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

Michelle Grattan discusses the week in politics with University of Canberra Assistant Professor Caroline Fisher.

This week the pair discuss the latest in a growing list of allegations concerning sexual misconduct in Parliament House, and Scott Morrison’s response – a mea culpa, the possibility of quotas for women in the Liberal party, and a botched press conference. Also discussed is the likelihood of a cabinet reshuffle in light of the separate crisis’ involving Christian Porter and Linda Reynolds.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on Scott Morrison’s response to the culture of Parliament House – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-scott-morrisons-response-to-the-culture-of-parliament-house-157969

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cheryl Desha, Associate Professor, School of Engineering and Built Environment, and Director, Engagement (Industry), Griffith University

Pretty soon, many more Australians are going to be composting their food waste. The Victorian government kicks off its four-bin system from this year, and the federal government is considering a plan to turn kitchen scraps into fertiliser for farmers.

But knowing exactly what to put in your compost bin can be tricky – and views differ on whether you should add items such as meat and citrus.

Composting is fairly simple, but it’s important to get it right. Otherwise, your compost mix may be too slimy or smelly, or attract vermin.

We are experts in food resilience and sustainability, and have prepared this “dos and don’ts” guide to get you on your way.

Your own composting system

Composting is a way of doing what happens in nature, where raw organic materials are converted to soft and spongy soil-like grains. These help soil retain water and make nutrients available to plants.

In fact, compost is so valuable for your garden, it’s often referred to as “black gold”.

For those of you composting at home, here’s how to make sure the system delivers what you need for your home gardening projects.

Dos:

• use a couple of bottomless bins so when one is full you can start on the other, in a shady spot

• have a good mix of “browns” (two parts) and “greens” (one part). Combine brown materials (hay, straw, sawdust, woodchips, leaves, weeds that have not gone to seed) with food scraps and other materials (fruit and vegetable peels and rinds, tea bags, coffee grounds, eggshells), and some types of animal manure (chicken, cow, horse)

• let the temperature climb. Heat in the centre of your compost pile is a good sign, as the microbes are breaking down what you’ve put in. As the compost matures it cools, creating a great environment for worms and other microbes to finish off the process

• make sure your coffee grounds and tea bags can break down, so remove the bag before you add it to the compost pile. Moist tea leaves can help your pile break down faster. Citrus fruit (lemons, oranges), spicy peppers, onion and garlic are fine, just don’t add them to your worm farm; the worms will suffer under the acidic conditions produced when these items break down

• get creative with natural “brown” materials – as long as there is no plastic mixed in, throw it in. This includes anything from cereal boxes to cotton balls, wine corks, fireplace ashes, and even human hair and pet fur.

Read more: We’ve had a taste of disrupted food supplies – here are 5 ways we can avoid a repeat

Don’ts:

• don’t let your compost bin be a feast for local rodents such as rats. Bury the base slightly into the ground, lining the bin with wire mesh and keeping it covered. Avoid adding meat scraps, cooking fats and oils, milk products and bones, which will attract vermin

• don’t let your compost get stinky or slimy – that means it’s too wet. Slimy compost means you need to add more “brown” materials. You can also speed things along by having a dig through the heap every week or so, or adding extra bits and pieces at various stages (chook poo, crushed rock and lime) to help it all happen faster

• don’t let nasty chemicals and germs get into your compost. This includes things like treated wood waste, pet waste (if they take medication or eat meat) and sick plants. Home compost bins are limited in what they can process. It is a good idea to wear gloves as an extra safety measure.

Council compost collection

Local councils are increasingly offering food waste collection programs, sometimes along with garden green waste. In such cases, these materials are processed at large scale composting sites

In Victoria, a four-bin waste and recycling system will be rolled out in partnership with councils. Most households will be using this system by 2030.

Gold Coast City Council City recently diverted 553 tonnes of food waste from landfill during a one-year trial. The program helps address home composting space challenges for the region’s many apartment and high-rise dwellers.

If your council offers food waste collection, make sure you follow their particular “dos and don’ts” advice. Depending where you live, it may differ slightly to ours.

Read more: Fertile ground: what you need to know about soil to keep your garden healthy

To bag, or not to bag?

Working out how to bag up your food scraps – whether for your home bin or council collection – can be confusing. Check your local instructions for kerbside collection to make sure your food waste is bagged in the right way.

You can try putting “home compostable” bags in your own compost bin, experimenting with your bin temperature to achieve the best outcome. Compostable plastic“ is designed to break down back into nutrients, but most still need managed, high-heat conditions to activate this process.

Don’t be tricked by “degradable” bags – these are likely to be made of plastic and just break into millions of tiny pieces. Also, as others have written, some “biodegradable” plastics made of plant-based materials might not be better for the environment, and they can take just as long to degrade as traditional plastics.

The benefits of composting

Making compost at home doesn’t just lighten our rubbish bin and help our gardens. It also helps tackle climate change.

Each year in Australia, food waste rotting in landfill creates methane equivalent to around 6.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. If global food waste were a country, it would be the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, behind the United States and China.

So clearly, there are many great reasons to compost. And by following a few simple rules, you too can create your own “black gold”.

– ref. What can go in the compost bin? Some tips to help your garden and keep away the pests – https://theconversation.com/what-can-go-in-the-compost-bin-some-tips-to-help-your-garden-and-keep-away-the-pests-156342

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karen Becker, Professor of Management, University of the Sunshine Coast

Since the beginning of the Afghanistan War in 2001, 41 Australian military personnel have been killed in combat, while more than 600 veterans have killed themselves.

This week the House of Representatives affirmed a resolution from the Senate calling on the Morrison government to establish a royal commission into the suicide rate among both current and former military personnel.

Calling a royal commission would certainly signal this is an issue of national concern, but whether it can achieve what previous inquiries have not is a real question.

Veteran suicides (and associated mental health issues) have been investigated by the Australian Defence Force, Department of Defence and Department of Veteran Affairs, as well as a Senate select committee, the Productivity Commission and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Yet the suicide rate among veterans appears to be rising.

The complexity of the problem is hinted at by the big difference between rates for those serving and veterans. As the resolution passed by parliament notes, the rate among serving military is less than half that of the general population, while among veterans it is now nearly double.

There are obvious causes, such as the trauma of past battlefield experiences. But there are more nuanced drivers, to do with the very nature of military life, a culture developed over hundreds (indeed thousands) of years to create effective fighting forces, and the difficulties many experience in leaving this life.

Read more: One veteran on average dies by suicide every 2 weeks. This is what a royal commission needs to look at

Anxious, misunderstood, alone

The challenge of transitioning from military to civilian life is highlighted by our research involving interviews with 31 men and women who had recently left military service.

They came from all three services (navy, army, air force). Twenty-five were men, six women. Their ages ranged from 25 to 56, with their length of service ranging from five to 37 years (16 years was the average).

Mental health was not our focus. In fact, we chose subjects without significant physical or psychological impairment due to their service. But almost every one told us about the culture shock of leaving military life, finding a new job and working in the civilian world.

They spoke of feeling anxious and frustrated; of not understanding others’ motives and behaviours, and of feeling misunderstood; of struggling to translate their military service to civilian jobs; of being cut off from their previous support networks; and of feeling, at times, very alone.

If this is the experience even of healthy, well-adjusted veterans, it seems hardly surprising those with mental health issues could be pushed to breaking point.

It’s not just another job

For those not personally connected to the military or a veteran, it can be easy to underestimate just how different military life is, and much of a culture shock leaving that life can be. It’s not just like changing jobs.

Most join the military straight out of school. They enter a highly regimented world where almost every aspect of their life is tightly controlled. Their training is designed to encourage thinking and acting alike. It emphasises values such as loyalty, courage, commitment to the collective good, and discipline. Military effectiveness relies on these attributes.

As the suicide statistics suggest, those who make it through basic training can adapt well to the life. The challenge comes when it is time to leave this culture behind.

One of our subjects likened it to “peeling an onion”. It starts with losing the uniform and expectations of presentation. But it eventually requires changing some deeply held beliefs, values and behaviours that may not fit in civilian life. They work at a rapid pace, focus on a clear and shared mission, don’t stop till the job is done and always put the team first. These are not necessarily things they find in a civilian workplace.

Losing comrades

Making this change is more complex and stressful than most imagine. In the words of one veteran, who served in the navy for five years:

“I’ve had to learn how to wind back, because warship mentality does not work in a civilian workplace.”

Many mentioned a sense of a loss of identity – military work wasn’t what they did, it was who they were. As another who served in the navy for 26 years, explained:

“All your friends are in uniform […] Something’s lost. It’s like you’re not in the club.”

Even participants who found jobs in organisations with explicit programs to support veterans still reported feeling stress and unease as they adapted to civilian work.

Five veterans we spoke to mentioned, unprompted, that they knew veterans who had killed themselves and understood how those individuals had reached that point.

So if the struggle is real for those in our study who had made it into employment, imagine what it is like for those who struggle to find work or those have been diagnosed with a mental illness trying to cope with integration into a world that is foreign to them and who are unlikely to easily find a new path into employment.

We are not advocating for any particular mechanism to inquire into veteran suicide. But we are adamant there must be an increased focus on the struggle veterans face when transitioning to a civilian world.

– ref. For many military veterans, leaving the force is the biggest battle – https://theconversation.com/for-many-military-veterans-leaving-the-force-is-the-biggest-battle-157774

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rick Sarre, Emeritus Professor of Law and Criminal Justice, University of South Australia

Criminology is the study of individual and social factors associated with crime and the people who perpetrate it. One of the discipline’s well-established truths is that men commit violent and sexual offences at far higher rates than women.

Men are also the most likely victims of physical violence across the board, but women are far more likely than men to be victims of sexual, familial and domestic violence.

Rates of imprisonment give us tangible evidence of this gender imbalance.

Across Australia, only about 8% of prisoners are women. While prison population figures provide only a very rough guide to criminal behaviour, we can safely assert that men perpetrate the vast majority of criminal conduct, and certainly violent conduct.

What does the research tell us about the patterns behind this alarming fact?

In the early days of criminological enquiry, much attention was given to the Y chromosome – the determinant of male sex organs. This line of research, referred to broadly as biological positivism, gave rise to explanations that “men can’t help themselves”. Fortunately, these theorists hold very little sway in criminological circles today.

Read more: ‘Cultural misogyny’ and why men’s aggression to women is so often expressed through sex

More contemporary attention is given to factors associated with the societies in which we live.

Social learning theory posits that men are more likely than women to associate with antisocial peers.

Other scholars are interested in the way in which key life experiences influence the propensity to commit crime. Known as developmental and life course criminology, it suggests the causes of crime are a result of a linking of individual characteristics, such as impulsiveness, with a person’s environmental factors such as their family, schooling, religion, neighbourhood and the way they were parented, including any exposure to neglect and maltreatment. Renowned criminologist David Farrington has suggested these factors play out differently for males and females.

Into the sociological frame, too, comes strain theory, which proposes that difficult circumstances or life stresses can produce anger and frustration that may lead to violence. The gender divide is explained by the evidence that men are likely to react violently to such strains. Women, according to this theory, are more likely to internalise their responses.

Edgework theory pursues the idea that men are more likely than women to engage in risk-taking behaviour, even to the edge of acceptable conduct. Men in the criminal justice system are best described, on this view, as “risky thrill-seekers” while women caught up in the same system are more likely to be described as “at risk”.

The science of psychology, too, plays an important role here. Psychological studies suggest gender role identification − internalised characteristics culturally regarded as appropriate behaviour for men and women − rather than gender itself is crucial to the experience of anger, its expression and control.

How are these gender divides created and shaped? Criminologists such as Ngaire Naffine have offered the view that there has always been an entrenched belief in the “natural” order of things, which associates masculinity with dominance and status. In this view, individuals construct their beliefs according to their class, ethnicity and sexuality, but the result is always a reinforcement of dominant patterns of masculinity. One can observe these patterns in competition for status, bravado among peers, the drive for power and control, shamelessness, and a lack of concern for others.

Women, by contrast, are less likely to display these traits because society (including the criminal justice system) has positioned them as needing greater protection, with consequent patronising benevolence.

In summary, men disproportionately exhibit far more anti-social behaviour than women. When it comes to sexual crimes, men are far more likely to commit them, and women are far more likely to be the victims. The easy cultural dismissal that “boys will be boys” simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny and is actively doing damage.

So how best can we respond to the problem of violence perpetrated by men?

Law reform is necessary to ensure the practice of law is in line with prevailing social norms and priorities. This has certainly not always been the case. For example, until the 1970s there was no such thing, legally, as rape in marriage. Even in the first iteration of reform to the law, a prosecution could only proceed if there was evidence of actual bodily harm to the victim.

Read more: Where do we go from here with the allegations about Christian Porter?

There have been other pleasing law reforms too. Today, in many jurisdictions, police provide victim assistance services, prosecution counsel are trained in handling traumatised clients, limits have been placed on cross-examination practices, and directions to juries do not carry the same cautions regarding corroborative evidence that were standard a decade ago.

Legal change is necessary, but it is not enough. For the most part, the law comes in only after the damage has been done.

Of greater importance in the drive for change is the value that societies must place on teaching all men to respect and value the worth of all people, regardless of gender, race, or creed. When that is socially learned, and flawed expectations of masculinity are put to one side, men will be less likely to engage in risky behaviours and internalise gendered expectations. They will also be more likely to draw on pro-social coping mechanisms when under stress, and more likely to reject the notion that masculinity must identify with power, control, shamelessness and independence.

Creating conditions beyond individual responses is important too. Mass movements and marches like the ones witnessed this month have provided great impetus to the social and political conditions required for positive change.

– ref. Men are more likely to commit violent crimes. Why is this so and how do we change it? – https://theconversation.com/men-are-more-likely-to-commit-violent-crimes-why-is-this-so-and-how-do-we-change-it-157331

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ran Porat, Affiliate Researcher, The Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation, Monash University

At the end of another round of elections, the fourth in just two years, Israel still cannot break away from debilitating political stalemate.

This means there will now be weeks of daunting coalition negotiations between parties chained to pre-election promises not to share a government with a particular party or prime minister – specifically, Israel’s longest-serving leader, Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu.

Depressingly for Israelis, election number five is lurking in the shadows before the end of 2021.

The pro- and no-Bibi camps

This campaign seemed like another referendum on Netanyahu. Currently on trial for corruption, the PM has been facing months of mass demonstrations against him.

With his back to the wall, Netanyahu was able to sustain his popularity within his base by personally taking credit for Israel’s world-leading coronavirus vaccine rollout, as well as the diplomatic achievement of forging ties with several Arab and Muslim states in the “Abraham Accords”.

The coalition of right-wing and religious parties supporting the PM has captured 52 seats of the Knesset’s (parliament) 120 seats in this week’s election, short of the 61 seats needed to form a government.

With 30 seats, Netanyahu’s Likud party retains its status as the biggest in Israel. Problematically, a small but essential element of this bloc is the extreme-right racist party Otzma Yehudit (“Jewish power”) and the anti-LGBTQI faction Noam.

Naftali Bennett, the leader of the national religious party Yamina (“Rightwards”), refused to commit to support or reject Netanyahu. However, he effectively tied himself to the PM when he promised not to join a government headed by the centrist politician Yair Lapid, who leads the anti-Bibi bloc.

The anti-Netanyahu camp secured 57 seats — not enough to dethrone the PM. Moreover, no single party leader is considered a possible challenger to Netanyahu, and the parties in this group profoundly advocate contradictory policies.

This bloc includes the second-largest party in the Knesset, Yesh Atid (“There is a future”), led by Lapid, with 17 seats. There are myriad other parties on the political right, left and centre in this group, each with between six and eight seats apiece.

Read more: Stark choice for Israel as voters head to polls for fourth time in two years

Israeli Arabs’ political power

The biggest story of the election is the paradoxical shift in the political power of Israeli Arabs, who may become the grain of rice that could tip the scales.

On the one hand, internal divisions and a low voter turnout among Arab Israelis resulted in fewer seats being won by Arab-led parties in the Knesset. The main culprit for this downturn is the leader of the Islamic conservative United Arab List Ra’am party, Mansour Abbas, who gambled on running independently from the Joint List of Arab parties. As a result, the Joint List shrank to six seats, from 15.

Indirect Arab representation came in the form of Zionist parties such as Labor and Meretz, who introduced Arab candidates in their lists in hope of capturing Arab voters.

More dramatically, the Ra’am party, which captured four seats, transformed almost overnight the political status of Arabs in Israel from unwanted to a coveted partner, wooed by both blocs.

Read more: Israel election: why is Palestine no longer an important campaign issue?

The party is now potentially a “kingmaker” that can determine the nature of Israel’s next government. Its agenda is focused on issues important to Arab Israelis, such as crime, violence and funding shortages, instead of, for example, the Palestinian question.

Abbas said he is open to joining a Zionist government or at least supporting it from the outside, even with Netanyahu as PM, if his demands for legal changes and extra funding for Arab municipalities are met.

However, Abbas seems closer to the anti-Bibi bloc, as Ra’am and the extreme-right Otzma Yehudit mutually disqualify each other as coalition partners.

No change in international policy

Domestically, Israelis want a government that will address mounting social tensions, for example, between secular and ultra-orthodox Jews, exacerbated over the disregard among some of the latter for the government’s coronavirus guidelines.

Internationally, many yearn for a stable government in Jerusalem after two years of uncertainty. US President Joe Biden may prefer someone other than Netanyahu, given the animosity between President Barack Obama and Netanyahu when Biden was vice president.

Yet, the special alliance between the US and Israel remains strong, despite any personal antagonism.

The Palestinians expressed indifference after the election and little hope for a change in Israel’s policy towards them.

They are facing their own parliamentary and presidential elections this year, which could affect the reign of 86-year-old Mahmoud Abbas, the longtime president. These elections may embolden or empower Abbas’ main opposition, Hamas, which controls the Gaza Strip and is considered a terrorist organisation by Israel and many Western countries.

Read more: Is it too soon to herald the ‘dawn of a new Middle East’? It all depends what the Saudis do next

The outcome of another key Middle Eastern election, Iran’s vote in June, seems predetermined. The next Iranian president will likely be a hardline ideologue affiliated with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Tehran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons will continue to dominate the dynamics of the region.

Given all this, the aggressive Israeli policy set by Netanyahu of promising not to allow Iranian nuclear weapons and curbing their influence across the Middle East will continue, no matter who is the leader in Jerusalem.

Such a position vis-à-vis Tehran will also be positively welcomed by the Persian Gulf kingdoms, led by Iran’s arch-nemesis, Saudi Arabia. This will likely contribute to the tacit and open ties these countries have been forging with Israel.

– ref. Israel elections: Netanyahu may hold on to power, but political paralysis will remain – https://theconversation.com/israel-elections-netanyahu-may-hold-on-to-power-but-political-paralysis-will-remain-157585

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Enderwick, Professor of International Business, Auckland University of Technology

As recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic continues, there are strong grounds for believing the rejuvenated global economy will be completely unlike what went before.

The liberal economic order that enabled rapid growth of trade, investment, technologies and incomes until the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008 shows signs of breakdown.

Many developed economies are now experiencing the rise of populist political movements. There is a growing disregard for the rule of law and an undermining of key global institutions, including the World Trade Organisation.

The level playing field of a rules-based system is being challenged by the rule of rulers. The challenge for businesses in New Zealand is how best to adapt to cope with this new global economy.

