

• multi-pylon concrete bridges that trap flood debris

• urban drainage channels choked with sediment and urban waste.

More broadly in the region, three climate features combined to create ideal conditions for the recent high rainfall and tropical storms: the West Pacific Monsoon, the Madden Julian Oscillation and a La Niña

The COVID combination

Dili is frequently hit by large floods – most recently in March 2020. But this time, the disaster coincided with an escalation in Timor Leste’s COVID-19 infection rate.

In late March this year, the number of new daily cases in Timor-Leste was rising quickly. On April 10, there were 70 new daily cases, bringing the total confirmed cases to more than 1,000.

Even without these twin disasters, many in Timor-Leste already lacked access to medical services and lived below the poverty line. COVID-19 restrictions exacerbated food shortages and poverty.

Read more: The best hope for fairly distributing COVID-19 vaccines globally is at risk of failing. Here’s how to save it

Then the floods hit. They left thousands homeless with severely restricted access to food and clean water. Roads and bridges collapsed. Crops were destroyed and firewood collection – essential for cooking – has been difficult in some areas.

The floods disrupted a COVID-19 lockdown in Dili, and forced people into crammed refuge centres. Flooding of a national medical storage facility damaged supplies. The national laboratory also flooded and a COVID-19 isolation facility was temporarily evacuated.

During floods, the risks of waterborne and vector-borne disease outbreaks increases. Should this occur, Timor-Leste’s fragile health system would be under even greater pressure.

The first batch of COVID-19 vaccines arrived in Timor Leste on April 5 and the vaccination program has managed to operate despite the flood-related challenges.

A global problem

Many global cities are vulnerable to multiple interacting hazards like those now faced by Timor-Leste. Our analysis suggests 16 of the world’s 20 most populous cities, comprising 5% of the world’s population, have similar geology, population density and/or land use to Dili and could face similar multiple disasters. These cities include Jakarta, Tokyo and Manila.

In emergency situations, the need for disaster response and recovery may justify temporarily lifting COVID-19 restrictions. But pandemic measures must be reinstated as soon as possible. Our modelling, pictured below, suggests when COVID restrictions are lifted in response to a disaster, infection rates ascend rapidly.

What can be done?

Potential solutions are more likely to be effective when they involve multiple groups working together. This includes international and local experts, diverse support agencies and affected communities.

Our research identifies ways to improve disaster preparedness and response in a COVID-19 world. They include:

• developing scenarios and forecasts to deal with the interaction of multiple hazards, including COVID-19

• using centrally operating disaster coordination platforms to assist and empower local disaster responders

• evacuation centres that allow for social distancing

• storing supplies of personal protective gear and medical equipment in areas less exposed to natural hazards

• mobile teams of humanitarian workers, volunteers and medical staff that can respond to natural disasters in COVID-affected regions.

Finally, measures must be taken to reduce the risks posed by future disasters. This must be done in culturally informed ways and includes:

• improving land and water management

• land-use planning that considers disaster risk

• urban clean-up after events such as floods.

Such actions are crucial in developing nations such as Timor-Leste, where urban development can amplify natural hazards with tragic results.

Oktoviano Tilman de Jesus, Demetrio Amaral Carvalho and Josh Trindade contributed invaluable expertise to this work.

This article is part of Conversation series on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. Read the rest of the stories here.

– ref. Double trouble: floods and COVID-19 have merged to pose great danger for Timor-Leste – https://theconversation.com/double-trouble-floods-and-covid-19-have-merged-to-pose-great-danger-for-timor-leste-158625

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

When China’s ambassador to Australia, Cheng Jingye, summoned journalists to the Chinese embassy last week, this was not an occasion for polite exchanges on a troubled relationship between Beijing and Canberra.

Cheng was intent on communicating a forceful message to Australian reporters that China was intent on fighting back against what it regards as a great wall of unfavourable publicity about its treatment of its Uyghur minority.

In some media reporting of the press conference, the exercise was referred to as a “charm offensive”. However, a more accurate characterisation would be to describe it as an attempt by China to draw a line under increasingly negative foreign reporting of its activities.

This reporting is having real world consequences for China’s image abroad. It is inviting pushback from an international community that is mobilising against Chinese overreach. Beijing will not be insensitive to the risks of brand damage to China’s reputation, or risks of sanctions.

The Biden administration’s canvassing of a potential boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in China will have got Beijing’s attention. If countries, led by the United States, stay away this would represent a significant loss of face.

Global campaign against unfavourable reporting

Senior Chinese officials and Uyghurs appeared via video during Cheng’s embassy briefing to refute media accounts of human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region as “Western lies”, “fabrications” and the work of “anti-China forces”.

In its propaganda offensive, China has not been averse to using the “fake news” label, popularised by former US President Donald Trump to assail its critics.

Part of the propaganda video display during Cheng’s press briefing. Mick Tsikas/AAP

Cheng’s press conference was part of a larger, global campaign against unfavorable reporting in which Beijing has resorted to a combination of bluster and in some cases reprisals against journalists who have cut too close to the bone.

Australian citizen Cheng Lei appears to be a case in point. Cheng, an anchor for state broadcaster China Global Television Network (CGTN), was detained in China last year without explanation, but now stands accused of ill-defined national security breaches.

Read more: Journalists have become diplomatic pawns in China’s relations with the West, setting a worrying precedent

In private social media posts, she had criticised China’s initial response to the coronavirus pandemic. It is not clear whether this is the basis of allegations against her, but no other reasonable explanation has been forthcoming to this point.

China appears to have been particularly displeased by the reporting of the BBC. In February, Beijing banned all BBC broadcasting in China in retaliation for British authorities having revoked the license of the Chinese overseas broadcaster, CGTN. This represented a significant escalation in the conflict between the Chinese authorities and Western media.

What Chinese propaganda is seeking to achieve

Cheng’s propaganda exercise should therefore be seen as part of a global campaign to stifle what China regards as unfair and damaging criticism of its policies at home and abroad under paramount leader Xi Jinping.

If this Canberra media event was designed to dampen negative reporting in the Australian media, however, the campaign is unlikely to work for the simple reason there is little, or no, sign of Beijing reversing its antagonistic behaviour towards Western media.

Read more: Despite China’s denials, its treatment of the Uyghurs should be called what it is: cultural genocide

Scarcely a day passes without criticism of foreign media in Chinese state-controlled outlets. These attacks underscore the gap that exists between Western perceptions of the role of journalists in democratic societies and China’s view that media should serve the interests of the state.

Typical of the sort of criticism levelled at Western media is the following contribution to the nationalistic Global Times by a professor of international relations at Shanghai’s Fudan University.

What some media have done is exaggerate Chinese authorities’ fault in a bid to overthrow the Chinese system. Take the BBC. This British media outlet did not call on the British public to overthrow the British government even if it has miserably failed to effectively curb the spread of COVID-19. This is double standards.

This level of naivete is hard to credit, but it is revealing nevertheless of the gap that exists between Chinese views of the Western media and vice versa.

China’s bluster against Western media may play to nationalist sentiment at home, but it is hardly likely to be effective in neutralising foreign media criticism.

Australian media will not stop providing a platform for legitimate and widely publicised concerns about China’s mistreatment of its minorities; its disrespect for the “one country, two systems” agreements it signed with the UK to facilitate the handover of Hong Kong; its threatening behaviour towards Taiwan; and its expansion of base facilities in disputed waters of the South China Sea.

