The federal government’s recommendation last week that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is now the preferred vaccine for adults under 50 has shaken public confidence in the COVID-19 vaccine rollout.
The Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) advised the AstraZeneca vaccine, previously planned as Australia’s main vaccine, will no longer be the preferred vaccine for adults under 50. It came after an extensive review of data from the United Kingdom and Europe which found an association between a very rare type of blood clot and the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Public confusion has already resulted in mass cancellations of vaccine appointments at GP clinics, by adults both over and under 50.
It’s important to remember the Australian government can afford to choose a safer path because we are not in the midst of a large COVID-19 outbreak.
But a decrease in vaccine confidence may be an unintended consequence of this path.
Now, the federal government must urgently restore public confidence in the vaccine rollout. It needs to quickly reassure adults aged over 50 the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe.
It’s essential the government gets this right. Concerns about one vaccine can damage public trust in other vaccines.
Why has a safer approach decreased confidence?
Vaccine confidence can be fickle. There are many recent examples of established vaccine programs that have been undermined by unrelated events or errors. This has led to mass disease outbreak and preventable death. For example, in the Philippines, a new measles outbreak that infected 47,871 people in 2019 and killed 632, mostly children, was fuelled by a drop in measles vaccination spurred by concerns about a dengue fever vaccine.
Vaccine program resilience is an even bigger ask during a new vaccine rollout where rare effects are expected once the vaccine is given to hundreds of millions of people.
Research from the Australian National University published last week found young women are the most likely to avoid vaccination. Women who did not approve of the government’s handling of recent sexual harassment scandals were less likely to accept a COVID vaccine. This demonstrates the importance of trust, and shows a lack of trust in one area of the government’s remit can spill into other areas.
Because the risk of catching COVID-19 is currently so low in Australia, many people are feeling less interested in being vaccinated.
One Australian study, published in September last year, found fewer people were willing to accept a COVID-19 vaccine compared to a similar study done two months earlier. This decrease was evident following a decreased number of new COVID-19 cases in Australia in the time between these two studies. People can change their intention to be vaccinated when they fear the effects from the vaccine more than the disease.
On top of all of this, some members of the community are still concerned COVID-19 vaccines were developed too quickly and without appropriate checks and balances — even though this isn’t true.
Changing recommendations during a vaccine program rollout can compound these concerns.
While the federal government was quick to accept the recommendation from ATAGI, the confusion has added to the rollout chaos. Public confidence has been damaged, and further vaccine delays are imminent across the board, including for younger health and aged-care workers.
Vaccine program resilience is essential to survive the bumps along the way and the government has not invested enough in understanding public sentiment and developing plain language information resources.
The challenge for public health and the federal government now is to address the understandable concerns and prevent them from contaminating the broader public dialog on COVID-19 vaccination.
With high numbers of Australians needing to be vaccinated to prevent further COVID-19 outbreaks, there’s very little room for vaccine rejection.
The government urgently needs to use clear messaging for all communities and health professionals. This includes communities with diverse cultural and language requirements
These efforts will greatly benefit from multidisciplinary teams of infectious disease, vaccine, social science and communication experts.
We need a compensation scheme
During Australia’s COVID-19 vaccine rollout, so far one man in his 40s has developed blood clots following vaccination with the AstraZeneca vaccine. There’s a 25% death rate following a vaccine-related clot according to ATAGI. Four to six clots are expected per million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine (first dose) and while this reaction is exceedingly rare, it is severe.
This also highlights the importance of a no-fault vaccine injury compensation scheme.
Such a scheme recognises that if the government promotes whole of community vaccination for collective good, then it also accepts the ethical and financial burden for the few people who will sustain a serious injury. The federal government should implement one as a matter of priority.
Australia’s COVID-19 vaccination rollout has hit yet another crossroads. Public confidence has wavered following the federal government’s announcement last week that the Pfizer vaccine was the preferred choice for people under age 50.
The advice was based on an extremely low risk of severe blood clots forming in younger recipients of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Many patients under 50 have since cancelled or been turned away from their vaccine appointments, according to reports.
Our Griffith University team is monitoring vaccine support levels among Australians. We’re doing this by analysing “big data” gleaned from social media platforms.
According to our analysis, the biggest drop in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance rates in Australia happened when blood clotting incidents were reported in some European countries, prompting rollouts to be stopped.
An evolving debate
Our team trawled through social media feeds for two months, collecting data on public attitudes towards the vaccine. We also watched these opinions change and evolve in response to important media announcements.
We found the Australian public cares about the vaccine’s effectiveness, side effects and roll-out process. Social media sentiment in particular is helping us identify misinformation in a way more traditional survey methods can’t.
Our findings, which have been provided to Queensland Health, are aiding decision makers in devising the best strategies to provide vaccine information to the public.
Carrying out surveys can be costly and time-consuming. It’s hard to get large samples because many people approached won’t participate. It’s also difficult to return to survey respondents later, to understand how their beliefs may be changing over time.
Between October last year and February this year, the Gold Coast Public Health Unit ran a survey asking people if they intended to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
Almost 19,000 survey invitations were given to people who visited fever clinics at the Gold Coast University Hospital and Robina Health Precinct. From these, 2,706 responses came back.
Results showed just over 50% of respondents “definitely intended” to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Around 15% said they “probably” or “definitely” would not receive the vaccine.
Results from the Gold Coast Public Health Unit’s survey of attitudes to COVID-19 vaccination.
Similarly, a study conducted by researchers at the Australian National University showed one in five (21.7%) respondents would “probably” or “definitely” not receive a vaccine.
While such surveys provide a “snapshot” from one point in time, big data analytics can examine social media data (such as from Twitter) in real time and therefore provide ongoing insight.
Nearly 100,000 posts from 42,000 accounts
These posts attracted a further 49,642 comments from another 15,648 unique accounts. This sample size is much bigger than the surveys mentioned above. Notably, the data we collected showed us how vaccine hesitancy had changed during that time.
We used techniques called “sentiment polarity” calculations and “topic modelling analysis” and also looked at the number of likes received by posts for and against the vaccine.
During the two months, we were able to identify links between changes in sentiment and specific media announcements from trusted news sources. The announcements had an obvious impact on people’s opinions.
Negative reporting had a direct impact
Vaccine support started at around 80% in January. With fewer COVID cases in Australia at the end of 2020 and in January this year, we saw declining support for the vaccine. But when the media showed people receiving the Pfizer vaccine in February, support grew.
The Pfizer vaccine is now the recommended one for people under age 50.Joel Carrett/AAP
Negative stories started to appear mid-to-late February, and support levels expressed on social media feeds dropped. In late February, the media told us about a poorly trained doctor who gave higher than recommended vaccine doses to two elderly people.
We then received reports of multiple European Union countries banning the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, due to concerns of blood clotting as a potential side effect. This marked the biggest drop in support, from more than 80% to below 60%.
How Australian rates of vaccine acceptance changed over time, as measured by analysis of Twitter posts. Public confidence in the vaccine rollout shifted dramatically following key announcements in the media.
In late March, support bounced back when the same countries resumed rolling out the AstraZeneca vaccine, and news emerged that GP clinics in Australia were gearing up to do the same.
There are some limitations to this research method. For instance, the views of Twitter users don’t necessarily represent the general population. That said, our data pool does seem to reflect a fairly diverse group of users sharing opinions by posting, re-tweeting and liking posts.
All of these opinions are captured and incorporated into our analysis. Considering the large volume of data used, as well as insights from other correct predictions, we are confident in our ability to provide an accurate near real-time analysis.
Addressing what the public wants addressed
Big data analysis can deliver fast results that show not just the prevalence of vaccine hesitancy but also help us understand the factors that drive it.
Further, by focusing on the regions or demographics which have the most doubts — whether this is certain age groups, or people with a given level of education — big data analysis can keep high-level decision makers informed about how the public feels.
This in turn assists them with pointing out the key issues and vulnerable areas to which they can direct targeted messages. In this way, the news sources which the public respects and trusts can (and must) be used to improve health outcomes for all.
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.
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 made up 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.
Emergency services crews in the WA town of Geraldton, preparing ahead of the arrival of Tropical Cyclone Seroja – an event rarely seen this far south.Department of Fire and Emergency Services WA
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.
Economists like to talk about “optimal policy instruments” — essentially, policies that achieve their objectives more effectively or efficiently than the alternatives, and have minimal unintended consequences.
Judged by those criteria, the New Zealand government’s recently announced package of housing policy instruments is a long way from optimal. You might even call it a shambles.
How so? To the uninformed, the package’s main elements may seem to address the housing affordability crisis by doing several things:
removing tax deductibility of interest on loans for residential property investments
extending the bright-line test — the period after which the property sale attracts a capital gains tax (CGT) liability — from five to ten years
favouring new builds in these tax changes
introducing a “changes of use” rule that effectively makes family homes liable to CGT if sold within ten years and rented out for more than one year
and raising income and house price caps for the government’s First Home Grant scheme.
If we examine the package in light of the three optimal policy requirements, however, we can see the problems.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson announce the Labour government’s housing policy changes.GettyImages
Achieving the policy’s objective
Economists have a policy “rule” that to achieve various policy objectives, you need at least as many policy instruments. The housing package is a hodgepodge of inter-related measures, but it has several explicit objectives:
stabilising house prices
facilitating home ownership
discouraging (ill-defined) speculative investment
increasing the housing stock with mainly (undefined) “affordable homes”
closing what the government claims is a housing “tax loophole”.
To these, add implicit objectives of tackling perceived income and wealth inequalities between tenants, landlords and homeowners.
Overall, this is quite a task, and it would be remarkable if any set of housing policies could achieve such wide-ranging objectives.
Arguably, the primary target of this policy package is stopping the inexorable upward march of (mainly Auckland) house prices. Failing to achieve that would simply put it among a long line of attempts by previous governments (National and Labour) over the past 20 years at least.
In all cases, the biggest problem has been insufficient political commitment to boosting housing supply.
All taxes cause “distortions”, mostly unintended, which need to be mitigated. Furthermore, policies that have conflicting objectives are “incoherent” and typically among the most distorting. This applies to the housing package’s removal of interest deductibility.
Previously, in New Zealand and almost every other country, interest on business loans is treated as a legitimate expense and therefore tax deductible, regardless of the nature of that business.
With that coherent principle now not applying to housing, then, what about other types of business loans the government thinks it should favour or disfavour? No doubt arguments could be made for such policies, but the result is an ad hoc tax system that generates multiple undesirable distortions and perverse incentives.
It could be argued the “new build” aspect of the housing package gets some incentives right by directing rental housing investment toward increasing the housing stock.
But with already existing constraints on new house building — such as planning regulations and availability of suitable land — the policy is likely to have little impact. It will simply shift housing investors from competing with first-time buyers for existing properties to competing with them for new properties.
Over time the rental housing stock becomes a patchwork of homes that do or don’t qualify for tax exemptions. Exploiting these new loopholes and assorted distortions to property prices will likely provide plenty of employment for tax accountants.
A back door capital gains tax
It would be rare to find a liability based on transactions and timing among the principles of a good tax policy. But the bright-line test manages both — it incentivises delaying property sales to avoid the tax even when selling would otherwise be in the taxpayer’s best interest.
It was originally introduced in 2010 with a two year threshold, without supporting evidence, supposedly to stop so-called speculators from flipping properties for quick profits. A ten year threshold cannot be branded an anti-speculation policy, it is simply a back-door CGT.
As with most back-door policies, this CGT is inevitably less transparent and coherent than a policy designed to tackle the problem head-on would be.
Consider the hypothetical case of an Auckland homeowner relocating to Sydney to work for two years. It wouldn’t be sensible to sell the Auckland house due to high transaction costs and the risk of slipping on the property ladder when trying to buy back later. Much better to rent in Sydney while also renting out the Auckland home.
But this would now generate a potentially substantial tax bill on the family home. Indeed, one calculation showed just such a plausible scenario could generate a CGT liability of almost a year’s salary — simply to move to a similarly priced house.
Alternative policy instruments
If there are better alternatives, they do not lie in even more ad hoc fiddling with a coherent tax regime.
Instead, like the famous real estate mantra of “location, location, location”, the mantra for New Zealand housing policy should be “supply, supply, supply”. Specifically, supply in Auckland.
Successive governments have aimed policies nationwide when rapid house price inflation is almost exclusively urban and essentially an Auckland phenomenon.
Without policies that reform construction sector regulations and open up more land for urban housing, there is little prospect of Auckland house prices stabilising while current demand-driven trends persist. To make matters worse, the government’s first-home buyer schemes will merely raise demand without incentivising supply.
With too many objectives and the probability of numerous unintended consequences, the government’s housing policies risk being seriously incoherent.
A powerful and assertive China poses significant policy challenges for Australia. Many of our most pressing policy issues have crucially important China angles, from freedom of speech on university campuses to scientific research collaboration and supply chain management.
Yet, there is a dire lack of policy expertise on China in the public service and few signs this is improving.
The Australian Public Service (APS) has long recognised the importance of Asia expertise generally. However, an independent review in 2019 noted that while Asia proficiency was a core focus of the 2012 Asian Century White Paper,
coordinated and sustained action to deepen Asia-relevant capabilities was not taken then, and it remains a skills gap across the public service.
For example, Asian language skills remain poor in Australia, and the number of people fluent in Mandarin is dismally low, especially among Australians without a Chinese background.
One estimate has put the number of fluent Mandarin speakers of non-Chinese background at just 130 across the entire country. And with a decreasing number of year 12 students without Chinese background studying Mandarin, the prospects of this situation improving are low.
Recruiting, retaining and promoting more Chinese-Australians with China capability should be of the utmost importance for the public service.
Yet, Australians of Chinese heritage are significantly under-represented in the public service, at just 2.6% of the total workforce based on the latest available internal figures.
This is despite Mandarin and Cantonese being two of the most common foreign languages spoken at home in Australia at 2.5% and 1.2% of the total population, respectively, according to the last census.
This is not simply a problem of workplace composition lagging demographic changes. The numbers of new Chinese-Australians being recruited into the public service are also significantly lower than they should be.
This demographic group has an enormous amount to contribute to Australia’s China literacy and policy-making capabilities. Yet, in the public service, Chinese-Australians are more likely to be found in accounting and IT roles, rather than policy-making roles.
The under-representation problem is especially acute in senior management, with only two Chinese-Australian “first assistant secretaries” out of a total of 577 across the entire Australian Public Service. This is just 0.3% of people in this key senior executive role.
With high tensions between Australia and China, we need more China specialists in positions of authority in the public service.Mick Tsikas/AAP
Why this is happening
In a report published today for the Lowy Institute, I have identified some of the major causes of under-representation of Chinese-Australians in the public service. Workplace culture, management systems and recruitment processes are among the principal challenges holding back this important source of talent.
When Chinese-Australians with deep knowledge of China are recruited to the public service, management preconceptions may hinder their placement in China-related roles. There is a tendency to perceive their ethnic and cultural background as an impediment or “conflict of interest” to work on issues related to China, even after they have successfully completed the exhaustive security clearance process.
The result is that government departments may spend substantial resources training public servants to speak a Chinese language and improve their expertise on Chinese society and culture, while those with existing Chinese language skills, knowledge and experience are side-lined.
Another pervasive problem in some bureaucratic systems is that staff are constrained by their formal role definition or official rank in how they can contribute their knowledge and expertise.
The Australian Public Service recruitment and promotion systems also tend to value “generic” public policy skills rather than “specialised” knowledge, such as country or regional expertise. This further contributes to a mismatch of skills and expertise with roles and positions.
What can be done to fix the situation
While the public service has taken steps towards addressing diversity and inclusion issues (and there has been notable work done by some government agencies), there is a sense some of these efforts are merely superficial.
Agencies may hold feel-good Harmony Day morning teas, while ignoring systemic workplace culture issues. Other initiatives are treated as “extra-curricular”, to be done outside working hours rather than as a core component of an employee’s work.
To fix the situation, the Australian Public Service needs to target culturally and linguistically diverse communities for recruitment, as well as support their retention and promotion. This is similar to what it is currently doing to progress women through the ranks.
The public service should also collect and publish better data on the representation of different culturally and linguistically diverse groups. However, the public service is doing the reverse: it removed ethnic diversity questions from last year’s APS employee census.
The irony is that despite the urgent demand within the Australian Public Service for Chinese language and cultural skills, the existing skills of many public servants are being overlooked or not used at all.
Australia has a large, diverse and growing population of Chinese-Australians, but the APS is failing to take advantage of this. And those who are in the service are often undervalued or underutilised.
A better harnessing of the skills and knowledge of this community would have substantial benefits for Australian policy-making in one of its most important bilateral relationships.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. Click here to subscribe to Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup and New Zealand Politics Daily.
Sixty years ago, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to travel in space when he completed his historic orbit of Earth on April 12, 1961.
Out of respect for Gagarin’s achievement, the Apollo 11 crew left a medal on the Moon commemorating the cosmonaut.AP
It was an extraordinary achievement, but created a dilemma for a world embroiled in the Cold War. Gagarin’s spaceflight heralded a vision of a unified planet.
However, in the battle between communism and capitalism, space technology was also a weapon to demonstrate the superiority of one political system over the other.
The Soviet Union was winning the battle. In 1957, it orbited the first satellite with Sputnik 1. Two years later, the Luna 2 probe was the first human artefact to make contact with the Moon. In February 1961 the Russians launched the Venera 1 probe towards Venus.
As congratulations for Gagarin’s feat poured in from around the world, the vehemently anti-communist Australian prime minister Robert Menzies stayed silent.
His views were echoed by members of the Australian scientific establishment. Sir John Eccles, president of the Australian Academy of Science, said the flight was of little value to humanity. Nuclear scientist Sir Mark Oliphant described it as a stunt.
scientifically I am happy, but from the cold-war perspective I am sad […] it could very well threaten the freedom of the world if Russia continues to triumph in space.
Sputniks and vodka at the Sydney Trade Fair
The Australian public had other ideas. In August 1961, Sydney hosted an international trade fair with a large Russian pavilion.
Such was the buzz that Henry F. Jensen, the Labor Lord Mayor of Sydney, invited Gagarin to visit as part of his post-flight world tour. A request was sent through the Soviet embassy in Canberra, which passed it on to Moscow. Jensen said:
I am certain Sydney citizens will give him a very warm welcome if he comes here.
Throughout July and August, newspapers reported on whether the invitation had been answered. Anticipation was building.
The Russian pavilion had two life sized replicas of Soviet spacecraft and the public flocked to see them. It was the most popular pavilion at the trade fair (although the mini-bottles of vodka that were given away may have helped too).
Not everyone was happy about it. On August 12, an anonymous caller told police there was a bomb in the Russian pavilion. After evacuation, the bomb threat was proven to be a hoax.
It’s not known if the Lord Mayor’s invitation ever reached Gagarin. Over the next year the cosmonaut visited more than 25 countries on his world tour, but Australia was not among them.
The space boomerang
That said, Gagarin still had a close encounter with Australian culture. Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett and his British colleague Anthony Purdy were the first Western journalists invited to interview him privately.
Burchett was the first foreign war correspondent to enter Hiroshima in 1945, and had been hounded out of Australia by the government for his communist sympathies.
Burchett and Purdy met with Gagarin and his interpreters at the State Committee of Foreign Cultural Relations in Moscow, on July 9 1961. They wrote a book about it, contextualising the interview within the broader Soviet space program.
Burchett’s father George was on holidays in Moscow at the time. Just as Gagarin was leaving, George walked in with a boomerang he had in his luggage. He offered it to the cosmonaut, saying “please take this as a symbol of safe return”.
“It always comes back, and I hope you and your colleagues do too.”
George Burchett presents a boomerang to Yuri Gagarin, July 9, 1961.National Library of Australia, File 13, Box 3
Gagarin was delighted, examining the boomerang closely while the interpreters explained its use. They returned his thanks to George Burchett: “I shall treasure it. It’s a nice sort of symbol to have”.
The label on the back of the photograph, now in the National Library of Australia, says:
Label on the back of photograph.National Library of Australia, File 13, Box 3
In January this year, nearly 60 years after Gagarin’s epic flight, a boomerang carved by Kaurna and Narungga man Jack Buckskin was taken onto the International Space Station by astronaut Shannon Walker.
US astronaut Dr Shannon Walker with the boomerang on the ISS.NASA
Space politics in the global south
On one hand, Gagarin’s spaceflight was a symbol of unity and peace. On the other, it fostered the fear of Soviet aggression from space that started with Sputnik 1. The US also had to obscure its military objectives in space to create a public perception of peaceful intent.
The world tour was an important exercise in soft diplomacy, particularly when Gagarin visited countries such as Ghana and Brazil, which were not aligned with either the US or USSR.
Soviet technology’s promise of modernisation, as seen at the Sydney Trade Fair, was a powerful lure for nations in Africa, Latin America and Asia.
But many rejected the premise of the Cold War. In May 1961, a newspaper in Uruguay asked readers to imagine
the benefits to be gained if the American and Soviet scientists were to unite their efforts […] if these feats were intended to unite rather than divide.
Yuri Gagarin holds a dove presented to him by the Bulgarian Young Pioneers, in Sofia, May 1961.Uknown
The paradox is captured in one of the most famous photographs of Yuri Gagarin, where he holds a dove, an international symbol of peace, while wearing his military uniform and decorations.
This image is frequently displayed in the Russian segment of the International Space Station.
