Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lauren Gurrieri, Senior Lecturer in Marketing, RMIT University

You may have had heard of Vanessa Sierra, the Instagram model and reality TV contestant who adeptly used her time quarantining with boyfriend Australian tennis player Bernard Tomic to build her public profile.

Sierra is just one of the hundreds of thousands of “content creators” – most commonly young women – monetising content produced on social media platforms. She has been using these platforms to promote “subscription-only” content. Most “social influencers”, however, have a more traditional business model, using their position to promote brands.

Among Australia’s influencer megastars are fitness influencer Tammy Hembrow (11.9 million Instagram followers), who can reportedly charge as much as A$55,000 for a single post, and Kayla Itsines (12.7 million Instagram followers), whose workout app and deals with brands such as Apple and Adidas placed her 27th on the Australian Financial Review’s 2020 Young Rich List (estimated worth: A$209 million).

One report estimates there are more than 830,000 influencers on Instagram alone. It’s the wild west of marketing. Surreptitious and dubious practices have flourished. So too has the exploitation of overt sexual representation.

The new code of ethics for Australian advertisers, which came into effect on February 1, addresses one of these problems – lack of transparency in disclosing financial deals. It does a less adequate job with the other.

It has much improved on guidelines for gender representations in traditional advertising. It acknowledges, for the first time, advertisers’ responsibility to avoid harm to consumers and society. But it leaves a big loophole for commercialising sexualised imagery through social influencers.

What is the code of ethics

The Australian Association of National Advertisers’ code of ethics is a central part of the self-regulatory model that governs advertising standards in Australia.

It sets guidelines for “all advertising or marketing communication under the reasonable control of the advertiser”. It is used to adjudicate complaints about advertising (by AdStandards, formerly known as the Advertising Standards Bureau).

The new code makes a number of welcome improvements, replacing a code much criticised for its laxity in allowing adverts that reinforced gender stereotypes and exploited sexualised imagery for commercial gain.

Read more: Sexualised and stereotyped: why Australian advertising is stuck in a sexist past

Addressing gender stereotypes

One key change is prohibiting harmful gender stereotypes suggesting “skills, interests, roles or characteristics” uniquely associated with women or men.

Such stereotyping in advertising has equated women with domesticity and men in caring roles as “dumb dads”.

Now messages such as the “Put time back in your day” advert for leading cleaning brand Pine O Cleen (owned by British multinational Reckitt Benckiser) will be contrary to the code, because they allude to alleviating the domestic load only of women.

Overtly sexual imagery

Another important change is prohibiting the use of “overtly sexual” images in outdoor advertising or shopfront windows, and in any other advertising medium when “not relevant to the product or service being advertised”.

Accompanying the new code is a guide specifying what may be considered overtly sexual, including suggestive undressing or depictions in sheer clothing or lingerie that expose private body parts.

This mean brands such as automotive repair company Ultra Tune, long subject to public complaints, can no longer use overtly sexualised representations of women to advertise their services.

Research has consistently found exposure to such images are directly associated with a range of negative consequences, including higher levels of body dissatisfaction, greater support of sexist beliefs and greater tolerance of sexual violence toward women.

But what about influencer culture?

The new code’s approach to sexist stereotypes better reflects contemporary society and signals a move away from a “sex sells” mentality in advertising.

What it doesn’t really address, however, is the rise of influencer culture, where a highly sexualised aesthetic that borrows from pornographic imagery is the norm.

Across influencer culture there’s a rigid standard of idealised femininity known as the “Instagram face” – doe eyes, arched brows, high cheekbones, smooth skin and pouty lips. It is a look that sets unrealistic beauty standards for girls and women, manufactured through cosmetic enhancements and photo editing applications.

Advertising budgets

The proportion of corporate marketing budgets going to influencers is growing rapidly. In 2019 the advertising spend on influencers globally was an estimated US$8 billion. By next year it is predicted to be US$15 billion.

That spend reflects the growing value of influencers to marketers, who are seen as effective promoters of products to large, dedicated and highly engaged audiences likely to make purchases based on influencer recommendations.

The new code of ethics does oblige influencers to disclose their commercial relationships in a clear, upfront and easily understood manner.

But, significantly, the code’s standards (including for overtly sexual imagery) don’t apply to user-generated content “not within an advertiser’s reasonable control even if brands or products are featured”.

That’s a big loophole for advertisers. Influencers tend to make almost all creative decisions in crafting sponsored content. Indeed, a survey commissioned by influencer marketing platform Takumi in 2020 found influencers’ top concern when working with brands was retaining creative control. This includes choices about location, staging, lighting, posing, wardrobe, makeup, scripting and directing.

This leaves open various challenges to what can be seen to constitute “reasonable control” for advertisers.

Read more: How highly sexualised imagery is shaping ‘influence’ on Instagram – and harassment is rife

Worlds apart

The new code’s vision of advertising and the norms of influencer culture are therefore likely to remain worlds apart.

In an ever-evolving media landscape, ensuring advertising standards keep pace is an ongoing challenge. The new code is catching up with community expectations for “mainstream” advertising.

But this progress won’t count for much unless advertisers are also held to account for how corporate money helps to sustain sexist and sexualised stereotypes perpetuated through the influencer market.

– ref. Social influencers: new advertising code addresses hyper-sexualisation, but not where it’s needed most – https://theconversation.com/social-influencers-new-advertising-code-addresses-hyper-sexualisation-but-not-where-its-needed-most-154174

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Scott Davie, Lecturer in Piano, School of Music, Australian National University

It seems safe to assume a musical “masterpiece” would show compositional magnificence and garner universal acclaim — yet Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (1928) is conspicuously lacking in the first.

Writing to a friend shortly after finishing the work, Ravel described it as having “no form in the true sense of the word, no development, and hardly any modulation”. And to the Swiss composer Arthur Honegger, he confided, “I’ve written only one masterpiece – Boléro. Unfortunately, there’s no music in it”.

Despite these misgivings, Boléro’s instant success was a delightful surprise for the composer. A few years later, on entering the casino at Monte Carlo, he was asked if he would like to gamble. He declined by saying, “I wrote Boléro and won — I’ll let it go at that”.

Read more: New music composers face the age-old question: do they write for themselves or for mass appeal?

Ballet beginnings

The piece arose out of a commission for a new ballet from Ida Rubinstein, a prominent dancer formerly with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Originally, Ravel had planned to respond with an orchestration of Spanish composer Isaac Albeniz’s Iberia (1905–1908), but when copyright issues proved insurmountable, he decided to write his own Spanish-themed work.

The Spanish influence is not surprising in a work by France’s then-most-famous composer, as his mother was Basques. Nor are the obvious inflections of jazz, as the style was popular in many of the bars of Paris frequented by Ravel, and his four-month tour of the United States early in 1928 had heightened the attraction.

What is truly surprising is the singular premise on which Boléro is based: an experimental orchestral crescendo lasting a quarter of an hour, based exclusively on a two-bar rhythm repeated a staggering 169 times.

There are but two melodic ideas in the piece, each heard twice before alternating, and always given to a new instrument or group of instruments.

Indeed, for a composer famous for his orchestration — both in his own compositions and in his arrangement of works by others — it is a marvel of orchestral assignment, writing for each instrument (and instrumental group) in ways that highlight particular aspects unique to them.

It is amusing to imagine Ravel, a self-confessed “dandy”, who once played the melody on piano for a friend, dressed in a yellow dressing down and scarlet head cap. “Don’t you think this theme has an insistent quality?” he reportedly asked.

The second melody contrasts with evocative repeated notes that have a flattened quality to them, these blue-note intonations no doubt contributing to what Ravel’s friend, Hélène Jourdan-Morhange, believed were “obsessive, musico-sexual” underpinnings in the work.

The gamble pays off

Almost immediately, the work found success in the concert hall, with recordings by luminary conductors like Sergei Koussevitzky and Willem Mengelberg. The popularity of the work in the United States was aided through performances led by Arturo Toscanini. Ravel, however, did not hide his scorn for the conductor’s interpretation: at around 13 minutes long, Ravel believed that it was played too fast. The composer’s own recording lasts over 16 minutes.

Toscanini believed that the work needed “saving”, yet it is arguable that, at the slower speed requested by the composer, audiences are beguiled into a state of complete enthralment. The more moderate tempo also fits better with our understanding of the composer, who had a lifelong fascination with mechanical devices.

Read more: Performing Beethoven – what it feels like to embody a master on today’s stage

Indeed, Ravel’s original scenario for the ballet built on this mechanistic idea, with the action to have taken place within a factory. In Alexandre Benois’s designs for the first production, however, the ballet was set in a Spanish tavern.

The combination of sinuous melody, mesmeric rhythm, and slowly building orchestral crescendo has inspired the imagination of Hollywood. In 1934, a film starring George Raft and Carole Lombard titled Bolero made much of the simmering tension underpinning the work.

In 1979, the music was similarly used to illustrate Dudley Moore’s attraction to Bo Derek in 10.

And to universal acclaim, gold medal-winning ice-skating duo, Torvill and Dean, danced to a (considerably shortened) recording of the piece at the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics.

Detractors

Yet there is no escaping that the singular premise of Boléro fuels the claim it is a composition with little content. According to the composer’s brother Edouard, this criticism was evident at a first performance, where an old lady was heard shouting “Rubbish! Rubbish!” above the applause. On being informed of this, the composer responded sagely, saying, “That old lady got the message”.

Sarcastic remarks on Ravel’s works were made by the British composer, Constant Lambert. He claimed that in some of the composer’s pieces the repeated rhythms eventually grew tiresome. This was even more of a problem with Boléro, he stated, as it occurs “shortly after the beginning”.

Perhaps the funniest response to the work is Patrice Leconte’s short film, Le batteur do Boléro, first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992. After the conductor walks to the stage and the orchestra begins, the camera pans to the back of the stage, the focus landing on the percussionist tasked with playing the incessantly repetitive rhythm. The facial movements of the drummer as he endures this undertaking amount to a farcical study of the difficulties of maintaining attention, and is endlessly amusing.

The ending

Sadly, the work was one of the composer’s last, an accident in a Paris taxi exacerbating what was possibly a latent neurological condition which drew his life to an end within a decade, incapacitated mentally and in pain.

While the work has proven easy to criticise, there is an element that nevertheless marks Boléro as deserving of lasting attention. Given the repetitive rhythm and the restricted melodic material, it would have been foremost in Ravel’s mind that monotony would be an issue, even with his carefully expanding orchestration. Especially in terms of its harmony, the piece is utterly welded to the key of C major.

Yet with a master’s understanding of the intricacies of timing, Ravel rachets the ending in two ways.

Firstly, he curtails the double statements of the two themes to single playings. And then, without warning, he moves the entire piece to the key of E major, a harmonically “distant” key with little relation to the home key of C major. And then, after eight glorious bars of peeling forth in this previously unimaginable harmonic region, he just as suddenly moves the music back again.

Given the unceasing momentum of all that has gone before, the momentary harmonic shift serves to satisfy our need for change, seemingly in an instant. And with this simple roll of the dice, Ravel likely guaranteed the lasting success of this masterpiece “without any music in it”.

Read more: Decoding the music masterpieces: Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances

– ref. Decoding the music masterpieces: Ravel’s Bolero — a sinuous and sexy composition with ‘no music in it’ – https://theconversation.com/decoding-the-music-masterpieces-ravels-bolero-a-sinuous-and-sexy-composition-with-no-music-in-it-149528

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By William Partlett, Associate Professor, University of Melbourne

Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny was today sentenced to two years, eight months in a prison colony for violating the probation terms of a suspended sentence on a 2014 conviction, which he claims was politically motivated.

This comes on the heels of a second weekend of unauthorised protests in which thousands of Russians took to the streets in support of Navalny.

This is an important moment for Russia. Now that Navalny faces a lengthy prison term, he could become a potent symbol of a lawless regime that is afraid of its people — and further energise the opposition.

To counter this, the Kremlin will seek to paint Navalny as a dangerous symbol of Western meddling in Russian politics.

The success of these competing messages will play a critical role in determining whether the opposition will be able to maintain its momentum moving forward.

A growing crackdown

For many years, Russia has been an unusual place for opposition politics. Despite dominating the messaging on traditional TV and (most) print media, the Kremlin has allowed a degree of free speech online. Navalny has taken advantage of this freedom, exposing high-level corruption first as a blogger and now as head of Russia’s leading anti-corruption organisation.

He and his team have produced voluminous reports and slickly produced viral videos detailing corruption at the highest levels of Russian politics. These videos have generated millions of clicks.

But last year it appeared this uneasy truce between the Kremlin and its online opponents was breaking down. Putin’s approval ratings fell to historic lows amid a stagnating economy and the government’s dysfunctional response to COVID.

In response, the Kremlin launched a large, stage-managed constitutional reform process aimed at projecting the image of strongman governance as the only way to avoid growing threats from a hostile Europe and United States.

In addition, the Kremlin has ramped up its targeting of government critics and human rights groups by pushing its claims they are “foreign agents” and restricting their operations. Navalny and his Anti-Corruption Foundation have also faced growing harassment.

Read more: Navalny returns to Russia and brings anti-Putin politics with him

Then, in August, Navalny was poisoned while visiting regional Russia to promote his “smart voting” system, which helps Russians vote tactically for opposition candidates, depriving the ruling United Russia party of votes and weakening its monopoly on power.

Perhaps anticipating his arrest after returning from Russia from his convalescence in Germany, Navalny personally appeared on YouTube describing a highly detailed report of a US$1.3 billion dollar palace allegedly built for Putin on the Black Sea.

This video has now been viewed more than 100 million times and has transformed the palace’s 700-euro toilet brushes — four times the average monthly pension in Russia — into a symbol of the protests.

Western agent or symbol of a new form of politics?

With Navalny now facing a lengthy prison time, two competing narratives are likely to emerge.

The government will seek to downplay his symbolic importance. For his part, Putin still refuses to call Navalny by name and has recently referred to him as “the Berlin patient”.

And to the extent the official state media do mention Navalny, the Kremlin has increasingly tried to characterise him as a Western agent intent on weakening Russia and unleashing revolutionary chaos.

Read more: Putin for life? Many Russians may desire leadership change, but don’t see a viable alternative

This image of Navalny fits with the Kremlin’s overall narrative that Russia is under threat from a hostile West seeking to undermine its stable development. This message has ironically been strengthened by European Union and US threats to impose additional sanctions on Russia for jailing Navalny.

The long-term success of this narrative in Russia, however, remains unclear. In contrast with Europe and the US, where Navalny is rapidly assuming the unambiguous status of “oppressed Russian dissident”, Russians have mixed views on Navalny. Many are uncertain whether they would vote for him if he could run for president. Others worry about his nationalist background.

But the protests suggest Navalny could come to symbolise something far more problematic for the Kremlin.

His jailing could galvanise Russians who want a form of politics no longer characterised by post-imperial nostalgia and a paranoid, siege mentality that constantly fears Western interference. Instead, they want to live in a country focused on building better schools, infrastructure and health care.

The protests show this narrative is particularly popular among young people, who ignore state media and instead get their news from social media posts that combine dark humour with criticism of the regime.

Some of these videos have sampled songs by activist musicians, such as IC3Peak’s Death No More, which mixes hard-core electronica and images of the singers pouring kerosene on themselves in front of government buildings and eating raw meat outside Vladimir Lenin’s tomb.

Further, the recent protests show this narrative is also gaining traction in regional cities in Siberia and the Far East, which have suffered from the Putin regime’s centralisation of power and money in Moscow over the last 20 years.

Finally, this narrative is popular among women. Navalny’s organisation is cultivating a new generation of female leaders and supporters, many of whom want to break away from the macho, strongman politics of the Putin era.

As Navalny (and many of his team) sit in jail, he is a reminder of the hypocrisy of many of the Russian political elite, who claim to be protecting Russian sovereignty, but own vast amounts of property in Europe.

Read more: Alexei Navalny has long been a fierce critic of the Kremlin. If he was poisoned, why now? And what does it mean?

The future of the protest movement

If the Kremlin successfully paints Navalny as a foreign agent who will only bring instability to Russia, the jailed activist may retreat from public view. If he does, the opposition will once again fail to place serious political pressure on the Kremlin.

But if Navalny comes to symbolise unjust oppression in the face of an increasingly corrupt, unaccountable and incompetent political elite, popular pressure will only increase on the Russian government.

It could take years for this narrative to gather steam. But if it does, Navalny will likely be correct when he stated in a recent court hearing,

right now brute force is on the state’s side, but that will not last forever.

– ref. By jailing Alexei Navalny, the Kremlin may turn him into an even more potent opposition symbol – https://theconversation.com/by-jailing-alexei-navalny-the-kremlin-may-turn-him-into-an-even-more-potent-opposition-symbol-154258

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Oli Wilson, Associate Professor of Music, Massey University

Recent accusations of harassment and coercion by leading figures in Aotearoa New Zealand’s music industry were shocking, but not surprising.

Last year, we released the Amplify Aotearoa report that revealed serious issues with gender diversity in the local music industry. Two main findings emerged:

• more than 70% of women reported experiencing gender discrimination, disadvantage and bias

• nearly half of women reported they had felt unsafe in places where music is made and/or performed.

While there are excellent initiatives encouraging inclusive and diverse cultures in music, women face a range of systemic barriers in the industry, including under-representation, earning less, receiving less airplay, winning fewer awards, and widespread harassment. These issues are experienced disproportionately by women of colour and gender-diverse people.

The recent revelations of abusive behaviour in the industry remind us that, beyond its career-limiting potential, discrimination involves a significant emotional cost to victims. This was a major motivation for our Amplify Aotearoa research.

Empowering the next generation

As curriculum developers and university educators in a music degree, we felt obligated to better understand the industry our students were entering. In the process, the project identified even more obligations.

It is not enough for the tertiary sector to “call out” the problems the music industry is facing. Rather, we must also reckon with the role music education should play in breaking down obstacles and empowering the next generation of Aotearoa’s music makers to lead cultural change.

Read more: Women take a hit for reporting sexual harassment, but #MeToo may be changing that

In recent years, many tertiary music providers have shifted their focus toward producing “real world” outcomes for their graduates. Music degrees have evolved with the goal of equipping students with proficiency across a variety of industry contexts. Work-integrated and project-based learning is prioritised, seeking to develop skills for career success and employability.

Such training aims to produce music graduates who are positioned to meet the demands of the industry, equipped with “realistic attitudes and intentions about their pending careers”.

Changing what and how we teach

What, then, should a “realistic” attitude entail, given the industry’s well-documented history of marginalisation, exploitation and harassment of women and gender-diverse people?

Training students for the reality of working in an industry in which they can expect to be targets of mistreatment risks complacency towards existing cycles of discrimination.