Beijing’s trade war against Australia smacks of the sort of overreach that may have become a staple of Chinese propaganda in state-run media, but in reality this is not a campaign that serves China’s own interests.

That is assuming Beijing is concerned about promoting itself as a reasonably constructive citizen in its own Indo-Pacific neighborhood.

China’s dismal treatment of journalists

China’s press freedom record leaves a lot to be desired.

In the latest Reporters Without Borders world press freedom index, China rated 177 out of 180. It is by far the world’s largest captor of journalists with at least 121 detained, some in life-threatening conditions.

In March, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China reported an intensification of harassment of foreign reporters and increased use of “visa weaponisation”. This had led to the expulsion of 18 foreign correspondents in the first half of 2020. Others, like ABC’s Bill Birtles and the Australian Financial Review’s Michael Smith left because of concerns about being detained..

China regards the FCCC as an “illegal” organisation. As Cedric Alviani, Reporters Without Borders’s East Asian bureau head, said,

In recent years, Chinese regime apparatus has come to consider foreign correspondents as unwanted witnesses and goes to great length to prevent them from collecting information that doesn’t mirror its propaganda.

In a 2019 survey of the 10 “most censored” countries in the world by the Committee to Protect Journalists, China rated fifth behind only Eritrea, North Korea, Turkmenistan and Saudi Arabia. It said,

China has the world’s most extensive and sophisticated censorship apparatus. […] Since 2017, no website or social media account is allowed to provide a news service on the internet without the Cyberspace Administration of China’s permission. Internet users are blocked from foreign search engines, news websites, and social media platforms by the Great Firewall. […] Foreign social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are banned.

This is the lived reality for foreign journalists in China in the Xi era, and for Chinese consumers of uncensored news, for that matter.

Read more: What’s behind China’s bullying of Australia? It sees a soft target — and an essential one

At no other stage since China began opening to the outside world in the Deng Xiaoping era of the late 1970s have conditions for foreign correspondents in China been more threatening — or more counterproductive from Beijing’s point of view.

China’s war against the foreign media is at a tangent to its proclaimed ambition to continue opening its economy to foreign investment. The anti-Western media campaign jars with hopes that it would become a responsible international stakeholder, as well.

If Ambassador Cheng’s press conference marks a new stage in China’s battles with foreign media, this promises to be a long march.

– ref. Why China’s attempts to stifle foreign media criticism are likely to fail – https://theconversation.com/why-chinas-attempts-to-stifle-foreign-media-criticism-are-likely-to-fail-158785

For more, see also: Global Map of Internet Restrictions that explores internet restrictions and censorship in 175 countries to better understand which countries have a free/open Internet and which Governments impose the harshest internet restrictions.

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deborah Gleeson, Associate Professor in Public Health, La Trobe University

COVAX, the global initiative to coordinate the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in an equitable way, is crucial for bringing the pandemic under control.

But COVAX’s aim of delivering 2 billion doses to participating countries by the end of 2021 — including 92 low-income countries that can’t afford to buy vaccines directly from manufacturers — is threatened by chronic under-investment, vaccine nationalism and export restrictions.

COVAX is not intended only for low-income countries: Canada has so far received 316,800 doses through the scheme. As such, it represents an important “insurance policy” for Australia, potentially enabling access to a wider portfolio of vaccines than we could secure through negotiations with suppliers.

The vulnerability of our vaccine procurement strategy has become clearer over the last few weeks, with supply blockages limiting vaccine imports from Europe and now the government’s warning about the AstraZeneca vaccine and its links to a rare blood-clotting disorder.

Saving COVAX will require more than donations (of both funds and vaccines), as well as the removal of export bans. Countries must collaborate to urgently remove the legal and technical barriers preventing more widespread vaccine manufacturing in order to increase the global supply of vaccines for COVAX to distribute.

Read more: Yes, export bans on vaccines are a problem, but why is the supply of vaccines so limited in the first place?

How does COVAX work?

COVAX is led by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI); Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance (a public-private partnership that aims to increase vaccination in low-income countries); and the World Health Organization.

It aims to deliver doses to all of the participating countries that have requested them in the first half of 2021, and 2 billion vaccines in total by the end of 2021.

COVAX is complex, but essentially it works by investing in a portfolio of promising vaccines and then distributing them according to a formula to both “self-financing countries” and “funded countries”.

Self-financing countries are those which have contributed funds to COVAX, such as Australia. They are able to buy the vaccines at cheaper prices negotiated by COVAX and will initially receive enough to vaccinate 20% of their populations. In the longer term, these countries may receive enough doses to vaccinate up to half of their populations, depending on how much they contribute.

Funded countries include 92 low-income countries that can’t afford to buy their own vaccines. They will also receive enough to vaccinate up 20% of their populations, provided COVAX is able to meet its goals. This is nowhere near enough to achieve herd immunity, but will at least allow health workers and the most vulnerable groups to be vaccinated.

Australia has committed A$123.2 million to enable it to purchase 25 million vaccines for domestic use.

It has also committed A$80 million specifically earmarked for providing vaccines for low-income countries. This money will be drawn from existing aid funding, however, and won’t go very far in terms of assistance.

How is the program going so far?

COVAX made its first delivery of vaccines to Ghana on February 24. By April 11, it had shipped approximately 38.5 million doses to 106 countries and territories.

While these figures might look promising at first glance, this is a long way behind COVAX’s aim to deliver 100 million doses by the end of March.

And they don’t stand up well in the context of global vaccine roll-outs. So far, only 0.2% of the 700 million vaccine doses administered globally have been given in low-income countries, whereas 87% have been received by people in high-income and upper middle-income countries.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the WHO, pointed out last week that only one in 500 people in low-income countries have so far received a vaccine — a situation he described as a “shocking imbalance”.

Read more: Why ‘vaccine nationalism’ could doom plan for global access to a COVID-19 vaccine

Why is COVAX struggling to deliver?

COVAX needs more funding, to the tune of US$3.2 billion even to meet its modest goals for 2021. But the supply of vaccines is an even bigger problem.

Rich countries like Australia have undermined COVAX by negotiating deals for vaccines directly with pharmaceutical companies, rather than waiting for COVAX to allocate them fairly. By last November, high-income countries making up just 14% of the world’s population had negotiated pre-market agreements covering 51% of the global supply.

Adding to COVAX’s problems, the flow of vaccine deliveries has mostly dried up in the last week.

Some 90 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured in India that were to be delivered to 64 countries in March and April have been delayed as a surge in COVID-19 cases prompted the Indian government to restrict exports.

What needs to happen?

WHO has called on rich countries to immediately share 10 million doses to prop up COVAX in the first half of 2021.

But so far, no country has committed to do this. Donations that come after countries have fully vaccinated their own populations will be too late. And where bilateral donations have been made outside of the COVAX program (mainly by China and Russia), they have largely been driven by security, strategic or political considerations, rather than donated to the countries where they are most needed.

Read more: New COVID variants have changed the game, and vaccines will not be enough. We need global ‘maximum suppression’

Removing export restrictions would help. But as long as demand exceeds supply and the countries where vaccines are manufactured face large outbreaks, we are likely to continue to see these types of barriers.

What is needed most are more sustainable approaches to dramatically boost the global supply of vaccines and ensure there’s enough to go around.

This first requires removing the intellectual property protections that allow vaccine developers to hold exclusive rights to control who can make and sell them.

India and South Africa have put forth a proposal at the World Trade Organization to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 medical products during the pandemic, which has been supported by more than 100 low- and middle-income countries. However, several high-income countries, including Australia, have blocked it.