Gagarin never flew in space again. He was tragically killed in a jet crash in 1968. Around the world civil, revolutionary and international wars were being waged, the most well-known being the American War (also called the Vietnam War) which continued until 1975.
Perhaps no space traveller has ever returned to a world at peace.
Among many surprising things about 2020 was how a novel coronavirus drove an equally novel upending of Australia’s political orthodoxy.
The hackneyed election straightener, “it’s the economy, stupid”, got shoved aside for a refreshing new imperative, “it’s the community, stupid”. Australians unhesitatingly turned to government, embraced expertise, and willingly abided by society-wide deprivations in the interests of the whole.
Reluctantly at first, centre-right politicians fell into line. Those who had built their careers on the virtues of small-government and gruff fiscal discipline, flipped to become big spending hyper-Keynesians.
Necessarily, political combat took a back seat to problem-solving. In an atmosphere of policy-not-politics, voters backed incumbent governments, marking them favourably for doing their jobs. Every election since the crisis began has returned the incumbents: in the Northern Territory, ACT, Queensland, and Western Australia. In the latter case, Labor’s Mark McGowan — arguably the country’s most aggressively parochial premier — was endorsed so strongly in March that the Liberal opposition officially ceased to exist.
Federally, Prime Minister Scott Morrison reaped the dividends of Australia’s tandem run of good management and good luck. While our closest allies, the United States and United Kingdom, descended into death and division, Australia closed its international borders early. It then compartmentalised further with the states episodically insulating their own populations and their own hospital systems.
Of course, there were mistakes. But the aggregate impact of these measures, high public trust, and the deliberately consensual mechanism of Morrison’s national cabinet has served the country well.
2021 brings new pressures
But 2021 has been a whole new ball game, and one for which a prime minister not accustomed to pressure, has proved far less equipped.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Health Minister Greg Hunt have found themselves in crisis-management mode over the vaccine rollout.Mick Tsikas/AAP
The vaccine rollout — which remember, started stubbornly late — is in disarray. A promised four million inoculations by the end of March and completion by the end of October proved wildly unrealistic.
As of Sunday, the government says it hopes all Australians could receive at least one dose of vaccine by the end of the year. But as Morrison posted on Facebook, the government has no plans for any new targets because
it is not possible to set such targets given the many uncertainties involved.
Through the second half of last year, as it became clear there would be effective vaccines, Morrison, Health Minister Greg Hunt, and health authorities assured worried Australians the government was up to the global competition. And that Canberra was being sufficiently front-footed about procuring vaccines.
Australians will be among the first in the world to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, if it proves successful, through an agreement between the Australian Government and UK-based drug company AstraZeneca.
Our strategy puts Australia at the head of the queue.
This was always unconvincing. That claimed “agreement” turned out to have been an over-egged letter of intent. Even ordinary observers could see demand from wealthy countries would be strong, and binding contracts would need to be signed quickly if Australia was to secure early adequate supplies.
It is now clear Australia’s risk-averse pandemic management — much of which was driven by premiers — has been followed by an insufficiently risk-aware vaccine contingency, controlled by the Commonwealth. And so we see another bizarre inversion: Australia being trounced by Britain and America, countries that had persistently botched their infection response.
Post-Trump America is now vaccinating three million people a day, and has gone above four million at least once. Covid-ravaged Britain is also roaring ahead. More than half of adults have had their first jab.
Textbook vaccination program?
What is not clear is why Morrison et al insisted the absence of urgency was an advantage because — combined with our judicious “portfolio” approach to multiple acquisitions — our health authorities could plan and execute a textbook public vaccination program.
Trouble is, the states have complained about a lack of genuine cooperation in the rollout, critical supply problems have been obscured, and the much vaunted broad “portfolio” approach has had its narrowness exposed.
Clearly, the slow and steady approach failed to build in redundancy for the wholly imaginable interruptions to supply from international competition and technical limitations in production and transporting. Then there is straight-out vaccine nationalism, as has been the cause of a blocked shipment from Italy.
Australia’s approach rather relied initially on two locally producible vaccines primarily with Pfizer (and later Novavax) as a back-up — the University of Queensland one which fell over in December, and AstraZeneca which is now “not preferred” for under 50s. While the AstraZeneca clotting risk is hardly a public health disaster — it has been compared to that of long-haul flights — it is certainly a disaster for an already fractious vaccine confidence.
Morrison now faces multiple, serious threats
Coupled with a poorly managed political crisis over the treatment of women, Morrison’s 2021 has been tin-eared. A sharp decline of public trust in government, in expertise, and in institutional competence looms as a clear and present danger for Morrison’s popularity.
The prime minister has taken a hit to his approval ratings over his recent handling of gender issues.Lukas Coch/AAP
Business-as-usual politics is already making a comeback with Labor’s Mark Butler toughening up of criticism of the rollout and calling for more transparency and a greater sense of urgency. Labor has little choice. Voters themselves see other countries are surging ahead while Australia inches along, tempting the fate of another outbreak, and delaying the economic recovery dependent on vaccination.
And that’s the next inversion we’re likely to see. Business and Coalition hardliners were outspoken last year against state border closures, lockdowns, and other restrictions, on economic grounds.
Expect to hear those voices too in coming weeks as the penny drops about a whole extra year lost to the pandemic.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, The University of Melbourne
Last week’s Essential poll, conducted March 24-28 from a sample of 1,100, showed a striking difference by gender over approval of Scott Morrison. With men, Morrison’s approval since February was steady at 65%, and his disapproval up just two points to 30%, for a net approval of +35.
With women, Morrison’s approval had slumped 16 points from February, to 49%, with ten points of that drop coming between the mid-March and late March polls. Morrison’s disapproval with women had increased 12 points since February to 40%, and his net approval was +9, down 28 points since February.
Katharine Murphy wrote in The Guardian on April 3 that Morrison’s approval was actually up 11 points with both young men (18-34) and rural/regional men. These findings would be based on small subsamples, so are not reliable.
A striking pattern is emerging: women are turning off Morrison while men are staying loyal. With so many terrible stories about the treatment of women coming out of Parliament House in recent weeks, why should this be so?
Newspoll has released aggregate data for its four federal polls taken between February and March. As noted by The Poll Bludger, these data fail to follow the script, with Labor ahead by 51-49 with both men and women, a four-point gain for Labor with men since the October to December Newspoll aggregate, and no change with women. There is little difference in Morrison’s ratings with men or women.
The Newspoll aggregate data used four polls from early February to late March, while Essential’s findings are based on just the late March poll. In my previous article, I implied Newspoll’s mid-March poll may have been affected by the WA election; it’s possible that election had a bigger swing to Labor among men than women.
Scott Morrison’s approval ratings have held steady among men, but slipped with women in recent weeks.AAP/Mick Tsikas
International polling on political correctness and sex
In a mid-March article, CNN analyst Harry Enten cited an American National Election Studies’ survey before the 2020 US elections. This was an academic survey of over 8,000 respondents that asked a large number of questions.
In one question, respondents were asked to choose between whether they thought people needed to change the way they talk to fit with the times, or whether that movement — often disparagingly referred to as “political correctness” — had gone too far and people were too easily offended.
By 53-46, respondents said people were too easily offended. In this same poll, Joe Biden led Donald Trump by a 53-42 margin, so the seven-point margin in favour of too much political correctness (PC) shows it is a strong issue for Republicans. As Biden actually won the national popular vote by 4.5%, not 11%, it is likely opposition to PC is stronger than this poll implies.
Furthermore, respondents under 30 were split at 50-50 on this PC question, even though they supported Biden by 30 points over Trump. So the fight over PC is something that could push more young people into supporting conservatives.
I analysed the ANES data on the degree of agreement on the statement “many women interpret innocent remarks or acts as being sexist”. The response options were strongly agree, somewhat agree, neither agree nor disagree, somewhat disagree and strongly disagree.
For the overall sample, 32% agreed and 31% disagreed that innocent remarks were interpreted as sexist. For men, it was 33% agree and 26% disagree, though for men under 35 it was 35% disagree and 28% agree. An issue is whether the neutral option is hiding some respondents who agree with the statement, but ironically choose a more PC response.
Polling for The Economist taken in 2018 shows young men (18-29) in four countries (Britain, France, Germany and the US) were less likely to say sexually inappropriate behaviour was sexual harassment than they were in 2017. This polling was taken a year into the #MeToo movement.
A 2018 poll taken in four countries showed young men were less likely to say sexually inappropriate behaviour was sexual harassment than they were the previous year.Shutterstock
US elections involving sex-compromised candidates
In Australia, candidates who do something that embarrasses their party will usually be disendorsed by their party before the election. It is unlikely a major party candidate accused of very sexist remarks would be allowed to face the voters as an endorsed candidate. However, sometimes scandals occur too late to remove candidates from the ballot paper.
In the US, major party candidates are selected by primaries, with the primary election held months before the general election. Once a candidate wins a primary, they cannot be forced to step aside by their party. So there are far more cases of sexually compromised major party candidates in the US contesting general elections.
In presidential election years, Congressional elections are held concurrently with the presidential election, in early November. With one extreme exception, Missouri’s 2012 Senate election is the last time a sexually compromised candidate performed far worse than the presidential ticket.
Republican Todd Akin made remarks in August 2012 implying women would not become pregnant from a “legitimate rape”. Incumbent Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill crushed him by nearly 16 points, even though Republican Mitt Romney won Missouri by over nine points in the presidential election.
Since that election, the only sexually compromised candidate who has underperformed is Republican Roy Moore at the December 2017 Alabama Senate byelection. Moore was accused of sexual assaults of girls who were below the legal age (the youngest alleged victim was 14).
Moore lost to Democrat Doug Jones by two points in a state Trump won by 28 points in 2016 and 25 in 2020. In 2020, Alabama reverted to type when Republican Tommy Tuberville crushed Jones by 20 points. As well as the accusations of child sex assault, Moore was hurt by Trump being near the worst popularity nationally of his term.
Owing to the alleged child sex assaults, Moore is an extreme case. As I have previously written, the Access Hollywood tape featured Trump himself making crude sexual comments, and that tape was released a month before the 2016 election. But it had little impact in the polls, and Trump won the 2016 election in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by 2.1%.
Despite the outrage of the Access Hollywood tapes during the 2016 US presidential campaign, Trump’s ratings suffered relatively little.AAP/AP/zz/Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX/IPx
In October 2018, Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed as a Supreme Court justice by a 50-48 Senate vote, despite allegations of sexual misconduct and assault. All except one Republican voted for him, and all bar one Democrat voted against.
Although Democrats won the House easily at the November 2018 midterms, Republicans extended their margin in the Senate from 51-49 to 53-47, mostly because the last time those senators had been up was in 2012, a very good election for Democrats. Only one Republican who voted to confirm was defeated in 2018 — Nevada’s Dean Heller — while four Democrats who voted against were defeated, including McCaskill.
The 2020 Senate elections were largely dictated by the presidential candidate’s support in a given state. The one significant difference from presidential results was Republican Susan Collins in Maine, who won by about nine points even as Trump lost Maine by the same margin. Collins had supported Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
In early October 2020, North Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Cal Cunningham was revealed to have engaged in sexting with a woman who was not his wife. This has been blamed for Cunningham’s narrow defeat, but he lost by 1.8% while Biden lost North Carolina by 1.3% — hardly a big difference.
To sum up, since the Missouri Senate election in 2012, the only candidate accused of sexual misbehaviour who has performed very badly considering the presidential results in his state is Moore in Alabama, and he was accused of child sex offences. Trump won despite the Access Hollywood tape and Senate Republicans who voted for Kavanaugh did not suffer electorally.
In this article, I have explored three categories: recent Australian polling showing a large difference in Morrison’s ratings among men and women; international polling showing that conservatives can benefit from an anti-PC sentiment and young men becoming less likely to view sexual misbehaviour as harassment; and US elections that suggest there is little penalty for sexual misbehaviour anymore.
Having looked at all the data, I believe there is a backlash against political correctness that is making sexual misbehaviour more acceptable.
The big question facing Australia’s National Electricity Market is how to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 without disrupted energy supplies or skyrocketing prices.
Some say coal-fired power will be needed. Others say 100% renewable electricity is the way to go. But our new report released today argues neither path is wise in the medium term.
It shows renewable energy – particularly wind and solar – can get us most of the way to net-zero. But as the renewable share approaches 100%, maintaining reliable supply will become very expensive.
The best approach for now is to target net-zero emissions. This will involve retaining a small proportion of fossil-fuel generation – namely gas – in the electricity mix over the next couple of decades. But it does not mean extending the life of existing coal-fired power stations, or building new ones.
Australia’s electricity system must decarbonise without affecting reliability or affordability.Shutterstock
A fork in the road
All state and territory governments have committed to achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says achieving that goal is his preference, too.
That means the electricity sector needs to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases it releases to the atmosphere.
Most electricity customers in Australia, except those in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, are supplied by the National Electricity Market (NEM). It comprises electricity generators, transmission lines and other infrastructure to deliver electricity to customers, and a wholesale market where electricity is bought and sold.
The market’s coal-fired power stations are ageing. As the below graph shows, virtually all are scheduled to be retired in the next three decades.
Renewable energy is now the cheapest source of electricity, but it’s an intermittent form of supply – generated only when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.
The question now is what technology mix – including fossil fuels, renewable energy sources and energy storage systems – the NEM should adopt.
‘Good news for Australia’
The Grattan Institute developed a sophisticated economic model of the NEM to answer this question. We investigated the emissions, reliability and affordability implications of different future technology mixes.
We compared three scenarios:
the NEM continues to rely on coal, with new coal-fired power stations replacing old ones as they are retired
70% of the NEM’s electricity comes from renewables, with two-thirds less coal capacity than today
90% or more electricity comes from renewables, with no coal-fired generation at all.
The model tested each technology mix against nine years of hourly weather and electricity demand data across the NEM, adjusted for projected changes in future demand. It then computed the cost of supplying electricity with each mix.
The results are good news for Australia. A 70% renewable system looks to be about as affordable as maintaining a coal-based system over the long run, but with 70 million fewer tonnes of emissions each year.
The cost of doing this is extremely low – about A$7 for each tonne of emissions abated. This is less than the A$16/t the federal government pays for emissions reduction now via its Climate Solutions Fund.
Moving from 70% to 90% renewables would trim another 35 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions for less than A$40/t. This is still low-cost abatement. By comparison, the European Union’s carbon price rose to about A$67/t in March 2021, while Canada plans to raise its carbon tax to about A$181/t by 2030.
One scenario analysed a future with no coal.Shutterstock
Let’s get connected
Transmission infrastructure is key to decarbonising the electricity sector.
High-voltage transmission lines carry electricity over the long distances from where it’s produced to where it’s needed. They also connect the states of the NEM, enabling electricity to be traded between regions. The below graph shows the transmission network today.
To get to higher renewable shares, more transmission infrastructure is needed, for two reasons:
First, many sunny and windy places are located at the edges of the NEM states. If wind and solar plants were built there, transmission would be needed to connect them to the network.
Second, more transmission between NEM states would allow each state to export renewable energy when it has too much, and import when it needs more.
There are costs and benefits to weigh up here. Extra transmission infrastructure requires significant investment. However it would mean less generation infrastructure is needed in each state, reducing overall costs.
Our report shows at 90% renewables, the benefits of a more-interconnected NEM outweigh the costs to the tune of A$800 million or more each year.
Net-zero is more affordable than 100% renewables
The best information available today indicates climbing from 90% to 100% renewables will be expensive. This is mainly due to the challenge of balancing demand and supply during rare, sustained periods of low wind, low solar and high demand.
Gas peaking plants will likely be an important, but not expanded, part of Australia’s energy transition.Shutterstock
Gas is an ideal backstop for this challenge. Gas-fired generators are cheap to build but costly to run. These economics suit this problem nicely because they will be needed only infrequently.
Alternatives look more expensive. Hydrogen could very well replace gas as a backstop, but only if the cost of producing and storing it falls significantly. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) can work only in certain locations, and is much less economic if used infrequently. Batteries and even pumped hydro will struggle over rare, multi-day challenges.
Of course, gas is not a zero-emissions solution. To reach net zero efficiently, the lowest-cost option in the medium term is most likely to rely on 90% or more renewables and offset the remaining pollution with negative-emissions technologies.
So it looks likely gas will play an important but not expanded role over the next few decades. And if zero-emissions alternatives fall in cost faster than current projections suggest, the role for gas will shrink faster.
If the cost of zero-emissions electricity generation falls more quickly than projected, gas will be phased out sooner.Shutterstock
The way forward
Three recommendations flow from these conclusions.
First, governments should have confidence in planning for a net-zero emissions future for the NEM by the 2040s. We’ve shown emissions can be reduced while maintaining reliable and affordable electricity supply.
Governments should not try to extend the life of existing coal-fired power stations, let alone subsidise new ones.
Second, net-zero emissions – not 100% renewables – is the appropriate target to be setting today.
Third, more transmissison infrastructure will help achieve higher renewable shares at lower cost. State governments should work together to resolve disputes about who should pay for interstate transmission upgrades.
And the states should not try to go it alone. Australia’s great energy transition will be most affordable if the states stick together.
In the world of research and scholarship, being published in academic journals is crucial to both the advancement of knowledge and the careers of those involved.
In particular, the peer review process that determines who and what is published is integral to ensuring reliability and quality in academic research. As the University of British Columbia’s Professor Sarah Hunt (from the Kwakwaka’wakw nation) has said, “It’s really about who we cite in our work, whose work we hold up, which really validates and legitimises that as knowledge”.
Unfortunately, for many Indigenous scholars, academic publishing and peer review present more of an uphill battle than for academics in general, in part due to the attitudes and practices of some reviewers.
It’s true that strides have been made towards decolonising academia in some places. Universities in Aotearoa New Zealand, the Pacific, Australia and Scandinavia, for example, have sought to increase the number of Indigenous academics they employ and to support their research work.
But despite strong Indigenous cohorts within our southern hemisphere universities, Indigenous academics are still a minority. These universities also have poor retention rates for Indigenous scholars.
The recent publication Ngā Kete Mātauranga: Māori scholars at the research interface highlighted numerous constraints facing Māori scholars, who comprise only 5% of academic staff at Aotearoa New Zealand’s universities despite representing 17% of the general population.
As one of the editors, Professor Jacinta Ruru, lamented, “Māori academics are lonely, isolated and struggling to be heard.”
The problem with publishing
While issues of racism and unconscious bias within some of our higher learning institutions are gradually being addressed, there has been little attention given to decolonising academic publishing.
There are excellent journals, such as MAI and AlterNative, specifically focusing on Indigenous scholarship. But Indigenous scholars are working in a range of academic disciplines where there are strong pressures to publish in highly ranked “mainstream” journals.
Certainly, some mainstream journal editors actively solicit and support the publication of work by Indigenous scholars, persons of colour, those from the global south or others marginalised in the academy.
Yet there are still signs of various forms of discrimination in the reviewing process, some of which might go unnoticed or unaddressed because editors are overworked and stretched by the volume of submissions they must process.
In turn, editors rely on an overtaxed army of volunteer reviewers who take on what is often a thankless task. Moreover, staff at mainstream journals and publishing companies often lack Indigenous representation.
These reviewers hold immense power but are shielded from accountability by their anonymity. Editors themselves may lack insight into unconscious bias, unwittingly sweeping prejudice under carpets and inhibiting the potential of Indigenous scholars.
Our own experiences
We are academics based at Aotearoa New Zealand and Australian Universities, and represent a mix of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous ancestry. Some of us collaborate on researching tourism as a means for sustainable development and social justice for Indigenous peoples, and others work on Indigenous sport as a tool for social development.
Our experiences and those of Indigenous colleagues we consulted exemplify the barriers often faced by researchers in the margins wanting to publish in mainstream journals.
In collecting these experiences of peer review from researchers in the fields of social science, health, business, social work and sport, we have identified a number of major areas of contention for Indigenous scholarship:
Lack of Indigenous content: in subject-specific mainstream journals this can make it difficult to see research published. When two of the authors submitted an article for publication in one journal, for example, it was not possible to select “Indigenous” or “post-colonial” as keywords. Further investigation revealed only a handful of authors had actually mentioned “Indigenous” in their writing.
Quality of Indigenous scholarship being questioned: When those scholars suggested a special issue on Indigenous issues in the field it was rejected by the editorial board due to concerns it would not attract enough articles of sufficient quality to be worthy of publication in the journal.
Questioning legitimacy of Indigenous knowledge: Another group of scholars was criticised by a reviewer for seeking lessons learned only from successful Indigenous enterprises, when the point had been to avoid the familiar negative framing of Indigenous experience. Reviewers regularly ask Indigenous scholars to cite other sources, often written by white male academics not directly relevant to the topic at hand but whose work is seen as authoritative — a practice dubbed “citational politics”.
Stifling critiques of mainstream systems: the Palestinian Arab scholar Ismael Abu-Saad describes having an article rejected for apparently challenging the Israeli mainstream education system, which two of his reviewers supported. Noting that “indigenous standpoints are in many cases still being excluded, ignored and usurped”, he concluded:
The purportedly objective, blinded peer review process of manuscript submissions to scholarly journals may become a tool for maintaining Western dominance over the mainstream body of international academic literature and suppressing the emergence of oppositional viewpoints.
Questioning the value of Indigenous methodologies: As one colleague explained, when you represent “the other” you spend a lot of time explaining context and justifying your methodological approach. Applying Indigenous knowledge and methodology to mainstream academic work creates many points of tension.