Read more: Nearly all sexual harassment at work goes unreported – and those who do report often see zero benefit

Encouraging students to develop “realistic” career intentions should mean empowering them not just to understand existing industry practices, but to have the tools to change them.

Part of the answer lies in what and how we teach. Critical theories that underpin our understanding of issues such as race, gender and sexuality allow us to engage with the ways music carries and constructs meaning in our society. In doing so, they provide us with the tools to understand the lived experiences of music industry workers.

But such approaches are at risk within the tertiary sector internationally. In Australia, staff and funding cuts have jeopardised courses that teach the critical skills essential to bring about cultural change.

Addressing the gender imbalance

Further urgent issues facing the tertiary music sector are barriers to access, and the lack of diversity in our student cohorts. Who are we training and graduating into the industry?

Tertiary Education Commission TEC data show music cohorts in Aotearoa are largely populated by young Pākehā men from high-decile school backgrounds. Women make up around 40% of enrolments in university music programs and courses. Women are also under-represented as staff across the sector.

This disparity is further amplified in the industry, with women representing 24.1% of APRA-AMCOS NZ members. That the imbalance we see in the industry is evident in university recruitment figures suggests problems with pre-tertiary education too. It seems fewer women than men see music as a viable pathway for study.

Educational institutions are also not immune to issues of sexual abuse and coercion, as recent allegations have shown. The tertiary sector must do more to foster diverse and inclusive cohorts and curriculums, and hold abuses of power to account.

Read more: In gender discrimination, social class matters a great deal

Change from within

For music educators, this means advocating for critical approaches to understanding music, even when this may not always align with institutional definitions of employability.

It also means leading by example in setting standards for respectful and inclusive behaviour, responsibly talking with our students about the epidemic of harassment in creative fields, and addressing disparities in recruitment through a better understanding of the social and economic factors that produce inequalities in student cohorts.

As researchers and educators, our aim is to forge a fairer and more inclusive environment for people to make and share music. But this comes with the immediate obligation of addressing how the wider tertiary sector must effectively engage staff and students in what it means to be a responsible member of a music community.

It is the responsibility of music education to empower students to challenge industry practices and organisations, rather than simply place students within them.

– ref. NZ music’s #MeToo moment is a wake-up call for educators: prepare graduates to challenge and change the industry – https://theconversation.com/nz-musics-metoo-moment-is-a-wake-up-call-for-educators-prepare-graduates-to-challenge-and-change-the-industry-154167

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

Few people expected the Reserve Bank to adjust its cash rate at its first meeting of the year today, and for good reason.

It has been saying loudly that it is “not expecting to increase the cash rate for at least three years”. Today it said the commitment extends to 2024.

But it isn’t a commitment not to cut the cash rate.

A further cut in the cash rate to take it below its present all-time low of 0.10% would turn the cash rate negative.

The cash rate is that rate that banks pay to borrow money from each other.

It has always been positive, at times very positive.

Ten years ago it was 4.75%. Then, as now, it was used to help set every other rate.

But there’s no reason why it couldn’t be negative. Borrowing (accepting deposits) entails costs. If the banks offered funds are offered more than they need, they’ll charge for accepting them.

Some rates are already negative

It’s already happened in the bond market. In several bond auctions, lenders to Australian government have agreed to pay for having the government accept their money.

Overseas, bond rates in Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Slovakia, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Belgium, France, Ireland, Slovenia and Lithuania are negative. In Germany it means that someone lending the German government 105 euros agrees to get back only 100 euros when the loan expires ten years later.

In at least three countries, Japan, Denmark and Switzerland cash rates are also negative, at rates of -0.10%, -0.60% and -0.75%.

Read more: Negative rates explained: how money for (less than) nothing is helping out the budget

In two other countries, the Bank of England and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand are talking with banks about how to make negative cash rates work.

Calculations I carried out with colleague Timothy Anderson suggest that if Australia’s Reserve Bank acted in accordance with its previous behaviour, it would have turned Australia’s cash rate briefly negative in the second half of last year.

There’s a case for negative cash rate here

Our model, that accurately describes previous Reserve Bank behaviour, is that the bank has a view about the “neutral” cash rate, one that will leave the economy neither “too hot” (too much inflation) nor “too cold” (too much unemployment). If inflation remains too low (and/or unemployment too high) at the neutral rate it moves the cash rate below neutral until inflation climbs back up.

In August 2020 when the Bank was forecasting a dire outlook with unemployment peaking at 10% and inflation well below target our model suggests that if the bank was following previous practice it would have cut the cash rate to around -0.25%.

Read more: Sure, interest rates are negative, but so are some prices, and when you look around, they’re everywhere

By November 2020 when the bank’s forecasts were more positive, our model suggests a positive, but still extraordinarily low cash rate, of about the 0.10% it adopted.

Australia’s Reserve Bank has been remarkably reluctant to take rates negative, seeing a cut into negative territory as fundamentally different to a cut that leaves rates positive.

Governor Philip Lowe has repeatedly said that negative rates are “extraordinarily unlikely”.

But he has conceded he would have to consider them if the world’s other important central banks went negative, a contingency several of them are preparing for.

Economic studies suggest that the neutral rate has been heading downwards for decades and possibly centuries. If the trend continues, negative rates will eventually become widespread.

To not match negative rates elsewhere would be to invite an influx of “hot money” chasing higher rates in Australia than were available elsewhere, pushing the Australian dollar uncomfortably high.

For now, the Reserve Bank has adopted a suite of other unconventional measures, such as lending cheaply to banks and buying government bonds, that it believes will have much the same effects as taking the cash rate negative.

Today it extended announced a decision to buy an additional A$100 billion of bonds when the current bond purchase program expires in mid April.

Lowe will explain more in a televised address to the National Press Club on Wednesday.

Should things worsen here or overseas he might have to go further and overcome his reluctance to push the cash rate negative.

We don’t quite know what would happen

How a negative cash rate would play out depends on how the banks respond.

There are three possibilities.

First, the banks could adjust neither their deposit nor lending rates, meaning the negative cash rate had little effect.

Second, the banks adjust down both their deposit and loan interest rates, but this would mean charging depositors for placing funds with them, something banks haven’t done in other countries that have zero rates for fear of losing customers.

Read more: Negative interest rates could be coming. What would this mean for borrowers and savers?

Third, banks could lower lending interest rates only. This might avoid unpopularity among customers but would erode interest margins. Over time banks might become less keen to lend.

It’s not clear what bank customers would do. In 2015 a survey conducted for ING Bank asked what savers would do if the deposit interest rate fell to minus 0.5%.

Only 10% said they would spend more. 14% said that they would save even more. 42% said they would switch some or most of their savings to somewhere like the stock market. 21% would move it to “a safe place”.

– ref. The Reserve Bank might yet go negative – https://theconversation.com/the-reserve-bank-might-yet-go-negative-149267

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

Just before Tuesday’s House of Representatives question time, Scott Morrison rang Liberal maverick Craig Kelly. The PM wanted to be sure Kelly wasn’t an anti-vaxxer.

Kelly said no – his outspoken campaign on hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin was for additional treatment, not as an alternative to vaccination.

Kelly has had his neck saved by two prime ministers: Malcolm Turnbull before the 2016 election and Scott Morrison prior to the last one.

They had their political reasons at the time, but Kelly doesn’t deal in gratitude. In the climate wars, he worked for the demise of Turnbull, and now he’s embarrassing Morrison with his freelancing on COVID.

Kelly is a zealot over the usefulness of the two drugs in treating COVID, despite public health officials dismissing the case. He’s tangled with Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly.

He posted in January: “The claim that there’s is ‘no evidence’ that HCQ and Ivermectin reduce Covid infections, minimise hospitalisations and reduce death is one the most costly and most deadliest lies in history. … And those that have acted to deny sick people access to this medicine need to be held accountable.”

He was back on his hobby horse at Tuesday’s Coalition parties meeting. He quoted a review of the literature by immunologist Robert Clancy (emeritus professor at the University of Newcastle), complained again about state restrictions on the availability of these drugs and linked the issue to Liberal values.

No one responded in the meeting. Colleagues, and especially Morrison, don’t want to give him any more than the considerable oxygen he takes up.

Kelly’s posts on Facebook (where he has more than 90,000 followers) are highly provocative, and suddenly Morrison is finding himself put on the spot about what his backbencher is saying.

At the National Press Club on Monday, the prime minister was asked about his failure to “rein in” government MPs “who are spreading disinformation about both the virus and the vaccines on social media”.

Morrison said people should get their information from official government sites, not Facebook.

When a journalist chipped in with Kelly’s name, Morrison said, “He’s not my doctor and he’s not yours. But he does a great job in [his electorate of] Hughes.”

On Tuesday, the first day of this parliamentary sitting, Labor homed in on Kelly, moving (unsuccessfully) a motion noting his “repeated use of social media to spread damaging mistruths about COVID-19” and his comments about vaccinations “which have the potential to undermine public confidence in the upcoming rollout”.

It called on Morrison to condemn Kelly’s “irresponsible and dangerous comments”.

Labor’s health spokesman Mark Butler called Kelly “a dangerous menace” to the national Covid response.

Realistically, it’s unlikely Kelly would have much influence with the public. Despite his Facebook following, most people wouldn’t have heard of him, let alone be looking to him for guidance.

The government is using experts in its advertising about the vaccine for good reason – the public have faith in them in the time of COVID.

The latest evidence certainly suggests people’s ears are tuned to the official advice, and the Essential poll published Tuesday showed a high level of confidence in the coming vaccination rollout.

Essential found 68% were confident the rollout would be done efficiency and 72% believed it would be done safely.

At another level, the potential of Kelly to do damage to the Coalition government has declined compared to those months of minority government last term (although with a narrow majority, the Liberals wouldn’t want him jumping to the crossbench).

If he lost preselection and ran as an independent, he would not pose a threat in the seat.

Morrison would calculate his best course is to avoid a shouting match with Kelly (if he can) and let a preselection spell the end of his Liberal troublemaker.

Critics will say this is a cop out, but it is a politically effective one.

Hughes local Kent Johns, a councillor in the Sutherland Shire (Morrison territory), a former local mayor and a former president of the NSW Liberal party, was hunting Kelly before the previous two elections, though the prime ministerial interventions meant there were not preselection ballots.

Johns, who is ex-Labor and an industrial chemist with a committed position on climate change, was considered to have had the support to win ballots if they’d been held. He is expected to run again, and it is presumed the numbers haven’t changed. Even if Johns didn’t run, the “anybody but Kelly” feeling among the local Liberals would mobilise.

And this time, there’s no likely prime ministerial protection (apart from the standard letter of support for an incumbent).

Last weekend, the local Liberals in the Victorian seat of Menzies decided it was time to move on former minister Kevin Andrews. The prospect is strong the Hughes Liberals will move Kelly on.

Miracles don’t often come in threes.

– ref. View from The Hill: Craig Kelly set to face preselection reckoning – without prime ministerial protection – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-craig-kelly-set-to-face-preselection-reckoning-without-prime-ministerial-protection-154485

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

Over the past few weeks, Google and Facebook have engaged in desperate attempts to avoid regulation under the Australian government’s proposed mandatory news media bargaining code.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg even appealed to Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Communications Minister Paul Fletcher personally last week, hoping to shift the government’s hard stance.

Both platforms’ strategies have involved a mixture of user-focused advertising, political lobbying, and even threats to pull services from Australia.

But what may initially seem like a confident stance reveals itself, upon closer inspection, as a panicked approach — one spurred by a lack of earlier action.

A delayed reaction comes with a price

The government has largely ignored the threats and is pushing ahead with reform — with a determination that underlines Google’s and Facebook’s ongoing inability to make inroads in Canberra.

Both tech giants have sought to stop the implementation of the mandatory code, which would force them to pay Australian news companies for content that appears on their platforms.

It also requires they abide by certain minimum standards, including informing media companies about the type of data collected through users’ interactions with news, and providing advance notice of any algorithmic changes that affect news content.

Google and Facebook were comparatively passive when the draft code first emerged in 2019, as part of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Digital Platforms Inquiry.

But they intensified their efforts in recent months, upon realising the government wouldn’t yield. Both have threatened to remove Australian news from their platforms if the code is introduced in its proposed form.

Facebook has publicly considered withholding the launch of the official Facebook News service in Australia. This news tab feature is already available in the United Kingdom and will be rolled out to more countries over the next year.

Google’s goal to appeal to you

But perhaps the most noteworthy response was when Google threatened to withdraw Google Search from Australia.

Adding to this, the company’s national public relations campaign involved publishing an “open letter” to Australian users, through the Google homepage.

Perhaps Google was trying to leverage its significant Australian audience, or capitalise on a general mistrust in Australian media. But any attempt to establish itself as a trusted company seems doomed since Australians are also distrustful of Google.

The open letter was followed by on-site pop-ups and an ad featuring Google Australia’s managing director, Mel Silva.

Threatening to pull Australian content from its services was a logical step for Google. In the past it happily withdrew Google News from Spain and decided to not deliver content from certain German publishers that sued it over intellectual property rights.

That said, the heavy-handed approach this time around suggests Google and Facebook recognise Australia’s planned reforms as a turning point for platform regulation, which could embolden other governments to make their own costly demands.

Read more: Web’s inventor says news media bargaining code could break the internet. He’s right — but there’s a fix

Movement behind the scenes

Facebook has been less active than Google on the public relations front, but has joined its lobbying efforts — going as far as hiring experienced lobbyists who know Prime Minister Scott Morrison personally.

The chief executive of Alphabet (which owns Google), Sundar Pichai, along with other high-level executives, have also spoken with Morrison.

These last-ditch efforts suggest the platforms are clutching at straws, particularly as they have so far failed to make significant inroads into Australia’s political sphere.

There are multiple reasons for this. The first is their opponent is the Australian media. While politicians and the media have a testy relationship at times, the two institutions are still connected through the Canberra bubble.

The relationship between political leaders and media executives can be especially close, as shown by the appearance of Morrison and Frydenberg at News Corp co-chairman Lachlan Murdoch’s 2019 Christmas party.

There’s no conspiracy between the Australian government and media, but they do have a shared history and are in regular contact.

Read more: Google is leading a vast, covert human experiment. You may be one of the guinea pigs

Moreover, while Google and Facebook have invested sizeable sums in political lobbying overseas, crucially they have not done this here. Each year they spend millions of dollars on political lobbying in the United States.

They’ve even transformed politics in the European Union. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft collectively injected €19 million (more than A$30,000,000) into liaisons with the European Commission and European Parliament during the first half of 2020, the New York Times reported.

Meanwhile in Australia, the companies indirectly contributed just A$34,700 (Google) and A$16,500 (Facebook) to the Labor Party over the past five financial years.

These donations were under the disclosure threshold (which ranged from A$12,800 to A$14,000) and voluntarily reported by Labor. The Liberal Party may have received similar contributions it wasn’t required to disclose them.

These sums are tiny compared with what has been spent in the US and Europe. They point to an overall lack of attention on Australia, despite the threat of the bargaining code.

Not enough of a foothold

Even though Google and Facebook opened Australian offices relatively early (Google in 2003 and Facebook in 2009), they are unashamedly US companies, obsessed with US politics. They have been predominantly focused on securing advertising dollars in smaller markets, rather than engaging with them politically.

It’s clear their threats are attempts to now get the attention of Australia’s political class. And if the platforms follow through with the threats, younger news consumers — who get most of their news from social media — may be significantly impacted.

Perhaps some of this could have been avoided if Google and Facebook had dedicated more time and energy to smaller countries, now emboldened by the prospect of reform.

For transparency, it should be noted The Conversation made a submission to the Senate inquiry regarding the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code.

– ref. Google’s and Facebook’s loud appeal to users over the news media bargaining code shows a lack of political power – https://theconversation.com/googles-and-facebooks-loud-appeal-to-users-over-the-news-media-bargaining-code-shows-a-lack-of-political-power-154379

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert McLachlan, Professor in Applied Mathematics, Massey University

The Climate Change Commission’s draft advice on how to decarbonise New Zealand’s economy is refreshing, particularly as it calls on the government to start phasing out fossil fuels instead of relying on offsets and carbon trading.

Until now, New Zealand has relied heavily on its Emissions Trading Scheme, but the evidence is clear that it has failed to reduce emissions. The commission’s package includes carbon budgets out to 2035 and detailed pathways to achieve them across all sectors of the economy.

Read more: Climate Change Commission calls on New Zealand government to take ‘immediate and decisive action’ to cut emissions

For the transport sector, which is responsible for half of New Zealand’s energy-related emissions, the commission suggests a sweeping set of changes to electrify the country’s car fleet and to replace imported fuels with local renewable electricity.

It’s exciting to see a national-level plan that actually cuts emissions. But it raises two questions: is it feasible, and is it the best or only option?

Transforming the transport sector

Land transport was always going to be squarely in the commission’s sights. Its emissions have doubled since 1990, and, unlike agriculture, it’s not a protected export industry.

The commission calls for cuts in transport emissions of 47% by 2035, achieved by:

• a rapid shift to electric vehicles, with the market share for light vehicles rising from 2% today to 50% in 2027

• an end to imports of pure petrol or diesel cars by 2032, and a similar but later transition for trucks

• the development of an integrated national transport network that reduces travel by private car

• changes to urban planning leading to 7% less travel per person

• the development of policies to increase walking, cycling, and public transport by 25%, 95% and 120% respectively by 2030

• scaling up low-carbon fuels, such as biofuels, to 3% of all liquid fuels by 2035

• some decarbonisation of the rail network, lifting rail’s share of freight from 16% to 20%, and more coastal shipping.

To achieve this rapid electrification, New Zealand would need to produce more renewable electricity. Only one large wind farm, the 840 GWh/year Turitea wind farm near Palmerston North, is currently under construction.

In the commission’s proposed scenarios, New Zealand would need another renewable electricity plant like this every year from now on. At the moment, New Zealand has only 690 MW of wind turbines, and no utility-scale solar generation. The industry would need to scale up considerably.

Other live issues are the planned 2024 closure of the Tiwai Point aluminium smelter, which would make a lot of renewable electricity available, and the NZ Battery pumped-hydro project.

Read more: New Zealand wants to build a 100% renewable electricity grid, but massive infrastructure is not the best option

The promise of deep cuts to fossil fuels

The proposed shift away from fossil fuels is clearly feasible technically, but would need a quick and radical change in policy. Unfortunately, New Zealand doesn’t have a good track record of carrying out the sweeping regulatory changes that will be needed.

Apart from the proposed import ban on petrol cars from 2032, the EV plan involves a system of subsidies and fuel efficiency standards. Last week, the government introduced a refreshed fuel efficiency standard, with a target of 105 gCO₂/km by 2025.

