Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Javaan Chahl, DST Group Joint Chair of Sensor Systems, University of South Australia

We have developed four-winged bird-like robots, called ornithopters, that can take off and fly with the agility of swifts, hummingbirds and insects. We did this by reverse engineering the aerodynamics and biomechanics of these creatures.

Our ornithopters have the potential to outperform and outmanoeuvre existing drone configurations with static wings or propellers.

Read more: How modern technology is inspired by the natural world

What are ornithopters?

Ornithopters are flying machines based on the design of birds. Existing drone configurations rely on propellers and static wings. Ornithopters flap their wings to generate forward thrust. The complex relationship between aerodynamics and wing movements allows birds and insects to fly in ways that are impossible for conventional drones.

Why do we want ornithopters?

Ornithopters fly differently to conventional drones. They can glide, hover, and perform aerobatics. In different situations, they can either save energy by flying like a regular aeroplane or choose to hover. They can take off and land slowly in tight spaces, yet might quickly soar upwards to perch like a bird.

Current multirotor drones hover very nicely, but use even more energy in forward flight than in hover, so they can’t really travel far. Fixed wing drones can travel efficiently at high speeds, but hovering is not normally possible without compromising the entire design. There are hybrid concepts, usually with wings and rotors. Hybrid aircraft perform poorly when hovering and cruising when compared to other designs due to additional weight and drag from having more parts.

Flapping wings are nature’s original solution to the need to fly both quickly and slowly, as well as landing and taking off from anywhere. For a bird or insect, every part of the system is used for hovering and cruising flight, without carrying redundant thrusters or additional wings.

Existing fixed-wing and rotary-wing drones are so well understood that designs are now near the limits of how efficient they can be. Adding anything new comes at a cost to other aspects of performance.

In principle, ornithopters are capable of more complex missions than conventional aircraft, such as flying long distances, hovering at times, and manoeuvring in tight spaces. Ornithopters are less noisy and safer to use around humans, because of their large wing area and slow wing beats.

How do we make a working ornithopter?

An ornithopter is a highly complex system. Until now, flapping wing drones have been slow flying and not capable of achieving the speed and power required for vertical aerobatics or sustained hovering.

The few commercially available ornithopters are designed for forward flight. They climb slowly like an underpowered aeroplane, and can’t hover or climb vertically.

Our design is different in several ways.

One difference is that our ornithopters make use of the “clap and fling” effect. The two pairs of wings flap such that they meet, like hands clapping. This makes enough extra thrust to lift their body weight when hovering.

We improved efficiency by tuning the wing/body hinge to store and recover the energy of the moving wing when the wings change direction, like a spring. We also discovered that most of the energy loss happened because the gears flexed under the load of driving the wing. We resolved this with minute bearings and by rearranging shafts in the transmission to keep the gears spaced correctly.

The large tail, comprising a rudder and elevator, creates a lot of turning force. This allows aggressive aerobatic manoeuvres and switching fast from horizontal to vertical flight.

The system was designed to be able to pitch nose up, rapidly increasing its angle of attack to the point where the wing does not generate lift, a phenomenon called “dynamic stall”. Dynamic stall creates a lot of drag, turning the wing into a parachute to slow the aircraft. This would be undesirable in many drones, but the ability to enter this state and quickly recover adds to manoeuvrability. This is useful when operating in cluttered environments or landing on a perch.

Catching up with evolution

One of the major findings of our work was that a practical ornithopter might achieve similar efficiency to a propeller driven aircraft. Several behaviours became possible for the ornithopter once some additional power was liberated.

This really showed that optimising the flight apparatus is key to making these new aircraft designs viable. We are now working to use wing designs copied from nature. We hope for equally large improvements.

In some ways, such large efficiency gains from design changes in these new systems should not be surprising. Winged organisms have been optimised by evolution over hundreds of millions of years. We humans have been at it for less than 200 years.

– ref. Learning from nature: a new flapping drone can take off, hover and swoop like a bird – https://theconversation.com/learning-from-nature-a-new-flapping-drone-can-take-off-hover-and-swoop-like-a-bird-143343

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Wark, Conjoint Professor, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle

We’re now all too familiar with the common symptoms of COVID-19: a fever, dry cough and fatigue. Some people also experience aches and pains, a sore throat, and loss of taste or smell.