Questioning the identity of Indigenous scholars: Reviewers have questioned the ability of Indigenous scholars to be “authentically Indigenous” when working within the academic mainstream, and queried their ability to remain true to their roots when collaborating with non-Indigenous scholars.
When this happened to the tourism authors of this article (despite having explained how we developed a balanced approach to working collaboratively on the research project), one of our Indigenous collaborators wrote:
The reviewer’s somewhat demeaning comments about our Indigenous heritage made me feel quite tired — another nudge towards leaving academia — especially the comment that we ‘are assimilated into Western ways and dominated by the non-Indigenous persons on the team’.
Prof. Linda Tuhiwai Smith: what counts as legitimate research?
Sadly, the questions raised in 1999 by Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith about “what counts as legitimate research and who counts as legitimate researchers” are still relevant. As another team of researchers (collaborating on Arctic issues) found, there was “little space within the standard peer review and editorial processes for Indigenous Peoples, their perspectives and knowledge”.
Finding a way forward
International codes already exist in a number of disciplinary fields that encourage the academy to be more ethical, respectful, inclusive and responsive to Indigenous peoples.
These codes outline guidelines to inform practice, underpinned by the principles expressed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. But what are publishing companies, journal boards, editors and reviewers doing to honour such international conventions, codes and guidelines?
Here are some suggestions for editors and peer reviewers who want to support Indigenous scholarship and ensure Indigenous researchers are mentored or recognised as legitimate contributors within academia:
recruit Indigenous and other marginalised scholars to the editorial boards and leadership of journals
recruit Indigenous scholars as peer reviewers
offer professional development throughout the academy on ethical and fair research involving Indigenous communities and knowledge, and encourage or require engagement from all staff
practice a duty of care when selecting peer reviewers for manuscripts authored by Indigenous scholars, manage peer review feedback and support manuscript authors
to grow and retain Indigenous scholars, actively recruit manuscripts from them, offer professional development opportunities specifically for their needs, and support their research career development
ensure criticism is constructive, relevant to the academic issues under review and not biased by personalised comments or judgements (for all scholars under review, regardless of background)
be aware of how unconscious bias can have a negative impact on any scholar and be prepared to be challenged.
The value of Indigenous scholarship and knowledge is increasingly being recognised around the world, including the insight offered into climate change and human adaptation.
If we want to share in this knowledge, as well as uphold individual mana and collective equity, supporting Indigenous scholars and Indigenous scholarship is essential. The suggested approaches here would go some way to supporting this.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Barbara Spears, Director: Wellbeing Research Group, Centre for Research in Education School of Education, University of South Australia
In an online petition launched by Chanel Contos in February, thousands of women have now disclosed instances of sexual harrassment and assault when at school parties. The petition’s author was calling for sexual consent to be taught better, and earlier, in schools.
But the petition was quickly swamped with personal testimonies, feeding into the broader national discussion about sexism and misogyny that had emerged after former government staffer Brittany Higgins alleged she had been sexually assaulted by another staff member at parliament house.
In an opinion piece in The Guardian, Contos wrote that everyone contributes to rape culture, including herself. She said:
Of course I called girls sluts […] of course I called people frigid and of course I made my friends feel insecure about their level of sexual activity. Of course I did, because everyone I knew did.
Such behaviour among girls can often be dismissed or trivialised as “just being bitchy”. But it is also a sub-type of bullying — what some researchers refer to as “sexual bullying”.
Sexual bullying is not something we can ignore. It is an aggressive behaviour and overlaps with sexual harassment, which we often hear of as being perpetrated by men against women. But as Contos pointed out, women and girls may also perpetuate unhealthy sexual attitudes. This may especially be the case among teenage girls, who are just discovering their sexual identity and place within peer groups.
What is sexual bullying?
Bullying happens when a person abuses their power in a relationship to aggressively and repeatedly hurt another person.
Sexualised bullying is not recognised officially in Australia. But in the United Kingdom, it’s defined as:
any behaviour which degrades someone, singles someone out by the use of sexual language, gestures or violence, and victimising someone for their appearance. Sexual bullying is also pressure to act promiscuously and to act in a way that makes others uncomfortable.
Examples include
abusive, sexualised name calling and insults (such as calling someone a slut, or frigid)
spreading rumours of a sexual nature online or in person. This includes using homophobic language and insults
unwelcome looks and comments about someone’s appearance or looks, either face-to-face or to someone else
inappropriate and uninvited touching
pressuring someone to sext and using emotional blackmail, such as threatening to end a relationship if they don’t send an image. Sending the image to others without consent
inappropriate sexual innuendo that is persistent and unwelcome
its most extreme form, sexual assault or rape.
In Australia, the above behaviours reflect our understanding of sexual harassment. We usually understand most of the above as harassment in the context of a workplace, and most often as males directing it toward females.
But the gender of the perpetrator and target is not so relevant if the behaviour is weaponised and the impact is deliberately destructive.
In this way, sexual harassment may shift to become ongoing sexual bullying. And while we most often hear about this being perpetrated by boys, it happens among girls too.
What we know about it
Most studies on sexual bullying among young people have explored sexual harassment.
In 2019, an Australian study aimed to provide the first estimates of the prevalence of sexual harassment among teenagers. It involved more than 4,000 teenagers aged 11-19. Around 42% of boys and 40% of girls reported having experienced some form of sexual harassment in the previous school term.
The authors wrote sexual harassment was a pervasive problem in Australian high schools. They suggested teenagers seemed to use sexual harassment to enforce their learned cultures of masculinity and femininity, to police heterosexuality conformity and to establish power in peer groups.
In the digital age, sexual bullying can happen via text or social media.Shutterstock
An Australian study in 1994-5 collected data on the bullying behaviours of nearly 1,000 girls aged 10-15. They wanted to see whether girls could sexually harass each other and if they did so as a form of bullying.
Around 72% of girls said verbal sexual harassment was bullying, around 24% were unsure and only 4% said it wasn’t bullying.
The survey also invited girls to anonymously record the name-calling they used when bullying each other and the types of rumours they would spread.
The analyses showed girls made crude statements about people’s sexual status, sexuality and about other girls’ bodies as part of their bullying.
The authors suggested girls denigrated other girls to elevate their own status in the group. They did so by making other girls look bad, as either promiscuous (slut shaming), frigid, or through saying they were gay.
A 2007 survey by the UK National Union of Teachers (NUT) suggested sexual bullying is most often carried out by boys against girls. But they also noted girls were increasingly harassing girls and boys in a sexual manner.
The survey’s findings showed:
45% of teenage girls have had their bottom or breasts groped against their will
38% of young people have received unwanted sexual images
37% of young people hear “slag” used often or all the time
65% of gay or bisexual young people experience homophobic bullying in school
48% of teachers have witnessed sexist language from one peer to another
66% of LGBT young people suffer from bullying at school. 58% of them never report it and half of them skip school as a result.
Sexual bullying is serious
Sexually derogatory behaviours among girls are not always deemed as sexual harassment in the school context. Nor are they explicitly recognised as contributing to the larger cultures of misogyny and sexism.
But if we do not tolerate such behaviours from boys towards girls, we should not be ignoring it if girls use the same sexual put downs.
If schools are mandated to have policies in place to protect young people from bullying, then the role sexualised forms of aggression play in the peer dynamic must be highlighted and explicitly addressed.
Sexual bullying is serious. It forms part of the continuum of aggression, power and violence. Schools need to acknowledge sexual bullying exists within and across gender and that it hits at the time when young people are their most vulnerable: as they are developing their sexual identity and orientation.
In this series we pay tribute to the art we wish could visit — and hope to see once travel restrictions are lifted.
The Chichu Art Museum is located on the tiny island of Naoshima, off the southern coast of Japan, in the Kagawa district, reachable only by ferry.
A cross between Buddhist simplicity and Modernist brutalism, from an aerial view Chichu looks like a series of weirdly-shaped concrete pits cut into a gently sloping, grassy hill.
The architect, Tadao Ando, is known for his masterful control of natural light, and to walk through Chichu is to embark on a journey of discovery in which that most ignored element — daylight — is both a mode of transformation and an object of wonder in its own right.
Even before social distancing, Chichu limited the number of tickets sold. Once inside, there are restrictions on how many people can be inside certain rooms and sometimes, how long you can spend there. No photographs are permitted, and quietness is encouraged.
Almost as good as being there … almost. A virtual tour of Chichu.
There are three artists on display at Chichu, the best-known being Claude Monet and his epic canvas, Water Lilies. The acquisition of this “grand decoration” painted, incredibly, when Monet was in his 70s and suffering from cataracts, was the prime catalyst for establishing the museum.
I had seen paintings from this series years before, in Britain’s morgue-like National Gallery. But in the warm, rounded rooms of Chichu, daylight spilling in from high, oblong windows, the paintings are a miraculous blending of form, colour and reverence for nature. They come alive in ways no viewing technology, however sophisticated, can enhance or emulate.
Ando’s building organically relates to the artworks in every way — the colour of the walls, the tiles on the floor, the dark corridors that link rooms where each visual experience is unique not because it is “world class” but because the relationship being cultivated with visitors is a personal one. The Chichu Handbook reads:
To provide a better understanding of Monet’s large decorative work from a contemporary perspective, we selected artists Walter De Maria and James Turrell. Both have been referred to as ‘land artists’ for the work they created in vast desert regions and desolate natural settings … Whether outside, inside a room, or in the surrounding environment, all the works are specifically intended for these spaces … The spatial boundary between the real world and contemporary art is indistinct.
Galleries are gatherings of art organised according to the principles of the people who set them up. More than theatres or concert halls, where rapid changes in repertoire create a spirit of flux, they rarely lose a connection with their founders’ underlying philosophy.
All art is reflective of the moment in which it occurs. But galleries are compass points from which, as a society, we take our bearings. MOMA, GOMA, the Guggenheim, Bilbao, the Powerhouse, the Pompidou Centre, the Hermitage. The meaning of these collections is larger than their real estate.
Visitors at Chichu are almost as carefully placed as the art itself.Chinnian/Flickr, CC BY
What has given rise to Chichu’s powerful vision of art? The answer is, of course, a powerful vision of life; of what our lives could be. Ando writes:
Chichu … opened as a museum in pursuit of ‘a site to rethink the relationship between nature and people’ in July 2004. The establishment of the museum was a personal way of answering and realising a question that I withheld myself for many years — ‘what does it mean to live well?’
As suggested by its name, chichu (underground), this museum is built below a slightly elevated hill that was once developed as a saltpan facing the Seto Inland Sea. Without destroying the beautiful natural scenery of the Island and seeking to create a site for dialogues of the mind, the museum is an expression of my belief that ‘art must exist amid nature’.
A visit to Chichu is not a prescriptive experience. There is no overriding message, as there is with MONA or the Tate Modern, for which visitors must brace. Instead, there is light, space, and quiet.
There is scope to let the senses unfold, and an expansion of self that permits the mind to occupy a zone of potentially greater understanding. There is nothing clever about Chichu, and a tertiary degree in art history is not required to appreciate what it offers. To walk through the building is education enough.
Minus commentary and cameras, asked to buy a modestly priced ticket ahead of time, to wait, to be silent, the resulting “dialogue of the mind” is structured but open-ended. This is perhaps what artists mean when they talk about “freedom within the form”.
Truth, value and alternative ways of life are related concepts, reliant on each other. There is a truth to visiting the Chichu collection that is expressed also in its wooden furniture made from shioji, a variety of Japanese ash, its strange triangular courtyards, and its breathtaking view of the Seto Inland Sea.
“To get the most enjoyment out of the works, the viewer should take a moment between each gallery to reflect on the lingering sensation before moving on to the next group of works”, says the handbook.
Zen Buddhist awareness of the transience of existence marries with a large scale public building in the Western democratic tradition to produce a purposeful, spiritual encounter not filled with dogmatic content.
If there was a preciousness to the Chichu Art Museum I didn’t feel it. It was a relaxed, well-appointed and functional place, rather like the Japanese Shinkansen train that brought me to the ferry terminal. Leaving, I felt lighter, as if something I did not need had been discretely removed.
The idea that young Australians should be able to dip into their super to help buy their first home keeps going round and round. The most recent iteration put forward by the Coalition’s Tim Wilson and a clutch of other backbenchers has the catchy slogan Home First, Super Second.
Wilson and co. are right in their diagnosis: Australia has a housing affordability problem. But they are wrong in their prescription: their proposal could actually make housing less affordable.
There are several much-better ways to revive the great Australian dream for young Australians.
Home ownership is plummeting
Home ownership rates are falling fast, especially among the young and poor.
In Australia today, fewer than half of 25-34 year-olds own their home.
Home ownership among the poorest fifth of that age group has fallen from 63% in 1981 to 23% today.
Today’s younger Australians are tomorrow’s retirees.
These trends suggest that by 2056 just two-thirds of retirees will own their homes, down from nearly 80% today.
The government’s Retirement Income Review showed most homeowners on track for a comfortable retirement. But Australians who rent are facing an increasingly bleak future.
Senior Australians who rent in the private market are much more likely to suffer financial stress than homeowners or renters in public housing.
Nearly one half of all retired renters are in poverty — with incomes below half the median — when housing costs are taken into account. Their numbers will only grow as fewer retirees in future own their homes.
Super can’t much help
Saving for a deposit is the biggest hurdle to home ownership. In the early 1990s it took six years to save a 20% deposit on an average home. Today it takes 10 years.
That’s why the Home First Super Second campaign is superficially attractive. It seems obvious that compulsory superannuation – forcing workers to save almost 10% of their wages for retirement – stops many from buying a home, especially poorer younger Australians without access to the Bank of Mum and Dad.
And it’s true that allowing people to dip into their super to help buy a house would certainly not leave Australians impoverished in retirement.
Grattan Institute research finds that most Australians would have a comfortable retirement even if they withdrew $20,000 early – because whatever they lost in super would largely be made up by a greater entitlement to the age pension.
But the problem for the Home First Super Second campaign is that allowing Australians to use their super to buy a home would do little if anything to increase home ownership rates.
The younger, poorer Australians who are increasingly being priced out of home ownership don’t have much in the way of superannuation.
The poorest 20% of households headed by a 35-44 year old – precisely the group for whom home ownership is falling fast – typically have no superannuation.
The next poorest 20% typically have only $15,000 in super.
It means allowing Australians to use their super for housing would mainly help wealthier people buy more expensive homes.
And there’s another problem: the more people you allow to use money from their super to buy a home, the more demand there is for housing.
Higher demand means higher prices, meaning the biggest winners would be the people who own homes already.
What can help is more homes
If Tim Wilson and the Morrison government really want to make housing affordable, they need to get more houses built.
Recent Grattan Institute research finds that relaxing planning rules to allow more homes to be built near the centres of Australia’s major cities would help.
The federal government has no direct control over planning rules, but it can provide incentives for state and local governments to relax planning rules, similar to those put forward by President Joe Biden in the United States.
As hard as it is, increasing the supply of housing — rather than pumping money from super into an already rising market — is the smartest way to make housing more affordable. Maybe Tim Wilson could start a campaign.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and National Party leader Judith Collins - during the first One News leaders debate, 2020.
Analysis by Bryce Edwards.
Political scientist, Dr Bryce Edwards.
Judith Collins’ National Party leadership is under more scrutiny, with increased talk in the media of her being replaced by brand new MP Christopher Luxon. For many commentators it’s just a question of “when” rather than “if” Collins is replaced. While others ponder whether Luxon really has what it takes to do better than the incumbent.
The theory put forward is that while Luxon might ultimately be the leader National needs, first he needs experience. Therefore, he might serve an apprenticeship under Bridges first, as deputy and Finance spokesperson.
In her column, Trevett lays out the case for Bridges’ return: “There is no doubt Bridges can do the leader’s job. He would almost certainly be the ’emergency’ option if Collins suddenly stepped down this year. Some in National believe the troubles since Bridges was rolled have shown the former leader’s strengths in the job and suggest that he could make a comeback, especially as the PM’s Covid honeymoon wanes. The theory is that if Bridges cannot pull it off, Luxon would at least be ready to go.”
However, she also identifies problems with this scenario: “Bridges would know he would be seen as an interim leader, and there would be constant speculation about whether Luxon would roll him. Bridges may also consider he would remain a viable contender in the future, time would heal old wounds, and it might be better to wait and see if Luxon fails before making his second bid.”
Much more likely, therefore, is that the new leadership combination would actually have Luxon as leader, and Bridges as the deputy. In this scenario, Luxon gets his go at becoming PM in 2023, and if he fails, Bridges get to take over again properly.
What Trevett’s column makes clear is that Luxon is now seen as the frontrunner to replace Collins: “an increasing acknowledgement among many National MPs – especially the more conservative MPs – that Luxon is seen as their best shot by the party supporters. That has seen others (with varying degrees of reluctance) put their own ambitions to rest and instead start to work out when and how Luxon could be installed”.
On Thursday Bridges went on Newstalk ZB and protested his lack of interest in being leader again – see: ‘Crazy silly talk’: Bridges dismisses rumour of new leadership bid. Reminiscent of the immortal words of Winston Peters back when he would be asked about leadership aspirations in National, Bridges essentially declared he was content to simply be the MP for Tauranga.
This week, rightwing Herald columnist Richard Prebble made the case for Bridges’ return to the leadership, rather than Luxon: “To be an effective MP, let alone leader, as Todd Muller proved, at least six years’ parliamentary experience is required. National cannot pick those who could not hold their seats. They do have a former leader who has ‘hardly been used’ in Simon Bridges. Bridges will have learned from his experience. John Howard, second time around, became a very successful leader. What all the MPs now know is National will never win with Collins” – see: Why Judith Collins is politically a dead leader walking (paywalled).
Prebble recommends the party moves fast in sorting out their next leader, as inaction will hurt National, warning that the party could in fact be surpassed by Act as the main party of thee right.
National leadership defeat on fluoridation
Part of Prebble’s argument for Collins’ imminent departure is her supposed involvement last week in a caucus debate on fluoridation. According to Prebble, Collins and her deputy Shane Reti proposed that National oppose the Government’s move to centralise control of water fluoridation decisions to the Ministry of Health, but they lost the caucus vote. Prebble suggests Collins was caught out flip-flopping on the fluoridation issue, as she had previously supported it.
Here’s Prebble main point: “Collins and Shane Reti’s proposal was defeated. It is a very big deal. It was, in effect, a vote of no confidence. Leaders do not present proposals to caucus unless they are important and they have the numbers to succeed. Collins was not defeated over her views on fluoridation but her tactics. Her erratic captain’s calls during the election concerned National MPs. Last week confirmed their doubts about her judgment.”
This all came from a story last week by Newshub’s Tova O’Brien – see: National MPs vote against Judith Collins, Shane Reti on fluoride policy in rare move for caucus. O’Brien reports on the significance of the discord: “It doesn’t bode well for Collins. It’s not a good day in the leadership office when your MPs override your decision on an important public health issue. National MPs have told Newshub this is incredibly rare and almost unheard of. One National MP said it’s even rare to have these votes in caucus, and that it shows indecisiveness and lack of belief from Collins.”
The story appears to have ignited further divisive leaking: “Another National MP says she’s confused about what Collins stands for. ‘There’s no way the party will go into 2023 with Collins as leader,’ the MP said. Remember, National’s caucus meetings are supposed to be top secret and impenetrable, but once against the caucus is leaking like a sieve.”
In response to this, National blogger David Farrar wrote an angry post, in which he says the issue is huge, not because of the policy issue, but because the leaking has started again – see: National leaking again. He quips, “If they keep this up, Jacinda will be Prime Minister until Neve is old enough to vote.”
Farrar also challenges the accuracy of the story, saying some of the details are incorrect, which means the leak is likely to have come from someone not present at the caucus. And others have suggested that the vote was more a defeat for Shane Reti than Collins. See also, Dan Satherley’s report on Collins’ response: ‘Highly wrong’: Judith Collins hits back at report she lost caucus vote on fluoride.
The focus on Christopher Luxon
The focus in National has clearly now moved onto Luxon. This was partly driven by the latest 1 News Colmar Brunton poll, which showed him on 2% as preferred prime minister (compared to 1% for Bridges, and 8% for Collins).
Many saw the speech as an adept attempt to position himself for the role National leader. Heather du Plessis-Allan wrote last week that the speech “felt like an opening bid, used to both introduce himself and clear away perceived problems” – see: Why Christopher Luxon may try National leadership tilt this term (paywalled).
It was an attempt to inoculate himself against charges of being too Christian and too business-oriented, but it also appeared to be an attempt to mimic John Key, which du Plessis-Allan says is both “smart” and “risky”. And as to those who say Luxon hasn’t been there long enough, she points out: “Don Brash did it within little more than a year of entering Parliament and then came with 2 per cent of taking the next election from Helen Clark.” And under the current Covid-induced flux, anything seems possible.
As to whether his Christianity is a problem, du Plessis-Allan had another column saying “we have been electing Christian prime ministers for the longest time” including recently Bill English, Jim Bolger and David Lange – see: Christopher Luxon needs to avoid being ‘the Christian guy’.
She does suggest that his Christian approach “could also backfire. Luxon now needs to back up his promise that Christianity isn’t a political agenda.” She points out that he recently “voted against safe spaces outside abortion clinics to keep protesters away.”