But the car industry appears to have won several concessions, including a halving of penalties (to NZ$50 per vehicle per gram of CO₂ over the target), a delay in the standard’s introduction until 2023 and a separate target for utes.

The EU did not begin to see rapid EV uptake until 2020, when a new 95 gCO₂/km target kicked in, along with fines of €100/gCO₂/km and generous incentives. Achieving the Norway-like transformation of the car fleet the commission envisages will likely require more incentives and stronger oversight of the market.

Is this the only way?

The commission’s plan doesn’t question the overall structure of the transport system. In the view of some critics, the present system is inequitable and disadvantages people who can’t or don’t want to drive, including children, older people and people living with disabilities.

It has contributed to poor health and safety outcomes, traffic congestion and car-dominated city streets. At an annual cost of NZ$17,000 per household (not counting greenhouse gas emissions), it is also expensive.

The commission’s technical advisory panel included representatives from the car importing industry and other road transport groups, but no experts on walking, cycling, public transport, public health or urban planning.

The massive road-building programme undertaken by both National and Labour governments, set to continue far into the future, is not mentioned, despite considerable evidence that it increases transport demand, sprawl and emissions.

There is no requirement to reduce parking, a topic currently contested in urban forums and already being studied by the government. Nor are there any plans for passenger rail or improvements to inter-city public transport.

Changing the way cities grow

New Zealand’s housing crisis has already prompted a rewrite of urban plans throughout the country to enable higher densities, especially near transport hubs. The commission recommends that, before 2025, all levels of government should embed links between urban planning, design and transport so that communities have integrated and accessible transport options, including safe cycleways.

A glimpse of what can be possible comes from Ireland:

• walking and cycling receive 20% of the transport capital expenditure
• every local authority must develop a high-quality cycling policy, review road use and increase the number of children walking and cycling to school
• new public transport infrastructure must receive twice the funding of any new roads
• surburban and commuter rail is to be enhanced across the country, including high-speed intercity links.

You don’t need a complicated model to accept that these steps are more in tune with the required emission reductions.

Those who argue that infinite growth is not possible on a finite planet will not find much to agree with in the commission’s report. Other perspectives, such as those outlined in the recent book A Societal Transformation Scenario for Staying Below 1.5ºC critique the growth and technology biases in most climate scenarios.

Another model of the future could involve less energy, less travel and less consumption overall, but an equivalent or higher standard of living.

– ref. How to cut emissions from transport: ban fossil fuel cars, electrify transport and get people walking and cycling – https://theconversation.com/how-to-cut-emissions-from-transport-ban-fossil-fuel-cars-electrify-transport-and-get-people-walking-and-cycling-154363

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Hawkins, Senior Lecturer, Canberra School of Politics, Economics and Society, University of Canberra

Few people expected the Reserve Bank to adjust its cash rate at its first meeting of the year today, and for good reason.

It has been saying loudly that it is “not expecting to increase the cash rate for at least three years”. Today it said the commitment extends to 2024.

But it isn’t a commitment not to cut the cash rate before then.

A further cut in the cash rate to take it below its present all-time low of 0.10% would turn the cash rate negative.

The cash rate is that rate that banks pay to borrow money from each other.

It has always been positive, at times very positive.

Ten years ago it was 4.75%. Then, as now, it was used to help set every other rate.

But there’s no reason why it couldn’t be negative. Borrowing (accepting deposits) entails costs. If the banks offered funds are offered more than they need, they’ll charge for accepting them.

Some rates are already negative

It’s already happened in the bond market. In several bond auctions, lenders to Australian government have agreed to pay for having the government accept their money.

Overseas, bond rates in Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Slovakia, Denmark, Austria, Finland, Belgium, France, Ireland, Slovenia and Lithuania are negative. In Germany it means that someone lending the German government 105 euros agrees to get back only 100 euros when the loan expires ten years later.

In at least three countries, Japan, Denmark and Switzerland cash rates are also negative, at rates of -0.10%, -0.60% and -0.75%.

Read more: Negative rates explained: how money for (less than) nothing is helping out the budget

In two other countries, the Bank of England and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand are talking with banks about how to make negative cash rates work.

Calculations I carried out with colleague Timothy Anderson suggest that if Australia’s Reserve Bank acted in accordance with its previous behaviour, it would have turned Australia’s cash rate briefly negative in the second half of last year.

There’s a case for negative cash rate here

Our model, that accurately describes previous Reserve Bank behaviour, is that the bank has a view about the “neutral” cash rate, one that will leave the economy neither “too hot” (too much inflation) nor “too cold” (too much unemployment). If inflation remains too low (and/or unemployment too high) at the neutral rate it moves the cash rate below neutral until inflation climbs back up.

In August 2020 when the Bank was forecasting a dire outlook with unemployment peaking at 10% and inflation well below target our model suggests that if the bank was following previous practice it would have cut the cash rate to around -0.25%.

Read more: Sure, interest rates are negative, but so are some prices, and when you look around, they’re everywhere

By November 2020 when the bank’s forecasts were more positive, our model suggests a positive, but still extraordinarily low cash rate, of about the 0.10% it adopted.

Australia’s Reserve Bank has been remarkably reluctant to take rates negative, seeing a cut into negative territory as fundamentally different to a cut that leaves rates positive.

Governor Philip Lowe has repeatedly said that negative rates are “extraordinarily unlikely”.

But he has conceded he would have to consider them if the world’s other important central banks went negative, a contingency several of them are preparing for.

Economic studies suggest that the neutral rate has been heading downwards for decades and possibly centuries. If the trend continues, negative rates will eventually become widespread.

To not match negative rates elsewhere would be to invite an influx of “hot money” chasing higher rates in Australia than were available elsewhere, pushing the Australian dollar uncomfortably high.

For now, the Reserve Bank has adopted a suite of other unconventional measures, such as lending cheaply to banks and buying government bonds, that it believes will have much the same effects as taking the cash rate negative.

Today it extended announced a decision to buy an additional A$100 billion of bonds when the current bond purchase program expires in mid April.

Lowe will explain more in a televised address to the National Press Club on Wednesday.

Should things worsen here or overseas he might have to go further and overcome his reluctance to push the cash rate negative.

We don’t quite know what would happen

How a negative cash rate would play out depends on how the banks respond.

There are three possibilities.

First, the banks could adjust neither their deposit nor lending rates, meaning the negative cash rate had little effect.

Second, the banks adjust down both their deposit and loan interest rates, but this would mean charging depositors for placing funds with them, something banks haven’t done in other countries that have zero rates for fear of losing customers.

Read more: Negative interest rates could be coming. What would this mean for borrowers and savers?

Third, banks could lower lending interest rates only. This might avoid unpopularity among customers but would erode interest margins. Over time banks might become less keen to lend.

It’s not clear how bank customers would respond. In 2015 a survey conducted for ING Bank asked how savers would respond if the deposit interest rate fell to negative 0.5%.

Only 10% said they would spend more. 14% said that they would save even more. 42% said they would switch some or most of their savings to somewhere like the stock market. 21% would move it to “a safe place”.

– ref. The Reserve Bank could still go negative – https://theconversation.com/the-reserve-bank-could-still-go-negative-149267

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jane McAdam, Scientia Professor and Director of the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW

More than a year since COVID-19 emerged, there are nearly 40,000 Australians overseas who want to come home.

Amid mounting stories of people desperate to return for financial, family and personal reasons, Australians are stuck because of government caps on international arrivals, transit-country restrictions and expensive and cancelled flights.

Prominent human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson has suggested Australians stranded overseas could make a successful complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

In his view, Australia’s caps on the number of returning travellers are a clear violation of international law.

There is certainly an arguable case Australia’s travel caps constitute an arbitrary restriction on Australians’ right to come home.

The UN Human Rights Committee says, as general rule, there are

few, if any, circumstances in which deprivation of the right to enter one’s own country could be reasonable.

But could a complaint to the Human Rights Committee offer stranded Aussies a quick return home?

Unfortunately, the short answer is, no.

The UN Human Rights Committee

The UN Human Rights Committee is composed of 18 independent, highly qualified human rights experts.

Among its functions, the committee can consider individual complaints. The Australian government has agreed to this process.

Read more: Australians don’t have a ‘right’ to travel. Does COVID mean our days of carefree overseas trips are over?

This means any individual can lodge a complaint against Australia, arguing it has violated its human rights obligations towards them.

But even though this is free and legal representation is optional (albeit recommended), there are a number of other challenges.

Two big hurdles

Firstly, there is a procedural hurdle.

A person can only lodge a complaint with the committee if they have already exhausted all domestic remedies. That means they must have first gone through the Australian courts.

The committee can waive this requirement, but only if it is clear the local process cannot provide an effective remedy, or if proceedings have been unreasonably prolonged.

Secondly, the merits of the case are not quite as clear-cut as Robertson suggests.

There is no absolute right for a citizen to enter Australia — their entitlement is not to be “arbitrarily” deprived of that right. This means the right may be subject to brief, temporary restrictions that are necessary, reasonable, and based on clear legal criteria — such as protecting the general public from the risks of COVID-19.

What about the #AusOpen?

Even so, it may well be possible for individuals to argue their right to return home is being unlawfully denied. Australia’s travel caps are only justifiable under human rights law if there are no other, less restrictive measures that can be taken to safeguard public health.

So, the federal government needs to show why the caps remain necessary – especially when 1,200 tennis players and their entourage were recently allowed to fly to Australia.

Read more: Self-entitled prima donnas or do they have a point? Why Australian Open tennis players find hard lockdown so tough

Indeed, a Senate inquiry suggested late last year that the federal government consider expanding Commonwealth-funded quarantine facilities to help stranded Australians get home, especially given its constitutional responsibilities for quarantine.

Two more hurdles

A third challenge is that even if the Human Rights Committee did find Australia had violated its international human rights obligations, Australia couldn’t be compelled to bring people home.

The UN human rights system relies on countries acknowledging and rectifying their breaches, but it can’t force their hand.

Australia has a pretty consistent track record of disagreeing with the committee’s findings and refusing to follow its recommendations, especially concerning our treatment of asylum seekers.

A fourth challenge concerns the important issue of timing.

Even if a complaint were lodged today, it would take years before the committee could even consider its merits. As a matter of process, Australia would be given six months just to respond to the initial claim.

A glimmer of hope

There is one small window that could offer an earlier reprieve.

If a person could show that not being able to return to Australia would cause them “irreparable harm”, the committee might recommend “interim measures”.

This is not a finding of a violation, but an urgent measure to avoid potential harm. Interim measures are commonly granted to restrain a country from doing something — for example, to halt the deportation of someone who fears they will be tortured or killed.

It is an open question whether the committee would consider interim measures as a means of getting citizens home. If it did, they would apply only to people who could show a risk of irreparable harm, such as separated children, those whose visa is about to expire, those without employment or a place to live, or those who have underlying health concerns or other compassionate reasons for returning.

And Australia could still ignore the committee’s request — although this would be a very bad look on the world stage.

Why it is still worth lodging a complaint

Still, what a case like this could achieve is a detailed elaboration of what the right to return to one’s country actually entails, and the kinds of circumstances in which it can be lawfully restricted.

The committee’s views on these matters would provide a valuable and authoritative contribution to the international human rights jurisprudence. This could have a powerful influence on how countries treat their nationals in the future.

Read more: Can governments mandate a COVID vaccination? Balancing public health with human rights – and what the law says

If Australia was found to have violated its human rights obligations, then the committee’s opinion would also provide some vindication for those who have been stuck abroad.

Unfortunately, for those stranded now, though, it wouldn’t be the golden ticket home.

– ref. Should Aussies stranded overseas go to the United Nations for help to get home? – https://theconversation.com/should-aussies-stranded-overseas-go-to-the-united-nations-for-help-to-get-home-154372

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Doherty, ARC DECRA Fellow, University of Sydney

The COVID pandemic has shown us that disruptions to the way we move around, complete daily activities and interact with each other can shatter our wellbeing.

This doesn’t apply only to humans. Wildlife across the globe find themselves in this situation every day, irrespective of a global pandemic.

Our latest research published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution has, for the first time, quantified the repercussions of logging, pollution, hunting, and other human disturbances, on the movements of a wide range of animal species.

Our findings were eye-opening. We found human disturbances, on average, restricted an animal’s movements by 37%, or increased it by 70%. That’s like needing to travel an extra 11 km to get to work each day (Australia’s average is 16 km).

Disruptions cascade through the ecosystem

The ability to travel is essential to animal survival because it allows animals to find mates, food and shelter, escape predators and competitors, and avoid disturbances and threats.

Read more: It’s not too late to save them: 5 ways to improve the government’s plan to protect threatened wildlife

And because animal movement is linked to many important ecological processes — such as pollination, seed dispersal and soil turnover — disruptions to movement can cascade through ecosystems.

Our study involved analysing published data on changes in animal movement in response to different types of disturbance or habitat modification by humans. This included agriculture, logging, grazing, recreation, hunting, and pollution, amongst others.

All up, we looked at 719 records of animal movement, spanning 208 studies and 167 species of birds, mammals, reptiles, fish, insects and amphibians. The size of the species we studied ranged from the sleepy orange butterfly to the white shark.

What we found

We found changes in movement are very common, with two-thirds of the 719 cases comprising an increase or decrease in movement of 20% or more. More than one-third of cases changed by 50% or more.

Whether an animal increases or decreases its movement in response to disturbance from humans depends on the situation.

Animals may run away from humans, or move further in search of food and nesting sites. For example, a 2020 study on koalas found their movements were longer and more directed in areas where habitats weren’t well connected, because they had to travel further to reach food patches.

Likewise, the daily movement distances of mountain brushtail possums in central Victoria were 57% higher in remnant bushland along roadsides, compared to large forest areas.

Decreases in movement can occur where animals encounter barriers (such as highways), if they need to shelter from a disturbance, or can’t move as efficiently through altered habitats. In the United States, for example, researchers played a recording of humans talking and found it caused a 34% decrease in the speed that mountain lions move.

On the other hand, some decreases in movement occur where an animal actually benefits from habitat changes. A wide range of animals — including storks, vultures, crows, foxes, mongooses, hyenas and monitor lizards — have shorter movements around garbage dumps because they don’t have to move very far to get the food they need.

Huge changes in movement make animals vulnerable

Overall, we found the average increase in animal movement was +70% and the average decrease was -37%, which are substantial changes.

Imagine having to increase the distance you travel to work, the shops and to see family and friends, by 70%. You would spend a lot more time and energy travelling and have less time to rest or do fun things. And if you live in Melbourne, you know what substantial reductions in movement are like due to COVID-related lockdowns.

In addition to greater energy expenditure, increased movements can mean animals need to move through risky areas where they are more vulnerable to predation.

And decreases in movement can be harmful if animals can’t find adequate food or disperse to find mates, or if ecological processes such as seed dispersal are disrupted.

Read more: Predators, prey and moonlight singing: how phases of the Moon affect native wildlife

For example, flightless rails, birds native to New Zealand, are important for dispersing seeds. But research showed birds in areas of high human activity (campgrounds) moved 35–41% shorter distances than birds away from campgrounds. This could limit the population growth of plants if their seeds are not being dispersed as far.

When disturbances are unpredictable

We compared the effects of different disturbance types on animals by splitting them into two categories: human activities (such as hunting, military procedures and recreation like tourism) and habitat modification (such as agriculture and logging).

Both disturbance types can have severe impacts, ranging from a 90% decrease to 1,800% increase in movement for human activities, and a 97% decrease to a 3,300% increase for habitat modifications.

But we found human activities caused much stronger increases in animal movement distances (averaging +35%) than habitat modifications (averaging +12%).

This might be because human activities are more episodic in nature. In other words, animals are more likely to run away from these unpredictable disturbances.

Read more: Be still, my beating wings: hunters kill migrating birds on their 10,000km journey to Australia

For example, military manoeuvres in Norway led to 84% increase in the home range of moose. And when moose in Sweden were exposed to back-country skiers, their movement speed increased 33-fold.

In contrast, habitat modifications like logging generally represent more persistent changes to the environment, which animals can sometimes adapt to over time.

Reducing harms on wildlife

To reduce the harms we inflict on wildlife, we must protect habitats in relatively intact sea and landscapes from getting degraded or transformed. This could include establishing and managing new national parks and marine protected areas.

Where ecosystems are already modified, improving the connections between habitats and the availability of resources (food and water) can help animals move more easily and populations persist.

And with regards to human activities, which generally caused stronger increases in movement, better managing disturbances such as hunting, recreation and tourism can help to minimise or avoid impacts on animal movement. This could include, for example, establishing a no-take zone in a marine protected area, or enforcing restrictions to activities during breeding periods.

Read more: The buffel kerfuffle: how one species quietly destroys native wildlife and cultural sites in arid Australia

– ref. Humans force wild animals into tight spots, or send them far from home. We calculated just how big the impact is – https://theconversation.com/humans-force-wild-animals-into-tight-spots-or-send-them-far-from-home-we-calculated-just-how-big-the-impact-is-152619

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Merlin Crossley, Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic and Professor of Molecular Biology, UNSW

The day a muddled mob stormed the US Capitol building, a team of American researchers published a paper in Nature that signified a landmark in gene therapy.

The head of the US National Institutes of Health, Francis Collins had joined forces with Harvard University professor David Liu and others to tackle progeria, a genetic disorder that causes children to age rapidly.

The achievement, successfully tested in mice, was made possible by Liu’s invention of a second-generation CRISPR gene-editing technology called “base editing”. With this, researchers may eventually be able to correct lifelong genetic diseases, including progeria, in humans.

A rare but devastating disease

Francis Collins, former leader of the Human Genome Project, had worked on progeria for many years before the breakthrough.

Children carrying the mutation for progeria have normal intelligence but show early signs of general ageing, including hair loss and hearing loss. By their teenage years they appear very old. Few live past the age of 13.

In 2003, Collins’s lab discovered progeria is caused by a mutation (which you can think of as a “misspelling”) in a gene that encodes a protein called Lamin A. Lamin A has a structural role in the cell’s nucleus.

Many of us carry mutations in various genes. But as we typically have two copies of genes (one from our mother and one from our father), we tend to have at least one good copy and that’s usually enough.

But the progeria mutation in Lamin A is different. While there may be a good copy present, the mutant copy generates a poisonous product that messes things up, like a spanner in the works. This type of mutation is called a “dominant negative mutation”.

The solution, ideally, would be to specifically correct the mutant copy using CRISPR. With this gene-editing tool, scientists can direct a pair of molecular “scissors” to any part of the genome (DNA). Unfortunately, first-generation CRISPR technologies — while good at cutting genes — do not have the level of surgical precision or efficiency needed to correct the Lamin A mutation.

Read more: Explainer: what is a gene?