Sufferers with mild illness might expect to get better after a few weeks. But there’s mounting evidence this isn’t the case, and COVID-19 may leave a long-lasting impression on its victims – not just the most severely affected or the elderly and frail.

It’s not just an infection of the lungs

On the surface, COVID-19 is a lung disease. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus infects cells of the respiratory tract and can cause life-threatening pneumonia.

However, the full range of symptoms affects multiple parts of the body. An app that records daily symptoms developed at King’s College London has tracked the progress of more than 4 million COVID-19 patients in the United Kingdom, Sweden and the United States.

Besides the well-described symptoms of fever, cough and loss of smell are other effects, including fatigue, rash, headache, abdominal pain and diarrhoea. People who develop more severe forms of the disease also report confusion, severe muscle pains, cough and shortness of breath.

About 20% of those infected with COVID-19 require hospitalisation to treat their pneumonia, and many need assistance with oxygen. In about 5% of cases the pneumonia becomes so severe patients are admitted to intensive care for breathing support.

It trips the immune system

People with severe COVID-19 seem to show an altered immune response even in the disease’s early stages. They have fewer circulating immune cells, which fail to efficiently control the virus, and instead suffer an exaggerated inflammatory response (the “cytokine storm”).

This is increasingly recognised as one of the main factors that makes the disease so serious in some patients. Suppressing this exaggerated response with the immunosuppressant dexamethasone remains the only treatment that reduces death rates in those who require oxygen support or intensive care.

Read more: Dexamethasone: the cheap, old and boring drug that’s a potential coronavirus treatment

Patients with severe COVID-19 describe a far more complex range of symptoms than would normally be seen with pneumonia alone. This can include brain inflammation (encephalitis), causing confusion and reduced consciousness. Up to 6% of severe sufferers may have a stroke.

Pathology studies and autopsies of patients who died from COVID-19 reveal the expected features of severe pneumonia or acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), with extensive inflammation and scarring. ARDS occurs when there’s sudden and widespread inflammation in the lungs, resulting in shortness of breath and blueish skin.

Uniquely, however, they also reveal the virus seems to directly cause inflammation of the small capillaries or blood vessels, not just in the lungs but in multiple organs, leading to blood clots and damage to the kidney and heart.

Persistent symptoms ‘deeply frustrating’

Anyone with a severe disease would be expected to suffer long-lasting consequences. But COVID-19 seems to have persistent symptoms even in those with milder forms of the illness.

Social media is replete with stories of survivors afflicted by ongoing symptoms. Support groups have emerged on Slack and Facebook hosting thousands of people, some still suffering more than 60 days after infection. They call themselves “long-termers” or “long-haulers”.

One of the most well-known sufferers is Paul Garner, an infectious disease specialist at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in the UK. He was infected in late March and his symptoms continue. In a blog post published by the British Medical Journal he describes having a:

…muggy head, upset stomach, tinnitus (ringing in the ears), pins and needles, breathlessness, dizziness and arthritis in the hands.

These symptoms have waxed and waned but not yet resolved. He says this is:

…deeply frustrating. A lot of people start doubting themselves… Their partners wonder if there is something psychologically wrong with them.

So far, only one peer-reviewed study has reported results on the long-term symptoms of COVID-19 infection: a single group of 143 survivors from Rome. Most of them did not need hospitalisation and all were assessed at least 60 days after infection. They reported a worsened quality of life in 44.1% of cases, including symptoms of persistent fatigue (53.1%), breathlessness (43.4%), joint pain (27.3%), and chest pain (21.7%).

While our experience with COVID-19 has only just begun, long-term symptoms following severe viral illness are not a new phenomenon. Influenza has long been linked to persistent symptoms such as fatigue and muscle pain, including after both the 1890 and 1918-19 pandemics.

Survival of a severe viral pneumonia or ARDS, particularly after intensive care, is known to have long-lasting implications. Some survivors suffer long-term breathlessness and fatigue as a result of the damage to their lungs or from other complications. Survivors can also suffer depression (26–33%), anxiety (38–44%), or post-traumatic stress disorder (22–24%).