The changing face of globalisation

Emerging economies are reshaping globalisation. For example, China and Russia are pursuing forms of state capitalism characterised by close government-business relations. By providing subsidised finance or a dominant domestic market share they distort competitive advantage in world markets.

Read more: A year on from New Zealand’s big lockdown the ‘team of 5 million’ needs a new story

The broader context for these developments is China’s challenge to the long-held global economic leadership of the United States. That growing tension is manifested in a number of ways:

The result is widening global chasms between liberalism and statism, democracy and authoritarianism, and rules-based versus unregulated governance.

A challenge for business

For business, these developments mean a more challenging operating environment, one that is more complex, uncertain and ambiguous. Growing fragmentation will certainly add to the costs of cross-border business, with arbitrary costs, regulations and distortions affecting resource movements.

More specifically, businesses will need to rethink some fundamental tenets.

Greater geopolitical awareness will be needed. Trade, investment and technology management decisions will have to give greater weight to political and regulatory considerations.

Commitment to one side of a technological, ideological or regulatory division might mean exclusion or marginalisation from the other.

The strategic focus of a business will evolve from simply cost or profit to evolutionary fitness. Businesses will need to adapt to differing constraints on the movement and protection of personnel, technology and knowledge.

Governments will need to rethink the scale and forms of support they offer their local businesses. Subsidies, protection, competition policy and industrial policy will all require review in the face of state capitalism.

The risk of trade wars

There are early signs close to home of what this new environment might look like.

When Australia called for an inquiry into China’s handling of the pandemic it faced tariffs on wine and barley. It has also faced restrictions on the export of coal, lobsters, timber, red meat and cotton to China.

Australia criticised China’s emerging “wolf warrior” diplomacy and surprised Chinese authorities by rejecting a proposed takeover of Australia’s Lion Dairy by China’s Mengniu Dairy.

In the same way, New Zealand was rebuked by China for supporting Taiwan’s re-admission to the World Health Organisation’s annual global health assembly.

These experiences highlight the growing interdependency of economic and political goals and the increased uncertainty businesses will face.

The future plan for business

These challenges will be particularly vexatious for New Zealand’s economy. It is heavily dependent on trade and tourism and has increasingly embraced the Asian regional economy since the 1970s.

New Zealand has globally diverse commitments and historical obligations. These include defence with the United States, intelligence with the Five Eyes alliance, migration with the Pacific and Europe (and more recently Asia), and economic prosperity, increasingly with Asia.

Read more: Latest NZ unemployment figure may not give a true picture of the number of people out of work

Our largest businesses pride themselves on their global reach but this may become more of a hindrance than an advantage.

Our leading corporates — such as Fonterra, Zespri and Lion Nathan — have all faced difficulties in China in the recent past. The future challenges appear even more complex.

New Zealand businesses need to plan for a post-COVID recovery characterised not just by more home workers, but by new strategic questions that are just emerging. Here are just a few:

• do you understand the growing politicisation of economic activity?

• do you have a government that supports you, or is the potential for collateral damage high?

• what sorts of networks and partnerships do you need to develop for success in this new environment?

• in what ways can legitimacy be gained and preserved in a fractured world?

There are no doubt other questions that need asking (and answering), but now is the time for businesses to start planning for the future or risk being left behind.

– ref. New Zealand businesses must adapt to a fragmented post-COVID global economy – https://theconversation.com/new-zealand-businesses-must-adapt-to-a-fragmented-post-covid-global-economy-156849

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Chappell, Scientia Professor, UNSW

In the wake of yet another week of disgusting behaviour and inadequate responses rolling out of federal parliament, it is abundantly clear Prime Minister Scott Morrison is clueless about how to fix it.

He is not the only one, judging by the equally superficial responses of many politicians confronted with evidence of systemic violence against women at the heart of Australian politics.

So what is the problem? And how might we address it?

I suggest Australia’s political class need to recognise three problems.

1) They must understand this is not just a problem about men behaving badly or about women being victims of this behaviour. Rather, it is a problem arising from the operation of what I call a “gendered logic of appropriateness”. By this I mean there are deeply embedded norms of behaviour – in this case masculine norms – that become the accepted ways of acting within an organisation.

We see a gendered logic of appropriateness in the Australian parliament reflected in its bullying culture, its adversarial debates and name calling. This is disguised as “politics as usual” and, unlike in other workplaces, it is protected by parliamentary privilege.

Given the revelations of the past month, it is now undeniable that this logic also includes norms of behaviour that support the mistreatment of women and, no doubt, some men. Such behaviour exists on a continuum from catcalls to verbal abuse to sexual harassment and abuse.

Men who perform such behaviour do so with impunity. As this is about gender norms, women can be perpetrators too – belittling other women or giving cover to men who are abusive.

Read more: Memo Liberal women: if you really want to confront misogyny in your party, you need to fix the policies

2) They must acknowledge the steep, deeply entrenched and gendered asymmetric power relations that structure the parliamentary arena. It is a deeply hierachical place, and men dominate the upper echelons.

These asymmetries exist at every level – within cabinet, and between it and backbenches, between government members and opposition, among ministerial offices and between them and bureaucratic agencies, between ministerial and parliamentary operational staff, and parliamentarians and the media.

3) They must recognise the narrow cohort from which these men are drawn. They are primarily white, university-educated and from private schools, middle-class men. Aside from their political differences, they share most other things in common.

One key problem is that these men have worked their way through relatively similar political party structures – which have foundations in immature, winner-takes-all, university politics. In is in these political parties that women and other marginalised groups first struggle to fit to the gendered status quo that dominates our political party system. Very often, they flee from it.

British feminist scholar Joni Lovenduski has noted in the UK political parties have been the “main distributors” of traditional masculinity in politics. In Australia, we appear to have perfectly mimicked this practice.

So now for the big question: what is to be done?

The prime minister’s announcement of a range of “training” initiatives in response to recent allegations of sexual abuse within Parliament House demonstrates his lack of understanding of the deep structural changes that are required to address it. Training programs will be nowhere near enough.

To achieve change will require action to disrupt the gender status quo on three levels.

1) New rules are required to outlaw derogatory speech, verbal and physical acts of bullying and sexual harassment and abuse. Standard human resources policies must also apply to all parliamentary workers. Independent complaint-based mechanisms, compensation and reparation measures must be made available for those experiencing sexual abuse.

The Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s investigation has the scope to set these new rules. But it is up to political leaders to ensure these rules are enforced, through sanctions, and applied consistently. Unless and until impunity is addressed, the existing parliamentary gender logic will remain in place.

2) Power is a feature of politics. It is impossible to rid parliament of its power dimensions, but we need new systems to report its abuse. These systems should build on human rights principles that acknowledge the rights of all people to privacy, to fully and equally participate in political life and to be free from violence.

Practically, this means developing strong policies and accountability practices not only within parliament itself, but within political parties, which distribute masculine gender norms. Recognition of gender, race and other forms of equality is essential within these parties, including within the junior ranks, where our future political leaders are incubated.

The ALP has started this process with its recent policy on sexual harassment but it needs to go much further to address more serious forms of abuse. The Liberal Party has developed a national code of conduct, but with vague enforcement mechanisms and sanctions left up to state branches.

3) There is an urgent need to increase diversity within parliament to better represent the wider Australian community and disrupt the status quo. The ALP has shown the value of gender quotas for diversifying its ranks.

Given recent events, Liberal and National members’ application of a “merit” argument to defend against quotas has been well and truly debunked.

Read more: View from The Hill: Scott Morrison becomes tangled in his own spider web

Perhaps the most rational path forward is to introduce a system of parliamentary quotas. A good place to start is to follow the now accepted practice in many law firms that have 40:40:20 recruitment practices appointing 40% women, 40% men and leaving 20% for either sex and non-binary employees.

We could transform the composition of parliament within one election by designing a system focused not on fixing the under-representation of women, but on fixing the over-representation of men by limiting the number of seats available to them.

After all, bad times call for bold measures.

– ref. Bad times call for bold measures: 3 ways to fix the appalling treatment of women in our national parliament – https://theconversation.com/bad-times-call-for-bold-measures-3-ways-to-fix-the-appalling-treatment-of-women-in-our-national-parliament-157683

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katrina Moss, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in maternal and child health, The University of Queensland

New South Wales and Queensland are in the grip of a major flood crisis. Homes have been swept away, businesses inundated, and thousands evacuated.

Natural disasters like this are devastating, and in the rescue and recovery efforts it’s important to protect a particularly vulnerable group: pregnant mothers and their unborn babies.

When the floods hit Queensland in January 2011, we were a part of a research team that tracked the health and well-being of pregnant mothers. We also investigated the impact of this prenatal stress on the development of their babies until six years of age.

We found higher prenatal stress was associated with a range of negative impacts among the children as they grew up.

But these aren’t inevitable, and ensuring pregnant women get appropriate support during and after a disaster can make a big difference. Choosing the right coping strategies can also help.

Read more: Floods leave a legacy of mental health problems — and disadvantaged people are often hardest hit

So what is flood stress, and what are the effects on mothers and babies?

There are two main types of flood stress. Objective stress is what happens to you: your house is flooded, your possessions are damaged or lost, you have to evacuate, you or your loved ones are injured or in peril.

Subjective stress is your emotional reaction: shock, distress, anger, anxiety, depression.

In our study, mothers who experienced more objective stress reported more immediate subjective stress, which led to longer-term depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress.

This prenatal stress also affected children. Babies of stressed mothers were more likely to have a difficult temperament and lower social and problem-solving skills.

As toddlers, they were more likely to have poorer cognitive development, and poorer motor development including both fine (such as drawing) and gross (such as crawling) skills. They also had a higher likelihood of behaviour, sleep and interpersonal problems.

As preschoolers, they were more likely to have anxiety symptoms and poorer motor development.

It seems strange to think that what a pregnant mother feels could affect her baby, but stress feelings are underpinned by stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. These hormones can change the way the placenta works.

They can also cross the placenta and disrupt the unborn baby’s developing stress regulation system, which affects their reactions to stressful events and situations after they’re born. What happens during pregnancy lays the foundation for health and development across the life course, which is why the consequences of prenatal stress can last for so long.

What can we do about it?

This all sounds very serious, but negative consequences aren’t inevitable. Our research team found a range of strategies can reduce harm and protect the health of mothers and babies.

Continuity of maternity care during pregnancy matters. At a minimum this means keeping your antenatal appointments, and telling your health-care professional you’ve been affected by the floods.

Even better, find a hospital that offers midwifery group care, where the same midwife cares for you throughout pregnancy, birth and postpartum. Compared to standard care, where you see a different midwife at each appointment, flood-affected mothers in our midwifery group care program had lower depression and anxiety and their baby’s early development was better.

It’s also important for pregnant mothers to keep their diet consistent, even though this can be very difficult in a flood crisis when usual food and eating patterns can be disrupted. Eating less dairy, more sweets, skipping meals or stopping multivitamins was linked with differences in infant head circumference, suggesting diet changes affect the way the developing baby grows.

Here’s how you can cope

Choosing the right coping strategy for the situation can also help.

Emotion-focused strategies reduce distress in situations you can’t control, and are the best strategies during a flood crisis. These include positive reframing, acceptance, humour and emotional support.

Problem-focused strategies are great for situations where your actions can solve the problem. These might help during the recovery, and include planning, taking action, and getting help or advice.

Dysfunctional coping strategies can add to your stress in the long-term, including venting, distraction, avoiding and self-blame. It’s OK to vent occasionally — sometimes you need to get things off your chest. But once you’ve done that, activate the coping strategies that are the best match for the situation you’re in.

Keep things in perspective. In these days of a 24/7 news cycle and doomscrolling social media, we’re surrounded by distressing images. You might feel very distressed about what’s happening to others, even if the direct effects on you and your family are small.

Read more: When too much news is bad news: is the way we consume news detrimental to our health?

Limit your exposure to distressing stories and images if they start affecting your mental health. Trying to find the positives, like neighbours working together to support each other, can also help.

Seek help if mental health symptoms persist. It’s natural to feel angry, shocked, upset and anxious in the face of a natural disaster. In a month, if you’re still experiencing strong feelings that affect your daily life, talk to your GP and seek further support.

Pregnant mothers need to be supported with high quality maternal care. Health-care professionals must also regularly screen mothers for psychological distress during pregnancy and through early childhood. It’s even more important in natural disasters, where stress is long-term.

But around 20% of pregnant Australian women don’t receive this recommended screening. It needs to be an integrated part of helping communities bounce back after these devastating floods, from the initial crisis through the long recovery process.

Read more: Collective trauma is real, and could hamper Australian communities’ bushfire recovery

– ref. Pregnant mothers’ stress during floods can disadvantage their babies, but it’s not inevitable. Here’s what we can do right now – https://theconversation.com/pregnant-mothers-stress-during-floods-can-disadvantage-their-babies-but-its-not-inevitable-heres-what-we-can-do-right-now-157682

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kailah Thorn, EdCC Earth Science Museum Curator, University of Western Australia

Many of us, at some point or another, dreamed of hunting for dinosaur fossils when we grew up. Palaeontology — the study of natural history through fossils — is the scientific reality of this. It encompasses all ancient lifeforms that left their trace in the earth, from stromatolites (microbial reefs up to 3.5 billion years old) to megafauna.

Australia has great fossil diversity and a lot of ground to cover, so it’s no surprise we have numerous active field naturalists, university clubs and Facebook groups out there fossicking for local treasures.

But amateur fossil collectors often aren’t provided with basic instructions from museums or government departments, to responsibly collect fossils. This means palaeontologists generally don’t encourage amateur collecting without supervision because of the environmental, cultural and scientific sensitivity of some sites, and rarity of some fossils.

But if you’re that kid, their parent or an amateur enthusiast still keen to get out there, I’ve put together a few pointers for collecting responsibly.

Why do we need to be responsible?

From the viewpoint of career palaeontologists, amateur fossil collecting has its pros and cons.

On the one hand, Australia has a great band of citizen scientists keen to help us cover more ground, particularly as funding and field work resources are becoming more scarce.

One of the most famous amateur collectors is Mary Anning from the UK. She was the first person to bring plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs — marine reptiles from the time of the dinosaurs — to science without formal training or recognition when she was active in the early 19th century.

More recently, Museums Victoria has had successes with help from the public, such as the discovery of Miocene shark teeth (from around 25 million of years ago) in coastal limestone.

On the other hand, there are two possible negative outcomes from amateur fossil hunting.

The first is misidentification, which can lead to important specimens left collecting dust on bookshelves, placed in garden beds or broken in two during excavation.

But the situation we fear most is the commercialisation of palaeontology: putting a dollar value on scientifically irreplaceable specimens, placing them beyond the realm of museum or university acquisition budgets. For example, last year in the US, STAN the T. rex sold for US$31.8 million.

This doesn’t just hinder science, but also restricts access of really neat fossils to a handful of wealthy people, rather than a public audience.

Both of these outcomes are entirely avoidable with good science communication, and museum information officers.

So how can you become a responsible citizen palaeontologist?

Here are five things to know before you go:

1. Get permission

Make sure you have permission to be somewhere (on private or public land), and to collect. This extends to permissions from Traditional Owners on native title, pasturalists and local councils. This, however, rules out any national parks. And depending on your state, you may need a permit to collect from crown land (set aside for government or public purposes) or council land.

It’s always a good idea to check with your state museum or interest group which sites are OK for fossicking — some may be culturally, historically or scientifically sensitive.

2. Stay safe

Never attempt any field work on your own, always bring a friend. Make sure you both know basic first aid and can contact emergency services in a pinch. Anything from a rolled ankle to a snake bite needs to be planned for.

You can avoid or manage risks for most hazards by wearing suitable clothing: long pants, enclosed shoes and sunglasses to shield your eyes from rock chips. Always slip-slop-slap to prevent sunburn.

3. Equipment

The equipment you need will depend on the fossils you’re looking for and the ground they’re in. Beginners should aim for fossils in sand dunes or crumbly rock. You can use paint brushes, dustpans, and kitchen sieves to unearth all kinds of marine fossils from ancient dunes or coral reefs.

Once you get the hang of it, you can try coastal limestones and hard clays with picks and trowels. Most importantly, bring a label kit and a field notebook.

4. Leave some for the rest of us

If you hit the motherlode of Permian brachiopods and feel you don’t already have enough on your mantle, stop and think about the next generation of collectors.

Even the biggest museums show restraint in their collecting. Eventually you’ll run out of shelf space and the Permian geological record will run out of brachiopods (unlikely, but the point remains).

5. Be a citizen scientist

Identify what you’ve found, label it and do some research into it’s significance.

Keep a detailed notebook containing a record of where you found each specimen, when and who found it, and details about the rock or dirt it came from. Take plenty of photos before and after you pry it out of the earth.

Identifying your fossil

There are a number of online resources for identifying Australian fossils. A good place to start is Paleobiology Database where you can explore a map of fossil sites across Australia, from Gingin in Western Australia to Bayside, Victoria (and the rest of the world).

Get in touch with your state museum if you think you’ve found something special, or can’t quite figure out what you have once your Google search comes to a dead end. Anything that hasn’t been recorded from that location or is remarkably well preserved is worth looking into further.

Plan for demise (of you or your hobby, whichever comes first). The reason we have museums — and why they’re entrusted to look after Australia’s fossil heritage in perpetuity — is their ability to plan ahead of our lifetime.

What happens to your collection when you can no longer store it? Do you want to pass it on to a friend or family member? Will you donate it to a school, university or museum?

Write down a plan for your collection and make sure it’s always stored with adequate labels, somewhere it won’t be destroyed by time as it’s exposed to temperature, humidity, pests and minimalist family members.

Once you’re equipped with the knowledge and resources, get out there and contribute to the field and help conserve Australia’s rich palaeontological heritage.

– ref. How to hunt fossils responsibly: 5 tips from a professional palaeontologist – https://theconversation.com/how-to-hunt-fossils-responsibly-5-tips-from-a-professional-palaeontologist-156861

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katy Thomas, PhD Candidate, University of Tasmania

In recent days, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told Australians the treatment of women is not “of a scale that any government can simply change, it is something we must change as a society”.

And as a society, we are in the midst of a massive shift in this direction. From women’s rights advocate Saxon Mullins pushing for legislative change with consent laws, Australian of the Year Grace Tame fighting for sexual assault survivors to have a voice, former government staffer Brittany Higgins telling her story of alleged rape in Parliament House, to Chanel Contos launching a petition for better consent education in schools, women of Australia are demanding change.

Contos has also called on schools to expressly address issues such as slut shaming, rape culture and toxic masculinity. School-based sexuality education is crucial, but it is supplementary at best. What happens in the home is vital if we want to see real change.

Talking to children about gender equality and respectful relationships is important. But parents must also show their children what they expect from them by modelling behaviour that demonstrates their belief in the right of people of all genders to have safe, pleasurable and respectful sexual encounters.

Kids learn implicitly from parents

Parents are perfectly positioned to be front-line sexuality educators. Positive communication between parents and children greatly helps young people establish individual values and make healthy decisions. Children want to hear from them.

It is, after all, parents, not teachers, who have regular and long-term contact with children from birth onwards. Parents can influence activities and choices beyond school hours, have the benefit of knowing the needs and developmental stage of their children, and can present information in a way that aligns with their family values and circumstances.

Read more: Not as simple as ‘no means no’: what young people need to know about consent

Children take their lead from their parents. The notion humans can learn through observing others is not new. There are many examples that illuminate how children are influenced in their behaviours and attitudes by those of their parents.