Complications with mass cell editing

CRISPR scissors are good at finding their target and cutting, but the reconstructive surgery that comes after is left to the cell — and isn’t guaranteed to happen in every cell.

In the lab, researchers can usually manage by just correcting a few cells before growing them in a petri dish for further research.

But in humans we need to accurately correct most, if not all, cells. It would be pointless to correct the progeria mutation in five cells in a patient’s finger, while leaving the rest of the body unrepaired.

This is where David Liu’s work on “base editors” is critical. Liu identified the limitations of CRISPR technology very early and began developing molecular machines that could do more than operate only as targeted molecular scissors.

He started with naturally occurring enzymes, which can change one type of chemical base of the genetic code into another; for example, enzymes that can convert an A (adenine) to a G (guanine), or a C (cytosine) to a T (thymine).

Liu then modified the enzymes to make them more precise and fused them to CRISPR to create fusion proteins called “base editors”. Since CRISPR technology is good at reading DNA and finding a target, it can effectively deliver the editors to the gene that needs to be changed.

It’s important to highlight Liu deliberately developed base editors so that they change letters, but no longer sever DNA like CRISPR scissors. This is crucial, as cutting DNA increases the risk of larger chromosomal deletions, which can potentially damage cells.

Read more: The Resilience Project: finding those rare people with genetic disease mutations who are healthy

The differences of mice and men

Collins, Liu and their colleagues knew they would have to get base editors into all (or at least most) of the cells of a mouse with progeria to cure it. For this, they relied on using hollowed-out viruses as delivery vectors.

They used a vector based on the Adeno Associated Virus, or AAV. As students, we joked AAV stood for “almost a virus”, as it’s one of the smallest viruses and doesn’t cause any known disease.

Collins and Liu packaged the AAV virus particles with genes encoding the relevant base-editing enzyme and delivered them into the mice. The treated mice essentially avoided the disease and became indistinguishable from healthy mice.

But, of course, this all happened in mice — and humans are bigger. We don’t know how difficult it will be to upscale this gene-editing machinery to work reliably in humans. But in any case, Collins and Liu have taken an inspiring first step by showing it’s possible in mice.

Base-editing CRISPR tools are a dream come true for experts committed to gene therapy and for families afflicted by conditions such as progeria. Work on this front is just beginning. But in these dark pandemic times, it provides much-needed new hope.

– ref. New CRISPR technology could revolutionise gene therapy, offering new hope to people with genetic diseases – https://theconversation.com/new-crispr-technology-could-revolutionise-gene-therapy-offering-new-hope-to-people-with-genetic-diseases-153641

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Duckett, Director, Health Program, Grattan Institute

The Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety released new data overnight comparing hospitalisation rates from residential aged care facilities.

The report found 36.9% of nursing home residents presented to an emergency department at least once in 2018-19.

It’s one of many research papers specifically commissioned and published to inform the Royal Commission, which will release its final report by February 26 this year.

The findings are a welcome addition to the dearth of information about the quality of aged care in Australia. It’s unacceptable that it’s taken a Royal Commission in 2021 to uncover simple information about hospitalisation rates.

The report highlights key metrics about the sector’s performance. It points to the next stages in the journey where information about the performance of individual residential aged care facilities is published, and where further investigation is undertaken locally about improving the interaction between residential aged care, general practice, and hospitals.

Aged care in Australia suffers the same accountability deficit as other aspects of human services, but that is slowly changing.

Last week the Productivity Commission released data comparing states on a range of indicators including availability of federal government funded aged care and consumer satisfaction with aged care services.

Read more: 3 ways to transform our ‘Soviet-style’ aged-care mess into a system that puts older Australians first

What the data can tell us

The report found about 3.4% of residents were admitted to hospital for a pressure injury, about 2% for weight loss, and 0.5% for an adverse medication event in the same time period. These rates are just the tip of the iceberg, as they represent those who were serious enough to be hospitalised and don’t include people who were treated in the nursing home and didn’t require hospital admission.

Importantly, the report says there are many facilities which are outliers on one or more of these measures. There are some facilities where the residents have significantly higher rates of hospital admissions for pressure injuries, weight loss, or adverse medication events than others. The report does not identify these but, in the medium term, the public has a right to know which residential aged care facilities are of concern and which are managing these quality risks well.

The report also found 10.5% of residents were admitted to hospital in 2018-19 because of a fall, up from 8.5% in 2014-15, and 5.4% for a fracture.

The data can’t tell us everything

But we need to be cautious about these findings. We cannot use the rate of falls and other injuries as the only indicator of quality care.

One way residential aged care facilities can minimise the risk of falls leading to hospitals admission is by better care and assessment of residents. And on the other hand, facilities should resist the urge to overreact by stripping residents of their autonomy and not letting them move around, nor letting them take any risks at all. Quality care also means treating residents with dignity.

The data also cannot answer the question of how many emergency department presentations could be avoided with better staffing, nor whether involvement of GPs, geriatricians or health outreach from the emergency department could’ve prevented any of these presentations.

Another risk of these data is they’re very health-oriented. The health sector, and especially hospitals, have lots of good data and so it’s easy to develop measures relating to hospitalisations. As good as the published data are, the risk is that decision-makers will focus on what’s measurable, rather than what’s important.

Reform in the aged care sector must have a rights basis, as we at the Grattan Institute pointed out in our 2020 report on rethinking aged care. The full range of residents’ rights needs to be promoted and protected.

More work needs to be done on measuring whether the rights of older Australians are being upheld alongside these hospital-oriented measures, and resident-relevant measures of quality including use of agency staff, staffing ratios, and dealing with individual preferences and differences.

What now? The public needs access to aged care facility peformance

This report was prepared for the Royal Commission, so it mostly highlights issues and demonstrates what can be done. The next step is for the aged care regulator to pick up where the Royal Commission has left off.

In light of calls for increased transparency and accountability in aged care, the regulator should provide feedback to all nursing homes about where they stand on these metrics and then identify relative performance publicly.

Read more: If we have the guts to give older people a fair go, this is how we fix aged care in Australia

Now these data have been collected and shown to be relevant, it’s now unethical for the regulator to withhold this information from the public, especially when the rhetoric about aged care is about promoting choice in a market where people choose their residential facility. Although providers are asked to report against quality standards to the regulator, very little of this information is passed on to the consumer.

The aged care regulator should set a target of publicising performance metrics for the December quarter 2021, and do so on an ongoing basis.

Performance metrics should also go beyond hospitalisation rates, and include information about staffing numbers and ratios as is done in the United States with its star rating system. They should also include the number of complaints and assaults — information which is currently unavailable to older Australians needing care.

– ref. New aged care data on hospitalisation rates show significant problem areas in residential aged care – https://theconversation.com/new-aged-care-data-on-hospitalisation-rates-show-significant-problem-areas-in-residential-aged-care-154365

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Megan C Evans, Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow, UNSW

For many businesses, climate change is an existential threat. Extreme weather can disrupt operations and supply chains, spelling disaster for both small vendors and global corporations. It also leaves investment firms dangerously exposed.

Businesses increasingly recognise climate change as a significant financial risk. Awareness of nature-related financial risks, such as biodiversity loss, is still emerging.

My work examines the growth of private sector investment in biodiversity and natural capital. I believe now is a good time to consider questions such as: what are businesses doing, and not doing, about climate change and environmental destruction? And what role should government play?

Research clearly shows humanity is severely damaging Earth’s ability to support life. But there is hope, including a change in government in the United States, which has brought new momentum to tackling the world’s environmental problems.

Poisoning the well

An expert report released last week warned Australia must cut emissions by 50% or more in the next decade if it’s to meet the Paris Agreement goals. Meeting this challenge will require everyone to do their bit.

Climate change is a major threat to Australia’s financial security, and businesses must be among those leading on emissions reduction. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case.

The finance sector, for example, contributes substantially to climate change and biodiversity loss. It does this by providing loans, insurance or investment for business activities that produce greenhouse gas emissions or otherwise harm nature.

In fact, a report last year found Australia’s big four banks loaned A$7 billion to 33 fossil fuel projects in the three years to 2019.

A pushback for nature

Promisingly, there’s a growing push from some businesses, including in the finance sector, to protect the climate and nature.

Late last year, Australian banks and insurers published the nation’s first comprehensive climate change reporting framework. And the recently launched Climate League 2030 initiative, representing 17 of Australia’s institutional investors with A$890 billion in combined assets, aims to act on deeper emissions reductions.

Read more: Worried about Earth’s future? Well, the outlook is worse than even scientists can grasp

Some companies are starting to put serious money on the table. In August last year, global financial services giant HSBC and climate change advisory firm Pollination announced a joint asset management venture focused on “natural capital”. The venture aims to raise up to A$1 billion for its first fund.

Globally too, investors are starting to wake up to the cost of nature loss. Last month, investors representing US$2.4 trillion (A$3.14 trillion) in assets asked HSBC to set emissions reduction targets in line with the Paris Agreement. And in September last year, investor groups worth over $US103 trillion (A$135 trillion) issued a global call for companies to accurately disclose climate risks in financial reporting.

Climate change is not the only threat to global financial security. Nature loss – the destruction of plants, animals and ecosystems – poses another existential threat. Last year, the World Economic Forum reported more than half of the global economy relies on goods and services nature provides such as pollination, water and disease control.

Efforts by the finance sector to address the risks associated with biodiversity loss are in their infancy, but will benefit from work already done on understanding climate risk

Of course, acknowledging and disclosing climate- and nature-related financial risks is just one step. Substantial action is also needed.

Businesses can merely “greenwash” their image – presenting to the public as environmentally responsible while acting otherwise. For example, a report showed in 2019, many major global banks that pledged action on climate change and biodiversity loss were also investing in activities harmful to biodiversity.

Getting it right

In the financial sector and beyond, there are risks to consider as the private sector takes a larger role in environmental action.

Investors will increasingly seek to direct capital to projects that help to reduce their exposure to climate- and nature-related risks, such ecosystem restoration and sustainable agriculture.

Many of these projects can help to restore biodiversity, sequester carbon and deliver benefits for local communities. But it’s crucial to remember that private sector investment is motivated, at least in part, by the expectation of a positive financial return.

Projects that are highly risky or slow to mature, such as restoring highly threatened species or ecosystems, might struggle to attract finance. For example, the federal government’s Threatened Species prospectus reportedly attracted little private sector interest.

That means governments and philanthropic donors still have a crucial role in the funding of research and pilot projects.

Read more: A major report excoriated Australia’s environment laws. Sussan Ley’s response is confused and risky

Governments must also better align policies to improve business and investor confidence. It is nonsensical that various Australian governments send competing signals about whether, say, forests should be cleared or restored. And at the federal level, biodiversity loss and climate change come under separate portfolios, despite the issues being inextricably linked.

Private-sector investment could deliver huge benefits for the environment, but these outcomes must be real and clearly demonstrated. Investors want the benefits measured and reported, but good data is often lacking.

Too-simple metrics, such as the area of land protected, don’t tell the whole story. They may not reflect harm to local and Indigenous communities, or whether the land is well managed.

Finally, as the private sector becomes more aware of nature and climate-related risks, a range of approaches to addressing this will proliferate. But efforts must be harmonised to minimise confusion and complexity in the marketplace. Governments must provide leadership to make this a smooth process.

The power to change

Last week, a major report was released highlighting grave failures in Australia’s environmental laws. The government’s response suggested it is not taking the threat seriously.

Businesses and governments hold disproportionate power that can be used to either delay or accelerate transformative change.

And although many businesses wield undue influence on government decisions, it doesn’t have to be this way.

By working together and seizing the many opportunities that present, business and government can help arrest climate change and nature loss, and contribute to a safer, more liveable planet for all.

Read more: You can’t talk about disaster risk reduction without talking about inequality

– ref. Taking care of business: the private sector is waking up to nature’s value – https://theconversation.com/taking-care-of-business-the-private-sector-is-waking-up-to-natures-value-153786

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Holmes, Professor of History, La Trobe University

This is a longer read. Enjoy

The speed with which the COVID-19 virus infected the world and the dramatic nature of its fallout is without parallel. Individually and collectively we have struggled to understand and process it. Early on in the pandemic, journalists looked to historians to help make sense of what was happening and to read from the past the possible impacts of this moment on the future. Experts on past pandemics tried to shed light on how we might recover, and on the prospective local and global consequences of this COVID-19 catastrophe.

Historians find remnants of the past in libraries and archives, in objects, monuments and buildings, in fields and forests, in music and art and images, in memories and stories. This is where we find the roads not taken, the possibilities foreclosed, the thinking that shapes a culture, the choices made that, sometimes through the slow accretion of time and action and sometimes suddenly and dramatically, change outcomes and “make history”.

The sense that a generation carries a distinct identity is forged by sharing the “experience of profound and destabilising events”. Those events have their greatest impact if people experience them young, typically in their late teens and early 20s.

Generational consciousness is shaped by the sharing of those dramatic events, their subsequent remembering and the recognition, often by older generations, of the distinctiveness of a generational experience or mode of self-representation.

What might the past offer us at this moment, and how will future generations reflect on this year? How will this present become the future’s past?

The COVID generation

The generation currently in their late teens and early 20s — the COVID generation — already had cause to be worried about their future.

In 2018 and 2019, hundreds of thousands of them had filled city streets to call for action on climate change and for an end to our dependence on fossil fuels.

In 2020, those young people found themselves stuck at home with remote learning, their rites of passage cancelled, their plans upended, their casual labour no longer required, their collective protests in city streets ruled illegal, their sense of agency curtailed by a microscopic virus with its origins in the ecological breakdown they fear.

Read more: No festivals, no schoolies: young people are missing out on vital rites of passage during COVID

Many joined the long unemployment queues snaking outside Centrelink offices.

While they are in the age bracket least likely to suffer serious health effects from the coronavirus, they are the generation most likely to struggle to find employment in the post-pandemic world, and the ones who, along with their younger siblings, will be carrying the debt burden of the government’s relief measures for the longest.

The fragility of their future is suddenly even more immediately apparent. Not since their great-grandparents were young has an Australian generation lived with such uncertainty, such a profound sense that the future is out of its control.

Collective memory

“Collective memory” is a term historians use to refer to the ways the public “remembers” an event or a period of time. It is the version that gets publicly told, endorsed and reworked through films and history books, commemorative activities, monuments and school curricula.

The further back in time an event occurred, the more abstracted the collective memory of it becomes.

Think Anzac, now one of our most carefully curated memories. In the immediate post-World War I period, understandings of what the war had meant for the nation were highly contested. Defeat at Gallipoli, 60,000 lives lost (the highest death rate among the Allied forces), a divided and grieving home-front community and an economy in shreds were not obvious raw materials from which to build a narrative about heroic manhood and the founding of the nation.

Read more: How Anzac Day came to occupy a sacred place in Australians’ hearts

Historians played a key role in creating that narrative. C.E.W. Bean crafted it carefully, selecting the stories that would best illustrate the history he wanted to tell, and then campaigning for a monument and museum that would house and celebrate that story — the Australian War Memorial.

Anzac provided a healing narrative that gave solace to grieving families and the nation alike. It helped make sense of unimaginable loss.

For the COVID generation, the return of overwhelming uncertainty cuts deeply in a cohort for whom anxiety and depression were already being described as a pandemic and in a context where mental health was a growing source of national disquiet. They might remember that feeling in their future — or it might not be mere memory.

In 50 years’ time, living with anxiety and uncertainty may be a normal part of the human experience, a consequence of the disruption and havoc of environmental degradation.

Which stories will the COVID generation remember from 2020 — 20, 30, 50 years from now?

An X-ray of inequality

They might remember their mothers. One of the fault lines of the pandemic has been gender. More jobs have been lost in female-dominated sectors than in male-dominated ones. Gender inequality is being further entrentched. While men’s participation in childcare has increased slightly with working-from-home arrangements, women have continued to carry the major load, as well as the bulk of the housework. The juggle of working while home-schooling their children has taken its toll on women.

Read more: Low-paid, young women: the grim truth about who this recession is hitting hardest

The COVID generation might also remember living in families where precarity and uncertainty were daily realities. The pandemic has functioned as an X-ray of inequality, revealing the cracks in our social fabric.

Will the image of Melbourne’s public housing towers — in which, as the Victorian premier admitted, some of the state’s most vulnerable communities lived — locked down and encircled by police, or the anxious face of a young child gazing from an upper-floor window, become part of the city’s collective memory?

Let them remember, too, alongside all the failures of our systems that have been exposed by the pandemic, the many examples of community strength and collective endeavour. For more than eight months, five million Victorians sacrificed personal freedoms to protect those most vulnerable to the virus.

Many thousands also acted with generosity and selflessness to support and care for those in need. Australians around the country made similar sacrifices.

The stories we tell ourselves matter

Historians know the stories a nation tells itself matter; collective memory can suppress competing versions of the past, while individual and family stories might hold conflicting memories. Our work has been crucial in shaping and dismantling, telling and retelling the narratives through which we have come to think of ourselves as a nation.

We have colluded in the silences of colonial dispossession, the erasure of women’s voices and the celebration of environmental-wreckage-as-progress, as much as we have, “in alliances with communities of action”, found voices that have challenged the racist and sexist hierarchies on which such histories were founded.

It’s important to note, however, that many of those stories have not been framed as “national”, but rather as histories of specific groups of people. Their essence has not been abstracted to a national stage and inflected with the power to carry us forward as Australians in periods of existential crisis.

Read more: White, male and straight – how 30 years of Australia Day speeches leave most Australians out

It is time to bring these marginalised group stories into the national story so we all learn from them as a nation: understand their morals and enact their lessons.

Such an embrace would provide the opportunity for a more honest reckoning with our past — including Indigenous histories — a more authentic reflection of our collective present and richer traditions from which to draw as we face an uncertain future.

The survivors from generations who lived through the Great Depression or World War II, many of them subsequently Australia’s postwar migrants, are among the COVID casualties from our aged-care facilities. They are the generation that helped create our contemporary world.

Daily obituaries in The Age told their stories, their experiences of mass unemployment, war, widespread rationing, poverty and few social services, and presented illuminating stories of hardship, endurance and the importance of community.

But beyond the COVID-19 case count, the exposure of an economic system contingent on precarity and inequality, and the incriminating tally of aged-care deaths, what memories might linger and take shape in the generations who live to look back on this watershed year?

An obituary to neoliberalism

It is far too early to predict where this particular historical tide will settle and how this moment of crisis will be recalled. We are still living this story, still captured by the drama of its unfolding, navigating our way along a shoreline none of us has walked before.

If 2020 does prove to be a rupture in our previous trajectory, that contingency will entirely depend on what happens next, be that further pandemics and climate catastrophes or a radical rewind of our carbon emissions and a restructuring of our economy.