Long-term symptoms a feature of other coronaviruses

Our experience with other coronaviruses should have forewarned us of these problems. The first SARS coronavirus and the Middle Eastern Respiratory virus (MERS) caused severe disease in a greater proportion of sufferers than COVID-19, with significant numbers of sufferers developing ARDS and needing intensive care.

Canadian researchers followed survivors of the first SARS outbreak in Toronto. They found sleep disturbance, chronic fatigue, depression and muscle pains were common. A third of survivors had to modify their work and lifestyle, and only 14% had no long-term symptoms. Similarly, in a Korean group of MERS survivors, 48% still experienced chronic fatigue after 12 months.

The COVID-19 pandemic is still in its early days. Survivors with persistent symptoms, the “long-haulers”, are clearly not uncommon and their symptoms and concerns need to be heard, studied and understood. Clinical trials in the UK, Europe and the US are now recruiting to do this.

As with many aspects of COVID-19, we have much to learn and there is much work still to do.

This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

– ref. Here’s what we know so far about the long-term symptoms of COVID-19 – https://theconversation.com/heres-what-we-know-so-far-about-the-long-term-symptoms-of-covid-19-142722

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Stephen Garnett, Professor of Conservation and Sustainable Livelihoods, Charles Darwin University

Taxonomy, or the naming of species, is the foundation of modern biology. It might sound like a fairly straightforward exercise, but in fact it’s complicated and often controversial.

Why? Because there’s no one agreed list of all the world’s species. Competing lists exist for organisms such as mammals and birds, while other less well-known groups have none. And there are more than 30 definitions of what constitutes a species. This can make life difficult for biodiversity researchers and those working in areas such as conservation, biosecurity and regulation of the wildlife trade.

In the past few years, a public debate erupted among global taxonomists, including those who authored and contributed to this article, about whether the rules of taxonomy should be changed. Strongly worded ripostes were exchanged. A comparison to Stalin was floated.

But eventually, we all came together to resolve the dispute amicably. In a paper published this month, we proposed a new set of principles to guide what one day, we hope, will be a single authoritative list of the world’s species. This would help manage and conserve them for future generations.

In the process, we’ve shown how a scientific stoush can be overcome when those involved try to find common ground.

How it all began

In May 2017 two of the authors, Stephen Garnett and Les Christidis, published an article in Nature. They argued taxonomy needed rules around what should be called a species, because currently there are none. They wrote:

for a discipline aiming to impose order on the natural world, taxonomy (the classification of complex organisms) is remarkably anarchic […] There is reasonable agreement among taxonomists that a species should represent a distinct evolutionary lineage. But there is none about how a lineage should be defined.

‘Species’ are often created or dismissed arbitrarily, according to the individual taxonomist’s adherence to one of at least 30 definitions. Crucially, there is no global oversight of taxonomic decisions — researchers can ‘split or lump’ species with no consideration of the consequences.

Garnett and Christidis proposed that any changes to the taxonomy of complex organisms be overseen by the highest body in the global governance of biology, the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS), which would “restrict […] freedom of taxonomic action.”

Read more: Taxonomy, the science of naming things, is under threat

An animated response

Garnett and Christidis’ article raised hackles in some corners of the taxonomy world – including coauthors of this article.

These critics rejected the description of taxonomy as “anarchic”. In fact, they argued there are detailed rules around the naming of species administered by groups such as the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature and the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants. For 125 years, the codes have been almost universally adopted by scientists.

So in March 2018, 183 researchers – led by Scott Thomson and Richard Pyle – wrote an animated response to the Nature article, published in PLoS Biology.

They wrote that Garnett and Christidis’ IUBS proposal was “flawed in terms of scientific integrity […] but is also untenable in practice”. They argued:

Through taxonomic research, our understanding of biodiversity and classifications of living organisms will continue to progress. Any system that restricts such progress runs counter to basic scientific principles, which rely on peer review and subsequent acceptance or rejection by the community, rather than third-party regulation.

In a separate paper, another group of taxonomists accused Garnett and Christidis of trying to suppress freedom of scientific thought, likening them to Stalin’s science advisor Trofim Lysenko.

Finding common ground

This might have been the end of it. But the editor at PLoS Biology, Roli Roberts, wanted to turn consternation into constructive debate, and invited a response from Garnett and Christidis. In the to and fro of articles, we all found common ground.