Secondly, governments need to support mechanisms for sharing intellectual property, such as the WHO’s COVID-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP).

This was set up nearly a year ago, but no vaccine developer has contributed to it yet. Governments need to make sharing intellectual property and contributing to the pool a condition of public funding for the development of COVID-19 products.

Finally, governments need to help low- and middle-income countries to produce their own vaccines. This means investing money to build up manufacturing capacities in these countries and facilitating technology transfers from companies based in high-income countries.

For COVAX to supply enough vaccines for even 20% of the world’s population, rich countries will need to step up. And fast.

– ref. The best hope for fairly distributing COVID-19 vaccines globally is at risk of failing. Here’s how to save it – https://theconversation.com/the-best-hope-for-fairly-distributing-covid-19-vaccines-globally-is-at-risk-of-failing-heres-how-to-save-it-158779

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Luise Kazda, PhD candidate, University of Sydney

During my daughter’s challenging first year of school, we discovered how much effort it took her to sit and learn.

She was the youngest in her class, placing her at higher risk of being diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder).

While she struggled with attention and hyperactivity, her problems were always more frustrating than truly impairing. Still, constant battles over finishing tasks, the amount of time (and nerves) spent on a child that needs that extra bit of attention and the anger or sadness on her face made me wonder if we should try to get some support.

Maybe a diagnosis could be a straightforward fix to the problem?

What’s the problem?

Increasing awareness of ADHD has led to consistent rises in the number of children diagnosed with and treated for it, both internationally and in Australia. This would be good if it meant we were getting better at finding, diagnosing and helping children impaired by inattention or hyperactivity.

However, my newly published study in JAMA Network Open finds these increases in ADHD diagnoses may be largely due to children like my daughter, whose behaviours fall within a normal (but frustrating) range. I conducted this research with colleagues from the University of Sydney and Bond University.

Our study concluded these children are unlikely to benefit from being labelled with ADHD and may, in fact, be harmed by it.

This surge in diagnoses also results in limited resources being stretched thinner among more children, ultimately taking away from those with severe problems who would benefit from more support.

Read more: How do I know if my child is developing normally?

What is ADHD? And why is it so controversial?

ADHD is a “persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development”.

It’s one of the most common childhood disorders, affecting about 5–7% of children. Over the past decades, debate on the appropriateness of diagnoses has grown in line with the rate of diagnosis.

Allen Frances, a prominent American psychiatrist, has been one of the most vocal critics of the trend. He describes it as the medicalisation of “every day experiences that are part of the human condition”.

However, others suggest the increases in diagnosed children are largely due to improved detection in previously undiagnosed children.

Both sides of the debate claim to have proof. But we were surprised to discover no-one had ever summarised the scientific evidence for the key reasons behind increasing diagnosis rates.

So we reviewed the results from over 300 studies on ADHD over the past 40 years to determine which children are being newly diagnosed and if they benefit. Our study design allowed us to summarise a huge variety of studies in a way not done before.

What we did and what we found

We found that since the 1980s, increasing numbers of school-aged children and adolescents around the world have been diagnosed with ADHD and medicated for it.

We know ADHD-related behaviours exist on a spectrum with no or minimal hyperactivity and inattention on one end and severe ADHD on the other.

Many children can get distracted easily, are forgetful, find it difficult to sit still or wait their turn. In most children, these behaviours are mild enough to not interfere with a “normal” life.

However, there is no clear biological cut-off point above which someone just “has” ADHD. Ways of diagnosing ADHD also vary between countries and change over time, with criteria generally becoming less stringent.

Together, this ensures many potentially new cases could be discovered, depending on how low the bar is set.

Read more: Five warning signs of overdiagnosis

In the US, for example, almost half of all children diagnosed with ADHD have mild symptoms, with only around 15% presenting with severe problems. Only about 1% of all children in an Italian study had severe ADHD-related behaviours. And, in general, children today are no more hyperactive or inattentive than 20 years ago.

All this led us to conclude a substantial proportion of these additional diagnoses (children who would not have been diagnosed 20 years ago) are, at best, borderline cases.

For example, one study shows while diagnoses increased more than five-fold over ten years in Sweden, there was no increase in clinical ADHD symptoms over the same time. This means that with the lowering of the diagnostic bar, children diagnosed with ADHD are, on average, less impaired and more similar to those without an ADHD diagnosis.

As a result children like my daughter, who are the youngest in their class, are at risk of being labelled with ADHD because their relative immaturity can be enough to push them over the threshold into the zone of “abnormal” behaviour.

Why it’s important to get it right

For children with mild symptoms

Children with mild ADHD symptoms are unlikely to benefit from a diagnosis. They (and their families) also incur substantial costs as well as potential harms from the diagnosis and treatment. That’s because:

• instead of drumming up extra support, an ADHD label can have negative social, psychological and academic effects, when compared to similar young people without a diagnosis

• medication reduces symptoms to a lesser extent in children with mild ADHD (however it is beneficial in many severe cases)

• medication for young people with milder symptoms also has no positive, but a potential negative, effect on academic outcomes (such as maths and reading scores) when compared to unmedicated young people with similar behaviour. Also, medication doesn’t reduce the risks of injuries, criminal behaviour and social impairment as much as in those with severe symptoms.

Read more: Weekly Dose: Ritalin, helpful for many with ADHD but dangerous if abused by those without it

For children with severe symptoms

It’s also important children with more severe ADHD symptoms are correctly diagnosed so they don’t miss out on much-needed support.

With ever-increasing diagnosis rates of ADHD, schools are increasingly struggling to adequately support every child with a diagnosis: the slice of funding and support every child can receive gets smaller and smaller, the more children are included.

In turn, this often means those with the most severe problems get left behind.

Read more: ADHD prescriptions are going up, but that doesn’t mean we’re over-medicating

What can we do?

In light of the potential risks associated with diagnosing a child with milder ADHD symptoms, we recommend doctors, parents and teachers work together following a “stepped diagnosis approach”. This ensures swift and efficient diagnosis and treatment in severe cases. For those with milder symptoms, taking some time to watch and wait may mean many of them won’t need to be labelled or treated.

Not only will this avoid potential harm for individual children, it also ensures resources are allocated where they are needed most and will be most effective.

Co-authors on this article were: Alexandra Barratt, Professor of Public Health, University of Sydney; Katy Bell, Associate Professor in Clinical Epidemiology, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney; and Rae Thomas, Associate Professor, Bond University.

– ref. More kids are being diagnosed with ADHD for borderline (yet challenging) behaviours. Our new research shows why that’s a worry – https://theconversation.com/more-kids-are-being-diagnosed-with-adhd-for-borderline-yet-challenging-behaviours-our-new-research-shows-why-thats-a-worry-156115

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cheryl Durrant, Adjunct Associate Professor, UNSW

Climate change is a hot topic in Australian security circles, as it poses an emerging threat to our national resilience and way of life. As a new report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) last week warned, the federal government is unprepared to meet these challenges.

The report, authored by Dr Robert Glasser, said the government has largely overlooked the security threat posed by rising seas, climate-induced famine, extreme weather events, mass migrations and other climate change damage in Southeast Asia. Australia is sitting on the frontline of this vulnerable region.

Glasser’s report focuses on Southeast Asia, but in the bigger picture, climate security is an existential global risk which the Australian government is yet to fully grasp. It is this global aspect of climate and security which will be on the agenda in two weeks time at the Biden Leaders Summit in the US.