Either way, the memories we take forward from this time will be a mix of stories. They will be drawn from individuals and families and gradually coalesce into a broader cultural narrative, one in turn shaped by more powerful forces seeking to draw national significance and meaning from the disaster.

The COVID generation will bring their own distinct memories to shape the national story.

The national stories we tell at this time are crucial. We need stories of adaptation and survival, of resilience and sacrifice, of rebuilding lives shattered by world events, of campaigning for justice, of hope and possibilities.

Too many obituaries have already been written as a result of this pandemic. But I hope for one more. I hope for an obituary to neoliberalism. When the COVID generation remember 2020 and the time that came just after, may they remember the power of community action, collective responsibility and the strength of our diverse body politic.

May they remember the way the passion for change that they carried onto the streets in 2018 and 2019 gradually infected us all, countering the poison of complacency and the power of the fossil-fuel industry alike.

Read more: Friday essay: COVID in ten photos

May they recall a government that, as in the postwar period, invested heavily in employment schemes, in the welfare state, in social housing and higher education; a government willing to make the connections between the droughts, fires and floods that have ravaged our land in the past three years and the pandemic that has ruptured our world, and to act in response — belatedly but definitively — to protect the future.

And may they celebrate and commemorate a community whose vision, sharpened by these unprecedented times, determined that the history they made and bequeathed would be infused with the values of care, stewardship and justice.

This is an edited version of an essay published in Griffith Review 71: Remaking the Balance

– ref. ‘The stories a nation tells itself matter’: how will the COVID generation remember 2020? – https://theconversation.com/the-stories-a-nation-tells-itself-matter-how-will-the-covid-generation-remember-2020-154367

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Madison Bland, PhD Candidate, Cities Research Institute, Griffith University

Shared mobility devices such as bicycles and electric scooters have experienced significant growth across the globe and Australia is no exception. In cities with such offerings, users are able to get around in more convenient and flexible ways.

The recent emergence of dockless shared e-scooters (i.e. Lime and Neuron) heralded a new-age of micromobility. In Brisbane, it signalled the end for the ten-year-old CityCycle bike-share scheme.

Read more: Limes not lemons: lessons from Australia’s first e-scooter sharing trial

Not long after announcing CityCycle’s demise in late 2020, Brisbane City Council proposed its replacement with shared dockless e-bikes and the topic started trending. The question is: why will the e-bike scheme succeed where its predecessors in Brisbane and other Australian cities failed? (See below for a summary of the evolution of shared mobility schemes in Australia.)

Mobility is being offered more and more as a service. The uptake of share travel across Australian cities has undergone a transition from docked bikes to dockless e-mobility, aided largely by advances in technology and the proliferation of mobile devices. Sharing is being considered as an attractive alternative to owning a bike or car thanks to new ways to bundle mobility services into packages, in much the same way as we use entertainment streaming services instead of buying movies or records.

Read more: We subscribe to movies and music, why not transport?

What can we expect from e-bikes?

E-bikes are pedal-assisted bicycles offering users electric motor assistance up to speeds of 25km/h. A shared bike scheme with self-locking and smartphone connectivity offers an extremely flexible riding experience.

It isn’t yet clear how e-bikes will be deployed in Brisbane. What we do know is the scheme will be privately operated under a short-term tender. As with CityCycle, 2,000 bikes will be provided across Brisbane, similar to how e-scooters are managed.

The e-bikes can improve on both e-scooters and CityCycle’s docked bikes in several ways.

Trip flexibility: GPS tracking and smart lock technology remove the need to locate set docking stations. Users can start and end trips at places of their own choosing. This means they avoid the frustrations caused by docking stations reaching maximum capacity, especially in popular destinations such as the CBD.

Wider appeal: unlike e-scooters and their younger target market, e-bikes can attract a wider demographic more familiar with riding bikes. They also offer greater load-carrying capacity and are permitted for use on roads whereas e-scooters are restricted to footpaths or bikeways in Brisbane. In New South Wales and Victoria, e-scooters are banned altogether – though changes could be on the way for Victoria.

Assisted riding: electrically assisted bikes can make cycling easier and accessible for more people. For those who struggle to ride at the best of times, e-bikes can help overcome fitness issues, especially in Brisbane’s hot climate and hilly terrain.

Read more: Billions are pouring into mobility technology – will the transport revolution live up to the hype?

So, what punctured CityCycle?

CityCycle was launched in 2010 under a 20-year single-operator contract. The scheme failed to achieve ambitious patronage targets and the goal of paying for itself. Despite usage growing until 2018, a shifting market has since resulted in significant declines.

The reasons for the lack of use are clear:

1. CityCycle was delivered through a monopolised model lacking market competition, with the shared bike scheme a secondary focus for operator JCDecaux Group’s advertising juggernaut, and this once-novel model became dated when dockless bikes emerged.

2. a cumbersome payment system made renting bikes difficult, with only smartcards accepted at first, and while uptake increased once credit card payments were introduced, e-scooters’ mobile-based payment options are more convenient for walk-up users.

3. the arrival of e-scooter schemes in 2018 attracted many CityCycle users, as the chart below shows (click to enlarge), and the 2020 coronavirus pandemic wrote off the scheme when the city became deserted during the lockdown.

Read more: How coronavirus made 2020 the year of the electric bike

The path to success

As Brisbane moves towards a dockless e-bike scheme, its ability to outperform its predecessor will ultimately rest with decision-makers delivering a safe and convenient rider experience. This involves several key considerations.

Pricing and payment: the scheme will have to be competitive with current modes (particularly e-scooters), where registration and payment are integrated with existing systems. The rise of mobility as a service (MaaS) platforms can incorporate the service within shared mobility apps and bundle offers (packaging public transport and shared mobility services).

Read more: For Mobility as a Service (MaaS) to solve our transport woes, some things need to change

Availability: the dockless model, while more flexible, will require operators to actively manage bike distribution and avoid cluttering. The blocking of access ways and even dumping of bikes have been sources of public opposition to other bike-share schemes. Though repositioning bikes (using service vehicles) will take up significant time and money, it is crucial in maintaining a balanced and orderly network that maximises bike availability.

Initial launch: the scheme’s roll-out will be important, as positive perceptions are best achieved by people riding, rather than bikes sitting idle. Importantly, a winter launch should be avoided – as Melbourne found – when bike trips are at yearly lows.

Cycle infrastructure: As with cycling in general, providing safe and connected bicycle networks is paramount for increasing participation rates. For Australian cities, the historic lack of funding for cycle infrastructure has limited ridership growth. Much work remains to be done, though Brisbane City Council has committed to trial improvements to its CBD on-road bike lanes.

Read more: Cycling and walking are short-changed when it comes to transport funding in Australia

Ultimately, dockless shared e-bikes can deliver a more flexible mobility option as operators maximise user convenience and governments develop urban cycling infrastructure.

– ref. Why e-bikes can succeed where earlier bike-share schemes failed – https://theconversation.com/why-e-bikes-can-succeed-where-earlier-bike-share-schemes-failed-151844

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robbie Moore, Lecturer, University of Tasmania

The gleeful manipulation of GameStop’s share price is not the first time amateur investors have created a legitimacy crisis on Wall Street.

In the late 19th century, so-called “bucket shops” allowed the American public to gamble small amounts on the movement of stocks and commodities on the New York and Chicago exchanges.

In most cases, a bucket shop client wouldn’t own the stock they wagered on: the shop acted more like a bookmaker than a broker, with clients betting against the house that a certain stock would rise.

Historian David Hochfelder describes bucket shops as a “shadow market”. For American Studies scholar Peter Knight, they were a “financial netherworld”. Some bucket shops were outright confidence tricks. The house could manipulate the telegraphic feed of stock prices or arrange “wash sales” to tank heavily-favoured stocks.

Nonetheless, bucket shops were immensely popular.

By 1889, the volume of shares wagered in bucket shops was seven times larger than the volume of shares traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Bucket shops drew many more Americans — including women — into the thrill-ride of speculation.

In 1892, The Sun reported on one of Chicago’s women-only bucket shops, filled mostly with:

elderly maidens and widows, with an occasional married woman who dabbles in stocks without the knowledge of any one but her broker.

This was the beginning of the American middle class’s real and imaginative investment in high finance.

Between the sanctioned and the shadows

Bucket shops mimicked the operations of the club-like bastions of American finance. Increasingly backed by big money and arranged in national chains, their interiors were often fitted with plush furniture and seductive technologies such as stock tickers and telephones.

This mimicry threatened the legitimacy of stock speculation. Glorified gambling dens that resembled legitimate brokerages created a dangerous slippage between the sanctified activities of stock speculators and the shadowy activities of card sharps and confidence men.

Reddit and Robinhood create similarly dangerous slippages today, forcing the finance industry to distinguish between gamified market manipulation and the supposedly legitimate activities of hedge funds and short sellers.

Read more: GameStop: Wall Street short sellers are not villains but Reddit traders should be totally free to attack them

Writing on GameStop for the Washington Post, Sebastian Mallaby made the distinction between “rational investors” who work to stabilise the market and keep prices realistic and “honest”, and the “crazies” whose frenzied activity creates irrational prices.

We saw similar language used by the finance industry of a century ago, asserting the superior masculine equipoise and rationality of trained financial professionals compared to the “hysteria” of bucket shop amateurs.

The Sun, for instance, suggested amateur women traders become “oblivious to sentiment and careless of personal appearance, and absurdly superstitious”.

Dangerous allures

Just as hedge fund researcher Paul Rowady said the “frictionless and highly gamified environments” of the Robinhood app “ignite the basest instincts of human nature”, early 20th century commentators argued amateur traders were vulnerable to the dangerous allure of the telegraphic stock ticker, which began to replace Wall Street messenger boys in the 1870s.

Tickers transmitted stock information over telegraph lines, and were available for anyone to purchase. One pro-Wall Street journalist described the ticker as a “narcotic”, while a doctor writing for the Medical Times described the illness of “tickeritis”:

I have long held the theory that the constant ticking of the instruments in the broker’s office throws the majority of traders into a state of self-hypnosis.

Through trade journals, financial newspapers and guidebooks the finance industry argued professional brokers were immune to the ticker’s allure.

The professional brokers and trained tape readers who interpreted the stock market fluctuations were said to be silent, private, studious and affectless.

“The Tape Reader is like a Pullman coach,” wrote the pseudonymous Rollo Tape in his Studies in Tape Reading (1910):

which travels smoothly and steadily along the roadbed of the tape, acquiring direction and speed from the market engine, and being influenced by nothing whatever.

The NYSE itself helped to propagate the image of the ticker reader as a rational actor in an efficient marketplace. An official illustrated history published in 1919, writes historian Julia Ott, presented “photographs of empty, tidy trading floors and small groups of neatly attired clerks calmly operating pneumatic tubes, tickers, and telephones”.

In tandem, the NYSE challenged cultural representations of stock trading as a collective frenzy.

A 1914 film adaptation of Frank Norris’s The Pit (1903) was threatened with a libel suit for depicting the psychological dissolution of a power-mad commodities dealer in the eponymous pit at the Chicago Board of Trade.

Changes to the film were secured after the legal threat was issued.

Over 100 years ago, the NYSE established a false though rhetorically seductive dichotomy: the gambler, the amateur, the crowd and the hysteric stood in opposition to the professional broker, whose part-mechanical subjectivity is cool, self-regulating and immune to panic.

Read more: GameStop: how Redditors played hedge funds for billions (and what might come next)

Today, both sides of the GameStop struggle are likewise invested in mythmaking and false dichotomies: Robinhood vs The Man; the Rational vs the Rabble.

But it is clear that both sides are more similar and more entangled than they would care to admit. This poses difficult questions for the finance industry as it tries to shut out the rabble while maintaining the status quo.

– ref. Long before GameStop, bucket shops challenged the legitimacy of Wall Street – https://theconversation.com/long-before-gamestop-bucket-shops-challenged-the-legitimacy-of-wall-street-154268

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

Scott Morrison has taken another, albeit very small, step towards endorsing a target of net zero emissions by 2050.

He told the National Press Club on Monday: “Our goal is to reach net zero emissions as soon as possible, and preferably by 2050”.

This follows his previous wording of wanting net zero “as quickly as possible”.

It remains unclear whether the baby steps will lead to his embracing the 2050 target later this year. But he’d almost certainly like to do so – it would undoubtedly smooth the way with the Biden administration as well as putting Australia in a better position for the Glasgow climate conference in November.

But there are pesky Nationals (and a few others) ready to make the road rocky.

The next climate test for Morrison is President Biden’s planned leaders’ climate summit on Earth Day, April 22.

Climate is at the centre of the Biden agenda, which makes the April summit particularly important.

The President’s climate envoy John Kerry told a White House press briefing last week: “the convening of … this summit is essential to ensuring that 2021 is going to be the year that really makes up for the lost time of the last four years and that the U.N. Climate Conference — COP26, as it’s called, which the UK is hosting in November — to make sure that it is an unqualified success”.

Kerry spoke to energy minister Angus Taylor last week when, according to the Australia readout of the discussion, Kerry “welcomed Australia’s commitment to achieving net zero emissions as soon as possible”.

As, perhaps, one might welcome an infant’s early progress.

Asked on Monday whether he expected to attend the Biden climate conference, Morrison replied cautiously, on the basis of lack of information.

Perhaps he didn’t want to take any risks. In December he was embarrassed when an expected invitation to a speaking spot at the “climate ambition summit” hosted by Britain, France and the United Nations didn’t eventuate. Australia was judged as not having sufficient “ambition” to warrant a slot.

“ At this stage, we haven’t received the details or nature of the event,” Morrison said of the April gathering.

“As you can appreciate, things are very busy over in the White House at the moment.”

When details were received, “then I’m sure the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Marise Payne and I, and Angus Taylor, and others, will discuss what is the best way for us to participate in that and how that will work.

“But we welcome it and we look forward to supporting it.”

Maybe there’ll be more to know when Morrison speaks to Biden. As of Monday, the PM was still waiting fot his first post-inauguration call from the President (they spoke after the election). The Prime Minister’s Office could only say the call was expected “within coming days”.

Morrison on Monday repeated strongly his mantra of advancing climate policy by “technology” not “tax”.

If he does move to the 2050 target, the rationale he will give for the shift will be the progress of technology.

“My commitment to Australians that I will not tax our way to net zero by 2050 is a very, very important one and I will hold my faith with the Australian people on those issues. So we will see how the technology develops,” he said.

If he wished, he obviously could use “technology” at any point as his cover for changing his position. The issue will be if and when he thinks he has the political cover.

– ref. View from The Hill: Now Scott Morrison’s ‘preference’ is for net zero emissions by 2050 – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-now-scott-morrisons-preference-is-for-net-zero-emissions-by-2050-154394

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

Last year, Anthony Albanese was criticised for his lack of cut-through during the COVID crisis, as Labor was sidelined by a hyperactive government.

This year, amid ALP leadership speculation and now a shadow ministry reshuffle, Albanese is seeking to assert himself more forcefully, declaring last week “I will be leader of this country after the next election”.

With that election possible within the year, the need for Labor to outline its policies, including on climate change and industrial relations, is becoming more pressing. Albanese is still intent on taking his time on climate policy, where international developments are fast-moving, but the IR policy is imminent.

This week, the opposition leader joins the podcast to discuss the reshuffle, and his and his party’s goals.

“Labor will always stand up for the interests of working people,” he says, and that commitment will be at the heart of its workplace policy.

The policy’s “priorities are very much on job security and income security.”

“Whether it be people in labour hire companies…working next door to someone but earning less money… whether it be people in the new gig economy who are sometimes working for almost nothing in some cases, whether it be issues of workers who are having to bid against each other.”

Albanese says the policy will be in direct contrast to government legislation, drafted last year and now before parliament, which would “cut wages and conditions”.

Will the ALP definitely vote against the government’s measures?

“We’ve said we will not vote for any legislation that cuts wages or cuts conditions such as penalty rates.”

Transcript (edited for clarity)

Michelle Grattan: Anthony Albanese has had a rough start to 2021, the serious car accident and speculation about the future of his leadership. He’s hoping for some reset from the frontbench reshuffle he undertook last week, which saw Chris Bowen replace Mark Butler as spokesman on climate and energy. And at least this week’s Newspoll brought some encouragement, showing the Coalition and Labor commencing the year 50-50 on the two-party vote. The opposition leader joins us today.

Anthony Albanese, your reshuffle didn’t quell the leadership talk. Did you expect it to?

Anthony Albanese: I was determined to do the right thing. The advice that I had of some people before the reshuffle was you don’t make changes. If you don’t make changes, no one can complain. But that’s not the right thing. The right thing to do is to put in place the team with the right people in the right jobs in the lead up to the election. And that contrasts with Scott Morrison’s reshuffle that he talked up when Mathias Cormann was leaving the parliament and which left Angus Taylor in place, left Stuart Robert, the person who presided over the robodebt debacle in place, Melissa Price, still there in charge of defence procurement when we have real issues with the subs, made no changes of any substance. So I did the right thing by the Labor Party and that is making sure that we maximise our potential to winning the next election.

MG: Now, Covid obviously made things extraordinarily difficult for oppositions last year, but even allowing for that, have you been surprised at the extent of angst within the Labor Party, given that federal Labor is polling not too badly, obviously on a two-party basis, the latest poll has you 50/50.

AA: Well, I reject the premise of the question. The fact is that overwhelmingly my colleagues and the caucus is focused on holding the government to account, on putting forward constructive suggestions and developing a clear alternative at the next election. That’s overwhelmingly what people are focussed on.

MG: Do you accept that Labor’s primary vote, around 36% is too low? And what can you do to get that up?

AA: Well, I want it to be 100%, Michelle, but it’s worth saying that that’s 3% higher than it was at the last election. And if anyone thinks that if we get 3% higher primary vote across the board, we won’t win the next election, then they’re wrong. The fact is that we, of course, need to continue to work on that, but it’s heading in the right direction. And one of the things that will continue to argue for is that this is a do nothing government. We’re seeing today the prime minister give a speech at the National Press Club where once again, there’s no reform, no plan for the economy or for social policy. We still don’t have an energy policy. No plan to deal with the challenges of the future. We’ll continue to hold the government to account. During 2020, we put forward practical ideas and policies such as wage subsidies, support for mental health programmes, including telehealth, the issue of the vaccine, issues of quarantine and our borders, the need to have a plan to deal with aged care. We put forward all of those suggestions, some of which were adopted by the government, such as wage subsidies, the increase in unemployment benefits. It’s not like we weren’t focused on policy, we were. It’s just that we were focused on the immediate needs, and that’s what the Australian people expected of us. We were constructive. And that stands in stark contrast to the attitude of the Coalition during the global financial crisis. And that will put us in good stead at the next election. And what we need as well now, and we’ve started to do that, as I said we would on your podcast when I became leader, when we received the review of the election defeat last time around, that we would have more strategy and less tactics. We would roll out our policies from the time of the budget reply. Now, that budget reply was delayed, but we certainly did that with major childcare reform, a major initiative, a building on just as Labor made universal health care through Medicare, universal superannuation, universal provision of child care, working towards that is a major economic reform and as well a future made in Australia, recognising that whilst the pandemic has shown the strength of Australian society and the strength of people being prepared to look after each other, it’s also exposed some of the underlying economic weaknesses, our lack of economic resilience. Our need to actually be able to manufacture more things for ourselves, the weakness that’s there in the labour market to increase casualisation and all of those present opportunities for Labor to present clear alternatives at the next election. We’ve done some of that, we’ll be doing more of that in coming weeks and months.