We recognised the powerful need for a global list of species – representing a consensus view of the world’s taxonomists at a particular time.

Read more: Summer bushfires: how are the plant and animal survivors 6 months on? We mapped their recovery

Such lists do exist. The Catalogue of Life, for example, has done a remarkable job in assembling lists of almost all the world’s species. But there are no rules on how to choose between competing lists of validly named species. What was needed, we agreed, was principles governing what can be included on lists.

As it stands now, anyone can name a species, or decide which to recognise as valid and which not. This creates chaos. It means international agreements on biodiversity conservation, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), take different taxonomic approaches to species they aim to protect.

We decided to work together. With funding from the IUBS, we held a workshop in February this year at Charles Darwin University to determine principles for devising a single, agreed global list of species.

Participants came from around the world. They included taxonomists, science governance experts, science philosophers, administrators of the nomenclatural (naming) codes, and taxonomic users such as the creators of national species lists.

The result is a draft set of ten principles that to us, represent the ideals of global science governance. They include that:

• the species list be based on science and free from “non-taxonomic” interference
• all decisions about composition of the list be transparent
• governance of the list aim for community support and use
• the listing process encompasses global diversity while accommodating local knowledge.

The principles will now be discussed at international workshops of taxonomists and the users of taxonomy. We’ve also formed a working group to discuss how a global list might come together and the type of institution needed to look after it.

We hope by 2030, a scientific debate that began with claims of anarchy might lead to a clear governance system – and finally, the world’s first endorsed global list of species.

The following people provided editorial comment for this article: Aaron M Lien, Frank Zachos, John Buckeridge, Kevin Thiele, Svetlana Nikolaeva, Zhi-Qiang Zhang, Donald Hobern, Olaf Banki, Peter Paul van Dijk, Saroj Kanta Barik and Stijn Conix.

– ref. How a scientific spat over how to name species turned into a big plus for nature – https://theconversation.com/how-a-scientific-spat-over-how-to-name-species-turned-into-a-big-plus-for-nature-138887

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Fischetti, Professor, Pro Vice Chancellor of the Faculty of Education and Arts; Dean/Head of School of Education, University of Newcastle

By the end of Year 11 we know almost exactly how well New South Wales students will perform on the state’s senior school exams. We used predictive analytics to reliably predict a student’s HSC (Higher School Certificate) results in a study of more than 10,000 students.

Predictive analytics links multiple data sources about student progression through school. These sources synthesise different kinds of data to reveal current trends and predict future performance.

A recent report into pathways for senior secondary school students, by the Education Council, notes:

Academic achievement is important but not the sole reason for schooling. We need to focus more on preparing the whole person, no matter what career path they choose.

We believe predictive analytics gives us a way to replace the current Year 12 structure with one more personalised, and that will help prepare the whole student for their journey into the future.

Ten years of data

In our study – the results of which are yet to be published – we analysed ten years of data across 14 HSC subject areas, for about 10,000 students. We started by analysing 41 variables over a child’s educational career. These included a student’s gender, marks across the decade and number of siblings.

But we found we only needed 17 of the 41 variables to accurately predict Year 12 performance. These included a student’s demographic information (such as how long he or she has lived in Australia and the school’s socioeconomic index), Year 9 NAPLAN scores in all areas, their HSC subject choices at the beginning of Year 11 and Year 11 attendance.

Read more: Teachers could be called on to estimate year 12 student grades – this is fairer than it sounds

Using these variables, we could remarkably predict a student’s HSC scores. The predictions are 93% accurate (within an error margin of 3%).

For example, if a student chooses English Advanced in Year 12, he or she likely did well in the reading and writing areas of the Year 9 NAPLAN.

If the same student’s (who did well in Year 9 NAPLAN) attendance is above 90% and we factor in their demographic information, we can tell them their HSC mark in English Advanced before they take the course and the exam.

Likewise, if a student has low numeracy results on their Year 9 NAPLAN and plans to take Chemistry and Mathematics Advanced in Year 12, they aren’t going to do well on the HSC in those areas. The Year 9 NAPLAN numeracy criteria dominates the other variables.

Our research tells us we know enough about each student by the end of Year 11 to help direct them into the pathway that best aligns to their current strengths. It also tells us we need to provide a different kind of Year 12 experience — one that boosts students’ chances for success in areas they are passionate about or interested in.