For instance, children of active parents are significantly more likely to be active themselves. Being an overweight parent is a risk factor for raising an overweight child. Parents’ attitudes and modelling of behaviours around alcohol and cigarettes are associated with adolescent rates of use.

And, interestingly, children who have been exposed to a parent’s infidelity are more likely to engage in infidelity themselves.

Early adolescents (10 to 13 years) perceive pressure to conform to “typical” behaviours associated with their gender. Parents can challenge what is “typical” through role modelling.

Role modelling positive behaviours

Parents can set an example in many ways.

For instance, a son who observes his father crying and expressing his emotions will be reminded men have feelings that can be released gently.

A daughter who overhears her father say “that politician shouldn’t have interrupted her like that” learns women are entitled to take up space in a debate.

A son who observes his father enjoying the company of his female friends understands women are multi-dimensional and not only romantic objects.

Read more: Still serving guests while your male relatives relax? Everyday sexism like this hurts women’s mental health

A child who observes their mother eating cake joyfully, without a disclaimer about exercising later or “being a bit naughty”, knows women are not required to obsess about body image.

A father who responds to a misogynistic joke with “that’s bang out of line, mate”, or “can you explain why that’s funny?” shows his children he recognises gendered violence can be born of disrespect cloaked in humour.

A daughter who screams “Stop!” mid-wrestle with her father, and is heard and respected, learns there are boundaries, rights and responsibilities with physical contact and that her bodily autonomy should be, and is, respected.

Read more: Use proper names for body parts, don’t force hugs: how to protect your kids from in-person sexual abuse

If we want a society in which children learn respect for women and can, when the time is right, negotiate a sexual encounter safely and joyfully, we should consider what we model to our children. They are watching us, following our lead, and we are accountable.

For tips on how to talk about relationships and sexuality with your children at any age, see Talk Soon, Talk Often. This provides age-appropriate topics, strategies and guidance for parents.

– ref. Parents, your kids are watching you. Sex education begins at home – https://theconversation.com/parents-your-kids-are-watching-you-sex-education-begins-at-home-157502

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

What Australian politicians call carbon tariffs, the European Union labels a carbon border adjustment mechanism.

While one sounds bad (the World Trade Organisation has rules that restrict tariffs) the other sounds understandable — if the European Union is imposing a carbon tax on its own products as Australia once did, surely it is reasonable to impose it on products from overseas.

The argument is that if a German steel manufacturer has to pay a tax of, say, $77 a tonne for the carbon it emits while making the steel, an Australian manufacturer should be charged the same when its product enters the country, unless it has already paid the same tax here.

To do otherwise would give the Australian product an unfair price advantage — it would create “carbon leakage” of the kind Australian businesses used to warn about in the leadup to Australia’s carbon price.

The European Union approved the idea in principle on March 10.

The details are less than clear, in part because it is possible that carbon tariffs are not permitted under the rules of the World Trade Organisation to which European nations and most other nations belong.

WTO rules might help Australia…

The rules say taxes or “charges of any kind” can only be imposed on imported products the same way as they are domestically.

That appears to mean that they can be imposed on importers but not on producers, which isn’t quite what the European Union has in mind.

Ideally the World Trade Organisation would be able to provide guidance, but (in part because of the actions of the US Trump administration) it isn’t really in a position to do.

…if only they were enforceable

The WTO has a new director general in Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala who took office this month, but it will remain in an “induced coma” for as long as its appellate body is unable to hear disputes.

Under Trump, the US kept vetoing appointments to the appellate body until the expiration of terms of its existing members meant it no longer had a quorum.

Disputes can still be initiated by countries such as Australia, forcing consultations, but without final determinations.

Although the European Union says it wants to ensure that its adjustment mechanism complies with the WTO’s rules, it hasn’t ruled out the possibility of relying on provisions that allow exceptions.

Both sides could make a case

Exceptions are allowed for the protection of human, animal or plant life or health or the protection of an exhaustible natural resource.

The catch is these exceptions are not allowed to discriminate between countries and must not be disguised restrictions on trade.

It is arguable that an adjustment mechanism designed to protect the competitiveness of European industries will breach these provisions.

Read more: No point complaining about it, Australia will face carbon levies unless it changes course

The European Union has suggested that border adjustments will be unnecessary when the rest of the world has matched it in committing to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, so long as these commitments are back up by real actions.

But that hasn’t happened yet, and despite talk by Prime Minister Scott Morrison of his “hope” that Australia can get to net zero by 2050, Australia hasn’t made a commitment, and hasn’t backed it with tax-like instrument.

With any World Trade Organisation determination uncertain and perhaps impossible, apart from complaining about carbon tariffs or border adjustments, there may be little Australia can do.

– ref. The European Union wants to impose carbon tariffs on Australian exports. Is that legal? – https://theconversation.com/the-european-union-wants-to-impose-carbon-tariffs-on-australian-exports-is-that-legal-156946

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

Australia has navigated the COVID-19 pandemic and is now in better economic shape than most countries due to a two-pronged strategy.

First, we quickly got the virus largely under control – reflecting the reality it would have been impossible to have a properly functioning economy in the face of an out-of-control epidemic. Second, we had key economic support measures, most notably JobKeeper and JobSeeker.

But with those measures ending, and Australia’s vaccination rollout only just beginning – and proceeding at half the pace of the US, UK and other European nations – the economy is still nine to 12 months from being able to truly open up.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Morrison grapples with slow vaccine rollout, end of JobKeeper and ministerial crises

Many sectors stuck in 2020 mode

JobKeeper and JobSeeker were always designed to be transitory measures – a way to weather the crisis. Rather than ending these measures abruptly, the federal government wisely tapered them.

Reasonable minds can differ about the timing and the extent of that taper. I (and others) have criticised the federal government for doing so too quickly. It is unwise to cut back fiscal support prematurely when accommodative monetary policy – through 0.1% short-term and three-year interest rates – is doing all the work it can.

But the economy is still far from fully recovered. As we wait to achieve widespread vaccination, sectors such as hospitality, tourism, higher education and many more are stuck in 2020 mode. Restaurants and other venues are operating at reduced capacity. Domestic tourism remains dramatically reduced from pre-pandemic levels. International students cannot return to Australia while our international borders are (rightly) closed. The list goes on.

Will unemployment spike?

Next week, with the end of JobKeeper, a new phase of the fiscal-tapering experiment begins.

Economic output is still below what it was pre-pandemic. The unemployment rate has fallen (from its peak of 7.5% last July) to 5.8%, better than some expected but still way more than the 3.5%-4.0% likely required to achieve “full employment” and get wages growing again.

Australia’s unemployment rate

The big unknown is how much unemployment will spike with JobKeeper’s end. How many businesses are still relying on those wage subsidies to keep people employed?

Treasury boss Steven Kennedy told a Senate Estimates hearing this week that 100,000 to 150,000 jobs may be lost.

That is broadly consistent with estimates from the Commonwealth Bank, which reckons the loss will be about 110,000 jobs, and of Australia’s leading labour economist, Jeff Borland at the University of Melbourne, who has calculated it will be 125,000 to 250,000 jobs.

However, with 50,000 to 60,000 jobs a month having been added in recent times, Borland is also optimistic it may only take a few months to wipe out these losses.

Read more: Vital Signs: we’ll never cut unemployment to 0%, but less than 4% should be our goal

Stars must align

That may be right. We should certainly hope it is. But more than a few stars have to align for things to pan out that way.

The recent rate of jobs growth must continue, or speed up. It might do just that, but it’s unclear. The easiest jobs to replace tend to come back first. Jobs growth could well slow down because the lowest-hanging labour-market fruit have already been picked.

The movement of 150,000 or so people moving from employment to unemployment benefits will have a direct impact on spending in the economy. Although this may not be huge at the macroeconomic level, the spike in the unemployment rate could hurt consumer and business confidence. What if (to borrow a line from the prime minister) consumers and their wallets stay “under the doona”?

Vaccination roll-out now the key

The federal government won’t be reversing its decision to end JobKeeper. It may offer targeted support programs for certain sectors as a partial substitute but, if the half-price air-travel scheme is any indication of their quality and magnitude, they won’t have much effect.

Read more: Marginal advantage: a whiff of pork in the government’s great tourist ticket lottery

The best thing to do to get jobs growth up and the unemployment rate down is to accelerate the vaccine roll-out. Most Australians being vaccinated is the only way the economy will truly return to anything like that of December 2019.

That means importing more Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson jabs, putting a fire under CSL’s domestic production of AstraZeneca, and establishing mass vaccination sites as other nations have done.

While we’re at it, Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt and health department head Brendan Murphy should stop saying “it’s not a race” and “we’re not in a hurry”, and show a greater sense of urgency.

– ref. Vital Signs: the best thing for jobs now is to accelerate the vaccine roll-out – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-the-best-thing-for-jobs-now-is-to-accelerate-the-vaccine-roll-out-157773

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Angela Woollacott, Manning Clark Professor of History, Australian National University

Rage and roar are two words commonly used to describe the events of Monday 15 March, when tens of thousands joined the March4Justice: the emotional rage fuelling the protests; the roar of angry shouting voices raised against the treatment of women.

The anger driving the marches around the nation connects the day’s events to earlier feminist protests in Australia, and by Australian women in London. For well over a century, feminists have been angered by women’s lack of equal rights, their treatment by governments, and issues surrounding sex.

Indeed, for some women this recent protest was just one more in a lifetime of fighting for women’s rights and expressing their anger.

This was especially evident in front of Parliament House in Canberra. The large and energised crowd was diverse: from babies to the elderly; mostly women but many men; Indigenous people and whitefellas; dogs and prams threading among university and school students and those in business attire on their lunch break.

Feminists of the 1970s generation were in abundance, expressing their demands through placards, t-shirts and with their voices. Elizabeth Reid, who served as Women’s Adviser to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam from 1973 to 1975 — making her the first women’s adviser to a head of government anywhere in the world — sat down at the front in a folding chair, a highly-deserved queenly position. Her presence and globally historic role were acknowledged by the speakers.

Reid’s friend Biff Ward, a key founder of the Women’s Liberation group in Canberra, was one of the speakers, appearing alongside younger women like Brittany Higgins.

It was a joy to observe this range of generations joining forces.

The March4Justice adds to the long history of feminists using public space in spectacular ways to draw attention to society’s gender problems. Anger, sorrow and issues surrounding sex run through this history.

But so too do themes of joy, hope and resilience.

The spectacle of women’s suffrage

Feminist protest in Australia began in the late 19th century, when women were galvanised en masse for the first time by the issue of voting rights. Many were angered by the inequality and violence they witnessed and faced on a daily basis. They saw the vote as the key to transforming society, believing it would allow them to elect leaders sympathetic to women’s rights.

As the historian Marilyn Lake explains in Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, while all women lacked rights in the Australian colonies it was the plight of the married (white) woman that really captured suffragists’ attention. Upon marriage, women lost what little independence they had. They could not own property, easily file for divorce or maintain custody of their children.

The gender-based violence dominating feminist conversations in 2021 was also rife and politicised many early feminists. They were outraged wives had no personal autonomy and frequently suffered marital rape, unwanted childbearing, physical violence and economic control.

In response to this dismal situation, from the 1880s campaigns for women’s suffrage mounted. Local suffrage and other women’s organisations were formed and acted as pressure groups lobbying for change.

Read more: The long history of gender violence in Australia, and why it matters today

Activists like Louisa Lawson and Rose Scott made impassioned speeches, held public rallies and wrote to major newspapers to press for the vote, refusing to stay silent and submissive as was expected of women at this time.

Campaigns in Australia were more peaceful than elsewhere, but, like those marching for justice last week, suffragists were very much motivated by anger and frustration. They wanted to make a splash and used spectacle to bring attention to their efforts.

In 1891, Victorian women collected a massive 30,000 signatures on a 260-metre-long “monster petition”.

In 1898, two to three hundred women in the colony reportedly “invaded the club-room of the Legislative Council” to pressure members to pass a women’s suffrage bill.

Although unsuccessful at the time, the scale of these efforts revealed the force of women’s desire for change.

It is important to note the suffragists were almost exclusively concerned with the rights of white women like themselves. Aboriginal women — who endured even greater and more institutionalised forms of discrimination and violence — were not included in their vision for a new society based on equal rights. Then just as now, feminism had a significant race problem.

In 1902, white Australian women became the first in the world to enjoy the dual rights of voting and standing for parliament. They revelled in their new-found status as enfranchised citizens. But as daughters of the empire, they felt strongly connected to their British “sisters” and despaired they remained voteless after decades of protest. Some even travelled to Britain and contributed to its increasingly spectacular suffrage struggle.

Read more: Australian politics explainer: how women gained the right to vote

One Australian who captured imaginations in Britain was the performer and activist, Muriel Matters.

She was incensed by British women’s second-class status and, in 1908, famously chained herself to the iron grille separating the ladies’ gallery from the rest of the House of Commons, proclaiming “We have been behind this insulting grille too long!”

Both she and the grille — which many women saw as a symbol of their oppression — were removed in a dramatic scene, and Matters was sent to Holloway Prison.

The following year, Matters took her protest to the skies. Laden with a megaphone and 25 kilograms of flyers, and with a huge grin on her face, she crossed London in an airship emblazoned with the words “Votes for Women”.

There was a joyousness in this act of defiance. As Matters said: “If we want to go up in the air, neither the police nor anyone else can keep us down”.

Vida Goldstein was another Australian who made waves in London. In 1911, she was invited by Emmeline Pankhurst — whose suffrage organisation, the Women’s Social and Political Union, was infamous for its militant tactics — to travel to London, where she participated in the Women’s Suffrage Coronation Procession.

The scale of this event was huge. Over 40,000 people marched four miles across the city, in what Goldstein described as “the most amazing triumph of beauty and organisation”. They were watched by great crowds of spectators and ended with a rally at the Royal Albert Hall.

Goldstein, along with Margaret Fisher (the Australian prime minister’s wife) and Emily McGowen (the NSW premier’s wife), led the Australian contingent. This group carried a banner designed by Australian artist Dora Meeson Coates. It was adorned with the figures of two women — representing Britain and Australia — and the words “Trust the women mother as I have done”.

Vivid imagery and clever slogans continue to be part of feminist protests today.

The suffrage protests of the late 19th and early 20th centuries used spectacle to draw attention to women’s grievances. They were driven not only by anger and frustration, but also an enduring sense of hope that sustained them in the face of adversity.

The roar of Women’s Liberation

The many protest marches of the Women’s Liberation era of the 1960s and 1970s were also driven in good part by anger. They were spurred, among others, by issues of sex: legalising abortion; access to the pill; the sexual double standard; objectification of women’s bodies; sexual harassment; and violence against women.

The anger was palpable in the size and noise of the marches, the protesters’ willingness to disrupt city streets and public spaces, the eagerness to shock spectators through casual styles of dress, and the deployment of both occasional profanities and popular music.

Just as rage and roar have been used to describe the events surrounding the March4Justice, the Women’s Liberation anthem written and sung by Australian Helen Reddy featured the lines: “I am Woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore”.

Yet there was also a joy to some demonstrations of this protest era, especially the Women’s Liberation marches that allowed feminists to ventilate their rage, to prove to the world and themselves they were strong in number, sisterhood really was powerful and there were plenty of women who weren’t going to take it anymore.

Read more: Helen Reddy’s music made women feel invincible

Both the anger and the joy are well documented in the recent film Brazen Hussies. Brazen Hussies tells the story of the Australian Women’s Liberation movement from 1965 to 1975, covering its roots and rise.

Catherine Dwyer’s film provides insight into the anger fuelling the movement, from women’s individual stories of pain and injustice — the awful grief and trauma of having your baby taken from you because you weren’t married, the fury of being paid less for comparable work just because you were a woman, the trials of being a single mother, the enraging burden of shame due to the sexual double standard. And it covers the movement’s exclusion of Indigenous women and, to some extent, of lesbians through interviews with people like Pat O’Shane and Lilla Watson.

But there are also the triumphs and achievements: the legislative victories, the intellectual joys of feminist insights, the growing visibility of the movement.

That Australian Women’s Liberation was also marked by a sense of fun is perhaps best shown by a key event sparking the movement. On March 31, 1965, three Brisbane women dramatically protested their exclusion from the front bar at the Regatta Hotel in Toowong. When they were refused service (as was customary at the time for women in a front bar), two of the women chained themselves to the bar footrail, and the third took the key and threw it into the river.

It took hours for the police to remove the chain, and the event won an enormous amount of publicity.

Merle Thornton, Rosalie Bognor and Elaine Dignan were consciously playing on history when they staged this event, evoking the proclivity of suffragettes to chain themselves to fixed objects. It was also a clear echo of the moment when Muriel Matters chained herself to the grille in the House of Commons over 50 years before.

The fact protesters at the March4Justice were urged to wear black, and many did, signals a vital difference in its overall emotional affect compared to such earlier moments of fun.

The sombre colour of the rallies on March 15 was in stark contrast to the international suffragettes’ customary white dresses (with green and purple sashes), or the Women’s Liberation style of blue denim and colourful t-shirts, hippy skirts and dresses.

Black is the colour of sorrow, which was evident last Monday alongside the anger: sorrow at the terrible pain and suffering of women who are harassed, assaulted and raped, and not able to speak up, or are denied justice.

And sorrow at the fact women are still being harassed, assaulted and raped.

But even stronger than the sorrow was the anger at the Morrison government’s failure to deal with the assaults and allegations, or even to send a representative to the protest happening at its front door.

Fighting gender-based violence in 2021

Looking back at the history of feminist protest highlights striking continuities in the nature of gender-based violence and discrimination over time.

It shows the various ways women’s bodies have been controlled and abused.

It reveals how feminists have persistently protested their subordination, taking up space and refusing to be silenced. Anger, frustration and despair have driven people to action. Optimism, resilience and joy have empowered women to keep fighting even in the face of significant barriers.

21st century feminists are building on a substantial legacy of women’s protest. They are also grappling with the limits of feminisms past and present.

Indigenous women, leaders and community groups participated in many of the rallies around the country last week, drawing attention to the extensive trauma First Nations women have endured and continue to face. Their presence called for feminists to meaningfully engage with issues of race and to help end systemic injustice in the era of Black Lives Matter.

Trans and non-binary activists are calling for recognition gender-based violence disproportionately affects gender-diverse people. Feminists of the past largely viewed their fight through a gender binary. The challenge for today’s activists is to move beyond this.

Intersectionality exists as an ideal; the challenge now is to meaningfully put it into practice.

It remains to be seen what will come of the March4Justice and whether it lasts as a genuinely transformative cultural moment. What is sure, despite the many hurdles they have faced, Australian feminists have consistently found creative and captivating ways to express their indignation and visions for a better future. Feminists today can find inspiration in — and learn from — the various moments and the people who have shaped this history.

Brazen Hussies is now available on ABC iView, and will be broadcast nationally on ABC TV on Monday 5 April at 8.30 pm.

Read more: Bad times call for bold measures: 3 ways to fix the appalling treatment of women in our national parliament

– ref. Friday essay: Sex, power and anger — a history of feminist protests in Australia – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-sex-power-and-anger-a-history-of-feminist-protests-in-australia-157402

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

“Is your leadership safe?” Scott Morrison was asked on the ABC on Thursday. The Prime Minister’s leadership is quite safe, but that the question was put says volumes for how embattled he’s become in a few weeks.

As did some early words in his answer. “What suggestions are you picking up there?”