Why should we be worried?

The global risk is broader than traditional security threats, such as the rise of China, terrorism and separatist movements. As the ASPI report emphasises, there is a relationship between climate security and other sectors such as food, health and environmental security.

Unlike traditional national security threats, climate threats have no respect for national or sector borders and cannot be solved with missiles.

The threat is urgent. With the end of the Donald Trump presidency, climate change is back on regional and international security action agendas. The penny has dropped on how little time is left to take action to prepare for the worst of consequences.

This is especially the case when there are long lead times to implement action, such as infrastructure development and military capability development.

Read more: Climate change poses a ‘direct threat’ to Australia’s national security. It must be a political priority

ASPI’s key recommendations to the government include:

• improving understanding of climate change risks through a broad whole-of-government process

• building capacity in government agencies to assess ongoing risks

• identifying opportunities for regional aid and investments.

These make sense, as the first step of preparedness is understanding the risk.

Security risks go beyond natural disasters

The ASPI report notes Southeast Asia “has the world’s highest sea-level rise per kilometre of coastline and the largest coastal population affected by it”. The region is a hot spot for cyclones, with some nations vulnerable to catastrophic heat or fires.

The ASPI report notes:

Those hazards will not only exacerbate the traditional regional security threats […] but also lead to new threats and the prospect of multiple, simultaneous crises, including food insecurity, population displacement and humanitarian disasters that will greatly test our national capacities, commitments and resilience.

The report focuses on Southeast Asia and natural disasters, but the risks and the affected regions are bigger than that.

The Indo-Pacific region may see the displacement of millions of people due to climate change-related extreme weather events, heatwaves, droughts, rising seas and floods. We’re already seeing this occur in Bangladesh and small island developing states.

We could also see conflict arise as climate change affects global food or water resources. A particular concern is the potential geopolitical tensions between India and China over dwindling Tibetan water resources.

Australia is getting left behind

Urgency and risk are central to an executive order from President Joe Biden in January. The order requires a US national security estimate on the economic and national security impacts of climate change by June. The US Department of Defence must also complete an analysis of the security implications of climate change in the same timeframe.

Read more: Biden says the US will rejoin the Paris climate agreement in 77 days. Then Australia will really feel the heat

Most tellingly, the US is taking an integrated approach to climate security. Foreign policy, defence and economic risk analysis are being conducted in a joined-up, systemic way.

In contrast, the Australian Defence Strategic Update 2020 was conducted in isolation from foreign policy and economic reviews. Taking a narrow military perspective, it does mention climate change, but only once, as a subset of human security threats.

Australia risks being left behind as other countries follow the US lead. Across the Tasman, our Kiwi friends are already well advanced in turning risk awareness into action. The New Zealand government completed its first national climate risk assessment last year, with a national adaptation plan to be completed by August 2022.

What are the consequences?

Being left behind has consequences for Australia’s international standing, national resilience and economic position.

From a diplomatic perspective, Australia’s influence in the Indo-Pacific region is diminished, relative to other actors, especially in states where climate change risk is a top priority, such as Vanuatu or Kiribati.

Risks offer opportunities as well. For example, Australia has an abundance of critical minerals and rare earths needed for modern communications, space technologies, and renewable energy generation and transmission. These are key for business, as well as critical for defence forces.

Read more: Critical minerals are vital for renewable energy. We must learn to mine them responsibly

However, processing and manufacturing is largely conducted offshore — in countries vulnerable to climate risks such as Malaysia — before returning to Australia as finished products.

This puts Australian defence and space and energy sectors at risk of disruption, and Australian businesses at risks of economic loss.

What needs to happen next?

ASPI’s report echoes the earlier recommendation from a 2018 Senate inquiry into the implications of climate change for Australia’s national security. The inquiry also called for a coordinated whole-of-government response to climate change risks.

Three years later, the federal government has yet to act on its recommendations.

The Australian government now needs to have a greater sense of urgency to act on the growing national and international calls to act on climate risk. But first, our leaders need a changed mindset. They must accept that climate change is an immediate threat to Australia.

Read more: Senate report: climate change is a clear and present danger to Australia’s security

– ref. Climate change is a security threat the government keeps ignoring. We’ll show up empty handed to yet another global summit – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-a-security-threat-the-government-keeps-ignoring-well-show-up-empty-handed-to-yet-another-global-summit-158702

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jim Stanford, Economist and Director, Centre for Future Work, Australia Institute; Honorary Professor of Political Economy, University of Sydney

Fewer than 2% of Australian employees work for the minimum wage (now $19.84 an hour). But the federal Fair Work Commission’s annual decision on how much to increase the minimum wage also helps determine pay rises for up to a third of Australian workers.

The adjustment, which comes into effect on July 1, flows through to those paid under awards, many on individual contracts and even some enterprise agreements (whose wage increases effectively track the minimum).

Last year’s increase of 1.75% was the smallest in 12 years.

That modest increase, which was delayed several months for most workers, was justified by the dramatic fall-out of the COVID pandemic. But with employment now rebounding – the jobless rate in February was 5.8%, down from its peak of 7.4% in July 2020 – we should expect a stronger “catch-up” increase.

That’s what happened after the Global Financial Crisis, with no change in the minimum wage in 2009, followed by an almost 5% increase in 2010.

But many employer groups are pushing for an outright freeze.

The federal government has implicitly sided with them. Its submission to the Fair Work Commission last week warned a higher minimum wage could “dampen employment” and impose a “major constraint” on the post-COVID recovery.

But this argument is based on outdated economic ideas. The evidence from economic research over the past few decades suggests boosting wages back to a normal trajectory would strengthen aggregate demand and consumer confidence, help keep inflation on target, and bolster government revenues at a vital moment in the post-COVID recovery.

Read more: Why kickstarting small business exports could boost stagnant wages

Consistently opposing increases

The Australian Council of Trade Unions has argued for a 3.5% increase. This is well within the normal historical range. It also aligns with the historical view of Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe, who in 2018 said annual wage increases of about 3.5% were necessary to meet the bank’s 2.5% inflation target.

It’s not often the union movement and the central bank sing from the same hymn book.

As my colleague Alison Pennington (senior economist with the Centre for Future Work) has written, the Coalition’s position is consistent: it argues against wage increases “whether the economy is weak or strong”.

Long before COVID-19, Australia was already experiencing the weakest wage growth since the 1930s. Since end-2013, wage growth has averaged just 2.1% a year. Rosy predictions of an imminent rebound, issued with each federal budget, have never come to pass.

Read more: So much for consensus: Morrison government’s industrial relations bill is a business wish list

A redundant economic orthodoxy

The federal government seems captive to an anachronistic belief that lifting the minimum wages will undermine job creation and competitiveness. This idea has been disproven by important developments in both economic theory and international comparisons.

The old economic orthodoxy, typically conveyed via simple supply and demand charts, argued unemployment was inevitable any time governments imposed a minimum wage above the natural “market-clearing equilibrium”.

In the past two decades, however, this conventional wisdom has been turned upside down. Starting with groundbreaking US studies of minimum wages and employment in the fast food industry, studies have found higher minimum wages do not generally destroy jobs – and in certain conditions may actually boost employment.

Reasons for this include:

• higher labour force participation and productivity among low-wage workers
• better job retention and lower turnover, reducing costs of job search and training
• reducing the “monopsony” power of very large employers to suppress wages
• more money in workers’ pockets, leading to more consumer spending.