Stuff newspapers approved of Luxon’s speech on his religious values, with an editorial concluding: “What Luxon did this week, in a thoughtful and open way, is to reconnect such values to the centre of New Zealand politics and show that they are not as strange or extreme as some might assume” – see: Putting some faith in politics.
Matthew Hooton has discussed Luxon’s political positioning, suggesting his speech was smart in its inclusions of implicit criticisms of John Key’s record, and making it clear that he’s relatively liberal and compassionate in his politics – see: Jacinda Ardern and Christopher Luxon, so close, and yet so far apart (paywalled). But Hooton warns Luxon’s anti-abortion stance could be a problem.
Andrea Vance is even less enthusiastic about Luxon as leader of National, arguing his brand of Christianity makes him too extreme: “The new Botany MP is a dogmatic ultra-conservative, and has publicly voiced his opposition to abortion and voluntary euthanasia, and suggested penalties for anti-vaxxers should extend to parents receiving benefits” – see: National, and why it can’t win with the ‘next John Key’.
While no fan of the incumbent leader (“Collins carries too much baggage: a reminder of internecine feuds, electoral slaughter and the Key years”), Vance suggests Luxon is not the answer: “He also does not represent the zeitgeist. Both he and Key embody the past, a world dominated by ‘stale, male, and pale’ politicians.”
Such identity issues, together with the religious debate, really do underline the problems National currently has – and they point to why Judith Collins might be able to stick around longer. Yes, Collins made much of her religious beliefs during last year’s election campaign, and in fact she took over from Todd Muller (Catholic), who took over from Bridges (Baptist), who took over from Bill English (Catholic). But is the country really ready for National to be led by an evangelical Christian?
Writing six weeks ago, Stuff political editor Luke Malpass argued that, although Collins’ can’t win the next election, “there is absolutely no mood among the National Party caucus for change. Plus there really is no obvious replacement. Not Simon Bridges and certainly not Christopher Luxon” – see: Why Judith Collins could already be a lame duck leader — whether she knows it or not. So, while speculation and rumours continue over National’s leadership, there’s no obvious answer to the party’s woes.
But for anyone wondering if all the speculation about leadership instability and Luxon positioning himself for a leadership run is based on nothing at all, it’s worth pondering why the new MP has recently launched a serious campaign of self-promotion. As Trevett wrote on Thursday: “National MP Christopher Luxon’s maiden speech – or rather the social media street parade he promoted it by – was instructive. Most MPs posted a simple video of their maiden speech. Luxon put up numerous posts before and after the event, including paying for Facebook posts of excerpts to be pushed out. It was akin to the promotion that goes around a leader’s State of the Nation speech.”
Similarly, Heather du Plessis-Allan reports that Luxon’s “Twitter and Facebook accounts are full of professionally shot photos and happy slow-mo videos of him walking and laughing – as you do – in Parliament’s corridors. He seems to have recruited someone to tag along snapping photos. Again, no subtlety. He’s done a lot of work meeting and greeting around Wellington, making sure to include the gallery journalists who can be crucial in endorsing leadership contenders as credible.”
What’s more a new poll out yesterday from Roy Morgan gives further impetus for the party to do something about its problems, with National down six percentage points to only 23 per cent support – see David Farrar’s Latest poll. Farrar comments: “What should be very concerning to National is there was an 8% drop in those saying NZ is heading in the right direction, yet National also dropped 6% in the poll. Shouldn’t over-react to one (or even two polls) but National definitely needs to make sure those voters who are losing confidence in the Government, see National as a credible alternative.”
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Quilty, Senior Staff Specialist, Alice Springs Hospital. Honorary, Australian National University
A sizeable chunk of Northern Territory’s doctors are thinking about leaving the territory because of climate change, our new research shows.
Our study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health, shows for 34% of doctors in our survey, climate change is already, or is likely to, make them consider leaving the NT.
If they do, this would leave a large gap in the territory’s health-care system, which already suffers from a fast turnover of staff. These doctors would leave behind communities already suffering from the effects of climate change.
Summer 2018-2019 temperatures relative to every other summer since 1910. Data from AWAP (Jones et al 2009).Pandora Hope/BoM, Author provided
Some of the hottest conditions in 2019 were in the Katherine region, which shattered previous records. However, this shouldn’t have been a surprise.
In 2004 the CSIRO reported the average number of days over 40℃ in the Katherine region would increase by up to 35 days a year by 2030, due to climate change.
In 2019 there were 54 days of 40℃ or above in Katherine. This surpassed CSIRO’s predictions more than a decade earlier than projected.
Climate change is predicted to affect the NT in other ways. According to the territory government’s own report, the NT can expect warmer spells to last longer, more frequent fire weather, to have more intense/heavy rainfall, more intense tropical cyclones, and rising sea levels.
NT has enough trouble retaining health workers anyway
Even without the effects of climate change, health workforce shortages in the NT have been significant challenges. The persistent challenges of attracting and retaining staff leads to high rates of churn. An entire clinic’s staff can turn over in just months, and the impacts can be shattering.
When Katherine’s only GP clinic closed last year, many people were forced to travel more than 300 kilometres to Darwin to see a family doctor.
For us doctors in the NT, knowing how hard it can be to recruit other doctors, summers like that of 2019-20 have raised the stakes. I’ve heard colleagues lament the impact of climate change and talk of moving south. Now we have the data to show how real this threat is.
We found out exactly the extent of the problem
We surveyed doctors working in the NT, with 362 responses, representing over 25% of the workforce.
Our study showed NT doctors believe climate change is a serious public health issue. A total of 85% indicated climate change is already or is likely to negatively impact their patients’ health; 74% believed climate change is already causing or likely to cause parts of the NT to become uninhabitable. And for 34%, climate change is already, or likely to, make them consider leaving the NT.
Extreme heat poses real risks, especially to the elderly and those with chronic conditions. Extreme heat is associated with increased rates of illness and death. Hot weather exacerbates existing heart, lung and kidney disease, and compounds mental illness.
For people living in the NT, the reality of this new and predictably worsening heat is tangible. Weekend sports are being affected, the period of relief in the cooler months is becoming shorter, and it’s uncomfortable simply going outside on very hot days. It is hard to contemplate living in a future NT hotter than it already is.
One means of adapting to climate change is to move to cooler climates. But such migration is an option only for people with the means to move. People without such means will have no choice but to stay.
It is unlikely our findings about climate change affecting migration plans are confined to doctors, or to the NT. In Australia and globally, many regions are facing the dual burden of health workforce shortages and increasing exposure to climate risks.
In many of these regions, even small increases of out-migration could have significant impacts on health care.
It’s true most doctors in our survey did not think climate change would make them leave the NT, thought this unlikely, or were undecided. However, the 34% of our respondents who thought climate change might affect their plans represent 115 doctors, who we can’t afford to lose.
To address these issues, we need to urgently consider climate change when planning future health workforce needs. And we need to include health workers when Australia assesses the risk of climate change impacts.
These are vital if we are to ensure rural communities, in particular, have secure access to health care in the face of rapidly emerging climate threats.
Trees are the Earth’s lungs – it’s well understood they drawdown and lock up vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But emerging research is showing trees can also emit methane, and it’s currently unknown just how much.
This could be a major problem, given methane is a greenhouse gas about 45 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming our planet.
However, in a world-first discovery published in Nature Communications, we found unique methane-eating communities of bacteria living within the bark of a common Australian tree species: paperbark (Melaleuca quinquenervia). These microbial communities were abundant, thriving, and mitigated about one third of the substantial methane emissions from paperbark that would have otherwise ended up in the atmosphere.
Because research on tree methane (“treethane”) is still in its relative infancy, there are many questions that need to be resolved. Our discovery helps fill these critical gaps, and will change the way we view the role of trees within the global methane cycle.
Wait, trees emit methane?
Yes, you read that right! Methane gas within cottonwood trees was first reported in 1907, but has been largely overlooked for almost a century.
Research on tree methane is still in its relative infancy.
In some cases, treethane emissions are significant. For example, the tropical Amazon basin is the world largest natural source of methane. Trees account for around 50% of its methane emissions.
Likewise, research from 2020 found low-lying subtropical Melaleuca forests in Australia emit methane at similar rates to trees in the Amazon.
Dead trees can emit methane, too. At the site of a catastrophic climate-related mangrove forest dieback in the Gulf of Carpentaria, dead mangrove trees were discovered to emit eight times more methane than living ones. This poses new questions for how climate change may induce positive feedbacks, triggering potent greenhouse gas release from dead and dying trees.
Trees account for around 50% of the total Amazon basin methane emissions.Shutterstock
Treethane emissions most likely account for some of the large uncertainties within the most recent global methane budget, which tries to determine where all the methane in the atmosphere comes from. But we’re still a long way from refining an answer to this question. Currently, trees are not yet included as a distinct emissions category.
So where exactly is the treethane coming from?
Within wetland forests, scientists assumed most treethane emissions originate from the underlying soils. The methane is transported upwards via the tree roots and stems, then through to the atmosphere via their bark.
We confirmed, in other recent research, that wetland soils were indeed the source of methane emissions in lowland forest trees. But this wasn’t always the case.
Some lowland forest trees such as cottonwood can emit flammable methane directly from their stems, which is likely produced by microbes living within the moist trees themselves. Dry upland forest trees are also emerging as methane emitters too — albeit at much lower rates.
Paperbark forest in a wetland, where bark-dwelling methane-eating microbes were discovered.Luke Jeffrey, Author provided
Discovering methane-eating bacteria
For our latest research, we used microbiological extraction techniques to sample the diverse microbial communities that live within trees.
We discovered the bark of paperbark trees provide a unique home for methane-oxidizing bacteria — bacteria that “consumes” methane and turns it into carbon dioxide, a far less potent greenhouse gas.
Remarkably, these bacteria made up to 25% of total microbial communities living in the bark, and were consuming around 36% of the tree’s methane. It appears these microbes make an easy living in the dark, moist and methane-rich environments.
This discovery will revolutionise the way in which we view methane emitting trees and the novel microbes living within them.
Only through understanding why, how, which, when and where trees emit the most methane, may we more effectively plant forests that effectively draw down carbon dioxide while avoiding unwanted methane emissions.
Microbe sampling techniques have advanced within the last few decades, allowing us to understand the diverse microbial communities living within trees.Luke Jeffrey, Author provided
Our discovery that bark-dwelling microbes can mitigate substantial treethane emissions complicates this equation, but provides some reassurance that microbiomes have evolved within trees to consume methane as well.
Future work will undoubtedly look further afield, exploring the microbial communities of other methane-emitting forests.
A trillion trees to combat climate change
We must be clear: trees are in no way shape or form bad for our climate and provide a swath of other priceless ecosystem benefits. And the amount of methane emitted from trees is generally dwarfed by the amount of carbon dioxide they will take in over their lifetime.
However, there are currently 3.04 trillion trees on Earth. With both upland and lowland forests capable of emitting methane, mere trace amounts of methane on a global scale may amount to a substantial methane source.
As we now have a global movement aiming to reforest large swaths of the Earth with 1 trillion trees, knowledge surrounding methane emitting trees is critical.
Last week, people were falling over themselves to get vaccination appointments and had to be told, by their doctors and their government, to be patient.
Patience is still needed — indeed, more than ever — but now there’s rising vaccination hesitation and the message from the government is people should remain eager for the jab.
Conservative advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), recommending against the AstraZeneca vaccine for the under 50s (because of the very small danger of blood clots), has alarmed many people.
The danger is the advice has a knock-on effect, spooking people to whom it doesn’t apply.
Apart from younger frontline workers in health and aged care, those with underlying health conditions, and certain others, under 50s are not presently being vaccinated.
But with changing messages, some of the over 70s — the cohort now at the head of the vaccination queue — might start to have second thoughts, despite being told they shouldn’t.
They may or may not be reassured by Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Friday declaring his mother is lining up for her AstraZeneca shot soon. Or Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly sharing the fact he’s urging his 86-year-old father to do so.
Thursday’s unwelcome medical advice was just the latest setback to the rollout and the Morrison government.
There have been the blocks and delays imposed on supplies from Europe and CSL production (of AstraZeneca) has been slower than anticipated.
The logistics haven’t all gone smoothly. Despite protestations to the contrary, the Commonwealth’s distribution has been sub-optimal.
Some doctors have complained of getting inadequate supplies; the arrangements for nursing homes have had glitches.
The whole program is running massively behind the original schedule. The government on Friday was celebrating passing one million doses administered, when we should have been well past four million.
We’re marching at a much slower pace than the United States or the United Kingdom. In the UK, incidentally, the authorities are being less conservative about AstraZeneca — it’s the under 30s who are being offered an alternative.
One can only imagine Morrison’s reaction when he was delivered the ATAGI advice, which of course he had to follow (even though some experts disagree with it). As he said, “You don’t get to choose the medical advice that’s provided by the medical experts”.
One guide to the prime ministerial mood is the fact he stresses it’s only advice to avoid AstraZeneca if you are under 50. The decision is up to you, and your doctor (though you will be signing a rigorous consent form if you ignore it).
But that line just contributes to the muddled messaging many people will feel they’re receiving.
With an already disorderly program thrown into further disarray by the medical advice, the government on Thursday night and Friday went into overdrive.
Another 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine — now the one for the under 50s — were instantly procured (this is on top of the 20 million already purchased). This is good news, if you are patient. They are not due to land until the last quarter of the year.
Health Minister Greg Hunt says Pfizer doses scheduled to arrive in coming days will ramp up, but details are sketchy.
The government is anxious to say the immediate stage of the vaccination schedule should not be much delayed.
The elderly who are being vaccinated now are good to get AstraZeneca.
As for the health and aged care workers? Determinedly looking on the bright side, Morrison noted many are over 50. Pfizer vaccines will have to be arranged for the younger ones, however, which could involve some scrambling.
But the rollout generally has to be recalibrated and delays are expected to hit in coming months when the program gets to the younger section of the general population.
For these people, vaccination is not as critical in health terms as it is for those older. But for the economy, vaccinating them as soon as can be done is vital.
At one level, Australia is being protected by our previous (and continued) success on the health front, which has left us with little or no community transmission. The rollout problems would be a disaster if we had COVID raging.
But we are riding on our luck. There are no guarantees against serious outbreaks.
Even without those, the longer the rollout drags on, the more we have the disruption of small lockdowns, and the slower the re-opening of Australia’s international border, with all the consequences that brings.
Morrison, who recently talked so confidently about everyone who was eligible and willing receiving one vaccine shot by October, now won’t commit to any date.
It would be a nightmare for him if the rollout wasn’t finished by year’s end, and the international border remained substantially shut.
He’d be only months from an election campaign, and Australians would probably be suffering a bad dose of cabin fever.
Politically, state and territory leaders have reaped rewards in elections from being seen to handle COVID well. A few months ago the pundits predicted Morrison would do the same.
But if they come to believe he has comprehensively mishandled the vaccine rollout, the voters could wreak vengeance.
A week ago, people were falling over themselves to get vaccination appointments and had to be told, by their doctors and their government, to be patient.
Patience is still needed — indeed, more than ever — but now there’s rising vaccination hesitation and the message from the government is people should remain eager for the jab.
Conservative advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), recommending against the AstraZeneca vaccine for the under 50s (because of the very small danger of blood clots), has alarmed many people.
The danger is the advice has a knock-on effect, spooking people to whom it doesn’t apply.
Apart from younger frontline workers in health and aged care, those with underlying health conditions, and certain others, under 50s are not presently being vaccinated.
But with changing messages, some of the over 70s — the cohort now at the head of the vaccination queue — might start to have second thoughts, despite being told they shouldn’t.
They may or may not be reassured by Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Friday declaring his mother is lining up for her AstraZeneca shot soon. Or Commonwealth Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly sharing the fact he’s urging his 86-year old father to do so.
Thursday’s unwelcome medical advice was just the latest setback to the rollout and the Morrison government.
There have been the blocks and delays imposed on supplies from Europe and CSL production (of AstraZeneca) has been slower than anticipated.
The logistics haven’t all gone smoothly. Despite protestations to the contrary, the Commonwealth’s distribution has been sub-optimal.
Some doctors have complained of getting inadequate supplies; the arrangements for nursing homes have had glitches.
The whole program is running massively behind the original schedule. The government on Friday was celebrating passing one million doses administered, when we should have been well past four million.
We’re marching at a much slower pace than the United States or the United Kingdom. In the UK, incidentally, the authorities are being less conservative about AstraZeneca — it’s the under 30s who are being offered an alternative.
One can only imagine Morrison’s reaction when he was delivered ATAGI’s advice, which of course he had to follow (even though some experts disagree with it). As he said, “You don’t get to choose the medical advice that’s provided by the medical experts”.
One guide to the prime ministerial mood is the fact he stresses it’s only advice to avoid AstraZeneca if you are under 50. The decision is up to you, and your doctor (though you will be signing a rigorous consent form if you ignore it).
But that line just contributes to the muddled messaging many people will feel they’re receiving.
With an already disorderly program thrown into further disarray by the medical advice, the government on Thursday night and Friday went into overdrive.
Another 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine — now the one for the under 50s — were instantly procured (this is on top of the 20 million already purchased). This is good news, if you are patient. They are not due to land until the last quarter of the year.
Health Minister Greg Hunt says Pfizer doses scheduled to arrive in coming days will ramp up, but details are sketchy.
The government is anxious to say the immediate stage of the vaccination schedule should not be much delayed.
The elderly who are being vaccinated now are good to get AstraZeneca.
As for the health and aged care workers? Determinedly looking on the bright side, Morrison noted many are over 50. Pfizer vaccines will have to be arranged for the younger ones, however, which could involve some scrambling.
But the rollout generally has to be recalibrated and delays are expected to hit in coming months when the program gets to the younger section of the general population.
For these people, vaccination is not as critical in health terms as it is for those older. But for the economy, vaccinating them as soon as can be done is vital.
At one level, Australia is being protected by our previous (and continued) success on the health front, which has left us with little or no community transmission. The rollout problems would be a disaster if we had COVID raging.
But we are riding on our luck. There are no guarantees against serious outbreaks.
Even without those, the longer the rollout drags on, the more we have the disruption of small lockdowns, and the slower the re-opening of Australia’s international border, with all the consequences that brings.
Morrison, who recently talked so confidently about everyone who was eligible and willing receiving one vaccine shot by October, now won’t commit to any date.
It would be a nightmare for him if the rollout wasn’t finished by year’s end, and the international border remained substantially shut.
He’d be only months from an election campaign, and Australians would probably be suffering a bad dose of cabin fever.
Politically, state and territory leaders have reaped rewards in elections from being seen to handle COVID well. A few months ago the pundits predicted Morrison would do the same.
But if they come to believe he has comprehensively mishandled the vaccine rollout, the voters could extract vengeance.
Last night, the federal government announced substantially revised plans for the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Australia.
Due to concerns about the vaccine’s possible links to a rare blood-clotting disorder, and following advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI), the Pfizer vaccine is now preferred for people under 50.
These developments raise questions about how authorities and individuals assess risk, and respond. Let’s try to make some sense of it.
Reports about rare blood clots possibly associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine have been floating around for a few weeks now.
So why has it taken so long for the government to clarify this relationship and make the recommendations? Authorities haven’t been keeping us in the dark.
When you have a new condition like this, and experts are examining data in real time, it takes a while to understand exactly what’s going on: to develop a clear case definition, to be confident what you’re seeing is a real phenomenon, and importantly, whether it’s likely to be caused by something in particular (in this case, the vaccine). It’s made more difficult when the event is very rare.
After reviewing a wide range of data relating to cases of this rare blood-clotting syndrome predominantly in the United Kingdom and Europe, Australian experts have now reached the threshold of evidence they needed to be satisfied there may well be a causal link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and this condition.
The Australian government now recommends the Pfizer vaccine for adults under 50, rather than the AstraZeneca one.Shutterstock
Understanding risk
It’s important to note every therapeutic agent (a drug or a vaccine, for example) carries the risk of unintended consequences. For most of us, most of the time, this will be minimal. This is a biological reality reflecting the interconnectedness and complexity of the human body.
So like for any other therapeutic agents, there are risks as well as benefits we have to accept in taking COVID vaccines. What we need to do is to weigh up these risks against the benefits.
We make these sorts of calculations every day in all aspects of our lives. When we decide to get in the car, we know there’s a risk associated with driving. But we assess the risks are worth taking as the benefits of getting where we want to go quickly are worth it.
Mostly, we make these calculations without being consciously aware we’re doing it. Sometimes the parameters underlying these calculations are easy to grapple with — but sometimes they’re more nebulous.
Weighing up the risks and benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine
We know the vaccine offers near-complete protection against severe disease and death from COVID-19.
We also know severe side effects from the vaccine, in particular vaccine induced prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia (VIPIT, the blood-clotting disorder in question), are extremely rare. But the condition is serious and around 25% of people have died after developing VIPIT.
There are a range of estimates of how often this syndrome occurs. But it’s generally accepted its incidence is about 4-6 cases per million doses of vaccine.
To put it in perspective, this puts the risk in the same order of magnitude to the average risk of dying if you complete a marathon, go scuba diving, or rock climbing.
It’s also important to note that we’ve started to see a pattern in that those who are at higher risk of this syndrome tend to be younger and tend to be women. We don’t have a clear understanding of why this is, but recognising this is really helpful in terms of making decisions about how to mitigate this risk.