These days Morrison gets out of bed each morning not knowing what disturbing, sometimes bizarre, story might hit him before he retires for the night.

Late Thursday, for instance, Nine went to Morrison with evidence Queensland Liberal backbencher Andrew Laming had bullied two women in his community via Facebook.

Morrison immediately summoned Laming, who was dispatched to the House to retract his comments and make a grovelling apology.

The string of accounts of dreadful behaviour in parliament house, from alleged rape to government staffers engaging in disgusting sexual acts and so-called “orgies”, is making the nation’s seat of democracy sound like the set of an X-rated movie.

Questioned about Network Ten’s graphic report, Morrison said: “This is conduct that is completely mysterious to me, it is not something that I can even conceive of, to be honest.” He wasn’t the only one.

Read more: Morrison says Coalition staffer sacked after ‘disgusting’ allegation

As we’ve seen, the broad message of disrespect and much worse from the revelations has lit a fire among women in the community, as they share their own experiences of assault, harassment and denigration with each other and publicly.

In another context, Morrison famously said “you know, I don’t hold a hose, mate”. But in this crisis engulfing the government, he’s frantically on the tools, announcing inquiries, promising initiatives, advocating quotas, delivering mea culpas, declaring empathy, inviting Brittany Higgins to meet.

Often, however, it’s one step forward, one back. Like the own goal when he turned aggressive, stupidly blurting out (inaccurate) gossip, during the news conference called to project an image of the caring man who listens.

Now he’s forced into a reshuffle, made imperative by the issues surrounding Attorney-General Christian Porter.

Morrison should have dealt with Porter’s situation much earlier, regardless of his going on mental health leave. (It is, incidentally, at least in my memory, very unusual for a minister at the centre of a political storm to take leave.)

In the imminent changes, Porter will be moved out of attorney-general’s and Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, under fire for her handling of Higgins (and on medical leave) will go from defence.

In a gesture of prime ministerial solidarity – or refusal to concede anything – Morrison will keep both in cabinet.

Morrison stuck by Porter initially but it’s clear (a point presumably spelled out in the advice from the Solicitor-General) that he would be riddled with potential conflicts of interest now he’s suing the ABC.

Porter should have stepped down for the good of the government as soon as the allegation of historical rape landed – even though he strongly denies it.

But neither Morrison nor Porter were willing to take that course, arguing it would set a new low bar for forcing ministerial departures.

It’s ironic that Porter’s move to try to clear his name through the courts will be the catalyst for moving him.

Reynolds’ future has been problematic since she entered hospital when she was under political fire and her heart condition became common knowledge.

The reshuffle – in which Michaelia Cash is tipped to become attorney-general and Peter Dutton defence minister – won’t be a magic carpet ride to the other side of this crisis.

Morrison will be helped by having no parliament until the May budget. But allegations and revelations are expected to continue, and striking the right tone and mustering effective responses will remain a struggle for the PM.

On Thursday Higgins struck again, with a letter to Morrison’s chief of staff, John Kunkel, lodging a complaint saying the PM’s media team had backgrounded against her partner.

Morrison, who’d dodged numerous opposition questions about this, later said a “primary” and “direct source” – apparently someone who had allegedly witnessed what had happened – had now come to Kunkel with “confidential information”.

Morrison said he’d asked Kunkel to commence a process to deal with the complaint. This sounded like a ticking time bomb.

On the positive side, the crisis has generated momentum for action on the Sex Discrimination Commissioner’s report on workplace sexual harassment – on which little had been done – with a full response before the budget.

And Morrison says he’s open to quotas to get more Liberal women into parliament. We’ll see where that gritty debate goes within the party.

Read more: Politics with Michelle Grattan: Sussan Ley on being a woman in politics

With the government taking such a battering, the question is how lasting the damage will be. Specifically, at election time next year will a significant number of women take their anger with them into the polling booth?

Not long ago bold commentators were declaring the election unlosable for Morrison.

Now, bets are hedged. But in politics, fallout is often unpredictable.

For example, shortly before the 2004 election, John Howard’s credibility came into serious question after a whistleblower made damaging claims about what the then prime minister had been told in the 2001 “children overboard” affair. Undeterred, Howard made “trust” central when he announced the election, at which he increased his majority.

Again, when Julia Gillard became PM in June 2010, putting her head-to-head with Tony Abbott, she instantly boosted Labor’s two-party vote, and nearly twice as many women preferred her to Abbott, according to an Age/Nielsen poll. In August, she almost lost the election.

There’s an election saying “the pig can’t be fattened on market day”. But it’s true as well that situations change incredibly fast, especially in today’s hyper cycles.

Equally true, is that people have a hierarchy of considerations when they vote. Many women will be critical of Morrison’s performance in recent weeks. But even if some of that feeling remains, where would it rate when they vote compared with, say, their judgment on how the government is performing on the economy?

Oppositions mightn’t win elections but opposition leaders have to attract votes for positive reasons (as did Whitlam, Hawke, Rudd) as well as harvesting people’s discontent with the government. The Coalition looks shambolic, but Anthony Albanese and his party remain unimpressive.

In earlier times, Labor’s national conference would be a significant event that could be used by the leader as a rallying moment.

However next week’s conference, delayed from 2020 by COVID, will be “virtual”, reducing the opportunity for hoopla.

There are no major issues – the policy arguments will be in the weeds. That’s good for the appearance of unity but it also removes the opportunity for the leader to show his command.

The best Albanese can look for is a good public reaction to whatever policy he decides to drop.

Recent weeks have been appalling for Morrison. They do not give us a pointer to an election result probably roughly a year away. They do indicate the contest looks more open than it appeared as 2021 began.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: The worst is not over in the crisis tearing at Scott Morrison’s government – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-the-worst-is-not-over-in-the-crisis-tearing-at-scott-morrisons-government-157906

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

Over the last month, as more and more stories of sexually explicit behaviour and misconduct within the walls of Parliament House have been revealed, the “culture” of politics has come into question.

One particular issue is the role and representation of women, and the need for more female voices to express the interests – and pain and frustrations – of women across the country.

As Sussan Ley puts it:

“I feel overwhelmingly that the culture of this place has got to change.”

Ley, Senator Marise Payne’s “proxy” as minister for women in the House of Representatives, represents the regional seat of Farrer in southern NSW. She acknowledges there is much work to be done in educating the diverse members of her electorate about how far the whole gender debate has moved.

While there was a small women’s march in her electorate – in Albury – she notes the silent majority who are desperate for change:

“Women on farms, women who are powerless in their relationships because they wouldn’t even be able to talk about these things at their kitchen table or, in some cases, women who aren’t allowed to leave the house because of the nature of their personal relationships.

“There were women silently cheering this from everywhere.”

Ley was one of the first government MPs to voice her support for quotas within the Liberal Party – to afford more women political opportunities.

Talking to Michelle Grattan, Ley advocates for what she calls for a “smart quota system” in contrast to a “blunt instrument”.

“I’m uncomfortable with something that would say ‘okay, your seat’s a woman seat, your seats not’. I mean, that doesn’t make any sense to me.”

Under her idea, “in [the Liberal Party] constitution, it will say we accept that we will have 40% or 30% of women candidates in our seats.

“It then has to say not just women candidates, because sometimes candidates have a very small chance of winning in safe opposition seats. So you’d have to say we’ve got seats that we describe as winnable…and unwinnable.”

“And the ones that step forward in seats where there’s not so much chance would get very well supported, so they wouldn’t be left to fend for themselves.”

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Sussan Ley on being a woman in politics – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-sussan-ley-on-being-a-woman-in-politics-157888

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Heidi Norman, Professor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology Sydney

Review: Appropriate, directed by Wesley Enoch. Sydney Theatre Company.

Wesley Enoch’s exuberant return to the Sydney Theatre Company to direct African-American playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Appropriate is a wild ride back to the power of live theatre.

This production is a deep dive into contemporary debates in America (and across most settler-colonial societies) about race, racism and its legacy. Jacobs-Jenkins unpicks and restitches the stories held within a white American plantation owning family. The once colonised are (almost) entirely absent from his stage, save for images and unmarked graves that return as haunting.

The estranged and dysfunctional Lafayette family gather in Arkansas following the death of their patriarch and last remaining parent. Accompanied by partners and children, Toni (Mandy Mcelhinney) and her brothers Bo (Sam Worthington) and Franz (Johnny Carr) converge in their father’s dilapidated mansion, overflowing with junk and burdened with debt. An upcoming auction offers the siblings hope of financial windfall, and finalisation of their difficult relationships.

As we settle in our seats, the lights lower as a chorus of cicadas evoke a smothering, humid southern summer night. The cicada song rises in volume and tempo for longer than is comfortable prompting a murmur through the audience (is this a technical hitch?). The insects hush — but are not silenced — when the plush red curtain lifts. We are perched at the edge of the night-dark living room to bear witness to the acerbic, bigoted and ferocious exchange among the adults.

Outside, nature is closing in.

Ebbs and tides of pain

The family history is disclosed to us piece by piece. Images of lynchings in a discovered album among the detritus cause shock and disbelief for some family members; others are more knowing of the family’s past. Another becomes defensive.

Among the father’s boxed up possessions, the confederate flag spills out. Trophy jars of flesh and bone are revealed: carefully kept family heirlooms from a violently racist past.

These material things unleash the ghosts. Some disgraces are viewed with greater alarm than others; some are denied; some charmingly misconstrued.

All are ultimately unresolved.

Jacobs-Jenkins’ rapid, emotive dialogue is fired from one player at another, rising and falling in rhythm and volume as the cicadas do for the entire course of the play. The writing encapsulates the surges of hurt, loss and love: remembering, forgetting, disavowal, denial and attempted redemption.

The ensemble performs the humorous and abrasive dialogue with magnificent energy.

As Toni, in her madness and grief and denial, McElhinney is outstanding, whipping up the family maelstrom from centre stage.

But she is lonely and isolated, in search of a hug that she is only ever able to request — and receive — from her “fuck up son”. The rest of the family manifest their relationships through passionate embrace, squeezed fingertips, faces held firmly or a comforting clutch. After the year we have had, our shared sense of humanity needs to shine through: can somebody give her a hug?

Grief is all around the family; no less so in their losses of position and influence. In the end, all they can do is stuff thoughts and memories deeper down, in vain hope to quell the haunting.

Human frailty

By end of act two, with disgraces laid bare, the families depart in a flurry of torment.

The once grand home filled with material fineries fast decays.

Enoch spectacularly stages a time-lapse passage of night and day. Seasons cycle; the cicada thrum surges and fades. Storms lash the exterior until nature crashes through a window.

Under siege, the grand old house sighs and begins to drop her fineries. The precarity of accumulated wealth is revealed as reliant on the presence of human pride and power. In the absence of humans the weather, the woods, the lake, the unmarked graves of those who have returned to the soil, prevail.

In these final moments, Appropriate seems to suggest this is the end of days for the economic structures and social order that built the United States and the west.
In the tight, living room drama of a family in crisis, Jacobs-Jenkins speaks to global themes of truth telling and historical legacy, and ultimately humanity.

Appropriate is at the Roslyn Packer Theatre until April 10.

– ref. A tight, living room drama of a family in crisis, Appropriate explores truth-telling and dark histories – https://theconversation.com/a-tight-living-room-drama-of-a-family-in-crisis-appropriate-explores-truth-telling-and-dark-histories-156291

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tony Kevin, Emeritus Fellow, Australian National University

The past week has marked a watershed moment in Russia’s relations with the West — and the US in particular. In two dramatic, televised moments, US President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin have changed the dynamics between their countries perhaps irrevocably.

Most commentators in the West have focused on Putin’s “trolling” of Biden by dryly — though, according to Putin, unironically — wishing his American counterpart “good health”. This, of course, came after Biden called Putin a “killer”.

But a more careful and complete reading of Putin’s message to the US is necessary to understand how a Russian leader is, finally, ready to tell the US: do not judge us by your claimed standards, and do not try to tell us what to do.

Putin has never asserted these propositions so bluntly. And it matters when he does.

Putin’s message to the new US president

The tense test of strength began when Biden was asked about Putin in an interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos and agreed he was “a killer” and didn’t have a soul. He also said Putin will “pay a price” for his actions.

Putin then took the unusual step of going on the state broadcaster VGTRK with a prepared five-minute statement in response to Biden.

In an unusually pointed manner, Putin recalled the US history of genocide of its Indigenous people, the cruel experience of slavery, the continuing repression of Black Americans today and the unprovoked US nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the second world war.

He suggested states should not judge others by their own standards:

Whatever you say about others is what you are yourself.

Some American journalists and observers have reacted to this as “trolling”. It was not.

It was the preamble to Putin’s most important message in years to what he called the American “establishment, the ruling class”. He said the US leadership is determined to have relations with Russia, but only “on its own terms”.

Although they think that we are the same as they are, we are different people. We have a different genetic, cultural and moral code. But we know how to defend our own interests.

And we will work with them, but in those areas in which we ourselves are interested, and on those conditions that we consider beneficial for ourselves. And they will have to reckon with it. They will have to reckon with this, despite all attempts to stop our development. Despite the sanctions, insults, they will have to reckon with this.

This is new for Putin. He has for years made the point, always politely, that Western powers need to deal with Russia on a basis of correct diplomatic protocols and mutual respect for national sovereignty, if they want to ease tensions.

But never before has he been as blunt as this, saying in effect: do not dare try to judge us or punish us for not meeting what you say are universal standards, because we are different from you. Those days are now over.

Read more: Nato-Russia tensions: what a Biden administration can do to lower the temperature

China pushing back against the US, too

Putin’s forceful statement is remarkably similar to the equally firm public statements made by senior Chinese diplomats to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Alaska last week.

Blinken opened the meeting by lambasting China’s increasing authoritarianism and aggressiveness at home and abroad – in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and the South China Sea. He claimed such conduct was threatening “the rules-based order that maintains global stability”.

Yang Jiechi, Chinese Communist Party foreign affairs chief, responded by denouncing American hypocrisy. He said

The US does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. The US uses its military force and financial hegemony to carry out long-arm jurisdiction and suppress other countries. It abuses so-called notions of national security to obstruct normal trade exchanges, and to incite some countries to attack China.

He said the US had no right to push its own version of democracy when it was dealing with so much discontent and human rights problems at home.

Read more: Biden faces the world: 5 foreign policy experts explain US priorities – and problems – after Trump

Russia and China drawing closer together

Putin’s statement was given added weight by two diplomatic actions: Russia’s recalling of its ambassador in the US, and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s meeting in China with his counterpart, Wang Yi.

Beijing and Moscow agreed at the summit to stand firm against Western sanctions and boost ties between their countries to reduce their dependence on the US dollar in international trade and settlements. Lavrov also said,

We both believe the US has a destabilising role. It relies on Cold War military alliances and is trying to set up new alliances to undermine the world order.

Though Biden’s undiplomatic comments about Putin may have been unscripted, the impact has nonetheless been profound. Together with the harsh tone of the US-China foreign ministers meeting in Alaska — also provoked by the US side — it is clear there has been a major change in the atmosphere of US-China-Russia relations.

What will this mean in practice? Both Russia and China are signalling they will only deal with the West where and when it suits them. Sanctions no longer worry them.

The two powers are also showing they are increasingly comfortable working together as close partners, if not yet military allies. They will step up their cooperation in areas where they have mutual interests and the development of alternatives to the Western-dominated trade and payments systems.

Read more: Australia’s strategic blind spot: China’s newfound intimacy with once-rival Russia

Countries in Asia and further afield are closely watching the development of this alternative international order, led by Moscow and Beijing. And they can also recognise the signs of increasing US economic and political decline.

It is a new kind of Cold War, but not one based on ideology like the first incarnation. It is a war for international legitimacy, a struggle for hearts and minds and money in the very large part of the world not aligned to the US or NATO.

The US and its allies will continue to operate under their narrative, while Russia and China will push their competing narrative. This was made crystal clear over these past few dramatic days of major power diplomacy.

The global balance of power is shifting, and for many nations, the smart money might be on Russia and China now.

– ref. Russia and China are sending Biden a message: don’t judge us or try to change us. Those days are over – https://theconversation.com/russia-and-china-are-sending-biden-a-message-dont-judge-us-or-try-to-change-us-those-days-are-over-157771

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mary Iliadis, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Deakin University

As federal parliament has been rocked by allegations of sexual violence, one of the frequent questions has been “why don’t victims go to police?”

But this is not a straightforward or easy solution. And victims can easily end up being re-traumatised by going through the criminal justice system.

How can we make going to court better for those seeking justice? One critical way is to provide victims with their own lawyers.

What many people may not realise, is that throughout the legal process, victims are simply assigned a lawyer through the Director of Public Prosecutions. This means they do not have access to their own lawyers to protect their privacy and individual interests at trial.

Women’s fears and community mistrust

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, almost 90% of women do not report their sexual assault to police.

Read more: Almost 90% of sexual assault victims do not go to police — this is how we can achieve justice for survivors

One of the reasons victims do not report sexual violence — or delay reporting — is fear they will not be believed. This does not come out of nowhere.

According to a 2017 national survey, there is a widespread mistrust of women’s reports of violence by the community, even though evidence shows false reports are rare.

The DPP has significant powers

Even for those who do report, the ability for victims to get justice is out of their hands.

The Director of Public Prosecutions has significant discretionary powers, including the ability to decide whether a criminal case should proceed and how it will be prosecuted. The reality is victims have no control or ability to challenge prosecutors’ decision-making.

For cases that proceed to prosecution, victims’ experiences are generally negative. This is due to insensitive treatment by criminal justice personnel, including defence lawyers.

Compounding this are the myths and stereotypes that underpin [intrusive defence questioning] at trial. These include questions about victims’ sexual history, used to create a false perception the victim consented to sexual activity or is the “type” of person who is more likely to consent.

This is also a reason why so few convictions are reached.

Read more: Consent laws aren’t the reason for low sexual assault conviction rates — it’s how society views rape itself

Women are re-traumatised

Given victims are disclosing highly personal and distressing details about their assaults, and potentially being subjected to fierce cross-examination at trial, they are often re-traumatisated by going to court.

This intensifies the barriers women face reporting and having their stories heard, which further denies them validation and control.

As US psychiatrist Judith Herman has noted,

if one set out intentionally to design a system for provoking symptoms of traumatic stress, it would look very much like a court of law.

The adversarial system

The adversarial nature of Australia’s criminal justice systems means crime is contested between two parties: the state who prosecute in the public interest and the accused person.

This means the victim is not considered a party to proceedings, despite being directly impacted by the offence, and therefore does not have an active role or voice.

Courts have a duty to protect victims from certain misleading, intimidating and humiliating questioning, such as in relation to victims’ sexual history and character.

However, research shows defence counsel continue to ask such questions to undermine victims’ character and testimony.

Calls for victim lawyers

Scholars and victim advocates, including women’s specialist and legal services, have raised concerns over the lack of judicial intervention.

This has led to calls for government-funded legal representation to enhance victims’ treatment in the legal process and reduce the likelihood — or extent of —re-traumatisation.

If victims can be assured their privacy and interests will be protected, they might be more inclined to report and/or stay engaged in the criminal justice system. Having a lawyer present at trial may also decrease victims’ feelings of stress and anxiety and improve their confidence when testifying.

As former South Australian Commissioner for Victims’ Rights, Michael O’Connell, has argued, legal representation can allow victims to feel like

integral players […] rather than mere bystanders in the criminal justice system.

Victim lawyers around the world

There are several different models of legal representation for victims around the world.