Once a leader, now a laggard

The Reserve Bank agrees recent minimum wage increases have had no visible negative effect on employment.

So the government’s submission to the Fair Work Commission is invoking a discredited shibboleth by suggesting an unavoidable trade-off between wages and employment.

It also ignores how much Australia’s minimum wage has been eroded in recent decades. Australia was once a world leader in minimum wage policy. This is no longer true.

The best way to measure the labour market impact of the minimum wage is by its “bite” – the ratio of minimum wages to overall labour compensation (best measured by the median wage).

Australia’s minimum wage is now 54% of median wages. In 1992 it was 65%.

Read more: There’s an obvious reason wages aren’t growing, but you won’t hear it from Treasury or the Reserve Bank

That decline has been accompanied by the weakening of other wage-supporting policies (including collective bargaining and awards).

It’s no accident Australia has experienced weak wage growth and a falling labour share of GDP, alongside record business profitability. That was the whole idea.

The fading ambition of Australia’s minimum wage policy is also evident internationally.

In 2002 Australia ranked third among OECD countries according to the minimum wage “bite”.

By 2019 we ranked 12th (out of 29 OECD countries with minimum wages).

As Australia treads water, other nations are acting on the new economic evidence and lifting minimum wages. In the US, the Biden administration wants to double the federal minimum wage.

The argument that lifting Australia’s minimum wage will necessarily cost jobs is outdated and unconvincing. After last year’s very modest increase, a more generous increase will strengthen Australia’s post-COVID recovery, not jeopardise it.

– ref. Resistance to raising the minimum wage reflects obsolete economic thinking – https://theconversation.com/resistance-to-raising-the-minimum-wage-reflects-obsolete-economic-thinking-158622

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrea Waling, ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in Sex & Sexuality, La Trobe University

The Netflix drama The One centres around a geneticist who invents a new matchmaking service. It uses DNA to help people find their romantic and sexual match: their “one”.

“A single strand of hair is all it takes to be matched with the one person you are genetically guaranteed to fall in love with”, says Dr Rebecca Webb (Hannah Ware). “The moment you meet your match, your one true love, nothing will ever be the same again.”

The One asks what would happen if we could use a DNA database to match “soulmates”. More importantly, it assumes if such technology existed it would be a wholly commercial enterprise — imagining a not-to-distant future where tech (and tech giants) mediate dating, sex and relationships.

So, is this future just around the corner?

The popularity of home DNA testing

Home DNA testing is now a massive business. It is estimated that by 2022 it will be worth over US$10 billion globally.

DNA testing companies have fuelled a cultural fascination with biology, in which genetic dispositions are conflated with identity. DNA is regarded by some as the secret to understanding who we fundamentally are as people.

DNA kits have been sold to explore genetic and cultural history, to tailor diets, and to look at genetic health risks.

Indeed, companies such as Canada’s DNA Romance and Instant Chemistry already claim to help people find love and sexual compatibility through DNA tests.

People send in saliva swaps, and their DNA is tested to genotype human leukocyte antigens, also known as the major histocompatibility complex. These are important regulators of the immune system, which also impact our body odour. Genotyping identifies which variants of these genes each of us carry – which supposedly determine who we are attracted to.

Companies claim to match people on the basis of this test for the best genetic love match.

There is no compelling evidence as to whether or not DNA matching can support a more fulfilling love life. These current tests on major histocompatability complex are based on limited experiments with mixed results.

Read more: Does Singld Out, a gene-based dating service, pass the sniff test?

Indeed for most things, home DNA testing isn’t scientifically advanced enough to give us true insights. It also comes with ethical concerns such as fears over data hacking, bodily autonomy in relation to who owns DNA data, and the accuracy of the data provided.

Nature versus nurture

The One reflects society’s current interest in understanding our DNA as essential to our social and cultural practices. This has significant implications for diversity and acceptance. The TV series relies on the idea that romantic and sexual destiny is predetermined by biological makeup.

Characters in The One feel intense attraction to their match. While it pokes fun at this idea — one character continues extramarital affairs despite being married to their match, another has multiple matches — the romantic ideal of The One is still committed to the possibility of “soulmates”.

This imagined possibility helps to entrench the notion that monogamy is the most “natural” human relationship and human sexuality is pre-determined, fixed and rigid. But human sexuality is fluid, influenced by our culture and society.

Read more: Explainer: what is sexual fluidity?

Similar to the controversial search for “The Gay Gene”, the world envisaged by The One takes politics out of human relationships and sex.

Social norms restrict and shape how we engage with sex and relationships: slut-shaming for women may mean women are reluctant to seek out pleasure and connections; sexual aggressions may mean reproduction of gender inequalities and intimate partner violence. Alternate relationship styles, such as polyamory, or the choice to remain partner-free, are positioned as “unnatural” or less valid.

We still live in an age where LGBTIQA+ rights are contested, and non-monogamous relationship styles or asexuality remain stigmatised.

It is dangerous to assume DNA matching holds the key to romantic and sexual success — our genes alone cannot account for these diverse life experiences.

Anxieties of dating may not be solved through DNA

The dating app industry alone is projected to grow to 3.925 billion users worldwide by 2025.

However apps have been blamed by some for facilitating superficial attitudes to sex and dating, such as fostering infidelity; the phenomena of ghosting and catfishing; and the paralysis of too much choice.

New technologies, like apps, can reshape romance. The One largely envisages DNA matching would reaffirm old moral standards and expectations for the ideal relationship: monogamous, lifelong, intense and perfect.

Humans tend to presume DNA and genetic testing can provide us with irrefutable certainty. But relying on DNA ignores the role society and politics have in shaping our lives. Who we choose to have a relationship with may be influenced by our life goals and experiences, personal desires, morals and values, cultures and heritages.

The idea you can meet a DNA-certified companion to avoid heartbreak is seductive and comforting — but the truth is life and relationships are just too messy.

– ref. The One: could DNA tests find our soulmate? We study sex and sexuality — and think the idea is ridiculous – https://theconversation.com/the-one-could-dna-tests-find-our-soulmate-we-study-sex-and-sexuality-and-think-the-idea-is-ridiculous-158533

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Duffy, Lecturer in Applied Geoscience, The University of Melbourne

Most people know that Mount Everest is the tallest mountain but I want to know for how long it has been the tallest, and for how long in the future it will remain so (…) Which range preceded it? (…) When will something else overtake it? — Nigel, age 14, Christchurch

Nigel, thank you for this wonderful and insightful question. The answer is actually quite complex, since the height (or elevation) of mountain ranges in the past can be difficult to know.

However, it is a very important question as mountains have a huge role in the environment. They can disturb air flow, affect global and regional climate and provide opportunities for plants and animals to evolve.

Understanding the history of mountain ranges

Geoscientists address questions about ancient mountain heights by looking at sedimentary basins within mountain ranges. These are low areas where sediment materials such as pollen and plant leaves collect and minerals form in the soil.

A basin today may be much higher or lower than it was when sediment entered it. The fossilised pollen, leaves and minerals that date back to the time when the sediment was deposited can reveal how the landscape’s elevation changed over time.

If we look at fossilised pollen, we may find it comes from plants which likely grew in a particular range of elevation, and we may also notice the absence of certain other plants. (We can figure out where ancient plants likely grew by looking at their modern relatives.)

So by dating the pollen we find, we can calculate the landscape’s possible range of elevation in the past. We can conclude the landscape was too high for plant A, high enough for plant B (which gave us the pollen), but not high enough for plant C.