Why the balancing act isn’t so easy
Although we have a pretty good understanding of the rate of severe outcomes from COVID-19, since we have over 12 months’ experience now of this illness, context is important. There are different levels of risk depending on where you live and what the rate of transmission in the community is.
While it’s all well and good in some countries to say you’re more likely to get very sick with or die from COVID than experience a complication from the vaccine, in Australia we have next to no COVID, so the risk of adverse outcomes from COVID is much lower. This needs to be factored into the equation.
We also have different strains of the virus, which can vary in how infectious they are and how sick they might make you. This also needs to be added to the mix.
In acknowledging the difficulty in completing these risk-benefit analyses, it’s really helpful to use a visualisation the University of Cambridge has put together based on UK data, which we’ve adapted here, comparing the risks and benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
It depicts the risk of adverse effects from COVID (being in ICU) against adverse outcomes from the vaccine, based on an assumed incidence of COVID in the community of two in 10,000 people. Although the incidence rate in Australia is lower than this, this visual is extremely useful in conveying the nature of the relationship between the risks and benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Australia.
What this visual shows clearly is that the benefits of the vaccine increase the older you are, because the risk of severe disease is higher the older you get.
It also shows that although the risks of side effects from the vaccine are relatively small regardless of age, the gap between risks and benefits narrows the younger you are. This is in part due to the reduced benefit of the vaccine for younger people who are less likely to have severe symptoms from COVID, and in part due to the increased risk of serious side effects, such as blood clots, for younger adults.
This visual clearly communicates the rationale for the changes announced yesterday. Where the risk-benefit becomes marginal, it makes sense to use other vaccines for younger adults — the Pfizer vaccine and possibly the Novavax vaccine down the track. The recommendations are both cautious and sensible.
On Saturday at the Adelaide Festival there will a public showing of Australian Atomic Confessions, a documentary I co-directed about the tragic and long-lasting effects of the atomic weapons testing carried out by Britain in South Australia in the 1950s.
Amid works from 20 artists reflecting on nuclear trauma as experienced by Indigenous peoples, the discussion that follows will focus on the ways in which attempts at nuclear colonisation have continued in South Australia, and are continuing right now.
For the fourth time in 23 years South Australia is being targeted for a nuclear waste dump — this time at Napandee, a property near Kimba on the Eyre Peninsula.
The plan is likely to require the use of a port, most probably Whyalla, to receive reprocessed nuclear fuel waste by sea from France, the United Kingdom and the Lucas Heights reactor in NSW via Port Kembla.
The Barngarla people hold cultural rights and responsibilities for the region but were excluded from a government poll about the proposal because they were not deemed to be local residents.
The 734 locals who took part backed the proposal 61.6%
The Barngarla people are far from the first in South Australia to be excluded from a say about proposals to spread nuclear materials over their land.
It’s not the first such proposal
Australian Atomic Confessions explores the legacy of the nine British atomic bombs dropped on Maralinga and Emu Field in the 1950s, and the “minor trials” that continued into the 1960s.
After failed clean-ups by the British in the 1960s followed by a Royal Commission in the 1980s, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency conducted a cleanup between 1995 and 2000 it assures us was successful to the point where most of the contaminated areas at Maralinga fall well within the clean-up standards applied for unrestricted land use.
But experts remain sceptical, given the near-surface burial of plutonium and contamination remaining across a wide area.
The Tjarutja people are allowed to move through and hunt at the Maralinga site with their radiation levels monitored but are not permitted to camp there permanently.
Nina Sanadze, 100 Years After, 30 years On, 3rd Tbilisi Triennial (2018) on display as part of The Image is not Nothing.Sandro Sulaberidze
We are told that what happened in the 1950s wouldn’t happen today, in relation to the proposed nuclear waste dump. But it wasn’t our enemies who bombed us at Maralinga and Emu Field, it was an ally.
In exchange for allowing 12 British atomic bombs tests (including those at the Monte Bello Islands off the northern coast of Western Australia), the Australian government got access to nuclear technology which it used to build the Lucas Heights reactor.
It is primarily the nuclear waste produced from six decades of operations at Lucas Heights that would be dumped onto Barngarla country in South Australia, closing the links in this nuclear trauma chain.
Nuclear bombs and nuclear waste disproportionately impact Indigenous peoples, yet Australia still has not signed up to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The declaration requires states to ensure there is no storage or disposal of hazardous materials on the lands of Indigenous peoples without their free, prior and informed consent.
Aboriginal people have long known the dangers of uranium on their country.
Water from the Great Artesian Basin has been extracted by the Olympic Dam copper-uranium mine for decades. Fragile mound springs of spiritual significance to the Arabunna People are disappearing, posing questions for the mining giant BHP to answer.
Artworks on display at The Image is not Nothing at the Adelaide Festival.Josh Geelen
Australian uranium from BHP Olympic Dam and the now-closed Rio Tinto Ranger mine fuelled the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Senior traditional custodian of the Mirrar people, Yvonne Margarula, wrote to the United Nations in 2013 saying her people feel responsible for what happened.
It is likely that the radiation problems at Fukushima are, at least in part, fuelled by uranium derived from our traditional lands. This makes us feel very sad.
The Irati Wanti (The Poison, Leave It!) campaign led by a council of senior Aboriginal women helped defeat earlier proposals for nuclear waste dumps between 1998 and 2004.
In 2020 the government introduced into the Senate a bill that would do away with traditional owners’ and farmers’ rights to judicial reviews and procedural fairness in regard to the use of land for the facility.
Resources Minister Keith Pitt is deciding how to proceed.
Australia’s vaccine rollout is due to be reset after the news last night the AstraZeneca vaccine would not be recommended for people under 50. Instead, this age group will be offered the Pfizer vaccine, with the federal government today announcing it had secured an additional 20 million doses.
Although details of the redesigned rollout have yet to be released, our new modelling, which has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal, shows how this might work under a range of scenarios, including the logistical requirements of different vaccines, and different vaccination venues.
Once a steady stream of locally manufactured AstraZeneca vaccine is available in Australia, the bottleneck in the vaccine rollout will shift from supply to administration. That’s when expanded GP vaccination clinics and mass vaccination hubs will be needed to deliver these jabs to nine million people over 50 in phases 1b and 2a of the rollout.
We used mathematical simulations of waiting in line, known as stochastic queue network models, to model the process of running a vaccination clinic.
Queue models allow us to assess the daily vaccination capacity for different venues, taking into account available staff numbers and estimated times to complete each stage of the vaccination process.
The two key venues we looked at were mass vaccination hubs — which could be large venues such as halls, parks or stadiums — and GP clinics.
Mass vaccination hubs and GP clinics lay out their vaccine clinics differently. Hubs with larger premises and more staff can adopt an assembly line approach to vaccination. They can divide the tasks of registration, clinical assessment, vaccine preparation and administration across a series of stations. Smaller clinics are likely to have fewer people available, each performing multiple tasks. We developed two distinct models to reflect these different set-ups.
We used these models to estimate how many vaccines could be delivered in an eight-hour clinic based on a range of staffing levels, within an average overall waiting time of under an hour.
We estimate a small general practice could administer 100 doses, rising to 300 doses for a large practice. Mass vaccination clinics could deliver 500-1,400 doses in the same period, depending on staff numbers.
We also used our models to test how clinics would perform under service pressures, including increased vaccine availability and staff shortages.
For both delivery modes, sites with more staff were better able to keep waiting times under control as system pressures increased. Unsurprisingly, mass vaccination hubs were more robust compared to GP clinics.
Our models rely on subjective assumptions about the time needed to complete different stages in the vaccination process. In reality, these timings will vary in different contexts.
For instance, the Pfizer vaccine takes longer to prepare than the AstraZeneca vaccine. Our models can account for this by increasing the expected preparation time and seeing how many extra staff would be needed to run a vaccine clinic with the same number of appointments. When the Novavax or other vaccines come on board, we can re-run the model with updated preparation times.
In fact, we have developed an an app that allows anyone to re-run our simulations based on their own assumptions about service times, appointment schedules and staffing availability.
Anyone can use the app to plug in how vaccination might play out under different scenarios.Author supplied/UNSW
This can support policymakers, individual GPs and community pharmacies to plan vaccination delivery, as the quantity and type of available vaccine varies throughout the rollout.
However, there are some aspects of vaccine rollout our models do not account for. This includes essential support staff, such as administrators, cleaners and marshals.
Neither do our models address the logistics of distributing vaccines to vaccination centres, which is a separate challenge.
Our models suggest mass vaccination hubs and GP clinics are equally efficient in terms of the number of doses delivered per staff member. This supports distribution through both modes, provided GPs are enabled to vaccinate at their peak capacity.
These two approaches offer distinct advantages. Older people or clinically vulnerable patients may benefit from attending their local GP, who will be familiar with their medical history.
Younger males, busy working people and marginalised populations are less likely to have a regular GP and may be easier to reach through mass vaccination hubs. The rollout of phase 2 to adults under 50 may require expansion of the hubs, as not all GPs may be able to store the Pfizer vaccine.
A diverse profile of vaccination sites, drawing on the benefits of different distribution modes, will help maximise the daily vaccination rate and vaccinate the Australian population against COVID-19 as quickly as possible.
Australia’s vaccine rollout is in chaos. The news last night the AstraZeneca vaccine, the only one Australia has guaranteed supply of, would not be recommended for people under 50 due to safety concerns has prompted an urgent rethink of how we get vaccines into people’s arms.
Rather than the AstraZeneca vaccine being the mainstay of our vaccination effort, as planned, the preferred shot for the under 50s will now be the Pfizer vaccine. People under 50 can still choose to receive the AstraZeneca vaccine when the benefits clearly outweigh the risks, and if they have already safely had their first dose.
After the announcement I was initially concerned there wouldn’t be enough Pfizer doses for everyone that needs one. But today Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced Australia has secured an extra 20 million doses of the Pfizer vaccine, bringing the total number of doses expected to arrive in the country to 40 million.
The prime minister said the extra 20 million would arrive in the fourth quarter of this year. Only around one million Pfizer shots are currently in the country.
This latest news follows analysis by the European Medicines Agency concluding there was a “possible link” between receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine and very rare but serious blood clots.
This shift in focus, away from the AstraZeneca vaccine that biotech company CSL can make in Australia, to the Pfizer vaccine which has to be imported, has serious impacts on the timing of the rollout and public confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine.
So, what can the federal government do?
Many people over 50 will now be concerned about the safety of the AstraZeneca vaccine and may be more hesitant to get vaccinated without an alternative. Therefore, the government needs to reinstate confidence and convince over 50s the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe. This will require a major effort using Australia’s best marketing brains.
The government also needs to facilitate the approval and rollout of the Novavax vaccine. Australia has a signed deal for 51 million doses of Novavax. An application for provisional approval is currently under evaluation by our drug regulator the TGA, and it’s estimated to be availablewithin months. This would safeguard us against any further issues with the AstraZeneca vaccine, and the Novavax could eventually replace AstraZeneca because of its much higher efficacy.
Phase 3 trials are showing the Novavax shot has 96% efficacy against the original virus and 86.4% against the UK variant. By contrast, AstraZeneca’s vaccine has an efficacy somewhere between 63%, with a standard two dose schedule according to the World Health Organisation, and 76% according to phase 3 trials in the United States, Chile and Peru. Longer intervals between AstraZeneca’s doses, up to 12 weeks, seems to be linked with increased efficacy.
Although the federal government had no way of predicting these problems with the AstraZeneca vaccine, they have been too reliant on it, especially after the University of Queensland vaccine had to be abandoned last year.
Eventually, Australia may have several times our requirement for vaccines. We should think about donating vaccines to our close Pacific and Asian neighbours who have much more difficulty in purchasing vaccines.
Finally, Australia really must develop our own capacity to manufacture mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna — not just for SARS-CoV-2, but to future-proof us against the next pandemic.
How did we get here?
It was all going so well. Australia, along with only a handful of other countries, was the envy of the rest of the world in its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Australia didn’t feel in a particular rush to roll out the vaccination program, and didn’t start vaccinating until the end of February. To date, Australia has vaccinated only around one million people, about 5% of our adult population, with their first dose.
The rollout has nowhere near achieved the federal government’s own stated targets, with problemsemerging due to interrupted supply, logistical issues, poor communication between the federal government and GPs, and a booking system that is just not working.
By contrast, some countries were very quick off the mark in their purchase and rollout of vaccines. Israel started its vaccination program in December, and has now given at least one dose of a COVID vaccine to 61% of its population, leading the world. The UK, which has been severely affected by COVID-19, also acted very quickly, and has now given at least one dose to 46% of its population.
Unfortunately, Australia’s slow and problematic vaccine rollout has somewhat taken the shine off our enviable reputation for managing COVID-19.
The Royal Commission into Aged Care left organisations that provide housing for aged care wondering how they will put its recommendations into effect. Most of these recommendations relate to the models of care and levels of staffing in homes. Put simply, in the architectural rabbit warrens that typify aged-care facilities, there can never be enough staff to manage every nook.
Models of care are also difficult to change when the architecture is obsolete. Yet these difficulties aren’t detailed in the report. It barely mentions architecture. Only two of the 148 recommendations relate specifically to architecture, numbers 45 and 46: to improve the design of residential care accommodation; and to provide “small household” models of accommodation.
But don’t be mistaken. Architecture has a profound impact on how we live our lives, work and respond socially.
If architects are able to work with some basic design rules – to design to a vision, with simplicity and a non-institutional design language – architecture can play a role in implementing the bulk of the recommendations. But, if the importance of design is neglected, obsolete architectural models will undermine the best efforts to reform the models of care.
We can design to remove restraint
Architecture is a critical element of “embedding a human rights-based and human-centred approach to care”, the focus of chapter 3 of the royal commission’s report. To understand the relationship between architecture and human rights, consider how human rights are taken away: look at prisons, detention centres, mental health facilities and even the residences where we care for our elderly citizens. Invariably, it’s architecture that stifles the freedom of movement, the dignity, the freedom of association, choice and other rights.
The commission estimates architectural solutions to seclusion and other forms of physical restraint are used on 25-50% of all residents of high-care residences. These restraints can look innocuous – including “seating residents in chairs with deep seats, or rockers and recliners, that the resident cannot stand up from”. But for residents who can’t get up on their own, deep seats restrict their freedom of movement and ability to make their own choices about as much as handcuffs do.
When a person can’t get up from a seat unaided, it becomes a form of restraint.Shutterstock
The forms of restraint (including in high-care aged-care residences) are increasingly disguised, but a locked door remains impenetrable even if it’s made of clear glass. Along with fences and high walls, such features are designed to keep some people in and others out.
If people fail to see how the design of a prison is the primary instrument for imprisonment, then it’s also hard to comprehend just how much good architecture improves people’s circumstances and well-being. But a well-designed aged-care building is replete with wholesome invitations to do such things as explore gardens without putting residents at undue risk.
In turn, spending time outdoors helps prevent “sundowning” – people with dementia may become more confused, restless or insecure late in the afternoon or early evening. It also improves the resident’s experience (personal well-being and satisfaction). Recent unpublished data (in review) shows time outdoors even protects against viral flu-like infections.
And that’s just one example of the benefits of good design. All good architectural choices have similarly positive effects.
3 principles for human-centred design in aged care
Principle 1: projects are driven by a vision that maintains and enables human dignity, even for people with cognitive impairment.
A vision includes a single, well-articulated concept that cannot be dismissed or ignored. The vision creates a hierarchy in which important things are valued more than anything else. A vision that makes human dignity a priority ensures other functional or pragmatic concerns do not lead to human rights being deprioritised.
A good vision isn’t just words or intentions. It involves concrete decisions that are armed with bravery and honesty. Bravery because a good vision always aspires beyond known benchmarks and guidelines. Honesty, because a good vision isn’t shy about speaking the truth.
The diagram below shows an example of a vision in which high-care aged-care residences were to be incorporated into a new precinct for the University of Woolongong. The vision prioritised human centredness – a human-centred workplace, a student-centred learning environment, patient-centred aged-care residences and a person-centred environment overall.
In this concept, the educational, residential (non-aged-care) and health facilities make natural walls around a shared village. Car-free streets, cafes, shops, parklands and a distributed residential aged-care facility create a pleasant and safe environment for everybody. The exterior buildings are accessible from both sides for students and staff, but not for high-care residents unless they are accompanied.
As cognitive abilities decline, this reduces people’s capacity to deal with complexity. So keep design simple, with destinations that are visible and clear.
Think about turning all bedrooms inwards to provide immediate access to common spaces, activities and gardens. The reception, all offices and commercial facilities can face outwards, and be invisible to residents.
Simplifying the layout also aids staff. Hidden spaces and doors to unsafe places cause anxiety for residents and staff alike, adding to the staffing burden.
Simple design doesn’t mean plain. It means keeping plans simple – especially for the residents, who have all they might need (and all they want) immediately visible. All no-go areas are hidden.
Much as they assist with routines of care, residences are residences. They are ruined by staff stations and institutional touches like vinyl flooring, strip lighting and furniture lined up against the walls.
Residents’ bedrooms must be customisable – meaning people should be able to hang their own art, listen to their own music, and have their own furniture and belongings. After all, these rooms are where people live. And how can people feel at home, unless they are allowed to feel at home with their surroundings?
The left image shows a relatively typical scene in an Australian residential-care facility. The details are institutional – the windows, the lighting, the residents lined up along a wall. The opposite (right) is a residential milieu. Which one would you choose?
From next week, unvaccinated staff working at managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) facilities will be moved to low-risk jobs, following a case of a worker who missed vaccination appointments and then tested positive for COVID-19.
The recently announced ban on arrivals from India underscores an important point: even once all border and health staff have been vaccinated, vaccination does not provide 100% protection.
Last month, a MIQ worker tested positive almost a week after receiving their second vaccine dose. This case shows that, occasionally, even fully vaccinated people can still carry the virus in their throats and therefore potentially spread it.
Small risk of infection remains
Clinical trials of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine show 90-97% efficacy which means most fully vaccinated people will not get sick, and the small number who do are very unlikely to develop serious disease.
The vaccine reduces the ability to contract and pass on the virus, but not always completely. It takes the sting out of COVID-19’s tail, because it particularly reduces its ability to cause serious illness or death.
In last month’s case, the vaccinated worker remained asymptomatic, which likely reduced the spread of the virus to others. The risk of spread is higher from sick people because they have a higher load of the virus, and therefore more to spread, and they are more likely to spread it, particularly with coughing.
Data from use in several countries suggests the vaccine has some effect in reducing an infected person’s ability to pass the virus on to others, but as this example shows, vaccinated people can still carry and spread the virus, albeit at much lower rates.
Frontline border staff and their families were the first to be vaccinated in New Zealand’s rollout of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.Ministry of Health, CC BY-ND
Herd immunity feasible, but challenging
The combination of a vaccine’s ability to reduce illness — and therefore spread of the disease — is good news, but it’s not fool proof. Should New Zealand consider opening its borders beyond the current travel bubble with Austalia (due to start on April 19), it’s likely this would allow people with COVID-19 into the country.
If the majority of New Zealanders are vaccinated, we can be confident that very few people will get sick. But whether this would be enough to stop spread through the community remains unclear.
New Zealand could aim for herd immunity, which would mean vaccinating enough of the population to stop the virus from spreading, should it enter a community. The ability to stop spread would depend on the proportion of the population that is immune (either following infection or through vaccination), whether immunity is spread evenly across the population, and the infectivity of the virus.
With measles, for example, a population requires up to 95% immunity before the virus can stop spreading. But measles is more highly infectious compared to COVID-19 so the level of immunity required to achieve herd immunity would likely be lower.
New variants complicate the picture
While it is possible to calculate a magic number needed for herd immunity for COVID-19, there are several variables that prevent us from doing so accurately. These include the recent more contagious mutations and the lack of data on precisely how effective the vaccine is against asymptomatic spread.
Also unhelpful in a quest for herd immunity is that we cannot yet vaccinate children under 16. Clinical trials are underway to determine the efficacy of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for children and preliminary results are promising. But until trials are completed and the data scientifically reviewed, New Zealand’s vaccination programme excludes just under a quarter of New Zealand’s population.
Even with an excellent vaccination programme, vaccination is not evenly distributed. There are groups and communities with lower coverage, which means there will be gaps across the population.
We have seen this with the 2019 measles outbreak in New Zealand. Even with high vaccination rates of over 90% across most of the population, and a highly effective vaccine, the disease affected communities or age groups with lower immunisation coverage.
Disease control instead of elimination
As long as COVID-19 continues to spread internationally, further border openings would import new cases and challenge New Zealand’s ability to maintain its elimination status.
A partial response may lie in aiming for the highest possible rates of immunisation, alongside ongoing public health measures that have worked well so far, including contact tracing.
One possible option would be to only allow vaccinated people into the country, because they are less likely to be carrying disease. But are we going to wait until vaccination gets to all countries, and to all age groups, before opening our borders?
Another option is to open the borders and support the vaccination of any unvaccinated people on arrival in New Zealand. This could be a feasible strategy once children are able to be vaccinated.
Another path is to let go of the concept of elimination and focus instead on disease control. We know with great confidence that this vaccine is effective at stopping severe disease and death.
I recommend we put all our efforts into vaccinating everyone we possibly can, particularly more vulnerable individuals and communities. Then, when we do open the borders and the disease comes into New Zealand, we will see predominantly mild and asymptomatic disease. This will be manageable.