MG: They’ve obviously become increasingly frustrated with the criticisms by Joel Fitzgibbon. But do you at least agree with him that labour, L-A-B-O-U-R, needs to be put back into the Labor Party.

AA: The Labor Party has never walked away from looking after working people. We’ve been around for some 130 years, we are Australia’s oldest and proudest political party and I reject the idea that we don’t look after working people. The last Labor government got rid of WorkChoices and put in place reforms in the interests of working people. What we’re advancing now in terms of childcare is about working people as well. Workers these days aren’t all blue collar males. They are women. They’re men, they’re young people, they’re older, older workers. You’ve seen the economy transition and we need modern solutions, we’ll continue to do that. But Labor will always stand up for the interests of working people.

MG: Do you think it’s possible that Joel Fitzgibbon might leave the Labor Party, join the crossbench?

AA: Look, no, I think that Joel Fitzgibbon actions will speak. People will make their own judgement about the role that he’s playing and whether he’s trying to be constructive or not.

MG: But you don’t think he’d jump.

AA: People will make their own decisions. Joel has said himself he made the decision some time ago, just after the last election, that he would stay on the frontbench for 18 months. And we had discussions about the timing of his departure. He chose to depart in a way that was different from what he had indicated to myself as leader and to others over a long period of time. And people will make their own judgement about that. I mean, the Coalition have Barnaby Joyce, have Craig Kelly, they’ve just knocked off Kevin Andrews, the longest serving member of the House of Representatives. They have a whole range of people on their side who are out of step with the mainstream opinion, on the LNP side. The difference is that Labor, when we’ve had an issue, we’ve dealt with it. We’ve intervened into the New South Wales and the Victorian branch whilst I’ve been leader, making necessary reforms and made those branches stronger as a result. Scott Morrison’s just sitting back watching the sort of chaos that’s seen, frankly, Kevin Andrews humiliated after a long period of time in the parliament.

MG: The coronavirus supplement stops at the end of March when JobSeeker would return to the old level. The base, at the moment, for JobSeeker is $565 a fortnight and the supplement currently is $150 a fortnight. What level do you think the ongoing JobSeeker should be struck at?

AA: Well, what we say is that it should be more. That $40 a day isn’t enough to live on, the government acknowledge that. We’re not in a position to change the level of JobSeeker in April and we’re not going to let the government off the hook. We’re going to continue to say that they should not be reducing JobSeeker to $40 a day because they themselves have acknowledged that this drives people into poverty. MG: This is not a complicated policy issue to nominate what you think would be a reasonable level.

AA: There are costings, that are required of that process, we will have…

MG: You could make them.

AA: We’ll have, well we could make things up, Michelle, but I don’t want to do that. Just make things up without proper costings and without proper processes. And I haven’t done that. We will be in a position, I would hope, to make changes to a whole range of policies after the next election when we’re in a position to form government. But what we’ve said under my leadership very early on was that $40 a day wasn’t enough to live on. That was acknowledged by the government that that was the case.

MG: You mentioned Scott Morrison’s speech today in which he’s very optimistic about Australia’s economic recovery. Are you as optimistic?

AA: Well, one of the things that I wouldn’t do, what Scott Morrison said that today and Josh Frydenberg has been saying as well, is that everything is all hunky dory. The fact is, a whole lot of people have been left behind during the pandemic. So, yes, some people have done well, some businesses have done well. They’ve not only received JobKeeper, they’ve had their profits increased and being able to give big bonuses to corporate representatives. But other people are really struggling and people who are in casual employment didn’t receive any JobKeeper payments. They were the first ones to be laid off, and you have around about two million Australians today are either unemployed or want more work than they’re getting at. They’re being left behind. A whole lot of people are struggling to pay their rent or to pay their mortgage. And a whole lot of other people, because of problems with the labour market, are really doing it tough. The costs of childcare are something like four or five times the increase this year than the inflation rate. You have circumstances whereby in some cases people working, doing the same job in the mining sector, some will be earning around about 30% or in some cases more, less than their counterparts simply because of the use of labour hire. There are people in the gig economy who are basically working for third world conditions. There’s no minimum rates for them and they’re being left outside the system. Now, some people choose and it’s convenient for them and will continue to use new technology. And that’s not a bad thing at all. But some people who are in the case of people driving around on bicycles, delivering food and other products to people, have seen a considerable loss of life because they have to take risks because they’re not being paid enough to get by. When you have all those sorts of issues, I think that Scott Morrison as the leader of the nation should speak up on behalf of those people who need assistance and are struggling, not just those people who’ve done well.

MG: Do you think JobKeeper should go beyond the end of March when it’s due to end?

AA: I think for some sectors that are needing of support, if the logic of wage subsidies was to keep relationships between employers and employees so as to avoid businesses failing and workers being unemployed, then if those circumstances are still there, why would you prematurely withdraw support.

MG: Which sectors?

AA: So areas, for example, like the tourism sector that are continuing to struggle, particularly in sectors that are reliant upon international tourism like far north Queensland.

MG: Now, obviously, climate policy was much talked about during your reshuffle with the move of Mark Butler and Chris Bowen being the new spokesman. What difference do you think this move will make?

AA: Well, Chris Bowen is a former treasurer. He will focus, as he has already. You’ve seen him focus not on diminution of our commitment to action on climate change, but emphasising, for example, that Deloitte Access Economics says that 250,000 jobs will be created by moving, over coming decades, by moving to net zero emissions by 2050, and that, by contrast, hundreds of thousands of jobs will be lost if we don’t act on climate change. It’s that link that I’ve continued to say since my time as the environment and climate change spoke. A person under Kim Beazley, I argued the action on climate change was good for jobs and good for the economy, the policies that were put in place under the Rudd and Gillard governments that I developed in Kim Beazley’s blueprint we published in 2006, were significant, such as the most important of which was the 20% renewable energy target by 2020. At the time opposed by the Coalition, questioned by a whole lot of people, including some people in the Labor Party. The fact is that was the right thing to do that helped create jobs not just directly in terms of the renewable sector, but also in terms of reducing costs of energy for manufacturing sector.

MG: So this move, does it represent a change of substance or a change in how the substance is presented?

AA: Well, the Labor party policy is decided by the Labor Party, not by an individual spokesperson. And the Labor Party believes in climate change and that it’s real and that by acting, you produce more jobs, lower emissions and lower energy prices. The Labor Party is very consistent on that. And we’ve been consistent on it for a long period of time since we advocated well before we, of course, signed up to the Kyoto Protocol. But we argued, of course, for ratification. And that was the first action of the Rudd government in December 2007. So we’re absolutely committed to action across the board. And I’ve seen some commentary that says that a member of the New South Wales right wing grouping somehow won’t take action on the environment. Well, Graham Richardson, Bob Carr, Tony Burke were three outstanding advocates for our natural environment and for action. They all have a proud record of achievement in that area. Chris Bowen’s absolutely committed to strong action. And and I think he will do an outstanding job.

MG: You’ve justified waiting to produce a climate policy on the grounds that a lot is happening this year. Now, that includes the Glasgow climate conference towards the end of the year. If we don’t have an election this year, will you delay announcing your policy until next year?

AA: Look, we’ll make our policy announcements at the appropriate time. They probably won’t be, with due respect, on a podcast, there’ll be a full scale press conference for all to see and to assess. But it’s not like we’ve delayed policy announcements, Michelle, I have very clearly stated in one of my earliest speeches and policy announcements as leader, net zero emissions by 2050, and that we would act consistently with that. We have argued and I wrote to the prime minister before I addressed the National Press Club in the middle of last year, saying that we supported a mechanism to drive change through the economy and that that should be a bipartisan mechanism and then people could disagree on what the ambition was within it. But we’ve done our best to try to be constructive, but we’ve made it very clear that we will be ambitious when it comes to climate change. We’ve made specific policy announcements as well, opposing the changes and and the attempts by this government to get rid of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. And we announced in the budget reply last year the Rewiring the Nation policy. Now, that was a $20 billion fund to be made available to make sure that you fix transmission in this country. And what the, all the experts, the Australian energy market operator, no less, and all of the major energy companies say is that, that would address the major challenge because what that would enable it to do is for the renewables sector, which is, the problem there is one of storage and and reliability to be a part of the grid, to operate more effectively, which would, of course, assist the renewable sector. Now, because that wasn’t couched in terms of a percentage or what have you, maybe it didn’t receive the focus of something like the net zero emissions by 2050. But that was a very, very significant announcement. And indeed, the most significant thing that could be done according to the energy sector itself.

MG: One policy you are going to announce soon is on industrial relations. Now, obviously, you’re not going to be revealing the detail of that today, but can you just tell me, what are the topic headings, as it were, that you’ll concentrate on – the priorities?

AA: The priorities are very much on job security and income security, the fact that workers currently feel vulnerable, that if you’re in insecure work, that means you have difficulty getting a mortgage. It means you have difficulty planning for your first child or future children. It means that businesses suffer because they don’t have the certainty either of people being able to spend money and keep that flow, which then flows on to the economy. So that’s a big challenge. The wage stagnation that has been there since 2013, we have never seen since records were kept, wages being so constrained as they are. We need to deal with people who are in secure in work, in the workforce, whether that be people who work in labour hire companies and are working next door to someone doing the same tasks but earning less money, whether it be people in the new gig economy who are sometimes working for almost nothing in some cases, whether it be issues of workers who are having to bid against each other. And that’s one of the things we’re seeing as to areas like the NDIS, workers are being essentially putting in a bid to provide services, but the lowest cost is the successful bidder. Now, that puts a real downward pressure on wages, but also in the delivery of the services and the quality of that service delivery.

MG: The issue of insecure work will be a centrepiece of this policy…

AA: It will be front and centre because that’s a big challenge. And that’s something at the same time as, what Scott Morrison’s solution? Well, we know they’ve produced legislation last year which would cut wages and conditions.

MG: Will you vote against that legislation…

AA: We’ve said we will not vote for any legislation that cuts wages or cuts conditions such as penalty rates.

MG: So you will vote against it in the Senate.

AA: We will try to, of course, amend legislation and then we’ll make decisions, but we won’t be. Labor will always stand up for working people and their wages and conditions.

MG: Well, it will be a lively industrial relations debate in the next few weeks.

AA: It certainly will be, and that will be a major focus of Labor, which is consistent with the approach that I’ve always held and my Labor team holds.

MG: Anthony Albanese, thank you very much for talking with us today.

Additional audio

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

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Anthony Albanese on his new frontbench, Joel Fitzgibbon, and Labor’s imminent workplace policy – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-anthony-albanese-on-his-new-frontbench-joel-fitzgibbon-and-labors-imminent-workplace-policy-154377

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

There’s a new kid on the social media block, and it is making big waves. It is less than a year old, yet is already valued at US$1 billion, and has venture capitalists scrambling to invest.

The newcomer is Clubhouse, a social platform built around “drop-in audio chat”. Featuring ephemeral real-time voice conversations that any user can listen to and nobody can record, the invite-only app has gathered a legion of high-profile fans and some two million users.

The coronavirus pandemic may have created the ideal conditions for Clubhouse to thrive: hordes of people isolated by lockdowns or safety concerns, desperate for social connection. Text-based social media is fine as far as it goes, but voice is a natural alternative.

After a recent injection of cash, Clubhouse is planning to expand. Here’s what all the fuss is about.

What happens inside the Clubhouse

Users can follow other users or topics of interest, as well as joining themed “clubs”. They then have access to a selection of chat rooms focusing on different topics, many of which are highly tuned to the zeitgeist.

Rooms come in all sizes. Some have just a few people chatting informally. Others might contain hundreds or even thousands of people listening to a panel of experts, perhaps a politician, a celebrity or a business leader.

The others in the room are visible and you can bring up their profiles, complete with a list of whom they follow. The Clubhouse algorithm takes all this into account when offering content choices.

If you want to say something, raise your hand, and the room owner can give you speaking privileges. You can even applaud a speaker by rapidly clicking the mute/unmute button.

All of this happens in audio-only. At its best, it’s like eavesdropping on a fascinating conversation – with the ability to join in if you have something to add.

Many early users raved about how much they like it. One reason Clubhouse is proving so popular is that audio can feel much more intimate and “live” than text-based social media. People often prefer to talk and listen rather than use a keyboard.

Social cachet

In its short life, Clubhouse has garnered an enviable social cachet. At present, the only way to access the app is to be invited by an existing user.

From initial popularity among Silicon Valley investors, Clubhouse has attracted an impressive number of public figures, including Oprah Winfrey, Elon Musk and Drake. You’ll also find experts with deep domain knowledge, politicians with policies to champion, and celebrities talking about their latest projects.

Well-known users like these have been a major drawcard, and the relative scarcity of invitations have added to a sense of exclusivity.

Rooms in Clubhouse are temporary. When the meeting is over, the room disappears, and any discussion is gone forever. And it is not possible to record the discussion.

The temporary nature of the rooms may help to stop the formation of “social media echo chambers” where people are only exposed to those with whom they already agree.

Read more: I’m right, you’re wrong, and here’s a link to prove it: how social media shapes public debate

Invitation only

With membership by invitation only, for now at least, there are two ways you can join. The first is by personal invitation from a friend who is already a member.

Otherwise, you can download the app and reserve a username to get yourself on the waiting list. If you do this, anyone you know who is already a member might be notified – and if that happens, they might let you in.

Clubhouse is currently only available on Apple devices. The firm has stated its intention to release an Android version in the near future.

What’s in the pipeline?

The social media newcomer recently secured a new round of funding in the order of US$100 million. Plans for the future include opening up to the general public and allowing content creators to be paid.

The firm is considering three types of income generation: tipping, ticket sales and subscriptions. How all of this will come together is yet to be decided. Their current user base of around 2 million will likely see exponential growth. (For comparison, Facebook is approaching 3 billion users and even Twitter boasts more than 300 million.)

Serendipity

The history of innovation is marked by people making serendipitous connections. Meeting the right person at the right time in an unplanned way. Such connections cannot be made on demand, but you can create the right conditions for them to happen spontaneously.

The app’s rules try to make sure conversations are effectively off the record:

You may not transcribe, record, or otherwise reproduce and/or share information obtained in Clubhouse without prior permission.

This encourages spontaneity and relaxed, off-the-cuff chats – but critics say it also makes space for misogyny and racism. As the Clubhouse network grows, it will face challenges around transparency and content moderation like those confronting the likes of Facebook and YouTube.

Voice-based networks such as Clubhouse and Twitter’s new Spaces feature are well suited to creating the right conditions for those serendipitous connections to be made – for better or worse.

Read more: Explainer: Why the human voice is so versatile

– ref. Meet Clubhouse, the voice-only social media app setting the internet abuzz – https://theconversation.com/meet-clubhouse-the-voice-only-social-media-app-setting-the-internet-abuzz-154066

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Simpson, Senior Lecturer, University of South Australia

Just before the newly elected members of Myanmar’s parliament were due to be sworn in today, the military detained the country’s de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi; the president, Win Myint; and other key figures from the elected ruling party, the National League for Democracy.

The military later announced it had taken control of the country for 12 months and declared a state of emergency. This is a coup d’etat, whether the military calls it that or not.

A disputed election and claims of fraud

In November, the NLD and Suu Kyi won a landslide victory in national elections, with the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) losing around half its seats.

Humiliated by the result, the USDP alleged the election was subject to widespread fraud. However, international observers, including the Carter Center, the Asian Network for Free Elections and the European Union’s Election Observation Mission, all declared the elections a success. The EU’s preliminary statement noted that 95% of observers had rated the process “good” or “very good”.

Read more: Aung San Suu Kyi wins big in Myanmar’s elections, but will it bring peace — or restore her reputation abroad?

Reputable local organisations, such as the People’s Alliance for Credible Elections (PACE), agreed. These groups issued a joint statement on January 21 saying

the results of the elections were credible and reflected the will of the majority voters.

Yet, taking a page out of former US President Donald Trump’s book, the USDP pressed its claims of fraud despite the absence of any substantial evidence — a move designed to undermine the legitimacy of the elections.

The military did not initially back the USDP’s claims, but it has gradually begun to provide the party with more support, with the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Min Aung Hlaing, refusing to rule out a coup last week.

The following day, the country’s election authorities broke weeks of silence and firmly rejected the USDP’s claims of widespread fraud — setting the stage for what Myanmar historian Thant Myint-U called

[Myanmar’s] most acute constitutional crisis since the abolition of the old junta in 2010.

The civilian-military power-sharing arrangement

It is difficult to see how the military will benefit from today’s actions, since the power-sharing arrangement it had struck with the NLD under the 2008 constitution had already allowed it to expand its influence and economic interests in the country.

The military had previously ruled Myanmar for half a century after General Ne Win launched a coup in 1962. A so-called internal “self-coup” in 1988 brought a new batch of military generals to power. That junta, led by Senior General Than Shwe, allowed elections in 1990 that were won in a landslide by Suu Kyi’s party. The military leaders, however, refused to acknowledge the results.

In 2008, a new constitution was drawn up by the junta which reserved 25% of the national parliament seats for the military and allowed it to appoint the ministers of defence, border affairs and home affairs, as well as a vice president. Elections in 2010 were boycotted by the NLD, but the party won a resounding victory in the next elections in 2015.

Read more: Ethical minefields: the dirty business of doing deals with Myanmar’s military

Since early 2016, Suu Kyi has been de facto leader of Myanmar, even though there is still no civilian oversight of the military. Until this past week, the relationship between civilian and military authorities was tense at times, but overall largely cordial. It was based on a mutual recognition of overlapping interests in key areas of national policy.

Indeed, this power-sharing arrangement has been extremely comfortable for the military, as it has had full autonomy over security matters and maintained lucrative economic interests.

The partnership allowed the military’s “clearance operations” in Rakhine State in 2017 that resulted in the exodus of 740,000 mostly Muslim Rohingya refugees to Bangladesh.