That is a pretty powerful capability, especially if the elevation of the landscape has changed significantly since the sediment was first deposited.

We can also look at the different kinds (or isotopes) of certain elements (particularly oxygen) contained in plant waxes, clays and carbonate minerals that form by chemical reactions in the soil. These plants and minerals incorporate rainwater.

As a band of rain reaches a mountain range, water with heavier oxygen isotopes falls out first. This means rainwater at higher elevations contains lighter oxygen isotopes, which then pass into the plants and minerals there.

If we find sediment that was deposited into a low basin 30 million years ago, but is now much higher, it will still contain oxygen isotopes that reveal the elevation at which it first formed. We can measure these isotopes to estimate how much higher the landscape has become.

How long has Everest been the tallest?

Everest is part of the Himalayas, a mountain range that stands at the southern edge of the vast Tibetan Plateau which is around 4-5km above sea level. Scientists have used the methods described above to understand the history of the plateau, which evolved as a result of several ancestral mountain ranges joining up.

Parts of the modern plateau were already higher than 3.5km by 26 million years ago. The southernmost of those ranges was a great, Andes-like mountain range called the Gangdese mountains.

These seem to have existed for more than 50 million years at elevations similar to those of the Andes today (about 4.5km).

However, south of the Gangdese, where we have today’s highest mountains, geologists found 34.5-million-year-old sediments from a shallow sea only a few dozen kilometres east of Mount Everest (locally called Qomolangma).

This tells us the part of the Himalayas that includes Everest, which now dominates the skyline, was not a mountain range back then. In fact, it was at sea level. It has grown more than 8km in the last 30 million years.

Everest, now the big kid on the block, is currently more than 100 metres higher than its closest rival. But a new victor will emerge with time.

What happens next?

To understand how Everest might lose its highest mountain status, we need to understand how mountain ranges are built. The largest mountain belts today were built from collisions between blocks of continental crust in Earth’s outer layer, the lithosphere.

As these blocks collide, they crumple and slices of rocky crust get stacked on one another, as seen in the right half of the cross section below. This gives birth to high mountains, which continuously rise and shift and change as the collision continues.

The video below helps visualise this process. It simulates the squeezing of a block of lithosphere in the Himalayas. You can refer to the “Sandbox Video” part of the cross section above to see where this process would occur.

You’ll notice the mountains begin to rise as soon as the collision begins. The arm pushing the sand represents the already thickened crust of the high Himalayas and the sand pile being pushed represents the Indian upper crust which lies below the mountain range.

The thickening moves to different spots over time. While the youngest and smallest mountain is furthest from the collision itself, the highest peak isn’t always in the oldest part of the range (where the collision began).

Eroding and growing

Large mountain ranges “erode” when changes in temperature, wind and water break down the rock and ultimately carry it away. Interestingly, erosion actually causes mountains to slowly grow over time.

This is a fascinating process geoscientists call “isostasy” which can be measured using GPS. The diagram below shows how the process is comparable to blocks of wood floating in water.

If intact blocks of a certain type of wood float in a pool, the same percentage of the overall volume will always protrude above the surface. So, if material is removed from one block, that block will rise.

We can compare these columns of wood to lithospheric blocks. As more erosion occurs, the mountain’s surface increases in elevation. This gives a way for deeply buried rocks to rise within the mountain range.

Hard to beat

Despite having 82,350km of convergent boundaries on Earth (where two plates meet and push together), it’s unlikely other mountain ranges will surpass the height of the Himalayas anytime soon.

This is because the Himalayas were built by the collision of two large continents composed of rocks with lower than average density. They therefore sit higher than the oceanic lithosphere.

One day in the distant future a new boundary will form somewhere and the forces creating the Himalayas will be removed.

The range will then collapse and eventually erode to become like the modern-day Appalachians in North America, which was an active mountain belt from between 325 and 260 million years ago.

Read more: Curious Kids: how do mountains form?

Hello, curious kids! Have you got a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to us. You can:

* Email your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au
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Please tell us your name, age and which city you live in. You can send an audio recording of your question too, if you want. Send as many questions as you like! We won’t be able to answer every question but we will do our best.

– ref. Curious Kids: how and when did Mount Everest become the tallest mountain? And will it remain so? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-and-when-did-mount-everest-become-the-tallest-mountain-and-will-it-remain-so-157509

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Claire Breen, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

Recent media coverage of women not being able to get treatment for birth injuries highlights yet another example of gender bias in healthcare in New Zealand.

Following a policy review, the Accident Compensation Corporation (ACC), which covers accidental injuries, has restricted access to compensation for women who suffer perineal tears during birth.

ACC’s policy appears gender neutral as it focuses on injuries caused by treatment. It states that most perineal tears are caused by the birthing process itself, and are therefore not covered.

In 2020, the Ministry of Health, drawing from overseas research, noted that 60-85% of women suffer some form of perineal tearing while giving birth. Overseas research also shows the number of women experiencing the most severe tears is small but growing.

The debate is multi-faceted, but there are domestic and international legal obligations ACC should take into account.

Equal rights to health

In terms of international law, the United Nations Charter 1945 reaffirms the equal rights of men and women. So, too, does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 1966 (CESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966 (CCPR) both affirm the equal rights of men and women.

The declaration and both covenants also prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex. Rights to equality and non-discrimination are also the subject of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women 1979 (CEDAW).

The right to the highest attainable standard of health is underpinned by the rights to equality and non-discrimination. The right to health is a human right and extends to reproductive and sexual health, a right that women should enjoy without discrimination.

Read more: Gender bias in medicine and medical research is still putting women’s health at risk

The New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 stipulates that everyone has the right to be free from discrimination, and that any limitations on this right must be reasonable and justifiable. The Human Rights Act 1993 prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sex, which includes pregnancy and childbirth. This law also prohibits indirect discrimination, meaning laws or policies that appear not to discriminate, but in practice do, are unlawful unless there is a good reason for them.

This legal framework must form part of the reasoning for ACC’s policy towards women (and babies) who suffer birth injuries. The current view is that only those who suffer birth injuries as a result of treatment, or failure to provide treatment, are covered.

ACC’s justification is that it is a more accurate interpretation of the compensation scheme, and that it provides certainty to decision makers.

Accident compensation favours male-dominated professions

ACC’s approach may be driven by the understandable desire to provide certainty, but the policy change has led to a drastic drop in the number of eligible women.

Women whose birth injuries do not meet ACC’s requirements can access treatment through the public health system, which satisfies New Zealand’s obligations around the right to health. But availability of such treatment does not fully address the problem of inequality.

A successful ACC claim may mean that a woman can get physiotherapy or even surgery in the private sector. More broadly, a woman may also receive home help and wage support. All of this assistance can be overseen by a dedicated case manager.

Although a woman can still access surgery and physiotherapy through the public health system, the waiting times can be weeks or months, and these women will neither receive home help nor wage subsidies.

Read more: Endometriosis: three reasons care still hasn’t improved

This situation is a manifestation of a wider problem. ACC’s system has been described as “sexist” as its focus on injury and cause tends to exclude occupations where women dominate, including care jobs, teaching and government employment.

ACC is also earnings-related, which is another way in which men are treated more favourably than women, in an approach that mirrors the gender pay gap.

Out of date and discriminatory

One of the reasons given for this overall state of affairs is that the ACC legislation is still primarily designed for the accidents that occurred in 20th century workplaces such as factories, mines and workshops.