This strategy will require an effective vaccination coverage that doesn’t leave out those most in need. We must offer the vaccine equitably to everyone, with the best possible informed consent approaches, care and thought. There will still be those who choose not to vaccinate, but with a well communicated immunisation programme, this group should be a very small percentage of the population.
If we have a high rate of immunisation coverage, alongside traditional contact tracing, we can minimise the risk to these individuals and maintain an approach that relies on education and support rather that the heavy hand of mandatory vaccination.
Could a change be afoot in the way Australians vote in federal elections?
The Coalition government may be eyeing a shift to optional preferential voting — as used in New South Wales — which allows voters to simply vote “1” or allocate only a partial list of preferences on their ballot, instead of a full ordering of preferences for every candidate.
The proposal was included in a series of potentially revolutionary changes to our electoral system that were quietly released by a parliamentary committee in December, when few people were paying attention.
The joint standing committee on electoral matters claimed a shift to optional preferential voting would help address rising rates of “informal voting” in NSW caused by the differences between the state and federal systems. The reason: a valid vote at the state level with less than a full list of preferences would be invalid if repeated at a federal election.
What the committee did not say is that based on current voting patterns, a shift to optional preferencing could also cement the Coalition in government.
As a follow-up to a newly published study, we have modelled how recent federal elections would have changed if an optional preferential system had been used. We found the results would have been devastating for Labor.
The reason the Coalition would benefit from an optional preferential voting system is simple.
In recent decades, Labor’s primary vote has slumped in federal elections, but full preferential voting has kept its two-party preferred vote high.
This is because LaborL benefits from consistent preference flows from parties to the left, in particular the Greens. Approximately 80% of Greens preferences at federal elections go to the ALP at present.
The Greens have preferenced Labor ahead of the Coalition in an overwhelming majority of races in recent years.Ellen Smith/AAP
A significant proportion of this preference flow is the result of Greens voters being forced to choose between Labor and the Coalition at some point – even in their final preference markings on the ballot – so their votes are valid.
Labor and the Greens oppose changing the current voting system, but the proposal from the joint standing committee reportedly has support from some Senate cross-benchers.
How Labor would have fared under optional preferences
Data collected by the ABC’s election analyst, Antony Green, at the 2015 NSW election shows the rate of Greens preferences transferring to Labor declines precipitously from 82.7% under full preferential voting to just 37.4% under optional preferential voting.
In our study, we extrapolated how past election outcomes would have been affected if this was repeated nationally. We were conscious of the challenges that come with generalising in this way, and comparing one state’s data to the country as a whole.
We found that in most seats, switching to optional preferential voting would have partisan effects that are sharply skewed to the right.
This is best illustrated by looking at the seats Labor has won in recent elections by overtaking the Coalition after trailing on first preferences. These would be the seats most affected by a shift from full to optional preferential voting.
These “come-from-behind” victories would become much rarer under optional preferential voting. By our calculations, Labor would have won somewhere between five and eight fewer seats at each recent federal election, as the graph below shows.
Author provided
This means Labor would have lost the 2010 election outright and suffered heavier defeats in the 2013, 2016 and 2019 elections if optional preferences had been in use. Labor would also have lost the byelections in 2018 and 2020.
In 2010, the fragile Labor minority government would have likely won independent Andrew Wilkie’s and The Greens’ Adam Bandt’s seats under optional preferential voting, but would have lost four others to the Liberals, including Treasurer Wayne Swan’s seat of Lilley. Labor would not have had enough seats to form government.
Labor won a total of 36 come-from-behind seats in the 2013, 2016 and 2019 elections. Our analysis suggests Labor would have won less than half (17) of these seats under optional preferencing.
The Coalition swept to power in the 2013 federal election, defeating incumbent Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and ending six years of Labor rule.John Pryke/AAP
Minor parties and independents would also be shut out
Our model also suggests minor parties and independents would struggle to win under optional preferential voting.
As mentioned before, Labor would have won the seats of Melbourne and Dension from Bandt and Wilkie in 2010.
And the Liberals would have triumphed over Cathy McGowan (independent), Clive Palmer (Palmer United Party) and Bob Katter (Katter’s Australian Party) in 2013; Rebekha Sharkie (Nick Xenophon Team/Centre Alliance) in 2016 and 2019; Kerryn Phelps (independent) in 2018 and Helen Haines (independent) in 2019.
Our modelling suggests Independent MP Cathy McGowan would have lost the 2019 election for the seat of Indi under optional preferential voting.Lukas Coch/AAP
With fewer independents and minor parties, the House of Representatives would be a less diverse and colourful place, and the crossbench less politically influential.
Given this, it is striking that both Centre Alliance and One Nation will reportedly back the government in the Senate if it decides to push for a change to optional preferential voting.
Whether the government pursues reform before the next election probably comes down to the Senate numbers, given Labor and the Greens will bitterly oppose any change.
It will also depend on internal Coalition management considerations, with the National Party traditionally opposed to optional preferences, and the government’s more precarious numbers in the House since Craig Kelly’s move to the crossbench.
The government response to the joint standing committee’s report is currently being prepared by the assistant minister for electoral matters, Ben Morton, a former party secretary.
While tightly guarded, we can say with confidence that the reason advanced by the committee for the change – that it will reduce informal voting – is unlikely to feature highly in his calculations. Instead, raw political calculations must make this a highly tempting reform for the government.
Jack Stewart, a Bachelor of Philosophy (Hons) student at the University of Western Australia, compiled the data for this study.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. Click here to subscribe to Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup and New Zealand Politics Daily.
If you’ve ever gotten your phone wet in the rain, dropped it in water or spilt liquid over it, you’re not alone. One study suggests 25% of smartphone users have damaged their smartphone with water or some other kind of liquid.
Liquid penetrating a smartphone can affect the device in several ways. It could lead to:
blurry photos, if moisture gets trapped in the camera lens
ruffled audio, or no audio
liquid droplets under the screen
an inability to charge
the rusting of internal parts, or
a total end to all functionality.
While new phones are advertised as “water resistant”, this doesn’t mean they are waterproof, or totally immune to water. Water resistance just implies the device can handle some exposure to water before substantial damage occurs.
Samsung Australia has long-defended itself against claims it misrepresents the water resistance of its smartphones.
In 2019, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) took Samsung to Federal Court, alleging false and misleading advertisements had led customers to believe their Galaxy phones would be suitable for:
use in, or exposure to, all types of water (including, for example, oceans and swimming pools).
Samsung Australia subsequently denied warranty claims from customers for damage caused to phones by use in, or exposure to, liquid.
Similarly, last year Apple was fined €10 million (about A$15.5 million) by Italy’s antitrust authority for misleading claims about the water resistance of its phones, and for not covering liquid damage under warranty, despite these claims.
How resistant is your phone?
The water resistance of phones is rated by an “Ingress Protection” code, commonly called an IP rating. Simply, an electrical device’s IP rating refers to its effectiveness against intrusions from solids and liquids.
The rating includes two numbers. The first demonstrates protection against solids such as dust, while the second indicates resistance to liquids, specifically water.
Here are the various Ingress Protection ratings. The numbering changes based on the level of protection.Element Materials Technology
A phone that has a rating of IP68 has a solid object protection of 6 (full protection from dust, dirt and sand) and a liquid protection of 8 (protected from immersion in water to a depth of more than one metre).
Although, for the latter, manufacturers are responsible for defining the exact depth and time.
The popular iPhone 12 and Samsung Galaxy S21 phones both have a rating of IP68. However, regarding exposure to water, the iPhone 12 has a permissible immersion depth of a maximum of 6m for 30 minutes, whereas the Galaxy 21’s immersion limit is up to 1.5m, also for 30 minutes.
While IP ratings indicate the water-repellent nature of phones, taking most phones for a swim will land you in deep trouble. The salt content in oceans and swimming pools can corrode your device and cost you a hefty replacement.
Moreover, phone manufacturers carry out their IP testing in fresh water and Apple recommends devices not be submerged in liquids of any kind.
Luckily, water resistant phones are generally able to survive smaller liquid volumes, such as from a glass tipping over.
Exposure to water is something manufacturers have in mind when designing phones. Most Apple and Samsung phones come with a liquid contact/damage indicator strip located inside the SIM card tray.
This is used to check for liquid damage that may be causing a device to malfunction. An indicator strip that comes in contact with liquid loses its usual colour and becomes discoloured and smudgy.
Samsung and Apple phones have Liquid Contact/Damage Indicators.Samsung/Apple
A discoloured strip usually renders your phone ineligible for a standard manufacturer warranty.
If you have any of the more recent smartphones from Apple or Samsung, then your device will be able to detect liquid or moisture in its charging port and will warn you with an alert. This notification only goes away once the port is dry.
New generation Samsung and Apple phones have a moisture/liquid alert notification.Samsung/Apple
But what should you do if this dreadful pop-up presents itself?
Fixing a water-logged phone
Firstly, do not put your phone in a container of rice. It’s a myth that rice helps in drying out your phone. Instead, follow these steps:
Turn off the device immediately and don’t press any buttons.
If your phone is water resistant and you’ve spilt or submerged it in a liquid other than water, both Apple and Samsung recommend rinsing it off by submerging it in still tap water (but not under a running tap, which could cause damage).
Wipe the phone dry with paper towels or a soft cloth.
Gently shake the device to remove water from the charging ports, but avoid vigorous shaking as this could further spread the liquid inside.
Remove the SIM card.
Use a compressed aerosol air duster to blow the water out if you have one. Avoid using a hot blow dryer as the heat can wreck the rubber seals and damage the screen.
Dry out the phone (and especially the ports) in front of a fan.
Leave your phone in an airtight container full of silica gel packets (those small packets you get inside new shoes and bags), or another drying agent. These help absorb the moisture.
Do not charge the phone until you are certain it’s dry. Charging a device with liquid still inside it, or in the ports, can cause further damage. Apple suggests waiting at least five hours once a phone appears dry before charging it (or until the alert disappears).
If the above steps don’t help and you’re still stuck with a seemingly dead device, don’t try opening the phone yourself. You’re better off taking it to a professional.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Macaulay, Professor of Public Administration, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
Following a number of high-profile inquiries into workplace misconduct — including within parliament, the police and fire service — it became clear people who report such behaviour in the first place need greater legal protection.
The commonly used term “whistleblower” is simplistic and emotive, but it remains true that speaking up can cause enormous emotional strain, as well as legitimate fear of retaliation or reprisal.
While the report does recommend ways to strengthen the bill, it fails to endorse some of the more far-reaching suggestions from a public consultation process earlier this year.
The bill itself is partly a response to the case of Joanne Harrison, jailed in 2017 for defrauding the Ministry of Transport of over NZ$700,000.
Colleagues who had reported their suspicions about her behaviour later lost their own jobs. And while a subsequent inquiry concluded this wasn’t a direct result of their reporting, they were still paid undisclosed sums in compensation.
If nothing else, however, the case forced the issue of reporting workplace misconduct into the open.
It is a shame, therefore, that the select committee report doesn’t go further towards creating a more robust piece of legislation, one that significantly increases the protections for people reporting misconduct.
Not enough protection
In the past few years Aotearoa New Zealand has been at the centre of research into workplace misconduct and organisational reporting. This has included our own research project, the biggest of its kind across public, private and not-for-profit sectors in New Zealand and Australia.
This was more than just an academic exercise. We partnered with the Public Service Commission and Ombudsman in New Zealand, as well as numerous central, state and local agencies in Australia. We investigated who comes forward with reports, what happens to those reports, what support people needed and received, and what processes achieve the most positive results for reporters and organisations.
Largely because of this research we can say with confidence that, despite some strengths, this bill does not go far enough to protect people who speak up.
To be fair, it does clarify how people can be expected to report their concerns, and when they qualify for a protected disclosure. The select committee’s recommendations also appear more respectful towards [tikanga Māori]organisations(https://maoridictionary.co.nz/search?keywords=tikanga) and alternative processes.
But the proposed bill still lacks clarity in its definitions of what constitutes “serious wrongdoing” and the actions or omissions that pose a “serious risk”.
Determining just how “serious” something is might be difficult for someone wishing to make a protected disclosure. The final legislation should offer specific examples in a schedule to its main provisions.
A best practice checklist
The select committee report also proposes section 12 of the bill, covering what should happen when an allegation is reported, be flagged as “guidance” only. At the same time, section 26 of the proposed bill requires all agencies to have internal processes for reporting that correspond to section 12.
But if section 12 is now a guide rather than a full legal requirement, there is a potential loophole: an organisation could argue its systems relate only to this guidance, rather than concrete legal obligations.
Even more importantly, section 26 ignores years of research into good practice for internal reporting. The bill makes no statements about what kinds of processes are required, even though these are well understood and were shared with the select committee. At the very least, organisations should have:
dedicated support persons for all people making reports
risk assessment practices (which should also be specified in section 12) to help protect the reporter and ensure natural justice
appropriate triage for reports so they are processed fairly and efficiently
consistent investigative protocols
a communication strategy that helps build transparency and accountability: how many reports have been offered, what have they been about, how many have led to investigations, and so on
mandatory education and training for all staff
an appropriate and transparent remediation strategy so people are not only protected, but may be rewarded for identifying serious misconduct in the workplace.
The Green Party, which supported a number of these provisions, also proposes another major improvement: an independent body to oversee the new regime.
This need not necessarily be an investigatory body. It could provide strategic direction, promote good practice, develop consistent training and development for organisations, act as a store of information, and collate and publish data.
It may, under certain circumstances, take on an investigative role to protect independence and mitigate possible conflicts of interest in internal processes.
Similar bodies worked in English and Welsh local government, where a national oversight body was established to end the kind of serious corruption and fraud scandals prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s.
Since the agency was abolished by the Conservative-led coalition government in 2014 we’ve seen more scandals, including a massive corruption case in Liverpool right now.
It’s clear people who want to report misconduct need better protection. And while legislation cannot be the only solution, it acts as a foundation for organisational and cultural change.
The current Protected Disclosure Bill, even following the select committee’s report, does not yet provide that firm foundation.
Despite this, our research reveals substantial public support for a First Nations Voice to parliament, pressing the case for action.
A First Nations Voice to parliament has been the focus of the push for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians since 2015. After being endorsed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders in the Uluru Statement from the Heart in 2017, the proposed Voice has also become the centre of efforts to give Indigenous Australians a permanent say in decisions affecting them, and progress meaningful reconciliation.
There are two different ideas for a Voice. The first is to enshrine it in the Constitution, as outlined in the Uluru Statement; the second is simply to legislate it.
Our research shows greater support for the former, which would require a national referendum. It would also require a change in the government’s current preference for a legislated Voice.
Politically, there is a long history of resistance to First Nations people having a voice in parliament. Recently, there has also been debate over whether enough Australians would support this reform.
In 2017, Griffith University’s Australian Constitutional Values Survey showed solid public support from the start, contrary to the fears of many leaders.
Now, the 2021 Australian Constitutional Values Survey by CQUniversity and Griffith University shows over 60% of Australians remain in favour of a First Nations Voice to parliament in some form.
The nationally representative online survey of over 1,500 Australians was conducted in February. While a quarter of Australians remain undecided, most of those had not heard of the proposal. Only one in eight respondents (12%) was opposed to the idea of a First Nations Voice.
The feedback on why Australians do or don’t value the reform comes at a crucial time, as submissions are being gathered by the federal government’s co-design process on what the Voice should look like.
Asked why they were in favour, most respondents said establishing a First Nations Voice would be the “right thing to do”, including as a step towards reconciliation. Many respondents also acknowledged the Voice’s role in addressing the ongoing effects of European colonisation.
Respondents also viewed the Voice as an important way of listening to First Nations peoples, improving policies and making a practical difference. Others saw the Voice as a way to recognise the special status of First Nations peoples as the country’s traditional owners.
These objectives and principles also have an impact on the form most Australians think the Voice should take.
Preference for constitutional rather than legislated Voice
Voice proposals began as the pathway to meaningful recognition of Indigenous peoples in Australia’s Constitution, described by Indigenous leader Noel Pearson as our “longest standing and unresolved project for justice”.
Constitutional recognition would require a strong vote in a national referendum, similar to the historic result in 1967 that allowed government to make laws for Aboriginal people and include them in the census.
Indigenous leader Noel Pearson describes constitutional recognition as our ‘longest standing and unresolved project for justice’.AAP/Mick Tsikas
A predictable “fallback” is to simply legislate the Voice rather than enshrine it in the Constitution. This strategy was reinforced by Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s insistence that constitutional change is not on the agenda, claiming a lack of any
clear consensus proposal at this stage, which would suggest mainstream support in the Indigenous community or elsewhere.
But our survey indicates this fallback option would fall short of public expectations. Over half of all respondents (51.3%) said they would be in favour of enshrining the Voice via constitutional change. Only a quarter (26.3%) said they would still be in favour of the Voice as only a legislated reform, with no constitutional recognition.
Many Australians are still undecided, but the results show that if the plan is said to be supported by Indigenous Australians, this would make a difference for many of those on the fence.
The scope for a positive 1967-style result, therefore, remains substantial and real.
Compared to a legislated Voice, a constitutional Voice would benefit from greater stability because its existence would be guaranteed. A constitutional Voice would also deliver recognition called for by many Indigenous Australians.
The low public support for a legislated option also reinforces arguments that successful constitutional change would give more popular legitimacy than a legislated Voice, directly engaging the entire community and making the reform part of Australian history.
The results also indicate Australians see the practical value of making the Voice permanent by putting it in Australia’s founding document. This means it could not be simply abolished by future parliaments.
With only 21% of Australians against a constitutional Voice – as opposed to 34% against a purely legislated one – there is wide opportunity to pave the way to successful constitutional recognition once the co-design process has resolved questions of the Voice’s functions and form.
Creating a First Nations Voice to parliament is now the obvious way forward. The government is committed to establishing it, and general public support is solidifying. This is a remarkable testament to how the idea has resonated with people.
But the important lesson to consider is that the core of public support lies in establishing the Voice in the Constitution as a step on the journey towards reconciliation.
This year is shaping up as the year of the COVID-19 vaccination photo, with the pandemic providing seemingly endless photo opportunities. We’ve seen stock photos of people getting vaccinated in news reports, images of the prime minister receiving his shot and health workers posting #vaxxies on social media.
But evidence shows the wrong images can make some people reluctant to get vaccinated. So our well-meaning efforts to use images to help demystify the vaccination process or share our pride in getting a COVID-19 vaccine can backfire.
Here’s what we can all do to choose and share vaccination images responsibly.
Communicating public health strategies like vaccination can be challenging. There can be complex and unfamiliar technical terms and health concepts, and not everyone can understand them. So pictures play an essential role.
Pictures can draw attention to the message, help people relate to and remember what is being said, and may nudge people to act on a health recommendation. People also rate brochures with pictures more positively than ones with just text.
Pictures not only provide meaning, they have an emotional impact. Images we see on social media can also shape our perception of social norms (what we believe others are thinking or doing) and our behaviour.
But what happens when the picture is a giant needle, or a needle poked into someone’s arm? We have all seen these images to illustrate media articles about COVID-19 vaccination.
In addition to being a bit gruesome, stock photos commonly used in stories about vaccination are often inaccurate. The needle might be in the wrong position, the health worker may be wearing gloves when they are not needed or the liquid inside the needle seems coloured rather then clear.
Do vaccination images really matter?
Yes, vaccination images matter. A study looking at vaccine-related news coverage found nearly one in eight images contained something negative, such as the classic “crying baby”.
This may lead new parents, who have yet to really experience the vaccination process, to become anxious. And this negative photo may override any positive vaccination messages accompanying it.
This issue is especially important because when a photo is of someone’s face, it can trigger an emotional response, making it easier for someone to have a strong reaction to that communication.
We can still illustrate vaccination without using scary images like this of a crying baby and an oversized needle.from www.shutterstock.com
We know images can help people remember health messages. But if we use an inappropriate photo, such as the wrong needle size or someone looking anxious, this is the image that can stick with us, not the public health messages or statistics we intended to convey.
For some people, photos of needles are so scary this might put them off vaccination. While we don’t know precisely which types of needle imagery could stimulate such a response, we know needle phobia is a real issue. In fact, one survey found 23% of adults have avoided influenza vaccines due to fear of needles. And we don’t want to risk this happening with COVID-19 vaccines.
Whether we are choosing images for news articles or for our personal social media, it is important we consider the potential impact of the photos we use. Here are some tips for choosing the right image:
focus on positive outcomes. Consider showing a smiling person with a plaster on their arm or someone holding a vaccination card or sticker. Flickr provides free photos that reflect the reality of immunisation and are medically accurate
humanise the process. People develop, deliver and receive vaccines. Show these people where possible, instead of disembodied needles
depict diversity. Ensure images of vaccination show diversity of ethnicity, gender, age and disability
imply rather than illustrate vaccination. Why do we need the needle in the photo? We do not illustrate articles about urinary tract infections in children with photos of urine samples or invasive medical treatments. An image of a health worker speaking to someone with their sleeve rolled up is enough to evoke a mental image of the vaccination process, particularly when it accompanies a story about vaccines
highlight the vial not the needle. For stories about vaccine production or rollout with no personal or emotive element, showing the vaccine vial is a neutral option
avoid inaccurate images. The emoji of a needle full of blood? Not a great choice to tell your friends and family you have been vaccinated. The plaster emoji is a good alternative. Publications should check any vaccine images with medical professionals for accuracy.