In the German system, victims of sexual offences can engage lawyers who have rights to represent them, including the ability to elicit evidence and ask questions of the accused person at trial. In Denmark and Sweden, victims of sexual offences also have the right to engage a lawyer from as early as the police reporting stage, to receive advice about the legal process and compensation claims, as well as moral support.

The right to victim lawyers in adversarial systems – like Australia’s — is less common. Victim lawyers are available in Ireland to prevent the disclosure of victims’ sexual history evidence in court. England and Wales also recently piloted provision for victim lawyers, as has Northern Ireland.

In Queensland and New South Wales, sexual assault victims can be legally represented when challenging defence applications for the disclosure of their counselling notes and other confidential therapeutic records. However, this representation does not extend to the actual criminal trial.

Resistance to the idea

Despite the benefits of lawyers for victims, concerns about practical implications remain.

This is due to the perceived threat a third party — a victim’s lawyer — might pose to the two-sided contest between the state prosecutor and the accused person. There are concerns the system would become unbalanced.

Read more: Delays in reporting alleged rapes are common — even years later. This isn’t a barrier to justice

In 2016, the Victorian Law Reform Commission opposed the idea on the basis police and prosecutors are already obliged to keep victims informed about the legal process and victim lawyers might lead to “dual representation”.

However, this fails to recognise victims have legitimate interests that might compete with the interests of the prosecution, who represent the public interest. These include rights to privacy about their personal records and prior sexual history, and to be free from character attacks during cross-examination at trial.

While it may not be viable, at present, to introduce victim lawyers throughout the entire prosecution process, there is certainly scope to introduce them at specific stages.

Change that is positive and possible

In the first instance, we need social and cultural change to quash the myths and stereotypes about sexual violence. They prevent victims from reporting and undermine investigations, prosecutions and victim experiences.

In the meantime, introducing victim lawyers is a practical, possible change we can make to enhance victims’ well-being, safety and access to justice.

– ref. Sexual assault victims can easily be re-traumatised going to court — here’s one way to stop this – https://theconversation.com/sexual-assault-victims-can-easily-be-re-traumatised-going-to-court-heres-one-way-to-stop-this-157428

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kathryn MacCallum, Associate Professor, University of Canterbury

We know COVID-19 and its associated changes to our work and learning habits caused a marked increase in the use of technology. More surprising, perhaps, is the impact these lockdowns have had on children’s and young people’s self-reported enjoyment of books and the overall positive impact this has made on reading rates.

A recent survey from the UK, for example, showed children were spending 34.5% more time reading than they were before lockdown. Their perceived enjoyment of reading had increased by 8%.

This seems logical — locked down with less to do means more time for other activities. But with the increase in other distractions, especially the digital kind, it’s encouraging to see many young people still gravitate towards reading, given the opportunity.

In general, most children still read physical books, but the survey showed a small increase in their use of audiobooks and digital devices. Audiobooks were particularly popular with boys and contributed to an overall increase in their interest in reading and writing.

There is no doubt, however, that digital texts are becoming more commonplace in schools, and there is a growing body of research exploring their influence. One such study showed no direct relationship between how often teachers used digital reading instruction and activities and their students’ actual engagement or reading confidence.

Read more: There’s more than one good way to teach kids how to read

What the study did show, however, was a direct, negative relationship between how often teachers had their students use computers or tablets for reading activities and how much the students liked reading.

These findings suggest physical books continue to play a critical role in fostering young children’s love of reading and learning. At a time when technology is clearly influencing reading habits and teaching practices, can we really expect the love of reading to be fostered by sitting alone on a digital device?

The limitations of eBooks

In schools and homes we often see eBooks being used to support independent reading. As teachers and parents, we have started to rely on these tools to support our emerging readers. But over-reliance has meant losing the potential for engagement and conversation.

Studies have shown children perform better when reading with an adult, and this is often a richer experience with a print book than with an eBook.

Reading when we’re young is still a communal experience. My own seven-year-old is at the age when reading to me at night is a crucial part of his development as a reader. Relying on him to sit on his own and read from his device will never work.

Read more: Has the print book trumped digital? Beware of glib conclusions

This is not to deny the usefulness of eBooks. Their adoption in schools has been led by the desire to better support learners. They provide teachers with an extensive library of titles and features designed to entice and motivate.

These embedded features provide new ways of helping children decode language and also offer vital support for children with special needs, such as dyslexia and impaired vision.

The research, however, suggests caution rather than a wholesale adoption of eBooks. Studies have shown the extra features of eBooks, such as pop-ups, animation and sound, can actually distract the learner, detracting from the reading experience and reducing comprehension of the text.

The book as object

Real books may lack these interactive features but their visual and tactile nature plays a strong role in engaging the reader.

Because books exist in the same physical space as their readers — scattered and found objects rather than apps on a screen — they introduce the role of choice, one of the big influences on engagement.

While generally a reluctant reader, my child loves to flick through books and look at the pictures. He might not necessarily read every word, but books such as Dog Man, Captain Underpants and Bad Guys have provided a fantastic opportunity to engage him.

We have even managed to link reading with our children’s favourite online games. Their Minecraft manuals have become valuable resources and are even taken to friends’ houses on play-dates.

Many of our books are not in the best shape, evidence they are lived with and loved. Second hand shops and school fairs provide a cheap option for adding variety, and libraries are also valuable for supplementing the home shelves.

Keeping it real

But cuts to library budgets and collections, such as have been announced recently by Wellington Central Library, threaten to further undermine the role of the physical book in children’s lives.

School libraries, too, are often the first space to be sacrificed when budgets and space restrictions tighten. This encourages the uptake of digital books and further reinforces a reliance on technological alternatives.

Read more: Do we really own our digital possessions?

Of course, digital technology plays an important role in supporting children to engage and learn, often in powerful new ways that would otherwise be impossible.

But in our haste to adopt and rely on “digital solutions” without clear justification or consideration of their effective use, we risk undervaluing the power of objects made from paper and ink.

As we emerge from a pandemic that has accelerated digital progress, we can’t let these developments obscure the place of real books in real — as opposed to virtual — lives.

– ref. After a year of digital learning and virtual teaching, let’s hear it for the joy of real books – https://theconversation.com/after-a-year-of-digital-learning-and-virtual-teaching-lets-hear-it-for-the-joy-of-real-books-156851

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Savulescu, Visiting Professor in Biomedical Ethics, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute; Distinguished Visiting Professor in Law, University of Melbourne; Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics, University of Oxford

When someone gets sick after receiving a vaccine, this might be a complication or coincidence. As the recent rollout out of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe shows, it can be very difficult to know how to respond.

For instance, reports of blood clots associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine led to several European countries suspending their vaccination programs recently, only to resume them once these clots were judged to be a coincidence. However, authorities couldn’t rule out increased rates of a rare brain blood clot associated with low levels of blood platelets.

There are also problems with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. By early February 2021, among the over 20 million people vaccinated in the United States, there have been 20 reported cases of immune thrombocytopenia, a blood disorder featuring a reduced number of platelets in the blood. Experts suspect this is probably a rare vaccine side-effect but argue vaccination should continue.

So what happens with the next safety scare, for these or other vaccines? We argue it’s best to give people the facts so they have the autonomy to make their own decisions. When governments pause vaccine rollouts while investigating apparent safety issues, this is paternalism, and can do more harm than good.

The ‘precautionary principle’ can backfire

Like any medicine, vaccines have risks associated with their benefits. And no one wants to recommend or use a vaccine with serious side-effects.

So when faced with recent unconfirmed serious side-effects following vaccination, European countries were tempted by the “precautionary principle”, or “better safe than sorry”. They opted to pause and gather more evidence.

Some might argue a precautionary approach could help protect the public’s confidence in vaccination in the long term. However, suspending or withdrawing a vaccine could also undermine confidence. Once a vaccine program is stopped due to safety concerns, it may not recover. This happened with the HPV (human papillomavirus) vaccine in Japan.

Read more: People with severe allergies warned off Pfizer COVID vaccine for now. But that may change as more details emerge

The precautionary approach can also be lethal. In a pandemic, suspending or withdrawing an effective vaccine leads to preventable deaths. The number of preventable deaths depends on three factors.

1. Delay

The first is how many people will be delayed in receiving a vaccine. Fortunately, the AstraZeneca vaccine is not the only approved vaccine in Europe, so its suspension or withdrawal would not wholly prevent vaccination; however, some people’s vaccinations could be delayed.

2. Deaths

The second factor is the risk of people dying if vaccines are delayed. For example, in England (a country that did not suspend the AstraZeneca vaccine), people aged 56-59 are currently being invited to book appointments for vaccination. A study in 2020 suggests roughly 0.3% of unvaccinated 55-59 year-olds infected with coronavirus die. But in countries that have not yet vaccinated older people, the risks of a suspension will be higher. The same study suggests the risk of dying for (unvaccinated) 70-74 year-olds infected with the coronavirus is roughly 1.7%. For those infected over 80, the risk is 8.3%.

3. How widespread is the virus?

A third factor is how common infections are at the time of suspension. When rates of infection are higher, we expect more deaths.

According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, as low as 8 or as many as 1,518 out of 100,000 people are infected with the virus. The rate varies between countries. Australia could afford to be precautionary because testing figures currently suggest a low incidence of COVID-19 (only 0.2% of COVID-19 tests conducted in the past week have returned positive results). Indeed, its slow vaccine rollout is consistent with a precautionary approach, as evidence is gathered from other countries.

Read more: Data suggest no increased risk of blood clots from the AstraZeneca vaccine. Australia shouldn’t pause its rollout

Paternalism or autonomy?

Safety regulation involves value judgements around evidence and weighing risks and benefits. It also involves judgements about who we allow to make decisions about that balance.

Paternalism is the practice of making judgements for other people about what is best for them. And the strongest form of paternalism (“hard paternalism”) fails to respect the autonomy of competent adults, and breaches their right to make decisions about their own lives.

Suspension or withdrawal of vaccines is hard paternalism. Preventing someone from accessing an effective life-saving vaccine to protect them from low risks of rare side-effects is a severe restriction of their autonomy.

Read more: Blood clot fears: how misapplication of the precautionary principle may undermine public trust in vaccines

There are limits to autonomy. Where an intervention will clearly do more harm than good, it is the government’s responsibility to prevent it. And when there are limited public resources, it is necessary to distribute benefits and burdens fairly.

But what matters ethically is not only vaccine confidence and public health, but whether people can make their own autonomous decisions about the risks they want to take: the risks of COVID-19 or the risks of vaccination.

So how would this work?

Autonomous decision-making here requires:

• disclosure of even small risks if the outcomes are significant

• admission of limits to confidence (for instance, how much we know about the risks and what we don’t know)

• disclosing this information in ways appropriate and comprehensible to all sections of the community

• helping people to think for themselves about the inevitable uncertainties of life.

Safeguarding autonomy here also requires putting safeguards in place to protect those who do not have the capacity to provide valid consent.

When looking at the background rates of blood clots, anaphylaxis or any other rare adverse events, it seems pretty clear vaccines are safe and the associated risks are small.

We must investigate all vaccine safety signals thoroughly. But the process also needs to maintain the public’s confidence in vaccines through effective and transparent communication of risk. Communicating risk in terms people understand is challenging but it is essential to ensure informed decision-making.

For most people, the benefits of being vaccinated will outweigh the risks. But we should treat people as adults and allow them to make up their own minds.

Governments should not be nannies, nor nervous ninnies. Suspending vaccination fails to respect people’s right to make their own choices. It also threatens to cause much more harm overall.

– ref. There’s no need to pause vaccine rollouts when there’s a safety scare. Give the public the facts and let them decide – https://theconversation.com/theres-no-need-to-pause-vaccine-rollouts-when-theres-a-safety-scare-give-the-public-the-facts-and-let-them-decide-157405

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elise Klein, Senior Lecturer, Australian National University

During COVID-19 the government ran what turned out to be a giant real-world experiment into what happens when you boost someone’s unemployment benefits and free them of the “mutual obligation” to apply for jobs.

On April 27 2020 the government as good as doubled the $565.70 per fortnight JobSeeker payment, lifting it by $550 per fortnight for what turned out to be six months. In September the boost dropped to $250 per fortnight, and in December to $150 per fortnight.

Next Thursday the boost vanishes, although the base rate of JobSeeker will climb by a less-than substantial $50 a fortnight, leaving recipients $100 a fortnight worse off than they have been, $500 per fortnight worse off than back when JobSeeker doubled and back well below the poverty line.

From Thursday April 1 they will also be subject to much more demanding work tests, having to show they have applied for a minimum of 15 jobs a month, climbing to 20 jobs a month from July 1.

On top of that the government has announced

• a return to compulsory face-to-face meetings with Jobactive providers

• work-for-the-dole after six months of unemployment

• a dob-in line for employers to report jobseekers who seem not to be genuine

• increased auditing of job applications to ensure they are legitimate

They are the sort of “mutual obligations” that were scrapped while JobSeeker was doubled.

Read more: Australia has a long history of coercing people into work. There are better options than ‘dobbing in’

Yet the government’s natural experiment where they doubled benefits and freed recipients of “mutual obligations” provides us with an opportunity to examine how a more generous approach affected recipients and whether, as the government says, a tougher approach is needed in order to compel people to work.

During last year’s more generous approach, we conducted an online survey of JobSeeker recipients and found that (contrary to what appears to be the government’s expectation), it was helping get people into work.

Freed of “mutual obligations”, many were able to devote time to reengaging with the workforce.

As one respondent said,

I was able to focus on getting myself back into the workforce. Yes, mutual obligation activities PREVENT people from being able to start a new business or re-enter the workforce as an employee

And the extra income freed recipients to do things that would advance their employment prospects; either through study, through properly looking for work, or buying the tools needed to get work.

One said

I could buy things that helped me with employment — equipment for online work, a bicycle for travel, a proper phone”

An Australia Institute review of unemployment payments and work incentives in 33 OECD countries found something similar — that higher payments correlate to lower unemployment.

Another respondent said the suspended mutual obligation requirements made it easier to care for an elderly parent during pandemic and their recovery from major surgery.

Read more: At least 2.6 million people face poverty when COVID payments end and rental stress soars

Another said she had been able to focus on her health needs and her children.

People on social security are often accused of being dependent on welfare, but it’s often the economy and society that are dependent on their unpaid labour.

Yet (except for during the worst of the pandemic) these people have been denied a safety net that ensures their survival.

The inadequacy of payments goes to a major and enduring flaw in the Australian social security system — its inability to recognise all of the productive activities people undertake, including unpaid care largely undertaken by women.

The decisions the government took during 2020 made a major difference to the lives of people outside the formal workforce.

They enabled them to turn their attention away from day-to-day survival towards envisioning and realising a more financially and emotionally sustainable future for themselves and their dependants.

The flow-on benefits, to all of us, ought to be substantial.

The government ought to be very interested.

If it was, it would examine the findings further, but they don’t seem to be on its radar.

– ref. What happens when you free unemployed Australians from ‘mutual obligations’ and boost their benefits? We just found out – https://theconversation.com/what-happens-when-you-free-unemployed-australians-from-mutual-obligations-and-boost-their-benefits-we-just-found-out-157506

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Caitlyn Forster, PhD Candidate, School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney

Record-breaking rain has destroyed properties across New South Wales, forcing thousands of people to evacuate and leaving hundreds homeless.

Humans aren’t the only ones in trouble. Many of the animals that live with and around us are also heading for higher ground as the floodwaters rise.

Often small creatures — especially invertebrates like spiders, cockroaches and millipedes — will seek refuge in the relatively dry and safe environments of people’s houses. While this can be a problem for the human inhabitants of the house, it’s important to make sure we don’t add to the ecological impact of the flood with an overzealous response to these uninvited guests.

What floods do to ecosystems

Floods can have a huge impact on ecosystems, triggering landslides, increasing erosion, and introducing pollutants and soil into waterways. One immediate effect is to force burrowing animals out of their homes, as they retreat to safer and drier locations. Insects and other invertebrates living in grass or leaf litter around our homes are also displaced.

Snakes have reportedly been “invading” homes in the wake of the current floods. Spiders too have fled the rising waters. Heavy rain can flood the burrows of the Australian funnelweb, one of the world’s most venomous spiders.

Some invertebrates will boom; others may plummet

Rain increases greenery, which can support breeding booms of animals such as mosquitoes, locusts, and snails.

Even species that don’t thrive after floods are likely to become more visible as they flock to our houses for refuge. But an apparent short-term increase in numbers may conceal a longer story of decline.

Read more: After the floods come the mosquitoes – but the disease risk is more difficult to predict

After periods of flooding, the abundance of invertebrates can fall by more than 90% and the number of different species in an area significantly drops. This has important implications for the recovery of an ecosystem, as many of the ground dwelling invertebrates displaced by floods are needed for soil cycling and decomposition.

So before you reach for the bug spray, consider the important role these animals play in our ecosystem.

What to do with the extra house guests?

If your house has been flooded, uninvited creatures taking shelter in your house are probably one of the smaller issues you are facing.

Once the rain subsides, cleaning in and around your property will help reduce unwanted visitors. Inside your house, you may see an increase in cockroaches, which flourish in humid environments. Ventilating the house to dry out any wet surfaces can help get rid of cockroach infestations, and filling crevices can also deter unwanted visitors.

Read more: Floods leave a legacy of mental health problems — and disadvantaged people are often hardest hit

In the garden, you may see an increase in flies in the coming weeks and months as they lay eggs in rotting plants. Consider removing any fruit and vegetables in the garden that may rot.

Mosquitoes are also one to watch as they lay eggs in standing water. Some species pose a risk of diseases such as Ross River virus. To prevent unwanted mozzies, make sure to empty things that have filled with rainwater, such as buckets and birdbaths.

If you do encounter one of our more dangerous animals in your home, such as venomous snakes and spiders, do not handle them yourself. If you find an injured or distressed snake, or are concerned about snakes in your house, call your local wildlife group who will be able to relocate them for you.

Just like the floods, which will subside as the water moves on, the uninvited gathering of animals is a temporary event. Most visitors will quickly disperse back to more appropriate habitat when the weather dries, and their usual homes are available again.

Don’t sweat the small stuff

While many of the impacts of floods are our own making, through poor planning and development in flood-prone areas, effective design of cities and backyards can mitigate the risks of floods. Vegetation acts as a “sponge” for stormwater, and appropriate drainage allows water to flow through more effectively. Increasing backyard vegetation also provides extra habitat for important invertebrate species, including pollinators and decomposers.

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

With severe weather events on the rise, it is important to understand how ecosystems respond to, and recover from natural disasters. If invertebrates are unable to perform vital ecosystem functions, such as soil cycling, decomposition, and pollination, ecosystems may struggle to return to their pre-flood state. If the ecosystems don’t recover, we may see prolonged booms of nuisance pests such as mosquitoes.

A few temporary visitors are are a minor inconvenience in comparison to the impacts floods have on the environment, infrastructure and the health and well-being of people impacted. So while it may seem like a bit of a creepy inconvenience, maybe we should let our house guests stay until the flood waters go down.

– ref. After the floods, stand by for spiders, slugs and millipedes – but think twice before reaching for the bug spray – https://theconversation.com/after-the-floods-stand-by-for-spiders-slugs-and-millipedes-but-think-twice-before-reaching-for-the-bug-spray-157600

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jenny Hocking, Emeritus Professor, Monash University

Oprah Winfrey’s brilliantly stage-managed “tell-all” interview with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry was for viewers, advertisers and the three participants, a tremendous success.