More generally, ACC has been criticised for being discriminatory and promoting serious inequalities. Former prime minister and lawyer Sir Geoffrey Palmer has called for an overhaul, arguing that to achieve social justice, New Zealand needs to replace ACC with a system that covers people incapacitated by accidents as well as those incapacitated by sickness or disability.

Under the current ACC regime, arguably, this lack of social justice affects women more significantly. Should the government decide to examine the specific issue of maternal health or engage in a complete overhaul of the ACC system, it must give effect to its legal obligations to the women of Aotearoa New Zealand. Surely, the labour of women is worth this?

– ref. ACC’s policy of not covering birth injuries is one more sign the system is overdue for reform – https://theconversation.com/accs-policy-of-not-covering-birth-injuries-is-one-more-sign-the-system-is-overdue-for-reform-158618

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Nott, Professor of Physical Geography, James Cook University

Tropical Cyclone Seroja battered parts of Western Australia’s coast on Sunday night, badly damaging buildings and leaving thousands of people without power. While the full extent of the damage caused by the Category 3 system is not yet known, the event was unusual.

I specialise in reconstructing long-term natural records of extreme events, and my historic and prehistoric data show cyclones of this intensity rarely travel as far south as this one did. In fact, it has happened only 26 times in the past 5,000 years.

Severe wind gusts hit the towns of Geraldton and Kalbarri – towns not built to withstand such conditions.

Unfortunately, climate change is likely to mean disasters such as Cyclone Seroja will become more intense, and will be seen further south in Australia more often. In this regard, Seroja may be a timely wake-up call.

Seroja: bucking the cyclone trend

Cyclone Seroja initially piqued interest because as it developed off WA, it interacted with another tropical low, Cyclone Odette. This rare phenomenon is known as the Fujiwhara Effect.

Cyclone Seroja hit the WA coast between the towns of Kalbarri and Gregory at about 8pm local time on Sunday. According to the Bureau of Meteorology it produced wind gusts up to 170 km/hour.

Seroja then moved inland north of Geraldton, weakening to a category 2 system with wind gusts up to 120 km/hour. It then tracked further east and has since been downgraded to a tropical low.

The cyclone’s southward track was historically unusual. For Geraldton, it was the first Category 2 cyclone impact since 1956. Cyclones that make landfall so far south on the WA coast are usually less intense, for several reasons.

First, intense cyclones draw their energy from warm sea surface temperatures. These temperatures typically become cooler the further south of the tropics you go, depleting a cyclone of its power.

Second, cyclones need relatively low speed winds in the middle to upper troposphere – the part of the atmosphere closest to Earth, where the weather occurs. Higher-speed winds there cause the cyclone to tilt and weaken. In the Australian region, these higher wind speeds are more likely the further south a cyclone travels.

Third, most cyclones make landfall in the northern half of WA where the coast protrudes far into the Indian Ocean. Cyclones here typically form in the Timor Sea and move southward or south-west away from WA before curving southeast, towards the landmass.

For a cyclone to cross the coast south of about Carnarvon, it must travel a considerable distance towards the south-west into the Indian Ocean. This was the case with Seroja – winds steered it away from the WA coast before they weakened, allowing the cyclone to curve back towards land.

Reading the ridges

My colleagues and I have devised a method to estimate how often and where cyclones make landfall in Australia.

As cyclones approach the coast, they generate storm surge – abnormal sea level rise – and large waves. The surge and waves pick up sand and shells from the beaches and transport them inland, sometimes for several hundred metres.

These materials are deposited into ridges which stand many metres above sea level. By examining these ridges and geologically dating the materials within them, we can determine how often and intense the cyclones have been over thousands of years.

Read more: Our new model shows Australia can expect 11 tropical cyclones this season

At Shark Bay, just north of where Seroja hit the coast, a series of 26 ridges form a “ridge plain” made entirely of one species of a marine cockle shell (Fragum eragatum). The sand at beaches near the plain are also made entirely of this shell.

The ridge record shows over the past 5,000 years, cyclones of Seroja’s intensity, or higher, have crossed the coast in this region about every 190 years – so about 26 times. Some 14 of these cyclones were more intense than Seroja.

The record shows no Category 5 cyclones have made landfall here over this time. The ridge record prevents us from knowing the frequency of less intense storms. But Bureau of Meteorology cyclone records since the early 1970s shows only a few crossed the coast in this region, and all appear weaker than Seroja.

Cyclones under climate change

So why does all this matter? Cyclones can kill and injure people, damage homes and infrastructure, cause power and communication outages, contaminate water supplies and more. Often, the most disadvantaged populations are worst affected. It’s important to understand past and future cyclone behaviour, so communities can prepare.

Climate change is expected to alter cyclone patterns. The overall number of tropical cyclones in the Australian region is expected to decrease. But their intensity will likely increase, bringing stronger wind and heavier rain. And they may form further south as the Earth warms and the tropical zone expands poleward.

This may mean cyclones of Seroja’s intensity are likely to become frequent, and communities further south on the WA coast may become more prone to cyclone damage. This has big implications for coastal planning, engineering and disaster management planning.

In particular, it may mean homes further south must be built to cope with stronger winds. Storm surge may also worsen, inundating low-lying coastal land.

Global climate models are developing all the time. As they improve, we will gain a more certain picture of how tropical cyclones will change as the planet warms. But for now, Seroja may be a sign of things to come.

Read more: Wetlands have saved Australia $27 billion in storm damage over the past five decades

This article is part of Conversation series on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. Read the rest of the stories here.

– ref. Cyclone Seroja just demolished parts of WA – and our warming world will bring more of the same – https://theconversation.com/cyclone-seroja-just-demolished-parts-of-wa-and-our-warming-world-will-bring-more-of-the-same-158769

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tamasailau Suaalii Sauni, Associate Professor in Criminology Programme, University of Auckland

Samoan politics is on a knife edge. After the country voted in general elections on April 9, counting so far has resulted in a dead heat between the two major parties.

This is a stunning and unexpected electoral rebuke of the ruling party, the Human Rights Protection Party (HRPP), which has dominated Samoa for four decades.

What are the results so far?

Coming into the election, HRPP held 47 of the 51 seats and Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele Malielegaoi predicted his party would win 42 of the 51 seats. It only won 25.

The nine-month-old opposition, Fa’atuatua i le Atua Samoa ua Tasi (FAST) party, also won 25 seats, just shy of the 26 needed to form government outright.

FAST’s leader, former Deputy Prime Minister Sa’o Faapito Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, says her party will consider a coalition deal with the winner of the 51st seat, independent Tuala Tevaga Iosefo Ponifasio.

Tuala has indicated he favours change. But Tuilaepa – a formidable and longstanding leader of 23 years — has not yet conceded defeat. Meanwhile, recounts and potential challenges to results will also slow a final outcome.

Why did we get this result?

The Samoan public was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with its government. This situation then quickly deteriorated when three controversial bills were passed last year, thanks to the government’s huge majority. These bills fundamentally altered the operations of the Lands and Titles Court, giving it additional powers over the bestowal of lands and titles within families and villages.

As Samoa-based lawyer Fiona Ey wrote last year, they also

undermine judicial independence and the rule of law, with significant implications for human rights.

In protest, Fiame – who had been Tuilaepa’s right-hand person — resigned as deputy prime minister in late 2020. In March, she joined FAST as its new leader.