Robots are writing more of what we read on the internet. And artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools are becoming freely available for anyone, including students, to use.
In a period of rapid change, there are enormous ethical implications for post-human authorship — in which humans and machines collaborate. The study of AI ethics needs to be central to education as we increasingly use machine-generated content to communicate with others.
Robots can write, too
AI robot writers, such as GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) take seconds to create text that seems like it was written by humans. In September, 2020 GPT-3 wrote an entire essay in The Guardian to convince people not to fear artificial intelligence.
AI does this through what’s called natural language processing and generation. This involves converting human language to computer commands and vice versa. To do this, machine algorithms study millions of text samples, words, sentences and paragraphs humans use to gain a general understanding of the context of human language. Then machines use that knowledge to put together text.
For example, the free Zyro content generator provides text for websites. I can select the categories “Health and Living” and “Personal Trainer” (I happen to be one, as well as an academic). In two seconds, the following text appears:
I am experienced with personal training, athletic performance, and nutrition. This includes working with children, pregnant women, older adults, people with disabilities, athletes, and anyone looking to achieve a competitive edge, improve their overall health, and overall performance. I also have an interest in alternative health, including wellness coaching and nutrition counselling. In my spare time, I enjoy spending time with my family, the outdoors, and writing.
This sums me up (despite the program knowing nothing about me) and would be fine for my website, if I had one. I have the option to generate more responses, and in two seconds, the program offers:
I am experienced in working with adults and children to improve their overall physical and emotional well-being. I have a strong desire to help you reach your goal […] I love helping others achieve their goals. I love working with others to achieve their goals. I am a mother of two healthy children and a wife to two incredible people.
While this is repetitive and Zyro does not notice the apparent error in the last sentence, these issues would be easy to correct. Text, even for niche purposes, can now be generated in a few clicks.
There are other digital tools such as paraphrasers and rewriters that can generate up to 1,000 articles from a single seed article, each of them substantially unique. Quillbot and WordAI, for instance, can rapidly rewrite text and make it difficult to detect plagiarism. WordAI boasts “unlimited human quality content at your fingertips”.
Questions for schools and universities
So what does this mean for education, writing, and society?
Of course, there’s the issue of cheating on essays and other assignments. School and university leaders need to have difficult conversations about what constitutes “authorship” and “editorship” in the post-human age. We are all (already) writing with machines, even just via spelling and grammar checkers.
Tools such as Turnitin — originally developed for detecting plagiarism — are already using more sophisticated means of determining who wrote a text by recognising a human author’s unique “fingerprint”. Part of this involves electronically checking a submitted piece of work against a student’s previous work.
Many student writers are already using AI writing tools. Perhaps, rather than banning or seeking to expose machine collaboration, it should be welcomed as “co-creativity”. Learning to write with machines is an important aspect of the workplace “writing” students will be doing in the future.
AI writers work lightning fast. They can write in multiple languages and can provide images, create metadata, headlines, landing pages, Instagram ads, content ideas, expansions of bullet points and search-engine optimised text, all in seconds. Students need to exploit these machine capabilities, as writers for digital platforms and audiences.
Perhaps assessment should focus more on students’ capacities to use these tools skilfully instead of, or at least in addition to, pursuing “pure” human writing.
But is it fair?
Yet the question of fairness remains. Students who can access better AI writers (more “natural”, with more features) will be able to produce and edit better text.
Better AI writers are more expensive and are available on monthly plans or high one-off payments wealthy families can afford. This will exacerbate inequality in schooling, unless schools themselves provide excellent AI writers to all.
We will need protocols for who gets credit for a piece of writing. We will need to know who gets cited. We need to know who is legally liable for content and potential harm it may create. We need transparent systems for identifying, verifying and quantifying human content.
And most importantly of all, we need to ask whether the use of AI writing tools is fair to all students.
For those who are new to the notion of AI writing, it is worthwhile playing and experimenting with the free tools available online, to better understand what “creation” means in our robot future.
House prices are back in the news, and out of control.
In the past three months the median house price in Sydney has risen by more than A$100,000 to A$1.12 million. Sydney’s median residential property price (including houses and apartments) is now 2.6% above its previous high-water mark, recorded in August 2017, before lending criteria were tightened (and COVID-19 struck).
Even areas far from central Sydney, such as the Central Coast, have recorded double-digit percentage increases.
What exactly is driving these sharp rises is a matter of debate. Australia’s economic recovery from COVID-19 has been stronger than many thought. The prospect of most Australians being vaccinated and international borders reopening provides further hope – even if our vaccine roll-out has been less than stellar in its planning and execution.
Of course, interest rates are at historic lows. More to the point, loans that can be fixed for three or five years have become much cheaper and more widely used as well. This has given borrowers the capacity to borrow larger sums.
The federal government has contributed, too, with a suite of measures targeted at first-home buyers. Like all such measures, these look attractive at the individual level but simply translate into higher prices. Schemes like the “first home owner grant” should really be called the “seller subsidy”.
Finally there is the elephant in the room: irrational exuberance.
Who knows how much “fear of missing out” has played into price rises. Against the backdrop of a worldwide public health and economic crisis, one might think buyers would be a little more circumspect about their future incomes.
But apparently not so much.
Our housing affordability problem
Sadly, there is little new about the fact that Australia – and the largest capital cities in particular – have a serious housing affordability problem. It has been that way for at least a decade.
Sydney and Melbourne are routinely ranked among the top half-dozen most expensive cities in the world when comparing housing prices to average incomes earned in those cities.
Home ownership rates have fallen more or less constantly. Young people are basically excluded from home ownership unless they have very high incomes or parents with the means and inclination to provide financial help.
On top of this, household debt levels in Australia are disturbingly high – reflecting the large mortgages people who do manage to claw their way into the housing market have to take out.
Sure, that is matched against the high asset values of the property they have bought. But as any student on economic history knows, that’s little comfort when an asset price bubble bursts.
To put it another way: asset prices come and go, but debt is forever.
So here we are again. The housing market is so frothy it has seriously reduced financial mobility at the individual level, and it threatens financial stability at the macro level.
Let’s start by ruling out some of the supposed quick fixes for getting property prices under control.
Some say the Reserve Bank of Australia should hike interest rates to make it harder for borrowers to pay such high prices. But the RBA should mainly focus on its inflation target (one it has missed year after year), getting unemployment down and wages growth up. Those things all require low interest rates.
To calm the frenzy, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority could use so-called “macroprudential tools”. These are requirements on financial institutions to limit systemic risks. In the past the financial regulator has set policies to limit credit growth and curb the proportion of “interest-only mortgages” (mortgages that don’t require principal payments). It can and should do these things, though it has a pretty spotty track record at acting in a timely and effective manner.
Perhaps most importantly, both sides of politics need to revisit Australia’s almost unique and certainly odd system of allowing interest payments on rental properties to be offset against a person’s taxable income – that is, “negative gearing”.
Such deductions are permissible for other asset classes such as stocks – and have been for 100 years or so. But no “ordinary” Australian wage earner can get big loans to bet on the stock market. Even wealthy investors cannot get anything like the leverage they can in residential property in other asset classes.
This is a peculiarity flowing from the amount of capital banks need to hold against property loans. It’s a market failure that should be addressed.
The best way to do this – as I pointed out in a report for the McKell Institute in mid-2015 – is to gradually phase out negative gearing over time, and allow it only for new dwellings in future. Expanding housing supply would also be very helpful.
Labor took a policy based on this report to two elections. It lost both – although perhaps the last loss had more to with other things, including a quite separate and less appealing franking credit policy.
The Coalition almost pre-empted Labor by reforming negative gearing in 2015/16. But then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull bowed to pressure from then treasurer and negative-gearing fan Scott Morrison.
Housing affordability remains a serious problem in Australia. We need to tackle it now, and with a multi-pronged approach. If we don’t, we risk the future of young Australians and our financial system at the same time.
Return to Uluru is the latest book from respected historian Mark McKenna. It is one of a few history books published recently that explicitly engage with the Uluru Statement from the Heart and its demand for a nationwide process of truth telling — one that some key advocates insist should be pursued locally and pluralistically. Not one truth, but many truths.
McKenna has already responded to the Uluru statement in his searching Quarterly Essay, Moment of Truth (2018). Amid that wide-ranging discussion of politics, history and Australian futures, he paused to consider a single street sign in the down-at-heel suburb of Kurnell on Botany Bay’s southern shore, where, in 1770, the Endeavour crew had spent a listless week.
Through reconstructing a history of a worn out sign announcing Kurnell as the “birthplace of modern Australia”, McKenna traced the changing significance of this site, and the strange politics of foundational myths. This revealing vignette seemed like a chapter-in-the-making, with Kurnell poised to be added to the itinerary of vantage points from which he showed his readers ways to view past, present and future differently.
But it was a tease. McKenna’s next book — this one — turns its back on the coastal fringes and faces inwards, gingerly and then confidently venturing into terrains, actual and abstract, he had not yet traversed.
Mark McKenna.goodreads
In Return to Uluru, McKenna continues his journey in search of alternative sites of national foundations — or, national sites of alternative foundations. This quest had begun with Looking for Blackfellas’ Point, subtitled An Australian History of Place, published two decades ago in 2002.
Searching for a satisfying way to intervene in the heat of the history wars, he turned his focus to what had become his own backyard: a bend in the Towamba river in southeastern NSW known in the local vernacular as Blackfellas’ Point, where he had purchased eight acres (3.2 hectares) of land. From there, McKenna’s vista spanned outwards to the far south coast region, reaching backwards to its frontier past and forwards to its racial present.
McKenna then detoured via his magisterial biography of Manning Clark, An Eye for Eternity, a suitable byway for a historian deeply interested in place and the redemptive power of narrative. By the early 2010s, he resumed his Australian journey by essaying four coastal locations. In From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories (2016), he explored the peripheral histories of the long stretches of beach of southeast Australia from Gippsland to Sydney; Port Essington on the Cobourg Peninsula in west Arnhem Land; Murujuga in the Pilbara in the northwest and Gangaar (Cooktown) in Far North Queensland.
These off-centre places were offered as viable and lively alternatives to the moribund, foundational myths of single moments of bloodless and benign possession. Such myths are gradually reaching their use by date, although still hanging on as last year’s commemoration of Cook and the Endeavour proved.
The Uluru Statement from the Heart is seen as a backdrop as Midnight Oil perform during a warm-up show ahead of their Makarrata Project tour in Sydney on February 25.Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Redemption
And so, Return to Uluru sees McKenna venture inland — for the first time. Heading inwards, he makes use of those stories of discovery and exploration, with which settler Australians (particularly those of a certain age) are familiar, to insert himself into a practised way of encountering the mythologised space of the continent’s heart. The opening section of the book has the quality of re-enactment; it is hard to know how ironic it is. This is a history approached from the outside in.
But the explorer narrative makes sense since it turns out McKenna is a rare creature — someone who had not yet made the pilgrimage to Uluru and the fabled Centre. And so, the “return” in the book’s title is initially a puzzle: Who then, if not the author, is making a return to Uluru? What is returning — or being returned?
It takes the remainder of the book — which is part travelogue, part detective story, part historical narrative and part political treatise — to appreciate in all dimensions this powerful metaphor of return.
With the Centre reached, the second section of the book, called Lawman, focuses on a policeman, Bill McKinnon, who murdered an Aboriginal man, Yokununna, in 1934. McKinnon is reasonably well-known in scholarship on the Northern Territory. His killing of Yokununna, an Anangu man arrested on suspicion of being responsible (along with others) for the death of an Aboriginal stockman, is likewise amply documented since it was the subject of a federal government inquiry. This part of the book provides a narrative retelling of episode — a seamless weaving together of the official story and its obfuscations and competing interests.
Constable Bill McKinnon with his daughter, Susan, approx. 1941.Library & Archives NT, Northern Territory Archives Service, NTRS 234, Photographic proof-sheets, 1979–1985, CP 426).
Reading this part is a reminder the audience for this book is not the critical historian who is wondering when the debates about policing in the NT or the contradictions of government policy will be canvassed. The archive holds secrets and stories, and this is an “archive story”, which requires little critical commentary.
If the four “off-the-beaten-track” coastal sites of From The Edge were chosen for the ways they lent themselves to the work of revelation — of hidden histories or discarded truths — Uluru provides McKenna scope for the work of redemption.
In this case, redemption comes through the belated admission of a sin that was denied — or covered up — for which the perpetrator avoided punishment, even as he lived out his life knowing that he had dissembled. That is the Uluru to which McKenna returns through his historical scholarship.
As with all his books, the work of historical reckoning that McKenna pursues through the poetic telling of history operates simultaneously at a series of scales: the individual, the family, the local, and the national. It is the same rhetorical move that originally allowed McKenna’s own land on the NSW south coast to become a space of imagining on a national scale. And now, Uluru speaks again to the nation’s unfinished business.
This time it is a single site (a cave near Uluru), a singular episode (a newly-minted territory policeman chasing accused Aboriginal men), and a split second (when the policeman’s bullet kills one of them) that becomes the viewfinder for seeing past, present, future anew.
Sammy Wilson, the grandson of one of the men arrested at the same time as Yokunnuna, pointing at the spot where Yokunnuna was killed.Mark McKenna
Ethical questions
Explaining its emphasis on the “micro”, the book begins with an epigram from the Swiss artist and sculptor, Alberto Giacometti: “By doing something a half centimetre high, you are more likely to get a sense of the universe than if you try to do the whole sky”.
But we are left with the question of whether a focus on the microcosmic is a productive model for this urgent and difficult work of national truth telling? Might it be a problem that a string of episodes — but not structures — are revisited and revised?
By the book’s third section, the power of the quest begins again — and here we are not only travelling to the Centre or into the past through the surviving official record. We are also jumping on a plane to Brisbane to meet with policeman McKinnon’s family. Here, we delve into other archives — those boxes of papers and other detritus of one’s life, which in Australia are less likely to be found in attics than in garages or, in Brisbane, in that evocative space known as “under the house”.
At this juncture, as the story spins from past to present, from the official memory to family memory, from public archives to private ones, the ethical stakes seem to grow ever greater.
While McKenna is flicking nonchalantly through McKinnon’s personal papers, he finds treasure — “a copious archive of Australia’s frontier” — including the notebook in which the policeman admits he had fired to hit Yokununna. Meanwhile, a curator in a museum in South Australia is searching records and finding the remains of McKinnon’s victim.
Our archives and collections — both public and private — still contain plenty of damning evidence to hold the past to account. These secret stashes. This murky memory-work.
Archaeologist Denis Byrne has described the “ethos of return”, in which the flow of things and knowledge is reversing, coming home — perhaps to haunt, perhaps to heal. This is another kind of redemption. A powerful section of the book deals with the urgent work of taking Yokununna’s remains home — a process interrupted by COVID-19 and still playing out.
So far, the two families at the heart of this story — McKinnon’s and Yokununna’s — are travelling on parallel journeys; the reckoning will come, as it has powerfully at Myall Creek and other places, when families on opposite sides of a violent past come face to face.
Such a future meeting is not yet guaranteed, but it hangs as a possibility. The Myall Creek memorial was shepherded by local churches and communities. Here, it seems, it will be museum curators and historians who are the nursemaids for re-membering — creating communities around common but differently experienced pasts.
A bronze plaque commemorating the Myall Creek Massacre.Wikimedia Commons
What are we to do?
At the height of the history wars in the 1990s, the anthropologist Gillian Cowlishaw expressed surprise at how readily some Australians were prepared to condemn their own ancestors rather than try to understand them.
She saw this as symptomatic of the polarising tenor of the furore — a failure of collective imagination to apprehend the complexities and contradictions of frontier lives. McKenna’s book (and inquiry) seeks to avoid such simplification and easy distancing from the fraught pasts we inherit.
He nudges his readers to see McKinnon and his crime for what it was: violent, illegal, excessive, irrational, and unconscionable, even if he was exonerated. No-one was found guilty of the killing, although the inquiry’s finding was that the “shooting of Yokununna […] though legally justified, was not warranted”.
McKenna does this not by swift damnation from the comfortable distance of the present, but by paying attention to the chinks in McKinnon’s own conscience. The fact that he held onto a piece of evidence that would expose him even as he spent his long retirement contributing occasionally to myth-making about himself and other police on the NT frontier.
Bill McKinnon, on top of Uluru, 1984.(McKinnon collection).
But McKenna also has to deal with the implications for cherished family memories and pride when it becomes clear the generosity and hospitality extended to him by McKinnon’s doting daughter (who is slipping into dementia) is the path to the evidence that exposed her father.
And, indeed, the shadow of memory loss — the cruel play of remembering and forgetting — falls over the whole sorry episode. What happens when the distant frontier takes up residence in the family home? How will we remember our flawed ancestors then?
McKenna shares a story of a difficult meeting with McKinnon’s grandchildren, who understand the gravity of the situation, and articulate their commitment to reconciliation. They are prepared to do what needs to be done to come to terms with their unexpected inheritance; what that will be remains to be seen.
The book ends – surprisingly, jarringly, uncomfortably – with a sympathetic portrait of McKinnon, sitting atop an overturned box playing a violin. The context of the photograph is explained (McKinnon took it and annotated it). But we are left with the question: What do we do with these benign and romantic images of men who murdered and got away with it because the racial structures of Australian society ensured they would?
Is this the challenge of a much anticipated process of truth telling? Not that we will return to the big historical truths that in some ways, we all already know, but that we will have to revise our own and others’ family myths and treasured memories, finding a way to reconcile or hold in tension our love of — and our abhorrence for — the sins of the fathers?
This is the redemptive strain in McKenna’s work — that quest for grace — which perhaps has echoes of his biographical subject Manning Clark and his belief in the moral purpose of the historian’s craft.
Return to Uluru, by Mark McKenna, is published by Black Inc.
The vaccine rollout was thrown into fresh uncertainty on Thursday night after the government received medical advice against using the AstraZeneca vaccine for people under 50 because of the very small risk of blood clots.
Most immediately, this means those younger health and aged care workers who have not yet been vaccinated will be offered the Pfizer shot. This may involve delays.
These people are in the cohort currently being vaccinated, together with over 70s who are unaffected by the new advice, which went to the government on Thursday evening.
Scott Morrison said the later stages of the rollout will now urgently be re-examined and re-calibrated. He said it was “far too early” to say what impact it would have on the rollout’s timetable.
The government’s deadline for all eligible people who want a vaccine to receive at least one shot by the end of October is set to blow out.
Vaccine purchases will also be reviewed.
Morrison unveiled the advice from the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation at a hastily summoned press conference on Thursday night, also attended by Health Minister Greg Hunt, Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly, and Health Department Secretary Brendan Murphy.
Morrison said he had received the advice “in the last 15 minutes”.
The government had urgently sought the advice following evidence overseas of a link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots, with some deaths resulting.
There has been one clot case in Australia, a man in his 40s.
Explaining that the Pfizer vaccine should be preferred over AstraZenica for those under 50s, ATAGI said, “This recommendation is based on the increasing risk of severe outcomes from COVID-19 in older adults (and hence a higher benefit from vaccination) and a potentially increased risk of thrombosis with thrombocytopenia following AstraZeneca vaccine in those under 50 years”.
But it said AstraZeneca can be used in adults under 50 “where the benefits clearly outweigh the risk for that individual and the person has made an informed decision based on an understanding of the risks and benefits.”
Under 50s who’ve already had one AstraZeneca dose without serious adverse effects can be given a second dose, the advice said.
ATAGI described the possible blood clot side effect as “rare but serious”.
Advice is being provided to GPs involved in the rollout.
This is the latest difficulty to hit the rollout. The government this week stressed the main problem was shortage of supply, with AstraZeneca doses from Europe being held back and CLS, which is manufacturing the vaccine locally, not gearing up to the one million weekly target as fast as expected.
As of Thursday, one million doses of one or other of the two vaccines had been administered in Australia. At present Australia only has the two vaccines available.
Morrison stressed that decisions were up to individuals and their doctors – this was advice only.
“There is not a prohibition on the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for persons under 50. There is an expression of a preference.”
Kelly said a clot was very rare. “At the moment, it seems to be around 4 to 6 per million doses of vaccine. It’s only been found in the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine, usually within 4 to 10 days after that vaccine. But it is serious, and it can cause up to a 25% death rate when it occurs.”
In a late night statement AstraZeneca said it respected the government’s decision based on advice to recommend AstraZeneca’s vaccine be used in those over 50.
It noted that, “Overall, regulatory agencies have reaffirmed the vaccine offers a high-level of protection against all severities of COVID-19 and that these benefits continue to far outweigh the risks”.
Scott Morrison is inclined to underestimate tough women.
He’s done this in the past, to his detriment. In 2006, when he was managing director of Tourism Australia, Morrison was sacked after falling out with the board and federal Liberal tourism minister, Fran Bailey.
Years later, in 2018, the Australian Financial Review quoted Tim Fischer, who’d chaired Tourism Australia at the time, saying “a lot of us could see it coming as relations between Scott and Fran Bailey had deteriorated over a range of issues. But Scott didn’t seem to see it.”
Morrison was close to then prime minister John Howard and he thought – erroneously – Howard would step in and save him from Bailey. But Howard supported his minister.
Fast forward to 2021, and Morrison’s grappling with a broad “women’s problem”. And women playing hardball are all around the place.
Take just two current examples, Christine Holgate and Grace Tame.