For the royal family, not so much. Globally, the interview’s audience was “gargantuan”. It was watched by nearly 50 million people as it went to air and in Australia, was Network Ten’s highest rating special in a decade. This remarkable reach continues to climb with millions of viewers on demand and, of course, generating its own hashtag — #OprahMeghanHarry.

Royalty as American celebrity had truly arrived.

Although it is easy to dismiss this interview as a cynical marketing exercise, it raises important questions about the contemporary role and relevance of the royal family in a modern liberal democracy, and Australia’s place in the arcane system of constitutional monarchy.

In doing so, it has added to the momentum for an Australian republic, highlighting the incongruity of the British monarch as the Australian head of state through the right of monarchical succession and not as the choice of the Australian people.

Palace secrecy

Above all, this interview broke through the armour of secrecy, the carefully constructed royal image, which is the monarchy’s great protector. This is #OprahMeghanHarry’s most important contribution beyond the celebrity circuit — the breach of royal secrecy that has given us a window onto the inner workings of “The Firm”.

What we saw there was not at all pleasant.

Among the litany of damaging claims aired are that Markle had faced the repeated leaking of false claims about her to select royal watchers in the media. This ranges from the petty — “Meghan made Kate cry!” — to more serious claims of bullying.

More disturbing, however, is Meghan’s description of isolation, powerlessness and depression, culminating in suicidal thoughts during her pregnancy. When she sought help from Buckingham Palace officials, she was told it would look bad for the monarchy if it were known she was having treatment for mental health issues. “Suck it up, princess”, literally.

Then came the claim by both Harry and Meghan that there had been “concerns and conversations” with a senior member of the royal family about the colour of their child while Meghan was pregnant.

Whaaatttt?

Oprah’s perfectly timed response hung in the air just long enough to hook us all back in, after the (very long) ad break.

Race and royalty

Race had been a peculiar fascination in the relentless media focus on Markle, escalating dramatically when she was first linked with Harry. One of the most overt, and it was just one of thousands, was the Daily Mail’s depiction of the fairy-tale “upward mobility” of Meghan’s family: from “cotton slaves to royalty” in just 150 years, with an accompanying family tree pointing to the “mulatto” antecedents of her “dirt poor” forebears.

That there would be “shocks” from the renegade royals’ interview was widely anticipated, but what was actually revealed during these coruscating two hours was never imagined. This was devastating, brutal and highly damaging.

Read more: The royal family can’t keep ignoring its colonialist past and racist present

Just two weeks before the interview aired, an early blow to Meghan’s reputation was struck with claims she had “bullied” staff at Buckingham Palace and “undermined their confidence”. These were leaked to preferred royal watchers in the British media. The palace immediately instituted a full investigation into these anonymous claims, stating it was “very concerned”.

It is notable no such investigation has been called into the relationship between Prince Andrew and Jeffrey Epstein, the late disgraced financier and convicted paedophile. Nor was any undertaken into Markle’s own claims of racial comments about her child. Those would be dealt with “privately”, the queen announced.

As Birmingham City University professor of Black Studies Kehinde Andrews writes, none of this would be of a surprise

to any Black person who spends their time navigating White institutions. The constant feeling of being out of place, undermined and misunderstood take a daily toll. The term we use in academia is ‘microaggressions’ — the paper cuts of racism that have the cumulative effect of damaging our mental health.

Unleashing on Harry and Meghan

In line with these micro-aggressions, and apparently determined to confirm everything Markle had said about them, the British media duly unleashed on #OprahMeghanHarry for their temerity in speaking out and doing this interview.

They reserved special contempt for Markle. A woman of colour, a commoner, a divorcee, an American, and an actress. On all counts an outsider. And she had dared to break the bounds of royal secrecy and reveal the monarchy for what it is, or at least what she perceived it to be: a monument to dynastic privilege and stupendous inherited wealth on the one hand, and a dysfunctional, emotionally damaged family, irreparably torn apart on the other.

The visceral response was almost as remarkable as the interview itself. The vaudevillian excess of the British media was encapsulated in ITV host Piers Morgan’s diatribe against Markle for well, everything.

I don’t believe a word she says. I wouldn’t believe it if she read me a weather report.

He then stormed off the set, never to return.

Racism and royalty

More difficult to sustain were the denials and denunciation of any suggestion of racism from within the royal family (and it’s difficult to write that with a straight face). This is an impossible line to run for even the most sympathetic monarchist.

When asked, Prince William said “we’re very much not a racist family”. The reality however, is very different, as historian Benjamin T Jones has discussed.

It’s impossible to ignore the structural racism of monarchy and empire, the historic support for and profit from slavery, King Edward’s overt racism and well-documented Nazi sympathies, and Prince Philip’s repeated racist comments – always politely and inappropriately dismissed as “gaffes”.

The inconvenient fact is that race is the logic of empire and the driver of imperial expansion. It lies at the heart of notions of dynastic monarchy and of a hereditary title of the blood. “Blue blood” is a thing.

Nor is it any coincidence there has been a lack of racial diversity in the queen’s body guard and royal household. Despite the existence of a diversity policy, Buckingham Palace acknowledges “more needs to be done” and is set to appoint a “diversity tsar”.

Until Markle, there was also no diversity in the royal family. Little wonder her arrival caused consternation over the prospect of colour entering the family — and even how much colour — as she related.

A palace above politics?

These unsettling revelations are the latest of several instances where the veil of royal secrecy has been lifted. None has been welcomed by the palace.

The 2015 release of the “black spider memos” from Prince Charles to members of Tony Blair’s government, revealed our future king’s personal input into government policy. In February, The Guardian showed the queen’s interference in legislation through the process of royal assent in order to advance and protect the financial interests of herself and Prince Charles.

Read more: The queen’s gambit — new evidence shows how Her Majesty wields influence on legislation

My own palace letters legal case revealed the queen’s embargo over a vast array of historic documents held in our National Archives, including her extensive correspondence with Governor-General Sir John Kerr, about Kerr’s prospective dismissal of Gough Whitlam’s government.

Read more: Book extract – The Palace Letters: the Queen, the governor-general, and the plot to dismiss Gough Whitlam

Soon to be released letters between Kerr’s predecessor, Governor-General Sir Paul Hasluck, and the queen are likely to further highlight the queen’s involvement in political matters during the Whitlam government.

The very real and much denied political power of the queen and the monarchy is now beyond dispute, thanks to the breakdown in royal secrecy to which this interview has contributed.

Institution vs family

In this display of royal family breakdown, one thing that stood out is the impossible duality of the monarchy as both institution and family. It succeeds as the former only by destroying the latter.

This is The Firm, the institutional family made up of the senior royals, staff, a clique of aristocratic courtiers, centuries of ritual and a fixed institutional memory, and yet bigger than them all. It speaks as one, follows protocol as one, and everyone knows their place.

In the process, the usual human interactions even within the family are stripped back to a callous and unresponsive dynastic dysfunction.

Markle’s professed shock at having to curtsy and Harry having to bow to the queen in private — “but she’s your grandmother!” — illustrates the surreal formality and artifice that governs their every move.

It is difficult not to feel sympathy for Harry after his public revelation his father stopped taking his calls and that after initially inviting him to dinner, the queen was “too busy” to see him before he and Meghan left for Canada. The royal courtiers, in his view, had stepped into this “family” matter and put the interests of the monarchy first.

It is a rare and unpalatable window onto a strangely Victorian mindset that remains unchanged in its settled imperial form and uncertain of its contemporary role. The palace has shown itself unable and unwilling to adapt to the expectations of a modern liberal democracy in which we should make our own choices and fully govern ourselves.

What now for the Australian Republic Movement?

The Australian Republic Movement has certainly felt the impact of the Meghan and Harry interview, despite claims to the contrary.

It saw a marked increase in members in the week after this deeply damaging interview aired, reflecting broader concerns about the dynastic dysfunction it revealed and the growing incongruity of our residual monarchical ties.

This comes on top of a 19% increase in members over the last year — despite the difficulties of COVID and lockdowns.

Opinion polls consistently show that a significant number of Australians support a republic – so why aren’t we one?

A new model

For some time, the Australian Republic Movement has been working towards a new model for a republic with an Australian head of state, with major input from public submissions, discussions with expert groups and all political parties to develop a consensus position.

The proposed model will be released by the end of this year.

The core requirements of any successful model are

• it has enough bipartisan political support to pass through parliament as the formal referendum question

• it needs to reflect the lessons of the unsuccessful 1999 referendum and bridge the artificial divide between an “elected or appointed” model, which drove a wedge between republicans last time

• most critically, it must be able to win the support of the Australian public.

Read more: Is Australia ready for another republic referendum? These consensus models could work

If we can do those three things, then an Australian republic is not far off.

It has been more than a generation since the 1999 republic referendum and one of the strongest sentiments for retaining the monarchy — that a republic would be seen as “ditching the queen” — is fast losing relevance.

We are getting closer to the day when the queen will be succeeded by King Charles of Australia and the choice then will be stark. Do we embrace a post-colonial future of independence and autonomy in all matters of governance? Or retain this residual connection with a monarch and a monarchy out-of-step with expectations of democratic practice?

‘If you can see it, you can be it’

In a very different context in the Oprah interview, Markle spoke of the importance of representation for all peoples. She talked of a line from one of her son’s books,

if you can see it, you can be it.

This resonates with questions about our own head of state, which is neither representative of us, nor something we can aspire to. It is and can only be the British monarch – we can see it, but we can never be it nor have a say in who it is. This is the defining familial privilege at the heart of monarchy itself, based on notions of superiority and heredity which are completely at odds with a modern democracy in which representation, accountability, and transparency are central.

Our head of state should be one of us, not one of them.

– ref. After Oprah: what will it take to revive an Australian republic? – https://theconversation.com/after-oprah-what-will-it-take-to-revive-an-australian-republic-156958

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cassandra Berry, Professor of Immunology, Murdoch University

The COVID vaccine rollout is underway, with Australians lining up to get their jabs. But what if you have already had COVID-19? Is it still a good idea to get vaccinated?

Although natural exposure to the virus stimulates immunity, we don’t yet know how long this immunity will last. And people will vary in their ability to mount a protective immune response.

Even if you’ve had COVID-19, you should still get vaccinated. A COVID vaccine may offer more reliable and sustained immunity than a previous infection. At the very least, it will add an extra layer of targeted protection.

Here’s how our immune response works after a natural infection versus a vaccine.

From B cells to neutralising antibodies

Soon after becoming infected with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19), our immune cells (T cells and B cells) activate. Activated B cells produce so-called neutralising antibodies. These antibody-secreting cells defend our bodies against the infection by making antibodies that bind to spikes on the virus surface, and block the virus from entering our cells.

Neutralising antibodies spill over into the bloodstream and travel around the body looking to mop up virus. After the infection has resolved, these activated B cells calm down and transition to a resting state. They move from our blood to our lymph nodes and bones. These so-called memory B cells survive for decades, along with help from memory T cells.

But they need a nudge once in a while to ensure they’re ready to kick into gear if we’re exposed to an infection.

Our immune cells rely on memory

When we’re re-exposed to a virus, or receive a vaccine booster, these memory cells awaken, become activated and produce large amounts of antibodies much faster. This immune memory reduces the risk we’ll become infected with SARS-CoV-2. But if we do, it allows for quicker healing from COVID-19.

Sustained neutralising antibody levels indicate a good degree of protection against SARS-CoV-2. How long we hang onto natural immunity after COVID-19 is variable and depends on viral, human and environmental factors. For example, the viral variant can make a difference, along with our genes, underlying health conditions, and age.

These factors can affect our neutralising antibody levels, which can wane over time to dip below protective levels.

As COVID-19 hasn’t been around for a particularly long time, it’s difficult to know how long natural immunity generally lasts. However, antibodies and immune memory appear to last for at least two months.

For patients who have recovered from SARS, a related coronavirus, research has shown they maintained antibodies for up to two to three years following infection.

Read more: The second phase of Australia’s COVID vaccine rollout is underway, despite a rocky start. Here’s what you need to know

Immune responses to a vaccine

Again, because of the short time frame, we have limited data on sustained antibody responses following vaccination. But immunity appears to be strong three months after the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine.

With COVID-19 vaccines, certain variable factors have been targeted, in a way they can’t with natural infections. For example, considerations like the dose size and the time between doses are all established to confer optimal immunity.

As we continue to monitor people who have received the COVID vaccines, we’ll develop a better understanding of protective immunity and its longevity.

Staying on top of variants

Natural immunity from infection may protect against other variants to some degree, but vaccines will play a crucial role as the virus continues to mutate.

It may be necessary to get regular boosters of the COVID vaccine until the pandemic is under control. This will provide protection against variants our pre-existing antibodies may not be able to neutralise.

Boosters enhance our broad immunity to parts of the spike proteins shared between different virus variants. Antibodies produced to these common regions can neutralise the virus and stop infection.

We saw this to a limited extent in people who had common cold infections with other coronaviruses before COVID-19.

Only one jab? Vaccines as a cure for long COVID?

There’s been some research suggesting people who have had COVID may only need one dose of the vaccine to be protected.

For people who have had COVID, one dose may serve to top up their antibodies to protective levels. This is because they’re starting on a stronger footing in terms of their antibody levels and immune memory, compared to people who haven’t had the virus.

But experts in Australia still recommended two doses, regardless of whether you’ve had COVID.

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

Meanwhile, reports have indicated people experiencing long COVID may also benefit from vaccination. We’re not sure how this happens, but symptoms may improve with clearance of any hidden virus reservoirs from the body. Research into this phenomenon is ongoing.

At the end of the day, when the vaccine is available to you, you should get vaccinated, even if you’ve had COVID-19. While the vaccine is likely to protect you, it’s also important to protect others, as we look towards a goal of herd immunity.

– ref. Do I still need to get a COVID vaccine if I’ve had coronavirus? – https://theconversation.com/do-i-still-need-to-get-a-covid-vaccine-if-ive-had-coronavirus-157599

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Colvin, Senior lecturer, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

Poll after poll suggests a large majority of Australians cares about climate change. Yet in recent federal elections, this hasn’t translated into wins for parties with stronger policy platforms on climate change.

So what determines someone’s climate change attitude, and how does it translate into voting?

In research published today, we studied 2,033 Australian voters’ attitudes across the political spectrum in the context of the 2019 federal election. And we found over 80% said they think it’s important Australia reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This includes close to 70% of conservative voters (those voting for Coalition parties).

However, digging deeper reveals nuance to these attitudes. While most Australians support climate action, stark differences emerge along political party preferences in terms of how important voters think it is.

Our research suggests the question about social support for climate action in Australia is no longer: “does climate change matter to enough Australians?”. Instead, the critical question may well be: “does climate change matter enough to Australians to shift climate politics?”.

Why the ‘climate election’ didn’t pan out

We conducted our survey in July 2019, two months after the Coalition won the federal election. Its victory came as a surprise to many, as the election was sometimes billed the “climate election”, implying climate change was a bellwether issue.

The climate policies of the two major parties were night and day, with the Labor Party campaigning on ambitious mitigation targets and the incumbent Coalition maintaining the status quo of very limited climate policy.

So what were the voters thinking?

We found about half of Australian voters (52%) said climate change was important when deciding their vote in the 2019 Australian federal election. However, climate was the most important issue for only 14% of voters.

Even among those who said they felt it was extremely important for Australia to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, most (58%) said climate change was important, but not the most important issue, when deciding their vote.

Read more: Australia’s major parties’ climate policies side-by-side

Climate change was stated as the most important issue for 21% of Labor voters and 39% of Greens voters, but for less than 5% of Liberal Party, National Party, and Queensland LNP voters.

This pattern was reversed for those who didn’t take climate change policy into account in their vote: 26% of Liberal, 21% of National, and 31% of Queensland LNP voters did not consider climate change when deciding their vote. Under 15% of Labor and Greens voters did the same.

And when we looked at how much voters cared about climate action, the differences become more potent. Three quarters (73%) of progressive voters (those voting for the ALP or the Greens) see Australian action to reduce emissions as “extremely important”. Only one quarter (26%) of conservative voters say the same thing.

Who’s more willing to make sacrifices for the climate?

Our research also explored the extent voters were willing to accept a personal cost to support climate action. We asked about their willingness to accept a significant or small personal cost, but didn’t specify what we meant by small or significant, because a small cost to one person may be a significant cost to another.

Most voters (72%) said they’d be willing to incur some personal cost in return for emissions reductions. Across the political spectrum, the proportion of voters willing to accept a small personal cost is relatively similar: 60% of progressive voters, 55% of conservative voters.

Major differences emerge when it comes to “significant personal cost”.

While 26% of progressive voters are willing to incur a significant personal cost, only 5% of conservative voters feel similarly. At the other end of the spectrum, 40% of conservative voters are unwilling to incur any personal cost, but only 14% of progressive voters feel the same.

Support for strong climate policies may depend on whether the policies will, or are perceived to, personally impact voters. Given political leaders’ stances influence public support for climate policies (as 2018 research showed), our research highlights an opportunity for conservative political leaders to clarify their position on climate change.

Interestingly, age was a consistent predictor of responses. Younger people were more likely than older people to consider it important that Australia reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Younger people were more willing to incur a personal cost to support climate action, and to consider climate change when deciding their vote.

In fact, we found an Australian voter from the Baby Boomer generation is half as likely as a voter from Generation Z to consider it important to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Divisive politics have a limited shelf life

If future young people cared just as much about climate change as today’s young people, and if existing cohorts don’t change their views as they age, then the percentage of Australian voters who consider greenhouse gas emissions to be “extremely important” is likely to increase from 52% in our 2019 data, to 56% by 2030. By 2050, this figure could rise to 65%.

These projections are purely on the basis of more climate-aware cohorts coming into voting age and replacing older voters. It doesn’t consider any future changes in attitudes within cohorts (which may also make a big difference).

The key implication is simple. If Australian political leaders pursued stronger climate action, they could rest assured most of the voting population will broadly support them, along with most of their own voter base — regardless of which party is in power.

This will become only more pronounced with gradual generational change, and likely changes in attitudes within age groups. In any case, it’s clear divisive politics that result in climate delay have a limited shelf life.

Read more: Nearly 80% of Australians affected in some way by the bushfires, new survey shows

– ref. If 80% of Australians care about climate action, why don’t they vote like it? – https://theconversation.com/if-80-of-australians-care-about-climate-action-why-dont-they-vote-like-it-157050

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Gamble, Lecturer, Monash University

Homeschooling registrations for children in Victoria in 2020 were almost four times the number of the previous year, recent reports show.

Some families who had children learning from home during lockdown discovered they enjoyed spending more time together and some children found they learnt better at home. Parents may have recognised academic or social challenges for their child at school and decided to continue with homeschooling.

But even before COVID-19, homeschooling was on the rise. If you’re considering homeschooling because your child seems to do better at home, but are unsure if it’s the right thing to do, here are five things to take into account.

1. Homeschooling is different to remote learning

Homeschooling is different from remote learning. Remote learning is the experience of teachers delivering the school curriculum to children at home, as was done during the recent school closures. This is more like distance education, which some families do if they live remotely, for instance.

In homeschooling, parents have elected to meet their child’s educational needs themselves, rather than using government or other school options.

Homeschooling is legal in all states and territories in Australia but there are differing registration and monitoring requirements.

2. It takes a lot of time and effort

Some parents put together a school structure at home with lesson plans and routine break times. They may employ a tutor to help with their child’s education or do this themselves.