Support for HRPP was also damaged by claims the government badly mishandled the 2019 measles epidemic.

On top of this, despite having no active COVID-19 cases in Samoa, the country is still under state of emergency restrictions. So there are increasing frustrations over continued border closures, which are straining the economy and preventing family reunifications.

But even with all these indications the government was out of favour, few predicted the weekend’s result.

Where did FAST come from?

Fiame’s move to FAST and appointment as leader was both politically astute and perfectly timed.

Fiame would give FAST what they needed to ultimately unseat the HRPP from its 40-year hold over Samoa’s governing systems. Her value was, and is, twofold. First, her chiefly and political lineage gives her significant domestic appeal. Second, her already established profile and experience on the world stage is invaluable should FAST become Samoa’s next ruling party.

Read more: Devastated by disease in the past, Samoa is on high alert after recent coronavirus scares

FAST was formed in July 2020 in reaction to the three bills. It began employing savvy tactics, attracting notable candidates and carrying out extensive social media outreach.

Through social media, FAST was able to reach across Samoa and beyond, connecting particularly with the substantial Samoan communities in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and the United States (many of whom donated significant amounts of money and time towards its election campaign). Due to the border closures, the large numbers of eligible voters residing outside Samoa could not return, as required, to cast ballots.

FAST’s success can be attributed to the combined leadership of Fiame and deputy leader La’auli Polataivao Leuatea Schmidt and their ability to capitalise on HRPP’s clear underestimation of the national mood, both against the three bills and for appropriate access to clear and robust policy information.

HRPP, on the other hand, relied heavily on its “business as usual” approach. The party’s underestimation of both the mood – and FAST — has cost it dearly.

What does this mean?

For Samoans, the election outcome is less about launching an attack against the prime minister and HRPP, and more about making an unequivocal point about Samoa’s commitment to protecting its two core “independence institutions”. These are the Samoan aiga (family) and the Samoan rule of law.

In voting for a non-HRPP majority, Samoa’s voters have signalled loud and clear they are prepared to step up to protect their “faasinomaga”, or their Samoan values, identity and heritage.

If the post-election negotiations go FAST’s way, Fiame is poised to be Samoa’s next prime minister. Although she would be the first woman in the position, pre-colonial Samoa has a strong tradition of national female leaders.

Read more: Traditional skills help people on the tourism-deprived Pacific Islands survive the pandemic

A transformed political landscape energised by new leadership promises renewed approaches to the many challenges facing the nation, including climate change and economic development.

Samoa has a rich history as a pioneer of political independence in the Pacific. It’s protest movements against colonial ruler Germany and New Zealand eventually led to Samoa becoming the first independent nation in the region in 1962.

With this election, Samoa resumes its place as one of the Pacific’s most innovative homes for Indigenous self-determination and democracy.

– ref. Samoa’s stunning election result: on the verge of a new ruling party for the first time in 40 years – https://theconversation.com/samoas-stunning-election-result-on-the-verge-of-a-new-ruling-party-for-the-first-time-in-40-years-158608

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Wellington, Senior Lecturer, Art History and Visual Culture, Australian National University

In this series we pay tribute to the art we wish could visit — and hope to see once travel restrictions are lifted.

If you are a country house fanatic like me, and you’ve been lucky enough to spend time travelling around Britain to seek them out, you might have visited some of the greats: Petworth, Blenheim, Chatsworth.

But have you heard of Boughton House, the “English Versailles”?

As an art historian born in England who works on the art and culture of Louis XIV’s France, I’m a little embarrassed to admit I only learnt about Boughton very recently.

Now, I yearn to book a flight to England to visit the house rebuilt by Ralph Montagu (1638–1709), the first Duke of Montagu, in the flashy new French style back in the 17th century.

Montagu inherited his family’s country seat in Northamptonshire when his father died in 1684. A monastic building was converted into a manor house by Sir Edward Montagu in 1528, following the dissolution of the monasteries by Henry VIII. The younger Montagu’s renovations began upon his inheritence and continued well into the 1690s.

Montagu’s contemporaries knew Louis XIV’s palace was the inspiration for Boughton.

The “Sun King” had transformed his father’s modest hunting lodge at Versailles into the most magnificent palace of the age. By 1680, it was the French king’s principal residence and the centre of government.

According to one account written shortly after Montagu’s death, Boughton was:

contrived after the Model of Versailles, with extending Wings, excellent Avenues, Vistas and Prospects; for Rich Furniture, Exquisite Gardens, Beauty of Building, and advantageous Situation, scare to be equalled in Britain.

Boughton House may not be well know today, but it was famous when it was built.

Dreams of France

Montagu was a greedy and ambitious fellow. He married twice for money and to advance his social status. He first went to France as an ambassador of King Charles II of England in 1669.

Although he was a minor noble, as the representative of the King of England his official entry into Paris was of unequalled magnificence. He developed a taste for the finest things at the time France was fast becoming the centre for luxury in Europe.

He travelled to France again in 1678, and returned to England with more than 200 trunks filled with works of art and furniture.

To live in the magnificent way he did in France, Montagu needed a house to display his treasures. With aid of his first wife’s dowry, he built Montagu House in London – which would become the site of the first British Museum in 1755, before being demolished to make way for a new grand museum in 1850.

Montagu employed all manner of French architects, painters, sculptors, wood engravers, furniture makers and silversmiths to decorate his London house and country seat. He commissioned artists like Jacques Rousseau and Charles de la Fosse who had worked for Louis XIV at Versailles.

Montagu was a Francophile through and through. His household staff were nearly all French — everyone from his housekeeper to his wigmaker — and the entertainments he gave were in the French style, with French dancing and music.

Treasures in situ

The main building of Boughton House is much as it was in Ralph Montagu’s time. The mansard roof and plain white stone of the façade lend the building a distinctly French feel.

Despite what Montagu’s contemporaries thought, it is not that similar to the Château at Versailles. It looks more like the lost Château of Saint-Cloud, where Montagu spent time in the circle of the English princess, Henrietta Maria, who married Louis XIV’s only brother Philippe.

I don’t want to visit just to see its lovely Frenchified exterior. Boughton is one of those rare country houses still in the hands of the family that built it.

Today, it is one of the ancestral homes of the Duke of Buccleuch, passed on by marriage in the 18th century.

Boughton is not the largest, nor the fanciest, of the Buccleuch seats. This is probably why it remains intact, full of the treasures collected and commissioned by the first Duke of Montagu.

Among the hundreds of trunks of objects Montagu brought back with him from France was a desk attributed to Pierre Gole, furniture maker to Louis XIV. According to family tradition, this was one of the personal gifts the French king gave to Montagu. The Gole desk is an exquisite treasure shimmering in the gold and silver tones of its pewter and brass inlay.

Objects have lives, too.

Just as the first Duke of Montagu was an English ambassador to France, this desk became a French ambassador to England. But where Montagu only played the role of ambassador for a few years, the desk has been in ambassadorial service for centuries, sitting at Boughton waiting for an audience.

Houses like Boughton delight me more than any museum. There is something so special about seeing works of art where they have remained for centuries.

Objects in museums are a little like birds in cages. By contrast, when you glimpse an exquisite object like that shimmering desk in a country house it’s like spying a rare bird in its natural habitat.

– ref. If I could go anywhere: Boughton House, ‘the English Versailles’ and its shimmering treasures – https://theconversation.com/if-i-could-go-anywhere-boughton-house-the-english-versailles-and-its-shimmering-treasures-157598