In the wake of that pogrom, Suu Kyi vigorously defended both the country and its military at the International Court of Justice. Myanmar’s global reputation — and Suu Kyi’s once-esteemed personal standing — suffered deeply and never recovered.

Nonetheless, there was one key point of contention between the NLD and military: the constitutional prohibitions that made it impossible for Suu Kyi to officially take the presidency. Some NLD figures have also voiced deep concerns about the permanent role claimed by the armed forces as an arbiter of all legal and constitutional matters in the country.

A backwards step for Myanmar

Regardless of how events unfold this week and beyond, Myanmar’s fragile democracy has been severely undermined by the military’s actions.

The NLD government has certainly had its shortcomings, but a military coup is a significant backwards step for Myanmar — and is bad news for democracy in the region.

It’s difficult to see this action as anything other than a way for General Min Aung Hlaing to retain his prominent position in national politics, given he is mandated to retire this year when he turns 65. With the poor electoral performance of the USDP, there are no other conceivable political routes to power, such as through the presidency.

A coup will be counterproductive for the military in many ways. Governments around the world will likely now apply or extend sanctions on members of the military. Indeed, the US has released a statement saying it would “take action” against those responsible. Foreign investment in the country — except perhaps from China — is also likely to plummet.

As Myanmar’s people have already enjoyed a decade of increased political freedoms, they are also likely to be uncooperative subjects as military rule is re-imposed.

The 2019 general election demonstrated, once again, the distaste in Myanmar for the political role of the armed forces and the enduring popularity of Suu Kyi. Her detention undermines the fragile coalition that was steering Myanmar through a perilous period, and could prove a messy end to the profitable détente between civilian and military forces.

– ref. Myanmar’s military reverts to its old strong-arm behaviour — and the country takes a major step backwards – https://theconversation.com/myanmars-military-reverts-to-its-old-strong-arm-behaviour-and-the-country-takes-a-major-step-backwards-154368

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

Last week, a German vaccine advisory committee recommended the AstraZeneca vaccine only be used in 18-64-year-olds, citing a lack of data on the efficacy of the vaccine in people over 65.

Subsequently, the European regulator, the European Medicines Agency, conditionally approved the vaccine for anyone over 18.

What can we make of this? Should we be giving this vaccine to older people or not?

While we don’t yet have all the data we’d like, we don’t have reason to believe this vaccine won’t be at least somewhat effective in older adults. To exclude them from receiving it wouldn’t necessarily be the right approach.

The recommendation

STIKO, a German vaccine advisory committee that reports to the country’s government, was responsible for the draft recommendation which caused the stir. It released a similar final recommendation at the weekend.

While the German government may elect to follow STIKO’s advice or the European Medicines Agency’s guidelines, the latter’s approval carries significant weight. Equivalent to the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) in Australia, this body decides which vaccines may legally be supplied in Europe.

The AstraZeneca vaccine has already received approvals, not singling out older age groups, from multiple international regulators, including those in the United Kingdom, India and Mexico.

Read more: Germany may not give the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to over-65s, but that doesn’t mean it won’t work

Why did STIKO make this recommendation?

STIKO’s advice is based on the fact it didn’t have enough data to definitively say whether the vaccine will work in older people — not because it won’t.

According to the data we have so far from AstraZeneca’s phase 3 trials, only two out of 660 people in the trial aged over 65 got sick with COVID-19. Two sick people isn’t enough for a strong statistical analysis.

AstraZeneca initially enrolled younger people in its trials, with older people enrolled only later. So data on older people in the original trials and another trial in the United States are still on the way.

What do we know about the vaccine?

We have very good safety data for the AstraZeneca vaccine in older people. Older people actually have significantly lower levels of early side effects after vaccination. This makes sense, as older people’s immune systems don’t tend to react as strongly to vaccines, which would reduce many of these early side effects.

But the vaccine has been shown to induce strong immune responses in older people, which are likely to provide a degree of protection. The European Medicine Agency’s press release on their decision refers to a reasonable likelihood of protection based on this data.

So, just looking at immune responses, it’s reasonable to anticipate the AstraZeneca vaccine will be of some benefit, at least, to older people.

Read more: Why we should prioritise older people when we get a COVID vaccine

What do we know from other vaccines?

Often, vaccines aren’t as effective in older people as compared to younger people, because their immune responses can be less robust. For example, in 2010-2011 in the US, the flu vaccine was 60% effective in the general population, but only 38% effective in people over 65.

There’s more information on efficacy in older people for other COVID-19 vaccines. Notably, the Pfizer vaccine maintained efficacy of 93.7% for people over 55, compared to 95% overall. Accordingly, it would be reasonable to prioritise the Pfizer vaccine for older people.

But we’re beginning to see that vaccine supply and distribution can be unpredictable, with supply issues for Pfizer and AstraZeneca starting to affect vaccine rollout.

Importantly, all COVID-19 vaccines assessed so far, including the AstraZeneca vaccine, provide a high level of protection against severe disease and death across variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

Limiting access limits options for older people

The question that advisory committees and regulators are weighing up is, should the AstraZeneca vaccine, or any vaccine, be recommended for older people if we know:

• the vaccine has low risk of side effects

• the vaccine has a fair but unconfirmed likelihood of providing some benefit

• COVID-19 has a higher likelihood of severe disease and death in the demographic.

This is tricky to navigate and advice may differ across different vaccines and countries. For example, China is delaying vaccine rollout to older people while it waits for more data.

But conditional approval is a reasonable path to take. It allows for some uncertainty and maintains contact with the manufacturer. It also recognises that the likely benefit of giving older people any available vaccine could outweigh the hypothetical risk that it might not work in the midst of a crushing pandemic.

Read more: The Oxford vaccine has unique advantages, as does Pfizer’s. Using both is Australia’s best strategy

In any case, approvals from regulators, such as the European Medicines Agency and the TGA, have the most impact — defining who the vaccine can be supplied to in a country.

If regulatory guidelines are kept open to all age groups above 18, it will facilitate access to vaccines for many people who could benefit from them. The next steps are distributing these vaccines, and educating and updating the public with the latest information as it comes to hand.

Crucially, we should support older people in vaccine decisions with two things; good information and easy access to an array of safe, protective vaccines.

– ref. The AstraZeneca vaccine and over-65s: we may not have all the data yet, but limiting access could be counterproductive – https://theconversation.com/the-astrazeneca-vaccine-and-over-65s-we-may-not-have-all-the-data-yet-but-limiting-access-could-be-counterproductive-154272

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew S. Champion, Senior Research Fellow in Medieval Studies, Australian Catholic University

It’s the time of year when we Australians start returning to our normal rhythms. The first beats of the day are often the dreaded beeps of the alarm clock or a digital symphony from a bedside phone.

These modern electronic alarms are just the latest in a long sequence of methods used to wake us from sleep: from the watchmen on ancient city walls waiting for the dawn to more recent clocks on wheels that have to be chased to stop ringing.

The job of waking us up when our body clocks are telling us to sleep is a big ask. When did we first start using alarms, and what did they sound like? What’s changed about the sounds of time, and what hasn’t?

Birdsong

Some of the earliest words we have for time measurement show people’s particular interest in dividing up the different parts of the night.

In the pre-modern world, without electric lights and electric alarms, people paid more attention to the quality of light and the sounds around them. A rich vocabulary emerged in ancient languages for the different parts of the night. One early Latin word for the time before dawn was gallicinium, the time of the cock’s crow. Scientists have since discovered roosters really do know what time that is.

Birdsong remains an important way of experiencing waking up. In Australia, we often evoke birdsong when we think about sleep and waking — from morning caroling magpies, to the versatile currawong or the midnight call of willie wagtails. Less melodic, though equally striking, is another possible bird noise associated with early rising — “sparrow’s fart” — first attested to in the 19th century.

Read more: Birdsong has inspired humans for centuries: is it music?

Human wake-up calls

The human body has developed its own repertoire of alarms.

The Islamic call to prayer, the adhan, sung by men called muezzin, is one of the most sonically striking examples, with various versions marking out differences between traditions and regions. The melismatic chant — where a single syllable is sung over several musical notes — is both a wake up call to prayer (“Prayer is better than sleep”) and a prayer in itself.

Some early-morning calls were combined with weather forecasting systems. In the 15th century the town criers of the port of Sandwich on the south coast of England would call out the wind changes in the night so seafarers would know when favourable (or unfavourable) winds sprang up. Much later, in some parts of the industrial world, professional knocker-uppers might use a pea shooter or stick to tap on windows to wake you up for your shift.

Having humans wake you up would usually mean someone has to stay up all night. But how would that person know when to cry the alarm? Sundials would obviously be useless. This is one reason technologies developed to count the hours of night — ancient and medieval water clocks with markings to show how water flow corresponded to time passing, and later (from around the 14th century) sand glasses in the familiar hourglass shape.

Mechanical clocks

The Middle Ages saw one of our most amazing inventions — mechanical clocks, originally driven by weights. Gravity pulled suspended weights down to drive the clock mechanism. The weights were periodically wound back up for another cycle.

These clocks began as large objects in churches and town belfries. Some had elaborate automata: the extraordinary 16th-century Strasbourg clock includes a famous cockerel whose cries echo through the cathedral. Its automated rooster is from an earlier clock made in the 14th century.

Some large clocks played music on bells before striking the hours. This year is the 700th anniversary of what may be the first such musical clock, installed in a monastery near Rouen in 1321. It played a hymn, Conditor alme siderum (Dear Creator of the Stars), for the season of Advent that starts the Christian year.

Such chimes are our first recorded mechanical music, and a precursor to today’s musical alarms. The technology was probably developed by tech-geek monks as a way of dealing with waking up to sing their prayers in the night — even better if that wake-up call, like the adhan, was a pious prayer itself.

Read more: Acedia: the lost name for the emotion we’re all feeling right now

The modern alarm clock

The earliest versions of the clocks we know today were made for large communities, public spaces or courtly elites.

Gradually though, and certainly by the mid to late 15th century, you could find heavy iron wall clocks in private houses (made in places still famous for clockmaking, such as Switzerland). These often had pins that you could place around the clock face to set the bell ringing at a particular time. These house alarm clocks could wake the owner to work and pray.

It was during this period, too, that compact spring mechanisms made smaller and smaller personal watches possible, carried or worn on the body from the 16th century.

The personalisation of time accelerated in the 19th century and gave rise to some wild modern alarm clocks. Among the more striking inventions of the French magician Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin was a clock that lit a candle after the alarm sounded.

Read more: Morning haze: why it’s time to stop hitting the snooze button

Though nothing has reached the sophistication of the breakfast-making Rube-Goldberg-style alarm clocks seen on The Goodies, automaton clock alarms have promised freshly made coffee and toast or even just their aroma. Here the familiar sounds of the kitchen, with their enticing morning smells, soften the rude awakening from sleep.

Today’s alarms, with all their invention, come as a gift (or depending on how much you enjoy waking up, a curse) from the Middle Ages to us today.

– ref. Wakey wakey: a history of alarm clocks and the mechanics of time – https://theconversation.com/wakey-wakey-a-history-of-alarm-clocks-and-the-mechanics-of-time-153716

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

The first Newspoll of 2021 has the major parties tied at 50-50 on two-party preferred, a one-point gain for Labor since the final 2020 Newspoll in late November. The poll was conducted January 27-30 from a sample of 1,512 people.

Primary votes were 42% Coalition (down one point), 36% Labor (steady), 10% Greens (down one) and 3% One Nation (up one).

63% were satisfied with PM Scott Morrison’s performance (down three) and 33% were dissatisfied (up three), for a net approval of +30 points. While this is still very high, analyst Kevin Bonham says it is Morrison’s lowest net approval since April.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese had a net approval of -2, down five points. Morrison led Albanese by 57-29 as better prime minister (60-28 in November).

While much commentary has written off Labor for the next election, a source of hope for the opposition is that while the Coalition has usually been ahead since the COVID crisis began, the two-party-preferred margin has been close.

Read more: View from The Hill: Coal push from Nationals is a challenge for Scott Morrison

Morrison’s great approval ratings have not translated into big leads for the Coalition. It is plausible that by the middle of this year COVID will not be a major threat owing to a global vaccination program.

A return to a focus on normal issues could assist Labor in undermining Morrison’s ratings and the Coalition’s slender lead on voting intentions.

Albanese has come under attack from the left owing to Thursday’s reshuffle in which Chris Bowen took the climate change portfolio from Mark Butler.

But the Greens lost a point in Newspoll rather than gaining. With the focus on COVID, climate change appears to have lost salience.

On Australia Day and climate change

In an Ipsos poll for Nine newspapers, taken before January 25 from a sample of 1,220 people, 48% disagreed with changing Australia Day from January 26, while 28% agreed.

But by 49-41 voters thought it likely Australia Day would be changed within the next ten years.

In a Morgan SMS poll, conducted January 25 from a sample of 1,236 people, 59% thought January 26 should be known as Australia Day, while 41% thought it should be known as Invasion Day.

In an Essential poll conducted in mid-January, 42% (down 20 since January 2020) thought Australia was not doing enough to address climate change, 35% (up 16) thought we were doing enough and 10% (up two) thought we were doing too much.

Read more: Toxicity swirls around January 26, but we can change the nation with a Voice to parliament

But there was a slight increase in those thinking climate change was caused by human activity (58%, up two since January 2020), while 32% (steady) thought we are just witnessing a normal fluctuation in the earth’s climate.

Trump set to be acquitted in impeachment trial

I related on January 20 that Donald Trump was impeached by the US House of Representatives over his role in inciting the January 6 riots with his baseless claims of election fraud.

The Senate is tied at 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris giving Democrats the majority with her casting vote. But it requires a two-thirds majority to convict a president, so 17 Republicans would need to join the Democrats for conviction.

On January 26, a vote was called on whether it was constitutional to try a former president. The Senate ruled it constitutional by 55-45, but just five Republicans joined all Democrats.

That is far short of the 17 required to convict, so Trump is set to be acquitted at the Senate trial that begins February 8.

Only ten of over 200 House Republicans supported impeachment. It is clear the vast majority of Congressional Republicans consider it more important to keep the Trump supporters happy than to hold Trump accountable for the rioters that attacked Congress.

In a late January Monmouth University poll, 56% approved of the House impeaching Trump while 42% disapproved. When asked whether the Senate should convict, support dropped to 52-44.

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

FiveThirtyEight has started an aggregate of polls to track new President Joe Biden’s ratings. His current ratings are 54.3% approve and 34.6% disapprove for a net approval of +19.7 points.

While Biden’s ratings are better than Trump’s at any stage of his presidency, they are worse on net approval than all presidents prior to Trump this early in their terms.

Prior to Trump, presidents were given a honeymoon even by opposition party supporters, but it is unlikely the 30% or so who believe Biden’s win illegitimate will ever approve of him.

– ref. Polls say Labor and Coalition in a 50-50 tie, Trump set to be acquitted by US Senate – https://theconversation.com/polls-say-labor-and-coalition-in-a-50-50-tie-trump-set-to-be-acquitted-by-us-senate-154370

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Griffiths, Fellow, Grattan Institute

Political parties in Australia collectively received $168 million in donations for the financial year 2019-20. Today, Australians finally get to see where some of the money came from with the release of data from the Australian Electoral Commission.

While the big donors will make the headlines, they are only the tip of the iceberg. More than half of the funding for political parties remains hidden from public view. And that is exactly how the major parties want it.

What does the data tell us?

The Coalition and Labor received more in donations than all other parties combined. The Coalition received 41% of all funds (or A$69 million), while Labor received 33% ($55 million). The Greens came a distant third at 11% ($19 million), bumping Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party out of the position it held during the 2019 election.

The largest 5% of donors accounted for half of declared donations. For the second year in a row, the largest individual declared donation was made by Palmer’s company Mineralogy, which gave $5.9 million to his own party.

The Coalition’s largest donor, Richard Pratt’s Pratt Holdings, donated $1.5 million. Other major donations to the Coalition included the Greenfields Foundation ($450,000), an investment company linked to the Liberal Party; and Transcendent Australia ($203,000), a company owned by Chinese businesswoman Sally Zou.

Unsurprisingly, many of Labor’s largest donors are unions, led by the “Shoppies” union (the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, or SDA), which donated almost $500,000. Labor also received large donations from fundraising vehicles associated with the party, including Labor Holdings Pty Ltd, which donated $910,000.

Read more: Eight ways to clean up money in Australian politics

Other large donors are bipartisan givers. The Australian Hotels Association gave $154,000 to the Coalition and $271,000 to Labor. Woodside Energy gave $198,000 to the Coalition and $138,000 to Labor. The Macquarie Group (including Macquarie Telecom) gave $254,000 to the Coalition and $184,000 to Labor. ANZ continued its regular donations to both sides with $100,000 each.

Total donations were smaller than the previous year (an election year). But those who donate “off-cycle” can still have substantial influence, whether they are political devotees, or playing the “long game” of using donations to open doors and wield political influence.

But a lot of the money remains hidden from public view

Declared donations are only a fraction of the total money flowing to our political parties.

Out of $168 million in party funding, only $15 million of donations were declared (or just 9%). Another $59 million — around one-third — is public funding provided by electoral commissions.

The rest? A murky combination of undeclared donations and a messy bucket of funds called “other receipts”, which includes everything from investment income to money raised at political fundraising dinners. This chart shows the breakdown for the two major parties.

More than half of the Coalition’s private funding is undisclosed, and 40% of Labor’s funds. This rises to about 90% across both parties when other receipts are included.

The major parties want it this way

The Commonwealth donations disclosure regime is incredibly weak compared to almost all Australian states and most other advanced nations. Let’s be clear: this is a political choice backed in by the major parties.

In December, both major parties rejected a bill introduced by crossbench Senator Jacqui Lambie to improve transparency of political donations. It wasn’t revolutionary — the bill didn’t ban donors, or limit donations, or restrict what parties could do with donations. It simply proposed giving the public more and better information on the major donors, including:

• requiring donations over $5,000 to be declared by the parties (the current threshold is $14,300)

• stopping “donations splitting”, in which a major donor can hide by splitting a big donation into a series of small ones

• making income from political fundraising events declarable

• publishing data about donations within weeks (rather than the current eight to 19 months).

Yet, the bill was whitewashed. The committee rejected it on the basis that “there is already an effective regime in place”.

Our current system doesn’t have the balance right

The Commonwealth donations disclosure regime is supposed to provide transparency and to “inform the public about the financial dealings of political parties, candidates and others involved in the electoral process”. But it clearly does not deliver on this in its current form.

There is a balance to be drawn between the interests of donors in protecting their privacy and the interests of the public in knowing who funds and influences political parties.

Read more: A full ban on political donations would level the playing field – but is it the best approach?

But it is very hard to see how the current system – which keeps the majority of private money out of public view and unnecessarily delays the release of all donation data – has got the balance right.