Others choose to use an unstructured or “unschooling” learning method. This is an informal way of learning that advocates student-chosen activities rather than teacher-directed lessons.

Read more: Don’t want to send the kids back to school? Why not try unschooling at home?

The process of developing a homeschooling routine takes time, effort and patience. Parents may be required to submit a plan to their state education department, which, in most cases, should show an alignment between their child’s learning and the national curriculum.

Parents may have to develop or implement a full school curriculum at home without the resources available in schools.

Even if parents decide to teach children in an informal way, they will need to put in significant time and effort. For example, a parent may use a trip to the shops to cover geography (the child navigating), mathematics (the child calculating the cost of items), or economics (supply and demand factors), but this may add hours to a routine shop.

So, parents will need to consider their ability and desire to take on this leading role in their child’s education. For some parents it can also take an emotional toll and feel isolating if there isn’t a plan or enough support.

3. Consider social and other difficulties at school

Some families homeschool on religious or ideological grounds; others are motivated by practical limitations to school access — such as if the school is too far from home or their child has a disability.

Many individual children can face difficulties going to school, such as the separation of leaving their carer or parent. Other children may be bullied at school.

Read more: Is your child anxious about starting school for the first time? Here’s how you can help

There is very little research into the effects on children who are experiencing difficulties at traditional schools and change to homeschooling.

But parents should know schools have a legal obligation to provide a safe environment for children. They must address bullying behaviour and provide support for both the victim and the perpetrator. When there are difficult interactions parents, teachers, the school and children (where appropriate) should collaborate to improve the situation.

Children often need support from teachers and parents to navigate exposure to bullying. But if the behaviour is allowed to continue with options exhausted, students will be more likely to experience negative psychological health from ongoing bullying.

Data from 2016 show around 70% of children aged 12–13 experienced at least one bullying-like behaviour within a year. All forms of bullying have the potential to create long-term and disastrous psychological as well as physical effects. Some young people who have died by suicide were found to have done so after persistent bullying.

Evidence suggests bullying constitutes a traumatic experience for students who are bullied. How teachers and schools respond to bullying and the frequency of bullying can also result in mental distress for students.

Not all schools can and do adequately manage bullying and other unsafe situations children may be in. In these instances, parents may decide to remove their child from school and homeschool their child.

Read more: School is not always a safe place for students with disability – this has to change

Parents can consider whether their child is showing ongoing signs of psychological distress such as changes in behaviour, withdrawal from others, irritability or problems concentrating.

Specialist support from a psychologist may help parents and students to understand the benefits and limitations of changing schools and homeschooling. If there are underlying social or separation anxieties involved, these issues should be addressed as they are likely to linger at home too.

4. Children can thrive academically

Children’s academic outcomes need to be considered in the context of the parents’ motivation for choosing homeschooling. For example, if a parent’s primary concern is religious education their focus may not be on their child gaining the highest year 12 results possible.

Research shows academic results of children who are home educated are mixed. This is partly because there are diverse parental motivations which may or may not prioritise academic pursuits.

Read more: Homeschooling is on the rise in Australia. Who is doing it and why?

In Australia, some studies have focused on NAPLAN results. These suggest home-educated students score higher than state averages across every measure. The effect continues even if the child returns to school.

Children who are homeschooled may be doing well because they receive one-on-one attention. Or it could be because the child’s learning is personalised and the child has agency over their learning.

5. Children can be socialised in both environments

Socialisation is again influenced by parental motivations and the education methods employed.

Homeschooled young people can have a diverse range of social interactions with people of different ages, including adults.

An Australian survey of homeschooling families showed nearly 50% of children participated in at least one club activity. This included 24 different sports — from AFL to aerial silks and yoga — and clubs including lego and chess. Around 40% attended at least one regular learning group. Classes included new languages, gardening, Shakespeare and archaeology.

The majority of research participants regularly had “play dates” with homeschooling and/or non-homeschooling families. Children actively participated in their community through the arts, including community theatre, bands, choirs, dance and visual arts classes.

Read more: Homeschooled children are far more socially engaged than you might think

Parents should consider the reasons behind their choice to homeschool and seek advice to ensure the best outcomes for their child socially, emotionally and academically.

– ref. Thinking of switching to homeschooling permanently after lockdown? Here are 5 things to consider – https://theconversation.com/thinking-of-switching-to-homeschooling-permanently-after-lockdown-here-are-5-things-to-consider-155381

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ted Snell, Honorary Professor, Edith Cowan University

Film review: The Last Vermeer, directed by Dan Friedkin.

Among the thousands of plundered treasures discovered in May 1945 by the Allies was an undocumented picture supposedly by Johannes Vermeer, a masterpiece titled Christ and the Adulteress.

Held in the personal collection of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, no one knew anything about it. Where had it come from? How did Göring get his hands on it?

The Last Vermeer — the first directorial outing for billionaire Dan Friedkin — recounts the fascinating story of the painting’s discovery, and exposure as a fake.

In the process, Friedkin turns a spotlight onto the art market, questioning why some artworks are worth millions and others only a few hundred dollars, and querying who makes these decisions.

Early in the film, our hero, the infamous Dutch art forger Han van Meegeren (played with flair by Guy Pearce), suggests the problem facing the film’s protagonist Captain Joseph Piller (played woodenly by Claes Bang) is not one of art. Instead, Piller should be “investigating money and power”.

From the rollicking beginning, it seems Friedkin intends to investigate just that, but after about 15 minutes, the wheels fall off. For the next hour, we lose track of the central narrative until suddenly (and unconvincingly) we arrive at the 1945 trial in which van Meegeren is accused of treason for selling national treasures to the Nazis.

Forgery as revenge

Born in 1889, the unsuccessful artist-turned-art-dealer van Meegeren was a charlatan, talented painter, bon vivant, opportunist, satirist, critic and — eventually — national hero.

Sadly, The Last Vermeer does not explore the complete and detailed narrative of this forger, the Nazi, and the art market. Instead, the film introduces a cohort of characters that confuse rather than clarify, changing and ignoring critical details of the story.

As we discover in the film, van Meegeren’s early career was impacted by negative reviews from his first solo exhibition in 1917.

To win back his self-esteem (and make himself absurdly wealthy) he began forging artworks.

One expert, art historian and curator Dr Abraham Bredius found fault with an early attempt and pronounced it a fake, instantly becoming the target for van Meergeren’s revenge.

To convince the world of his true genius, van Meegeren painted forgeries to fulfil Bredius’ theory that the Dutch master Johannes Vermeer had been influenced by Italian painting. Van Meegeren painted the quintessential “missing link” to try to prove this Italian connection.

By 1936, he had perfected his technique, painting Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus. Bredius was delighted, and arranged for the Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam to buy the painting, which he believed to be a Vermeer, for a huge sum.

In 1942, van Meegeren sold another painting, Christ and the Adulteress, as a true Vermeer to Göring.

Read more: The secret to all great art forgeries

In the film, once the plot is set up with the discovery of the treasures, the story meanders around the central characters and a lengthy exposition of antipathy between the Dutch and their liberators, before Friedkin finally returns to the core of the story.

However, here he presents a revamped version.

The film suggests van Meegeren, on trial for treason for selling Vermeers to the Nazis, convinced his jailers to allow him to paint and drink whiskey while in confinement.

The real story was much more dramatic.

Even though he could tell the jury which paintings they would find under his “Vermeers” when x-rayed (forgeries are often painted over existing paintings from the same era), the court remained unconvinced.

To settle the case, van Meegeren was set up in a house rented by the Dutch government — under the scrutiny of six witnesses — to paint another Vermeer. To their astonishment, he completed Jesus among the Doctors in a matter of weeks.

Read more: You may spot the fake at Dulwich Picture Gallery, but forgeries are no joke

Surely this is a much better cinematic scenario than the absurdity of soldiers setting their prisoner up in a studio with all the comforts of home.

Nevertheless, the result of this extraordinary evidence was so conclusive van Meegeren was convicted of forgery — not treason — in November 1947. And as the man who had swindled Göring, he became an instant folk hero for the liberated Dutch.

Sadly, his glory was short-lived. He died of a heart attack six weeks later.

Faking the fakes

Despite the rambling first half of the film, we do finally get most of the details of this extraordinary story of power, the art market, the role of critics, and how the latter two can destroy careers.

But I do feel sorry for van Meegeren, the most successful forger in history. The master forger would be rightly horrified that instead of using his own forgeries of Vermeer, Friedkin hired a scene painter named James Gemmill to create rather ham-fisted versions for his film.

Although not Vermeers, they were van Meegerens — and worthy of our admiration.

Like Göring, who according to the film’s final credits, “looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world” when told his beloved Vermeer was a forgery, van Meegeren would be justifiably horrified by this final insult.

The Last Vermeer is in Australian cinemas from March 25.

– ref. Guy Pearce shines, but The Last Vermeer paints over the remarkable true story of the world’s most successful art forger – https://theconversation.com/guy-pearce-shines-but-the-last-vermeer-paints-over-the-remarkable-true-story-of-the-worlds-most-successful-art-forger-157401

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

Scott Morrison has pointedly left in doubt the future of Christian Porter as Attorney-General, saying he is presently considering advice on Porter’s situation in the context of the “ministerial guidelines”.

Morrison’s statement heightened speculation about a cabinet reshuffle after parliament adjourns this week until the May budget.

Defence Minister Linda Reynolds, currently on medical leave with heart problems but due back to work on April 2, is considered unlikely to stay in her portfolio.

It was learned on Wednesday that on medical advice she would not attend the Raisina Dialogue on April 13 in India.

Morrison’s failure to clarify Porter’s future comes a week before he is due to resume his duties as first law officer, after taking mental health leave in the wake of being accused of a 1988 rape, which he denies.

It was the second time in two days the Prime Minister had indicated he was still mulling advice about Porter.

In parliament on Wednesday, opposition leader Anthony Albanese asked whether Morrison had received advice from the Solicitor-General about Porter’s portfolio responsibilities.

Albanese also noted Morrison had previously confirmed he had sought advice from his department in relation to the Attorney-General and ministerial standards.

“Is the Prime Minister preparing to make his Attorney-General a part-time minister or is he preparing to drop him all together?” Albanese asked.

Morrison said he was considering “that advice with my department secretary, in terms of the application against the ministerial guidelines”.

“When I have concluded that assessment […] I’ll make a determination and I’ll make an announcement at that time.”

The assessment of Porter’s position follows his launch of federal court action against the ABC over its February 26 report that the allegation of rape made by a now deceased woman had been sent in a letter to several parliamentarians including Morrison.

It has already been announced Porter will not deal with anything to do with the federal court or the ABC.

Last week Morrison said he had sought advice from the Solicitor-General about the scope of the Attorney-General’s “portfolio responsibilities in light of the defamation law suit”.

Porter is also Minister for Industrial Relations and Leader of the House of Representatives.

Depending on the content of the Solicitor-General’s advice, Morrison has the options of further carve outs of Porter’s Attorney-General responsibilities to avoid conflicts of interest, standing him aside, or removing him altogether from that position.

If he wished to show some continued support for Porter, he could leave him in cabinet holding just the industrial relations job.

Reynolds went on medical leave after coming under attack for her handling of the Brittany Higgins matter. Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague in the office of Reynolds, then defence industry minister, in 2019.

Meanwhile, Tasmanian Liberal senator Eric Abetz on Wednesday was accused by the Speaker of the Tasmanian parliament, Sue Hickey, of denigrating Higgins.

Hickey told the Tasmanian parliament that on March 1 at a citizenship ceremony in Hobart she had casually asked Abetz whether Porter was the minister involved in the historical rape allegation.

She said Abetz had replied it was Porter, “but not to worry, the woman is dead and the law will protect him”.

According to Hickey, Abetz “then said ‘as for that Higgins girl, anybody so disgustingly drunk who would sleep with anybody could have slept with one of our spies and put the security of the nation at risk’”.

Abetz said he categorically denied “Ms Hickey’s defamatory allegations under Parliamentary privilege”.

“As someone who was on the inaugural committee of a women’s shelter and its honorary legal adviser for a decade prior to entering parliament, I reject outright her suggestions and gross mischaracterisation of our discussion,” Abetz said.

“It’s noteworthy Ms Hickey has made her assertions some 3 weeks after she alleges they occurred.

“At no stage has Ms Hickey ever raised concerns with me about any of our conversations.”

Abetz suggested Hickey was motivated by Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein telling her on Sunday she would not be endorsed by the Liberal party for the next state election.

After the conversation with Gutwein, Hickey said she had been “effectively sacked” from the Liberal Party. “It appears that the men in dark suits are firmly in control and there is no place for small ‘l’ Liberal women who refuse to kowtow or be subservient to the dominant males.”

In 2018 Hickey won the speakership with Labor and Greens support, against the Liberal candidate.

Abetz said that “on her way out the door she is trying to destroy the party”.

Hickey hit back in another statement in parliament on Wednesday, accusing Abetz of “very grubby politics”. She stood by her account and said, “I have witnesses who can testify that I told them of the discussion at the event and immediately afterwards”.

Late Wednesday the ABC reported that Gutwein had written to Morrison requesting he consider Hickey’s allegations against Abetz.

It said that in a written statement Gutwein said Hickey had told him several weeks ago Abetz had made offensive comments but had not gone to the level of detail she had raised in state parliament.

“As Ms Hickey has outlined her allegations in more detail in the Parliament, this afternoon I have written to the Prime Minister and requested that he consider the matters raised.”

– ref. Scott Morrison leaves Christian Porter’s future in doubt, amid reshuffle speculation – https://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-leaves-christian-porters-future-in-doubt-amid-reshuffle-speculation-157778

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Bronitt, Head of School and Dean Professor of Law, University of Sydney

Public debate about our rape laws in recent weeks has fixated, yet again, on the concept of consent and whether our current definition in the law is “fit for purpose”.

Over the past three decades, Australia’s states and territories have set out to modernise the definition of consent, albeit with some variability in how it is defined.

South Australia, New South Wales and Northern Territory, for example, have a requirement of “free and voluntary agreement” to sexual intercourse, while Victoria and Tasmania have a more pared-down version of “free agreement”.

Queensland and Western Australia have gone their own way, rejecting the idea of consent as “agreement” in favour of a more active interpretation that consent is “freely and voluntarily given”.

These definitions are still being refined and debated. The NSW Greens have, for instance, introduced a bill to extend the current definition to require enthusiastic consent to sex. This is a qualitative threshold that would go far beyond the “free and voluntary” language in the current law.

Last week, NSW Police Commissioner Mick Fuller also proposed using an app to record sexual consent — an idea that was roundly criticised.

Why consent can’t be contractually given

Advocates for rape law reform argue our current definitions of consent are leading to “staggeringly low” reporting rates of sexual assaults and conviction rates.

According to the national statistics, nearly nine in 10 victims of sexual assaults do not go to police.

In NSW, official statistics reveal the number of sexual offences reported to police increased from 3,541 to 4,444 from 2015–19. Of most concern, however, is that only 19% of these incidents proceeded to trial in 2019. (Two-thirds of those charged were found guilty.)

Understanding the attrition of cases is complex. This can turn on the strength of evidence, as well as how police and prosecutors exercise their powers to progress a case at various points in the process.

Read more: Almost 90% of sexual assault victims do not go to police — this is how we can achieve justice for survivors

These statistics are often cited in support of the case for expanding the legal definition of rape. Some law reform advocates and survivors are calling for a broader “affirmative” consent standard, which would require consent to be actively given by actions and/or words before, and continuously throughout, a sexual act.

Encouraging open conversations about consent before and during sexual activity is important, as awkward as this might be for some people. Though it may seem “unromantic” — as Fuller noted last week — this type of communication provides safety and assurance for both parties.

The NSW police commissioner’s idea that consent could be structured and recorded via an app, however, has raised the ire of many commentators.

Some critics argue this approach to consent is apt to mislead. It promotes a contractual understanding of sexual relations – an “offer and acceptance” model, in which one person actively initiates sex with an offer and terms that can be revised, accepted or rejected by the other person.

Read more: Apps against sexual violence have been tried before. They don’t work

Indeed, the idea of a “consent app” is deeply problematic. It is reminiscent of the paper-based consent forms that floated about some university campuses (with free condoms) in the 1990s.

Such written consent forms, on closer scrutiny, had little if any legal or evidential value in sexual assault cases. The key point behind a “positive” definition of consent is that it should be viewed as an active, conscious and above all reflexive exercise.

Consent is given and obtained through communication, not contracts. It cannot be inferred from a written document or an app, negotiated some time before the sexual activity. And it must be remembered that consent must be ongoing and can be withdrawn at any time before and during sex.

Put simply, consent should never be implied or inferred by an offender from apps, Tinder swipes or social media likes.

The proposal for a consent app has little merit, except perhaps to provide a platform for educating people about the law and reminding them about the standards of behaviour expected from people when engaging in sex.

Perceptions of what constitutes ‘real’ rape

From my perspective, there is another core issue that is leading to low reporting and high attrition rates of sexual assault cases — and this can’t be solved by further fiddling with our legal definitions of consent.

This is how our community perceives rape — or what constitutes “real” rape as opposed to consensual intercourse.

The law has an important role in shaping community standards. Over the past three decades, the legislature and courts have worked to embed and reflect more modern concepts of human dignity and respectful decision-making in the law governing sexual activity.

For instance, marital rape gradually came to be criminalised in all Australian states and territories, though the process took many years.

And the legislatures and courts have provided further guidance on the wide range of cases where the victim’s apparent “consent” has been compromised by the effects of intoxication, fraud, mistakes, blackmail, threats or other abuses of power.

The battle at the heart of rape trials rarely relates to issues of identity or whether in fact sexual activity took place. Rather, cases often turn on the differing perceptions of the people involved about what took place (what is referred to as “he said, she said”).

And this is where community attitudes toward gender, sexuality and race invariably come into play.

Read more: ‘Cultural misogyny’ and why men’s aggression to women is so often expressed through sex

When it comes to consent, for example, juries must decide whether the prosecution has proven beyond a reasonable doubt there was no free and voluntary consent. And the perceptions of juries are influenced by these wider societal beliefs and attitudes.

In the end, the “law’s truth” about consent, as legal feminist Carol Smart pointed out more than three decades ago, is decided in the context of how the police, prosecutors, defence team, courts and wider community view what constitutes a “real rape” (or not).

Countering these entrenched biases and myths about “real rape” is needed to improve sexual assault reporting and conviction rates.

We can do this by reviewing our laws and procedures governing rape investigations, improving our judicial and lawyer education, and providing better jury directions on consent in “plain English”.

This is the best way forward to tackle what is, and will remain, a complex and often deeply contested aspect of every rape trial.

– ref. Consent laws aren’t the reason for low sexual assault conviction rates — it’s how society views rape itself – https://theconversation.com/consent-laws-arent-the-reason-for-low-sexual-assault-conviction-rates-its-how-society-views-rape-itself-157689

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Maxwell, Associate Professor in Performance Studies, University of Sydney

No-one has done more for Australian drama than Katharine Brisbane. When she talks, we should all be listening to what she has to say. Over seven remarkable decades, she has played one of the leading roles in Australian culture.

As theatre critic for the Australian from 1967 to 1974, she documented the most exciting, innovative and tumultuous period of the nation’s artistic, cultural, social and political activity — from the avant-garde stirrings of the late 1960s, through the revolutions of the Australian Performance Group in Melbourne and the Nimrod Theatre in Sydney.