Of course, the science of predictive analytics isn’t perfect. Our study shows some students do improve their academic achievements throughout Year 12 and score higher than expected on the HSC exams (no more than 7%). But for an increasing number of students, the HSC and the process leading towards it are barriers to active engagement in education at a pivotal transition period.

So, what does all this mean?

End of school exams and the resultant ATAR are often presented as make-or-break milestones. Students preparing for the exams suffer increased anxiety and stress beyond what is normal. The process is unnecessarily debilitating for many young people.

The purpose of the HSC is to use the cumulative exam results to convert to a tertiary admission ranking (ATAR) that is used to facilitate university entry. But our data reveal we don’t need the current Year 12 to determine the HSC results and therefore the ranking. And for those who do not have university aspirations, the HSC is already irrelevant.

There are now multiple ways to be accepted into university, including early offers, portfolios and principal recommendations. These make the HSC increasingly redundant.

Read more: Don’t stress, your ATAR isn’t the final call. There are many ways to get into university

A Productivity Commission report showed almost one fifth of Year 10 students in 2010 didn’t complete Year 12 by 2012. And the perpetuation and widening of equity gaps due to the realities of the senior years of high school are staggering. A 2015 Mitchell Institute report found about 40% of Australia’s poorest 19 year olds don’t finish Year 12, compared with about 10% of the wealthiest.

The challenge we face is to make the senior year more relevant in preparing students for their next steps.

A new Year 12 design

We propose to dramatically revise Year 12 with the help of predictive analytics.

Our proposal is to allow flexibility for each student to get ready for the next phase of their learning during Year 12. This includes opportunities to use Year 12 to engage in real-world projects, formal apprenticeships, TAFE or university certificates, study abroad (when that can occur again safely), going deeper into advanced courses of interest and providing new supports to promote success without dumbing things down.

Read more: Most young people who do VET after school are in full-time work by the age of 25

All of these are currently the exception rather than the rule. Through these experiences, Year 12 students can build unique evidence about their skills, knowledge and passions that take them into their futures.

Instead of using Year 12 to prepare for the exams, students can use it for broadening their experiences and honing in on life and career aspirations. This approach refocuses the final year to an individualised journey that better prepares young people for Year 13 — whatever that may be for them.

– ref. We know by Year 11 what mark students will get in Year 12. Do we still need a stressful exam? – https://theconversation.com/we-know-by-year-11-what-mark-students-will-get-in-year-12-do-we-still-need-a-stressful-exam-140746

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lisa Adkins, Professor of Sociology and Head of School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Sydney

HomeBuilder grants of A$25,000 are being offered to build or renovate a home as part of the Australian government’s emergency economic response to the coronavirus pandemic. Critics note that the program, framed as stimulus for residential construction, benefits already well-off households. It ignores the realities of the housing market, especially the affordability crisis, with housing stress affecting precarious renters, the homeless and those struggling with bloated mortgage payments.

Homebuilder appears to be a bewildering policy. It’s likely to support construction work that would have occurred anyway while failing to meet real housing needs.

However, to criticise HomeBuilder simply as bad policy made on the run is to miss a broader picture. HomeBuilder begins to make a lot more sense when understood as a response to the role of housing assets in shaping both economic inequality and electoral politics.

Read more: Scott Morrison’s HomeBuilder scheme is classic retail politics but lousy economics

The rise of the ‘asset economy’

We describe this dynamic as the “asset economy”: our socio-economic positions are defined less and less by employment income and more and more by our holdings of wealth-generating assets, especially housing.

The government has touted HomeBuilder as boosting construction jobs through a “tradie-led” recovery. House-price inflation has made the economy particularly dependent on construction jobs. Construction is the third-biggest employer in Australia and the only industry outside the services sector to have had significant job growth in recent years.

However, the government could have boosted construction jobs at least as much, if not more, by investing in social housing or energy-efficient housing. Why then did it choose to make the already well-off even better off by paying owners to add value to their homes?

Read more: Why the focus of stimulus plans has to be construction that puts social housing first

A long history of looking after home owners

It’s no coincidence that, beyond the initial emergency responses to support household and business incomes, the first substantive stimulus the Coalition government announced went to residential property owners.