In a submission to a Senate inquiry released this week Holgate, former Australia Post CEO, has launched a comprehensive counterattack to her being effectively forced out of her job last year, after a ferocious prime ministerial attack.
On a very different front Tame, the young and feisty Australian of the Year, has targeted Morrison’s choice of Amanda Stoker to become the new assistant minister for women.
Morrison in October excoriated Holgate over her rewarding four employees with Cartier watches (worth an average of $5000) for landing a lucrative deal with banks, which sustained Post’s network of franchises around the country.
Immediately after Holgate had told a Senate committee about the watches, a furious Morrison let loose in the parliament. Declaring the action disgraceful, he said: “The chief executive has been instructed to stand aside and, if she doesn’t wish to do that, she can go.”
A devastated Holgate, regarded as a high-performing CEO, soon left her position.
A later inquiry (which the government initially declined to release) found no dishonesty or intentional misuse of Post’s funds, although it did find the purchase of the watches was inconsistent with the legislative obligation imposed on Post.
The controversy has now resurfaced with a Senate inquiry, instigated by Pauline Hanson, at which Holgate will appear next week.
Holgate argues in her submission the watches’ purchase was “legal, within Australia Post’s policies, within my own signing authority limits, approved by the previous Chairman, expensed appropriately, signed off by auditors and the [chief financial officer]”.
While Holgate in her submission focuses her ire on Post’s chairman, Lucio Di Bartolomeo, rather than on Morrison, the affair goes directly to the PM’s original reaction, which blackened her reputation.
Regardless of whether Post, as a government business, should have used watches as rewards, Morrison’s outburst was extreme and ill judged.
It led to a highly competent chief of a government business being publicly trashed and unnecessarily sacrificed, over not very much.
Holgate – who attracted sympathy from many CEOs and support among Australia Post small businesses – has yet to be replaced, a long and expensive process.
Morrison obviously thought the name “Cartier” would resonate (negatively) with his “quiet Australians”. If the employees had each been given cash bonuses of $5000 would he have reacted in the same way? The answer seems clear.
A harder question is, if the CEO had been male, would the PM’s temper tantrum have been as unrestrained?
Impossible to say, of course. But many people, especially women in this current climate of heightened sensitivity, would believe he’d have been more measured.
Grace Tame – whose passionate words when awarded Australian of the Year were an influence on Brittany Higgins to go public with her rape allegation – is potentially an ongoing thorn in the side of a PM trying to assure women he “gets it”.
She’s a strong woman who finds herself, suddenly and unexpectedly, with a megaphone and she will use it all year.
In nominating Stoker, who is socially conservative and can be combative, as assistant minister for women, Morrison was inviting trouble.
Apart from dealing with the problems posed by Christian Porter and Linda Reynolds, the PM’s reshuffle was an effort to improve his and his government’s credentials on women’s issues.
It promoted female ministers and inserted references to “women” in various ministerial titles.
Yet he put Stoker into a position that would inevitably spark a adverse reaction among some women’s advocates.
Tame claimed Stoker had “supported a fake rape crisis tour aimed at falsifying all counts of sexual abuse on campuses across the nation”.
She said Stoker had also “supported” men’s rights advocate Bettina Arndt “who gave a platform [in an interview] to the pedophile who abused me”.
Stoker returned fire, defending her record promoting justice for women, and saying, “I did not attend Ms Arndt’s campus tour. I raised it in Senate estimates to highlight the universities’ inconsistent approaches to free speech and deplatforming.”
This week she dismissed Tame’s claims about falsifying accounts of abuse on campuses as “utter nonsense”.
Leaving aside the nitty gritty of their dispute, in the circumstances Morrison made a provocative choice, when he could have allocated the post to a less controversial frontbencher.
On Thursday Morrison and his new attorney-general Michaelia Cash unveiled the government’s full response to the Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s Respect@Work report.
The measures will strengthen protection for people in workplaces against sexual harrassment and remove the exemption from the sex discrimination legislation that members of parliament and judges now enjoy – although Morrison could not say how this would be applied in relation to MPs.
On Wednesday the government announced a two-day National Women’s Safety Summit to be held in late July.
The budget will have the stamp “women” on parts of it.
But the Prime Minister is not keen on the call, put forward for Friday’s national cabinet by Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, for a summit to address the “economic and social inequality facing Australian women”.
Palaszczuk, seizing the moment, wants national cabinet to host such a summit, which would have state and territory and stakeholder representatives. It would canvass issues including the pay and superannuation gender gaps and affordable child care.
“It’s the perfect time to have it,” she says. “Everyone is having conversations – in workplaces, around kitchen tables, on social media.”
A combination of such a broad agenda and so many strong women would make that a formidable political challenge for Morrison.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jo Caust, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow (Hon), School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
Who gets what in the arts has long been topic of much debate. There are myriad issues round elitism, regional distribution, excellence, artforms, organisations versus individuals and so on. Some of this is generated by an unequal allocation of funding as well as the limited amount available overall. But other issues relate to historical approaches and a hierarchy of arts practice.
It is unusual, though, for an arts minister to step into the fray. In 2015, then arts minister George Brandis decided to change the funding distribution and invent his own funding scheme for excellence. This did not work out well for anyone, including the minister.
Now the current Minister for the Arts, Paul Fletcher, has decided to put his view out there. At a talk on Wednesday to the Sydney Institute, Fletcher attacked the arts sector for being a “cosy club” of elites while raising the issue of “fairness”, particularly in relation to regional and urban distribution of arts funding.
He described the audience for the arts as “an elite group of people wearing black tie going to opening nights in our big cities”. This might sound more like a Labor dig at the top end of town than a Coalition line. The minister seems to be confusing privileged audience members with hard-working arts workers, who could use support rather than insults.
Perhaps, like many, Fletcher is still feeling a bit bruised from 2020. The art sector was shutdown due to the pandemic and then was generally ignored for more than eight months by his government, despite the dramatic economic impact on the sector. The extremely slow response by the federal government was not seen by the arts sector as “sensitive” or “fair” for that matter. The federal government did end up providing a large amount of funding at the end of 2020 and into 2021, but the process for deciding “who got what” was hardly transparent.
Now it seems the minister wants to raise issues around elitism and funding share, as well as the urban/regional debate. This seems a little disingenuous given recent accusations of funding “rorts” at both federal and state levels.
Fletcher has declared he wants to see if he can shift the Labor party and Greens from their high ground positions in relation to the arts, while reminding everyone of past contributions by the Coalition to the cultural sector.
However, it is the minister’s government that disappeared the “arts” into an amorphous department of infrastructure.
It is the minster’s government that has continued to downplay the importance of Australian content by reducing “red tape” obligations to produce Australian content. It is the minister’s government that has continued to decrease the amount of arts funding available. And yes, it is the minster’s government that chose to ignore the needs of the arts sector during a time of desperate need.
Yet, in this speech this week, Fletcher claimed the “level of funding committed to the arts by the Morrison Government in 2020-21 has been unprecedented”. Belated additional funding for COVID relief may have increased the federal arts allocation dramatically for the past 12 months. But this additional funding has not been equitably allocated, and the government has continued to ignore cultural workers who were not eligible for JobKeeper or JobSeeker.
The minister said that his department advised him to give $971,895 in RISE funding to the Harry Potter the stage show in Melbourne.AAP/Haystac
Certainly, it can be agreed arts funding is skewed towards the big end of town. The opera companies, symphony orchestras and major theatre companies receive more than 60% of the funding available from the Australia Council.
Is Fletcher talking about changing this ratio or providing more money overall? Or is he using the opportunity to have a go at a vulnerable sector when he is meant to be their advocate? The minister maybe diving in at the deep end, without necessarily understanding the full complexity of the arts or arts funding.
Dancers of The Australian Ballet rehearse New York Dialects: Watermark at Sydney Opera House earlier this week.AAP Image/Bianca De Marchi
Perhaps he is playing to supporters when he argues too much funding is going to urban performing arts companies, rather than, for example, to regional activity or commercial productions that tour.
But professional arts practice is usually located in urban centres because that is where artists live and work. It is also where they can attract the biggest audiences, which is critical when arts activity depends on box office income. Of course, there are also fantastic arts groups and individuals working in the regions that also need to be recognised, celebrated and more generously funded. But in the annual Australia Council report for 2019-2020, it is noted that of “government initiatives”, only 5% of total arts funding was allocated to regional areas. If the government was serious about providing more funding to regional areas, it could certainly increase this percentage.
However, since the Coalition parties came into power in 2013, the amount of money available for arts funding has continued to decrease. This is something that could easily be changed given the small amount overall given to arts practice at the Australia Council ($187.1 million in 2019-2020). A further 95 companies have lost their funding since 2016.
Over the past eight years there has been a dramatic continual decline in arts funding relative to population growth, which has particularly affected individuals and small to medium arts organisations. Is the minister arguing that he wants to give more money to the sector or is he really concerned about electoral boundaries and getting the support of Coalition voters in the regions?
The arts sector would love to have a minister who demonstrates they care about the needs of the sector and does their best to improve the position of the arts in Australian society. Instead, it feels like Fletcher is employing and possibly enjoying a “divide and rule” approach, which helps no one in the end, least of all the arts.
Shareholder primacy is often said to be the guiding principle of corporations.
The idea is that they exist to benefit their shareholders by providing dividends and capital gains, the more the better.
Fifty years ago, Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman went as far as to argue that was the only responsibility of companies — to make as much for their shareholders as the law would allow.
These days, most boards refrain from speaking about shareholder primacy and instead talk about the interests of the company, which includes things such as social license, stakeholder engagement and community expectations.
But what happens if shareholders try to tell boards and company managements how to go about their jobs?
Are the directors and chief executives required to follow their instructions?
Directors serve their companies first
From a legal perspective, company directors are required to act in the best interests of the company rather than (what might be the shorter-term) interests of shareholders.
If shareholders are not happy with the decisions of the company, they have the option of replacing the directors.
The directors, under the leadership of the board chair have the ability to remove and give instructions to the chief executive and senior managers.
Directors are accountable to shareholders indirectly, because shareholders have the ability to vote them off the board.
Shareholders lack direct power
In large public companies, this threat is often difficult to carry out because big institutional investors usually support incumbent managements and lack the resources or the will to actively monitor all of the companies in their portfolio, at least while they seem to be doing well.
Even smaller shareholders (most of them) are passive investors.
But directors don’t have carte blanche. They are legally bound to act in the best interests of their company.
There is no parallel duty for them to act in the best interest of shareholders.
Decisions about how the company’s money should be spent and what it should pay its workers are solely decisions for company management, under the supervision and ultimately authority of the board of directors.
Even government shareholders
But what if the company is a government-owned enterprise? What if it has only one shareholder (the government) who has appointed the entire board?
Legally speaking, that makes no difference. The board still has the authority to refuse to do what the shareholder wants.
From a practical perspective, serving on the board of a government-owned company is different from serving on the board of a non-government company.
Governance in the boards of government-owned companies is inherently politicised because the government can appoint and remove directors whenever it wants, for whatever reasons it wants, rational or otherwise.
Former Australia Post chief Christine Holgate.BRENDAN ESPOSITO/AAP
A new chief executive, Christine Holgate, transformed the business, opening up new business lines, expanding offshore, producing massive increases in revenues and profits and energising the company’s network of disillusioned franchisees.
Instead of thanking her, late last year the head of the sole shareholder, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, labelled part of her conduct “disgraceful and not on”.
She had used company money to buy expensive presents (watches) for staff who secured contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
“So appalled and shocked was I by that behaviour — any shareholder would in a company raise their outrage if they had seen that conduct by a chief executive”, the prime minister said, that the chief executive had been instructed to stand aside and, “if she doesn’t wish to do that, she can go”.
Australia Post lacked guidelines
In mainstream corporate Australia, the idea of bonuses of $20,000 for staff producing millions of dollars would only raise eyebrows if no bonus was paid.
Linking pay to performance is common, including in government-owned entities such as the Future Fund.
But apparently not if it is done via luxury watches during a pandemic.
Part of the problem is confused corporate governance. The board of Australia Post didn’t have a clear framework for rewarding employees with bonuses.
This left the chief executive to determine how to implement a suggestion from the then chair of the board that the employees be rewarded. Increases in salary or new company cars might not have raised eyebrows, not in the way watches did.
But handing out watches didn’t break any rules. If the board had put in place detailed-enough policies for bonus payments the chief executive would have had clear rules to follow.
Those rules could have been designed with the aim of not embarrassing the government.
Its chair sided with the prime minister
Without clear rules, the chairman and chief executive should have worked as a team, and might have. In her submission to the Senate inquiry, Christine Holgate says that when the watches were bought in 2018 the then chair took part in a discussion about whether to award the bonuses in the form of watches.
The subsequent chair paid greater attention to a complaint from the sole shareholder even though his legal duty was to the company rather than its owner.
The more-serious scandal involving Crown Casino demonstrates clearly the problems that can arise when board members appear to bend over backwards to assist the major shareholder rather than the company.
The old saying says “a person cannot serve two masters”. Directors’ duties are to their companies.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nathan Bartlett, Associate Professor, School of Biomedical Sciences and Pharmacy, University of Newcastle
Authorities in the United Kingdom overnight recommended people under 30 be offered an alternative COVID vaccine to the AstraZeneca/Oxford shot.
The recommendation came after the European Medicines Agency (EMA) found a “possible link” between the vaccine and blood clots. The EMA also said blood clots should be listed as a “very rare” side effect of the vaccine.
It’s important to note there’s still no conclusive evidence the vaccine is causing the clots, as so few have been reported. However, evidence there is a link is increasing, which has prompted more focused monitoring.
The benefits of getting a COVID vaccine still far outweigh the risks. I would still be encouraging everyone to be vaccinated with the AstraZeneca vaccine.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison said this morning “there’s nothing to suggest at this stage that there would be any change” to Australia’s current rollout strategy. The Therapeutic Goods Administration and the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation are currently reviewing the data and latest advice from Europe and the UK.
What’s causing these clots?
Blood clotting events linked to vaccination are being called “vaccine-induced prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia” (VIPIT).
It appears, in these instances, the body’s response to the vaccine is triggering an “off target” immune response that is attacking platelets. Limited data that is yet to be peer reviewed suggests antibodies targeting platelets cause them to become activated and trigger clotting. This autoimmune response also targets the platelets for destruction, reducing their level in the blood. So platelets are either tied up in clots or are eliminated. Both processes contribute to “thrombocytopenia” (low blood platelet count).
Like infections, vaccines trigger an immune response, so when receiving any shot that stimulates a robust immune response there’s a small but real risk your immune system will generate “off target” effects. In these rare instances, these effects can lead to autoimmunity, which is an immune response that attacks your own cells.
All vaccines and medications come with small risks
The numbers of clots reported after the AstraZeneca are very small, so we don’t exactly know how common they are. But they appear to occur at a rate between one in 25,000 and one in 500,000.
The UK’s vaccine advisory board said there were 79 cases of blood clotting issues among more than 20 million people given the AstraZeneca vaccine. That’s a chance of about 0.0004%, or one in 250,000.
Researchers haven’t yet identified any specific risk factors so far for the development of blood clots following COVID vaccination. We need to understand as quickly as possible what these are if indeed a causal link is established.
Some have suggested there could be a link with women taking the contraceptive pill having a higher risk of blood clots after receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine. But there’s no evidence for this at all. As far as I know, information on whether women receiving the vaccine are taking the contraceptive pill isn’t captured. Perhaps it’s something to consider going forward.
Young people don’t appear to be at particularly higher risk of blood clots linked to the vaccine. The publicised cases of blood clots have occurred in mostly women under 60 years of age.
Australia shouldn’t follow the UK’s new recommendation
One reason the UK is able to advise younger people to receive other vaccines is because it has other vaccine options, including the Pfizer and Moderna shots. Offering the under 30s an alternative vaccine isn’t really going to hinder the rollout, which is going very well in the UK.
But this isn’t the case in Australia. The AstraZeneca shot is the only one we have guaranteed supply of, given CSL is producing it in Melbourne.
It’s important to remember the AstraZeneca vaccine is a very safe and effective vaccine. It’s also easier to store and distribute than the Pfizer vaccine.
The priority is vaccinating as many people as possible and quickly
It’s important to note we’re in uncharted territory. This is the first time in modern history we’ve been in a situation where we’ve needed to roll out a vaccine to deal with a pandemic.
We’re also using new vaccine technologies that we’ve had to expedite to try and get on top of this virus as soon as possible. These new technologies, including AstraZeneca’s, have never been tested at this immense scale until now.
There are a lot of unknowns, but certainly the scale in which were doing this means we’re going to see very rare adverse events linked to these vaccines.
At this stage the priority is still to vaccinate as many people as possible, as quickly as possible.
My primary concern is ongoing high levels of transmission across the world. The more cases there are, and longer we delay vaccinating people, the higher the likelihood is of new variants of the virus emerging.
Even though we have very low COVID-19 case numbers in Australia currently, we’ve seen regular outbreaks stemming from hotel quarantine. We can’t predict what’s going to happen in the future. The longer the virus is waiting at our doorstep, the greater the risk we’ll have another outbreak and end up in lockdown and much worse — and nobody wants that.
The federal government has asked Australia’s medical and vaccine regulators to urgently consider the European Medicines Agency’s finding of a possible link between the Oxford/AstraZeneca COVID vaccine and rare blood clots.
This follows reports over recent weeks of blood clots in a small number of people around the world who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine, including one man who was hospitalised in Melbourne.
Scientists have termed the condition “vaccine induced prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia” (VIPIT). But what does this actually mean, how significant is the risk, and what are the implications for Australia’s vaccine rollout — which is currently relying predominantly on the AstraZeneca jab?
A paucity of platelets
As indicated by its name, VIPIT is a form of something called thrombocytopenia.
Thrombocytopenia is a condition whereby the numbers of thrombocytes (very small blood particles, or platelets) are markedly reduced. Platelets form clots to stop bleeding, so when you don’t have enough platelets in your blood, your body can’t form clots. This can lead to excessive bleeding.
The symptoms of VIPIT can include severe headaches, abdominal pain, seizures and visual changes. These are similar to the symptoms of thrombocytopenia unrelated to the vaccine.
In rare cases of thrombocytopenia, clots can develop in the vessels draining blood from the brain. The European Medicines Agency said it had received reports of 169 cases of brain blood clots in people who had been vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot.
In severe cases, thrombocytopenia can be fatal. There have been deaths from blood clots reportedly associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine, including 19 in the United Kingdom.
So how could this vaccine potentially cause thrombocytopenia? The “prothrombotic immune” part of the name denotes it’s caused by an over-activation of the immune system, which gives us a clue.
Platelets and COVID-19
The AstraZeneca vaccine prompts cells to make a specific part of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), called the spike protein, which the virus uses to attach to cells when infecting us.
The vaccine stimulates our immune system to generate antibodies against the spike protein, which then primes the body to mount an immune response against SARS-CoV-2, if it encounters the virus in the future.
But in some people, the AstraZeneca vaccine seems to produce antibodies that react with platelets, making them stick together, leading the blood to clot. This in turn reduces circulating platelet numbers, and hence the thrombocytopenia.
These antibodies are similar to those found in some people on a blood thinning drug called heparin. The immune response to heparin generates antibodies that bind to platelets. This can lead to blood clots in some people, called heparin induced thrombocytopenia. As many as one in 20 patients receiving heparin develop thrombocytopenia.
Keeping in mind we’re yet to establish cause and effect, it’s a possibility that the biological mechanism by which we believe heparin leads to thrombocytopenia could be the same biological mechanism by which the AstraZeneca vaccine might.
The AstraZeneca vaccine is currently rolling out in Australia.James Ross/AAP
How common is it?
Naturally occurring thrombocytopenia affects about one in 30,000 adults a year in the United States.
As for the suspected vaccine-induced kind, according to data collated by the Thrombosis and Haemostasis Society of Australia and New Zealand, VIPIT is as rare as one in 500,000 people. But the society notes the data are incomplete.
Different countries have reported different rates. Norway, for example, has so far reported one in 25,000 vaccinated adults under the age of 65 have experienced low platelet counts, bleeding, and widespread thromboses (blood clots).
Of course, the possibility that some of these cases of thrombocytopenia may have occurred regardless of the vaccine makes understanding vaccine-induced cases more complicated. But taken together, thrombocytopenia appears to be more common in the general population than among those who have been vaccinated.
As we continue to vaccinate the world, it’s likely small subsets of people will continue to experience this complication. Whether we can establish a causal link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and thrombocytopenia is subject to continued investigation.
Amid this ongoing investigation, some countries, such as Norway, have paused their rollouts of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Others have restricted use of the vaccine in certain groups, like Canada, which is using it only for adults older than 55, who may have higher risks from COVID and lower risk of blood clots. Meanwhile, the UK has pledged to make other vaccine options available for younger people.
We will wait to see how the Australian experts respond. But for the general adult population, we agree with the current guidance from bodies including the European Medicines Agency and the World Health Organization that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine outweigh the risks.
That said, it’s not unreasonable to be cautious. You should monitor for these symptoms up to 28 days after receiving the jab:
breathlessness
pain in the chest or stomach
swelling or coldness in the leg
severe or worsening headache
blurred vision
persistent bleeding
multiple small bruises, reddish or purplish spots, or blood blisters under the skin.
If you’re experiencing any of these symptoms and you’re concerned, seek medical advice.