Australia’s new wave was not so much a singular wave, but a thrashing, roiling series of tempests lashing the complacent, monochrome cultural landscape: Brisbane was there to document it all.

With her late husband, Philip Parsons, Brisbane founded Currency Press in 1971 committed to publishing the explosion of new Australian plays, a commitment it maintains to the current day.

A public discussion

In 2001, responding to a sense of “despondency” amongst performing arts workers — deriving in no small part from the contraction of funding over the prior decade — Brisbane and a handful of collaborators set up a monthly discussion club they called “Currency House”.

Over the following three or four years, the group encouraged artists to join them in an attempt to restore a sense of purpose and significance: to reignite the passion, optimism and energy of the years of cultural expansion that followed the establishment of the Australian Council for the Arts in 1968, and the fiscal (and ideological) investments of subsequent governments.

In 2004, Currency House took the private discussions public, launching the quarterly essay series Platform Papers. Now 89, Brisbane’s latest provocation, an essay called On the Lessons of History, is a stirring call to arms for the arts sector, and, reportedly, her last Platform Paper.

Read more: The problem with arts funding in Australia goes right back to its inception

On the surface, On the Lessons of History presents as a retrospective of the 62 essays and their authors, luminaries of contemporary practice and thinking, including Wesley Enoch, Lyndon Terracini, Lee Lewis and Alison Croggon.

However, there is something much more important going on here, as hinted in the title’s nod to Will and Ariel Durant’s formative The Lessons of History (1968), a book that distilled history into sharp, focused themes, with a view to better understanding the past and the times to come.

Brisbane’s sights are set resolutely on the future. The essay charges artists with a responsibility not only to their practices, but to a broader project. The arts, she writes, should provide a space where we undertake reflection as an active, interventionist and disruptive project.

In this, theatre can lead us to an imagining of “Australia as a wiser and more creative country”.

Crafting a new future

Brisbane writes with informed urgency. Since 2001, she has observed “a period of cultural change from which we have emerged a different nation”.

But not a better one, she writes. Rather:

we have allowed ourselves to be swept up in fears and occupied with distraction — new [electronic] devices of incomprehensible ingenuity that invite entry into dazzling new worlds to escape the wreck we have made of this one.

Artists are caught up in the terror: precarious, scared to speak out for fear of losing work, locked into logics of competition, celebrity and commerce.

In response to this trend, and to the acute challenges of the most recent few years — drought, pandemic, the shattering revelations of corruption and inhumanity across our public institutions — Brisbane urges a fundamental repositioning of the arts.

Most pointedly, she points to the “fatally flawed” terms under which the Australia Council was established.

Since its establishment in 1968, the council has been focused on funding “products rather than creators”, and dividing the arts sector into discrete artforms — losing sight both of the artists themselves, and the ways art forms meld and evolve.

Rather than persisting in the “endless, competitive pursuit of excellence” — a trajectory which culminated in former arts minister George Brandis siphoning funding away from the Australia Council — we must reconsider the needs of the arts sector in the 2020s and beyond, and act on these new needs.

Instead of framing arts funding as “money with which to produce art”, could we not instead see it as “money for cultural research”?

This, then, is what Brisbane describes as Currency House’s new project: concrete steps toward re conceiving and redesigning the arts and cultural sector.

The first of those steps is to provide a rallying point for artists: an activist platform from which to build upon the proposals and provocations of the Platform Papers series, lobbying and advocating for genuine change. For Brisbane, among the most pressing demands should be a cabinet-level acknowledgement of the creative sector, with an arts department “staffed by arts workers, dedicated to forward planning and fostering collaborative enterprises.”

Read more: Remember the arts? Departments and budgets disappear as politics backs culture into a dead end

Crucially, it is artists themselves who must show the way forward. They must not be cowed into silence, but instead must demand, at the very least, “funds to experiment and a living wage.”

“In 2021” Brisbane writes, “we are starting again.” What, she concludes, do we have to lose?

Platform Paper 63: On the Lessons of History by Katherine Brisbane, is on sale now.

– ref. Katharine Brisbane has been a leader in Australian theatre for decades. Her new proposal is her most daring yet – https://theconversation.com/katharine-brisbane-has-been-a-leader-in-australian-theatre-for-decades-her-new-proposal-is-her-most-daring-yet-157239

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Baker, Senior lecturer in business strategy, Auckland University of Technology

The past 12 months presented unprecedented challenges for the performing arts as the pandemic curtailed many live performances.

Some organisations relied on pushing digital content to remain in the public eye, but this was next-to-impossible to monetise.

Now, as the COVID vaccines roll out and the sector heads towards a reset, it’s worth applying some fresh thinking to the arts landscape of the future.

Some have asked for more sustainable funding, others for more funding. But the central question is: can we get better value-for-money from the spend through central and local government?

Read more: A year on from New Zealand’s big lockdown the ‘team of 5 million’ needs a new story

The answer is “yes” — if we don’t duplicate effort, if we target funding to those organisations that are of an appropriate scale, and if those organisations take a more creative approach to market development.

We love the arts

Pre-pandemic research in 2017 commissioned by Creative New Zealand (CNZ) found the majority of people agreed the arts improve our society and help define what it is to be a New Zealander.

The research also found about 52% of people believe the arts should receive public funding, with only 17% disagreeing.

The arts sector overall contributed NZ$2.38-billion to GDP in 2018, about half as much as sports and recreation.

Of all art forms, the performing arts (music, dance and theatre) are the most popular and just over half of all New Zealanders attended an event in 2017.

Value for money

Performing arts organisations receive some funding from local government but the bulk comes from CNZ, which in 2018-19 received $16 million from the Ministry for Culture & Heritage (MCH) and $43 million from the Lottery Grants Board.

A small number of national performing arts organisations receive funding from MCH directly, out of its total budget of $577 million.

A look at some of the publicly available performance reports of arts companies provides an interesting picture of how that money is used.

What becomes apparent if you adopt a systemic perspective of the sector are at least two key, interlinked areas that need attention:

• scope and scale of organisations
• the need for market development.

The first key issue is related to organisational scale and scope – those that are too large and those too small.

National tours

At the large end, NZ features organisations required to deliver performances on a national scale, in multiple centres around the country.

For the organisations themselves, this is expensive. It leads to large chunks of budget being spent on production costs — including hotels, daily allowances and airfares. Funding levels must make up for this.

For example, in 2019 the Wellington-based New Zealand Symphony Orchestra (NZSO) spent almost 40% of its total revenue of $20m on mounting its 98 performances around the country. These costs were over and above paying all the personnel and general operating costs.

In contrast, the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (APO) spent almost half that proportion of its ($12.4-million) budget mounting its 70 performances in Auckland.

Government funding must accommodate high touring costs. Almost three-quarters of the NZSO’s total revenue was derived from government funding. Less than half the APO’s total revenue came from government.

Similarly, the national opera company, NZ Opera, had to source almost two-thirds of its $6.3-million total revenue from government. Only 15% of its revenue came from box office.

National touring also leads to a lot of duplication of effort. In addition to the 70 APO performances in Auckland in 2019, the NZSO delivered 15 more to satisfy its mandate.

The Christchurch Symphony Orchestra (which received only 36% of its $3-million total revenue from government), performed 17 concerts in Christchurch. The NZSO performed another four.

On the whole, organisations that stick to their city deliver better value for money. So we should be aiming for organisations with the right size and scope that meet market needs, while still delivering excellence.

That doesn’t mean we won’t have national performing arts organisations. It just means they will be called “national” because they are based in the capital city, much like other countries around the world.

Size should matter

There are also issues with very small performing arts organisations.

In 2018 the performing arts employed about 30,000 people. But with almost 10,000 performing arts organisations in NZ that’s an average of just three employees per organisation.

The median income for all New Zealanders in 2019 was $51,800. For artists it was $32,400 for those in acting and theatre production, $28,300 in music and sound, and only $17,500 in dance.

In Auckland there has been a proliferation of small contemporary dance companies — assembled around individual choreographers. Achieving efficiency is enormously difficult, with a large proportion of funding going to administrators and managers, not performers.

The scale of these organisations also hobbles their ability to engage in effective marketing and audience development, leading to modest box office take.

Government funding comprised 63% of total revenue for one of these organisations, for another it was 86% and for another, 100%.

Our city-based theatre companies are much better sized to deliver the full package both artistically and managerially.

Court Theatre in Christchurch received a modest 23% of total revenue from government and 37% from box office. And Auckland Theatre Company received 36% from government funding and 41% from box office.

So which organisations qualify for recurring CNZ investment funding needs careful reconsideration. This means making some hard decisions about what’s really needed.

Collaboration brings benefits

The second key issue is the need for more deliberate development of the market for performing arts — largely through collaboration.

Currently, arts organisations see each other as competitors.

We know what happens when organisations compete. They are reluctant to collaborate, become risk-averse and carefully protect intellectual property — such as subscriber databases.

But we aren’t talking about Pepsi and Coke. Any ticket sold to a live performance is a small victory for the entire sector.

Our research shows how collaboration between competitors can be used to shape markets, leading to new networks, practices, assumptions and levels of engagement. Ultimately, in the arts this would deliver increased audiences.

A market-shaping strategy works in multiple contexts. For example, what is today the entertainment behemoth Cirque du Soleil emerged in the 1980s. At the time, it was just one of numerous new circus troupes.

But what Cirque did differently was to build close connections into related disciplines, including Broadway and gymnastics. It worked closely with circus education programmes, and built truly imaginative productions that challenged the status quo and appealed to a wide range of people.

Read more: Has a gap in old-school handwriting and spelling tuition contributed to NZ’s declining literacy scores?

Our research into music festivals and the wine industry show similar processes and results.

So the appropriate response is for the sector to better articulate the value proposition — the benefit to customers — of the performing arts. Then arts managers should decide how to deliver it together, which will generate some fresh thinking.

When you think about international artists such as André Rieu or, more locally, the Pop-Up Globe, you see great attention put into production values, setting, timing and dedication to audience appeal.

For NZ performing arts, a revitalised value proposition might leverage off people’s growing need for experiences that distract them from their busy, digital lives.

Arts funding should not be reduced, nor should it necessarily be increased. Instead, some fresh thinking needs to be applied to the status quo to increase New Zealander’s value for money.

– ref. The show must go on, but it’s time to re-think how we fund the arts in NZ – https://theconversation.com/the-show-must-go-on-but-its-time-to-re-think-how-we-fund-the-arts-in-nz-156488

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paola Balla, Lecturer in Indigenous Education and Indigenous art, PhD Candidate, Victoria University

“We want your blood,” declared Dark Mofo on Saturday. This was not a metaphorical call. This was a literal request of First Nations Peoples by Spanish artist Santiago Sierra.

The call-out was confronting — and probably set out what it intended to do: shock — but the white curators may not have counted on the level of Indigenous disgust, refusal and critique it prompted.

On Monday, Dark Mofo released a statement defending the project, called Union Flag. By Tuesday afternoon, it had been cancelled.

The critical question is how this was allowed to be programmed in the first place? And what structures support white curators to speak of Black traumas?

Trawlwoolway and Plengarmairenner Pakana visual artist and dancer, Jam Graham Blair led the call on social media to denounce the project, and is now among those calling for artists to boycott MONA.

Yorta-Yorta curator Kimberley Moulton described “the neo-colonial curatorial practice that haunts us”. Wardandi (Nyoongar) curator Clothilde Bullen reminded the art world “this is why we need far more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts workers and curators in senior leadership and director positions.”

As Noongar writer and researcher Cass Lynch wrote for Overland: “the proposed artwork betrays itself as hinging on violence against Indigenous bodies.”

More than ever, we need Black curators who work from community standpoints.

A track record

Aboriginal blood is still being spilt in acts of generational colonial violence at the hands of the police. In the 30 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, over 450 First Nations people have died in custody.

As Aboriginal People, we know racism and white supremacy are not hidden in corners. Indeed, MONA has a track record of unsettling practices and cancellations. In 2014, they pulled an Aboriginal DNA identity testing installation by Swiss artist Christoph Buchel after a similar outcry.

Union Flag aimed to literally extract Aboriginal blood as an anthropological and biological specimen. Extracted to be used as paint without the bodies or sovereign voices it belongs to and within.

This is a deep triggering of the wounds caused by the exploitation done to and on the bodies of our Ancestors and Old People in the name of anthropology and science. Our remains are held in museums in Australia and around the world.

This is unfinished business unaided by empty performances of decolonial consciousness.

We are taught by our Elders that our bodies and all they hold are sacred, from our hair to our sweat.

Capitalism and colonialism work hand in hand in the art world, dominated by privileged white Australians, directors, curators, wealthy board members and customers. Few white artists are able to contend with the violence of the ongoing colonial project without literally using or alluding to the blood of Indigenous Peoples.

Read more: The Tjanpi Desert Weavers show us that traditional craft is art

Resisting and contesting

Aboriginal artists create work that is nuanced, complex, multi-layered and engaged with lived realities, the traumas caused by colonial violence and how to survive and thrive in spite of it.

Part of this is because of our abilities and skills to resist and contest the never-ended colonial project and all the tentacles of its violence. This violence that disturbs and unsettles us once again with the daily labour of responding to white peoples’ poorly constructed ideas.

MONA’s David Walsh has now apologised, saying he “didn’t see the deeper consequences of this proposition” and Dark Mofo creative director Leigh Carmichael said he had “made a mistake” in commissioning Union Flag.

But Dark Mofo know better. In partnership with the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the 2019 festival presented the work of Trawlwoolway artist Dr Julie Gough. Her 25-year career survey show, Tense Past, showed her long engagement with art-making on the ongoing impact of colonisation on Tasmania’s First People.

Read more: Julie Gough’s ‘Tense Past’ reminds us how the brutalities of colonial settlement are still felt today

How is it lead curator Carmichael, who also sits on the board of the Australia Council, isn’t complying with arts protocols for using First Nations cultural and intellectual property?

This isn’t about mistakes. This is about the wilful decision making focused on shock tactics and sensationalism that is part of the Dark Mofo brand.

Aboriginal curators and artists have been asking for positions of leadership and decision making for decades. If MONA, Dark Mofo, and indeed all of Australia’s arts institutions centred First Nations people in collaborative leadership and curatorial positions, festivals could still make work that engages without shock, and without contributing to ongoing colonial trauma.

The criticism of Union Flag was not about censorship, cancel culture or halting personal expression. It is about accountability and ethics.

To recognise and memorialise First Nations grief and loss caused by ongoing colonialism (not an historical past tense, as referred to by this project) requires sovereign Aboriginal led and self-determined decisions.

This work continues to be done by artists and academics, such as Dr Vicki Couzens’, Dr Fiona Foley, Djon Mundine and many other Aboriginal community peoples, artists, activists, curators and educators.

Our peoples’ prior and informed consent is non-negotiable to making shared, collective projects.

We don’t need to see our blood to know we bleed.

Read more: Review: Fiona Foley’s Biting the Clouds is a visceral look at opium and control on the colonial frontier

– ref. Dark Mofo doesn’t deserve our blood. Australia must invest in First Nations curators and artists – https://theconversation.com/dark-mofo-doesnt-deserve-our-blood-australia-must-invest-in-first-nations-curators-and-artists-157677

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marios Koutsakos, Research Fellow, The Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity

Variants of the virus that causes COVID-19 are emerging and becoming dominant around the world. So some vaccines are being updated to allow our immune system to learn how to deal with them.

But this process of identifying and characterising variants that can escape our immune system, then tweaking a vaccine to deal with them, can take time.

So researchers are designing a universal coronavirus vaccine. This could mean one vaccine to protect against different variants of SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Alternatively, a universal vaccine would target many different coronaviruses, perhaps one waiting in the wings to cause the next pandemic.

Here’s where the science is up to and the challenges ahead.

Why would we need a universal coronavirus vaccine?

Coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, belong to a large and diverse family of viruses that infect humans and animals. And a universal coronavirus vaccine might be particularly important under two scenarios.

The first is the emergence of new variants of SARS-CoV-2. The second is the emergence of new coronaviruses that may cause a pandemic in the future. Indeed, SARS-CoV-2 is not the first of the coronaviruses that has “crossed” from animals and can cause severe disease in humans and it is unlikely to be the last.

Read more: UN report says up to 850,000 animal viruses could be caught by humans, unless we protect nature

How do we even start?

Researchers are already designing and testing a universal vaccine against influenza. If successful, this would avoid needing to tweak the vaccine every year to guard against new variants. So we can apply what we’ve learnt to designing a universal coronavirus vaccine.

Read more: A universal influenza vaccine may be one step closer, bringing long-lasting protection against flu

We could look for common features

We could identify parts of the virus common to the entire family of coronaviruses or variants. So we could analyse and compare the genetic sequences of the viruses to find some common ground.

Alternatively, we could isolate immune cells that can react with all coronaviruses or a number of variants. These could be antibodies or T cells (a type of immune cell that specialises in identifying and killing virus-infected cells). Then we could map where on the viruses these target. In other words, we’re looking for a common antigen or group of antigens.

We can then use that knowledge to design a vaccine to teach the immune system how to specifically recognise those parts of the virus.

Several pharmaceutical companies around the world are investigating such approaches against COVID-19, although all are at very early stages of development, and have yet to start clinical trials.

Read more: Explainer: what is the immune system?

We could make a ‘mosaic’ vaccine

An alternative approach is to make a “mosaic” vaccine. This is a vaccine that contains antigens from a few different variants or coronaviruses.

These are arranged on a nanoparticle — an extremely small biological structure made from proteins that serves as a platform for delivering antigens. Using this approach, our immune system figures out the commonalities itself. It then learns how to generate antibodies that react broadly to all the different viruses.

Scientists from the US have tested this approach in mice. After being vaccinated with the mosaic vaccine, the mice had an immune response against SARS-CoV-2 and a range of other coronaviruses from bats. The results are interesting for two reasons.

The first is the type of immune response. The mice raised a broad range of neutralising antibodies, the types of antibodies that can stop a virus from infecting our cells and therefore provide the strongest protection. These neutralising antibodies are the main goal of vaccines.

The mice also raised an immune response to bat coronaviruses. This strategy could be useful for providing protection against future pandemics, should a bat coronavirus cross over to infect humans.

But “mosaic” vaccines against coronaviruses have yet to be tested in humans.

So what are the challenges ahead?

The design of a universal vaccine against any group of viruses is no small task. Indeed, universal vaccines against HIV or influenza have been the focus of intense research for years.

Some candidate universal vaccines against HIV or influenza have been assessed in human clinical trials and shown to be safe. However, the efficacy results have generally been modest.

One big challenge is these vaccines need to able to protect against an incredibly large number of possible variants. The good news is that SARS-CoV-2 mutates slower than HIV or influenza viruses, so variants may take longer to arise.

The second challenge is establishing long-lasting immunity, which both HIV and influenza universal vaccines have yet to show.

A third barrier to overcome is learning how to anticipate the virus’ next mutation or which animal coronavirus may cause the next pandemic.

So it is likely a universal coronavirus vaccine, whether it aims to cover multiple variants of SARS-CoV-2 or animal coronaviruses with pandemic potential, may take years to develop.

For now, we have to rely on reformulating currently available vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 to accommodate the emergence of new variants.

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

– ref. A single vaccine to beat all coronaviruses sounds impossible. But scientists are already working on one – https://theconversation.com/a-single-vaccine-to-beat-all-coronaviruses-sounds-impossible-but-scientists-are-already-working-on-one-156373