A good disclosure system would close the loopholes that allow major donors to hide, while protecting the privacy of small donors.

Australians consistently say that they are suspicious that politicians are corrupt and that governments serve themselves and their mates rather than the public interest. Perhaps they’re right. Today’s donations release reminds us of the shortfalls of a system designed for donor and party interests over the public interest.

– ref. More than half of funding for the major parties remains secret — and this is how they want it – https://theconversation.com/more-than-half-of-funding-for-the-major-parties-remains-secret-and-this-is-how-they-want-it-154364

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flavio Romero Macau, Senior Lecturer in Supply Chain Management and Global Logistics, Edith Cowan University

I live in Perth. Like most people here, on Sunday I was ready for a busy week of getting the kids to school, going to work, visiting the gym and so on. I planned to spend the hot afternoon at the beach.

That changed with the announcement of a five-day lockdown, effective from 6pm, sparked by a security guard at one of Perth’s quarantine hotels testing positive to COVID-19.

The lockdown rules are similar to those in other Australian cities in recent months. Shops for essentials such as groceries, medicine and other necessary supplies remain open. West Australian premier Mark McGowan urged people not to “panic buy”:

There is no need to rush to the supermarket. There will not be a shortage of toilet paper or other goods. You will be able to go out and shop for essentials over the course of this week. I urge everyone to remain calm and to act responsibly.

It made no difference. Within the hour, long queues formed outside supermarkets, service stations and other stores. People stood in 35⁰C heat for up to an hour awaiting their turn to strip store shelves of toilet paper and other items.

Read more: A toilet paper run is like a bank run. The economic fixes are about the same

We’ve seen this all before – nationwide in March, in Melbourne in July, Adelaide in November, and Sydney in December.

People are nervous, I get it. But the premier is right. There’s no need. The only shortages that will occur are those brought on by this very behaviour.

The good news, however, is that any induced shortages will be short-lived. In fact, by the time you read this, the fuss might be over.

The psychology behind stockpiling

For some, the news of a lockdown has little to no effect. Their behaviour is guided by a rational response to uncertainty. They watch in dismay the extreme responses of others during stressful times.

For some a lockdown triggers a complex psychological chain reaction, leading to panic buying and hoarding. Particularly for those more prone to feelings of insecurity and anxiety, stocking up on items is a way to feel more in control. The fact there’s no actual need, because supermarkets will be open tomorrow, has little to do with it. The fear of missing out (FOMO) overcomes rationality.

Not all stockpiling behaviour can be explained away as “irrational”, though. As we’ve seen in recent cases such as GameStop’s share price, people also make “rational” calculations about other people’s behaviour, and respond accordingly.

In this case, based on past evidence, it might seem quite sensible to predict some people will “panic buy” and decide the rational response to that irrational behaviour is to get in first.

Read more: Stocking up to prepare for a crisis isn’t ‘panic buying’. It’s actually a pretty rational choice

There’s little a political leader (or anyone else) can say that will change this. In fact, official warnings against panic buying might even do more harm than good by drawing attention to its probability.

Things will work themselves out

The good news is that any shortages are likely to be very short-lived – even if this lockdown continues beyond its scheduled five days.

Last March, when stockpiling led to weeks-long shortages of toilet paper, hand sanitiser and grocery staples such as pasta, it was because most of Australia was involved. Business and supply chains primed to run as efficiently as possible with highly predictable demand were taken by surprise. They struggled to compensate.

This time, having now had multiple experiences to hone their preparedness and response, supply chain managers know the drill.

Knowing such lockdowns are now a risk, they’ve added more fat to supply chains. Inventory is not kept at a minimum. Supermarkets are quick to limit the amount customers can buy. In most case shelves stripped today will likely be replenished tomorrow.

Read more: A toilet paper run is like a bank run. The economic fixes are about the same

With a localised event, also – in this case Perth and Western Australia’s southwest – extra stock can be diverted from around the country. There’s no need for suppliers to suddenly ramp up production. The only thing stopping supply returning to normal is the speed of transportation and restocking.

What happened across the nation in March 2020 was like a major accident leading to delays and detour on a supply chain highway. This situation is more like a car with a flat tyre slowing the traffic on a local road.

What comes next?

COVID-19 outbreaks – with short, sharp lockdowns in response – look to be part of the “new normal”, until the pandemic is over.

Outbreaks of store stripping also look to be part of the new normal. But so long as we don’t have these outbreaks in multiple states simultaneously, they will pass quickly.

So stay calm and avoid the rush.

– ref. ‘Panic-buying’ events are the new normal; here’s how supply chains have adapted – https://theconversation.com/panic-buying-events-are-the-new-normal-heres-how-supply-chains-have-adapted-154362

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dale Dominey-Howes, Professor of Hazards and Disaster Risk Sciences, University of Sydney

The human and environmental cost of climate change is all around us, and on the rise. The UN reports about 90% of all disasters are weather-related, and that weather and climate are major drivers of disaster risk. So it’s more important than ever to examine who is bearing the brunt of this change.

A growing body of post-disaster research shows people — even those living in the same area — experience disasters differently.

For some the events are minor inconveniences. For others they are devastating. Disasters exacerbate pre-existing inequalities in areas such as education, income, gender, ability/disability and social status.

Read more: Natural disasters increase inequality. Recovery funding may make things worse

As the UN puts it:

Poverty is both a driver and consequence of disasters, and the processes that further disaster risk related poverty are permeated with inequality. Socio-economic inequality is likely to continue to increase and with it disaster risk for those countries, communities, households and businesses that have only limited opportunities to manage their risks and strengthen their resilience. The geography of inequality expresses itself at all scales: between regions and countries, within countries and inside cities and localities.

Who is most at risk when disasters strike?

At the heart of this problem is lack of power and access to resources to increase resilience. An ideology that calls on each of us to be personally responsible for our own resilience and disaster preparedness — when power, wealth and income are distributed so unequally — has obvious shortcomings.

Examples of this dynamic abound.

Research by colleagues and I looked at disaster declarations in local government areas in New South Wales, and found a “hotspot” in the north of the state. Of the most disadvantaged local government areas in NSW, 43% were found in the state’s disaster hotspot.

Another study found residents in the Lismore town centre flood foodprint had “significantly higher levels of social vulnerability” and higher rates of smoking, alcohol consumption, pre-existing mental health conditions and poorer health – all of which make these people more vulnerable to disasters.

Heatwaves are set to become more common and more extreme as the climate changes. According to the Climate Council:

Those most at risk include the very old, the very young, those with existing health problems (such as heart, kidney, lung or liver disease) or disabilities, lower socio-economic, remote or marginalised communities, socially isolated individuals, the homeless, and those who work outdoors. People who do not have access to an air-conditioned environment are highly vulnerable.

Running air conditioning, of course, is an expensive luxury out of reach for many Australians and even those who can afford it worry it may become prohibitively expensive in future. Some local communities are trialling a system where local churches, halls and other air-conditioned venues can act as “heat refuges” on extremely hot days.

The “personal responsibility” ideology rings hollow when it comes to bushfire preparedness too. As others have argued, preparation can cost time and money especially for those not physically able to execute fuel reduction measures alone.

Evacuation as a primary safety measure for any number of disaster types may sound simple enough, but research shows even that’s not always easy for poorer, disadvantaged people. Recovery after disaster can extremely uneven within communities — especially in regards to housing and job markets — which can help compound pre-existing inequalities.

Poorer, more disadvantaged people are less likely to be able to afford household insurance, exposing them to even greater risk.

Some researchers have argued the COVID-19 pandemic is also a disaster, with its roots in climate change and environmental degradation, and that:

Along with habitat loss, shifting climate zones are causing wildlife to migrate to new places, where they interact with other species they haven’t previously encountered. This increases the risk of new diseases emerging.

The pandemic has certainly shone a blinding light on how pandemics are experienced differently by the haves and the have-nots, with those in casualised work, on lower wages and lower job security often at greater risk.

Read more: Natural disasters are affecting some of Australia’s most disadvantaged communities

What can we do to make people less vulnerable to disasters?

Too often, the difficult task of addressing inequality is left out of the disaster preparedness discussion.

But ensuring a minimum living wage, improving working conditions and boosting job security are crucial elements of disaster risk reduction. Raising the rate of Jobseeker (or Newstart) to keep recipients out of poverty is essential.

Lastly, we may need to start a national “catastrophe pool” of funds to help lower income households access insurance and to support the poorest to recover when disasters strike.

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

– ref. You can’t talk about disaster risk reduction without talking about inequality – https://theconversation.com/you-cant-talk-about-disaster-risk-reduction-without-talking-about-inequality-153189

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven David Hitchcock, Lecturer, University of Sydney

In her new book, Can’t Even, American journalist Anne Helen Peterson writes of how Millennials have become “the burnout generation”.

[It’s] feeling that you’ve hit the wall exhaustion-wise, but then have to scale the wall and just keep going. There’s no catharsis, no lasting rest, just this background hum of exhaustion.

The book, recently released in Australia, builds on the viral essay Peterson wrote in 2019.

At its heart, the book is a critique about the nature of modern workplaces and the modern economy.

As Petersen recently told Vox,

There’s a feeling of instability that’s the baseline economic condition for many, many millennials, and it’s enhanced by these other components of our lives that make it harder to turn away from.

Peterson argues Millennials, born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s, have come of age in a world where more and more of their time is being demanded by not just work, but by life.

Technology means work follows us everywhere, at all hours, while leisure time happens (or is “performed”) on social media. Meanwhile, homes are turned into Airbnb rentals, cars become rideshare services.

What’s age got to do with it?

Peterson tells real and important stories about the frustration, anxiety, and malaise of herself and her contemporaries. However, she does us all a disservice by framing this as particularly “Millennial problem”.

While Peterson does acknowledge burnout impacts everyone, she assumes Millennials are a concrete group of people whose experience of burnout is exceptional.

The idea of clear generational groups, each possessing defining characteristics seems intuitive. It makes sense a group of contemporaries who had similar experiences in their formative years, would come to have similar attitudes, values, and beliefs.

But many scholars are uncertain that the generational groups as we know them — such as Millennials, Gen X or Baby Boomers — are as real or useful as we might think.

Read more: From Boomers to Xennials: we love talking about our generations, but must recognise their limits

Empirical research to prove generational groupings has produced “highly mixed and contradictory results”. So, many academics aren’t convinced birth-year groups even exist — there are too many variables.

For example, if a 20-year-old today doesn’t follow office etiquette, is this a product of them being Generation Z? Or because this person is new to the workforce?

Read more: Millennials at work don’t see themselves as millennials

More broadly, the majority of research about generations have been undertaken across Europe, North America, and Australia/Oceania. Given these three regions combined make up less than 18% of the world’s population, it becomes clear how little we know.

So, while the frustrations of Peterson and her contemporaries are real — it is important to emphasise they are something everyone is facing.

‘Feelings of energy depletion’

Burnout has historically been studied in relation to workplace stress, particularly where employees are in a caring role.

It is defined by World Health Organisation as

(a) feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; (b) increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and (c) reduced professional efficacy.

But medical experts are starting to see burnout as a society-wide issue, particularly as people find themselves overwhelmed and fatigued by COVID-19. Similarly, mental health groups have identified burnout as a product of long-term, or chronic, stress.

That is to say, scientists and support services are coming to understand burnout is not necessarily a product of the workplace specifically — but everything going on in someone’s life — from how much technology they use, to how many commitments they have.

Everyone is over it

In 2020, who of us can say they aren’t feeling burned out?

After a summer of bushires, we had (and still have) a pandemic. For many, the boundaries between work and life have collapsed as we have needed to work, care, and relax at home — sometimes in the same room.

COVID has been accompanied by a seemingly permanent state of angst, as we all found ourselves doomscrolling for the latest updates. Many people have also lost income and job security. And more than 2 million people around the world have lost their lives.

Burnout is about more than the pandemic

But it is not “just 2020”. The past several decades have seen huge changes to the way that we live, and engage with those around us.

For example, social media has had a profound effect — and not always for the better in terms of our mental health.

In the workplace, an “overtime culture” has blossomed. As of 2019, about 13% of Australia’s workforce was working more than 50 hours a week.

The rise in casual employment may have allowed for more flexibility, but it has increased insecurity — with no paid leave, and unstable work schedules.

Here it is important to note, in 2020, those aged 15-24 made up less than 40% of all casual jobs. While the casual workforce is skewed towards younger workers – the casualisation of the workforce impacts all of us.

Read more: Uber might not take over the world, but it is still normalising job insecurity

On top of all of this, we have seen rising levels of student and household debt, skyrocketing house prices, and the increasing effects of climate change.

We all have plenty of reasons to feel bombarded by life.

How do you solve burnout?

So, what do we do? It goes without saying, widespread burnout due to social, economic, and political forces in the middle of a pandemic is a complex problem to solve.

At an individual level, resources do exist to help us address our mental health and support those around us.

Read more: The day is dawning on a four-day work week

However, systemic change is far more complex. Academics and world leaders have suggested reducing the work week might be an important step. Though, as noted by Peterson, it’s no longer just work demanding our time, energy, and attention.

As Peterson points out, one area that may need reimagining is how much and how often we consume information. Scholars in the 1960s were already raising concerns about the impact so much information could have on people, and in turn, society.

We as humans are social and curious creatures, but how much news, connection and information is good for us?

Comparing generations is a trap

As Slate journalist Shannon Palus observes, Peterson deserves credit for identifying big problems about a culture that constantly asks for more access to every aspect of our lives.

However, framing this issue as one belonging to, or uniquely impacting Millennials is a trap. It encourages us to compare different generations to see who is the least or most burned out.

Really, our attention should be devoted to working together to reduce burnout for everyone.

– ref. Millennials are not the only ‘burnout generation’ (just ask the rest of us) – https://theconversation.com/millennials-are-not-the-only-burnout-generation-just-ask-the-rest-of-us-147089

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By George Karystianis, Research fellow, UNSW

Rare access to almost half a million police reports of domestic violence has revealed a hidden picture of mental health issues in perpetrators and victims.

This is academics’ first attempt in the world to use computers to mine the text of so many police reports. These would otherwise have taken humans years to read and analyse.

As part of our recently published research, we discovered many more mentions of mental health issues in these police reports than expected.

We have already used those data to identify lesser-known groups vulnerable to domestic violence, including people with autism spectrum disorder and in yet-to-be-published research, people in nursing homes. But our findings could also have other implications for public health, victims, perpetrators and policing.

Here’s what we did

Police are often the first to attend domestic violence events. As well as details such as the names and ages of the people involved, police also write up a narrative description of the event, including any observable injuries, drug and alcohol information, and mental health.

The NSW Police Force told us that in 2017 alone, officers attended 123,330 domestic violence events. This gives some idea of the scale of the problem and the challenge of reading, processing and pulling together the volumes of information these reports contain.

So we developed a way of mining the text to automatically extract certain information. We analysed almost half a million (492,393) domestic violence police records in New South Wales, covering a 12-year period (2005-16).

Read more: Out of the shadows: the rise of domestic violence in Australia

To illustrate the advantage of automatic text processing, we estimate it would have taken one person around 160 years to read and process the reports. That’s based on 14 reports a day, working 220 days a year (unlike computers, humans take holidays).

Although the source records were not de-identified (it would have taken too long), we only extracted anonymised information (mentions of mental illness) to ensure privacy.

Here’s what we found

We focused on domestic violence events that mentioned a single perpetrator against a single victim (416,441). Within those, we identified more than 120 different mental illnesses for victims and perpetrators in almost 65,000 police-attended domestic violence events over those years.

These ranged from generic disorder descriptions (for example, mood disorders, self-harm) to highly specific conditions (for example, oppositional defiant disorder, dissociative personality disorder) for victims and perpetrators.

A total of 16% of domestic violence events examined had at least one mention of a mental illness for either the perpetrator or the victim. In more than three-quarters (76%) of these events, mental illness was mentioned for the perpetrator only, 17% for the victim only, and 7% for both victim and perpetrator.

Overall, mood affective disorders, which include depression or bipolar disorder, were the most common in both victims and perpetrators.

Read more: Domestic violence soars after natural disasters. Preventing it needs to be part of the emergency response

One key finding was a steady increase over time in domestic violence involving alcohol abuse in perpetrators aged 15-64 years. Another was the number of domestic violence cases with victims over 55 years said to have dementia.

While the records contained many more reports of mental health issues than we might expect, this is likely a big underestimate. This is because police do not systematically seek information on people’s mental health state when they attend domestic violence events.

We need to be careful when interpreting these results

We know police reports don’t capture all cases of domestic violence. We also need to be careful when using reports of mental health based on interviews with victims, perpetrators and third parties who are not mental health professionals (such as parents).

However, police reports draw on a range of sources, including the victims, perpetrators and witnesses. They also consider evidence at the scene (such as medications and signs of drug and alcohol use).

Due to stigma issues, people might not be comfortable or willing to share their own mental health issues with others, including police.

Read more: Media reporting on mental illness, violence and crime needs to change

What could this data be used for?

Rather than stigmatise people with mental health issues, our research can potentially dispel myths about domestic violence and mental health, and raise awareness about certain groups’ vulnerability.

For example, our research has identified vulnerable groups at risk of being victims of domestic violence, including people with autism spectrum disorders, carers, and people in specific settings (such as nursing homes).

We showed the perpetrators of domestic violence against people with autism spectrum disorders were more likely to be their family or carers. And the most common conditions in perpetrators were developmental conditions and intellectual disability; for non-autistic perpetrators, schizophrenia and substance abuse were most common.

From a public health perspective, this rich information also gives us extra insights not captured in data sources such as emergency department presentations, which cover only the more severe cases of domestic violence that result in significant physical injury.

And our data could also help police handle domestic violence events where mental health is an issue.

We are currently using artificial intelligence methods on the data from text mining and other sources to predict future domestic violence events by individuals with particular profiles.

There are concerns

This study raises the issue of how we use “big data” and how we share information between the police and mental health services.

We argue the potential benefits outweigh the potential harms, especially as analyses like ours can potentially increase community safety, lead to better outcomes for people with mental illnesses, and inform interactions with police.

Read more: Explainer: what is big data?

We suggest the public should be consulted about their views on “big data” issues, including any privacy concerns, rather than decisions being made solely by government officials and academics. This is important given the “big data” tsunami that has engulfed us, representing a significant public asset.

If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call the National Sexual Assault, Domestic Family Violence Counselling Service (1800RESPECT) on 1800 737 732 or Lifeline on 13 11 14.

– ref. We analysed almost 500,000 police reports of domestic violence. Mental health was an issue – https://theconversation.com/we-analysed-almost-500-000-police-reports-of-domestic-violence-mental-health-was-an-issue-153649