The rise of the asset economy has occurred in parallel with a shift in voting patterns. The 2019 Australian Election Study observed a move “away from occupation-based voting and towards asset-based voting”. Voters who own housing – owner-occupiers and investors – strongly favour the Liberal and National parties.

Our research on the asset economy reveals the long-term drivers of Australia’s asset-based politics. HomeBuilder is the latest in a long line of Australian government policies over the past four decades to encourage, prop up and reward residential property ownership. These policies have included selling off public housing, tax incentives (especially negative gearing and capital gains tax exemption for the family home) and promoting home ownership as an alternative to welfare programs such as public pensions.

Read more: Fall in ageing Australians’ home-ownership rates looms as seismic shock for housing policy

These policies have not simply encouraged home ownership – they have transformed it. Nowadays the home is a financial asset, an investment financed by growing debt that is supposed to generate capital gains.

Property price increases, driven by the liberalisation of credit and low interest rates, came to be seen as a key route to economic security for households in an economy with stagnant wages and precarious employment. Credit-driven home ownership expanded and property prices grew. Many property-owning households saw major gains in their wealth portfolios.

Read more: HomeBuilder might be the most-complex least-equitable construction jobs program ever devised

Housing is now a driver of inequality

Credit-driven home purchases pushed prices to heights where it became increasingly difficult for people to enter the market. In Australia as well as in other Anglo-capitalist countries ― including the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada ― rates of home ownership show the same pattern from 1980 to 2020: increases followed by decreases.

In large cities such as Sydney and Melbourne price inflation over time has made it virtually impossible to buy a house on the basis of an average wage alone. As a result, private rental markets have expanded, rents have soared and new modes of occupancy have emerged, including multigenerational and shared living. These renters are not simply locked out of home ownership but also out of the wealth it generates.

These trends have opened up a rift between those with and without housing assets. This entails not just major differences in levels and patterns of wealth accumulation, but also in life chances. The asset economy has fundamentally reworked the social structure, or what sociologists study as patterns of “class” or “stratification”.

This means even when people have similar jobs or earn the same wages, deep inequalities can exist between those who own assets and those who do not.

These trends are particularly notable among younger generations, giving rise to stark new forms of inequality. Those who are set to inherit housing assets or whose access to parental wealth offers a route into home ownership have a distinct advantage. They can benefit from property-based asset inflation and capital gains.

Read more: The housing boom propelled inequality, but a coronavirus housing bust will skyrocket it

Shoring up the base in a crisis

HomeBuilder is a product of the electoral politics that emerged out of this asset economy. Asset owners vote with their feet and resist any changes that would jeopardise the long-lived advantages that asset ownership gives them. The result of the 2019 federal election, when Labor’s policy was to reduce the benefits available from negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, showed this.

The government knows as long as it keeps in place the advantages that flow to home owners, residential property investors and the “bank of mum and dad”, they form a powerful core of the Coalition’s electoral base. It’s offering a stimulus measure directed specifically at this constituency, adding yet more value to their assets at a time of economic uncertainty. HomeBuilder is an asset owner’s policy aimed at appeasing and shoring up the Liberal-National party’s electoral base.

As home ownership rates decline and asset-based inequalities increase, just how long such tactics can produce electoral success remains a critical question.

– ref. HomeBuilder only makes sense as a nod to Morrison’s home-owning voter base – https://theconversation.com/homebuilder-only-makes-sense-as-a-nod-to-morrisons-home-owning-voter-base-142169

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine de Fontenay, Honorary Fellow, Department of Economics, University of Melbourne

Our memories of the job market prior to COVID have become rosier: the last decade was a period of fairly low unemployment, even if wage growth was less than stellar.

But that perspective may not be shared by people under 35. For that age group, the past decade has been a period of intense competition for jobs, even before COVID, which will make things worse.

It is likely to have long-term effects, even were it not for the COVID crisis.

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

In a new study published this morning, climbing the jobs ladder slower, myself and three colleagues at the Productivity Commission examine labour market scarring after the 2008 global financial crisis.

Scarring is a semi-technical term for what happens when wounds don’t properly heal. It was mentioned twice in last week’s economic statement.

Scars from the crisis

Specifically, we asked whether young people entering the labour market during and after the crisis had a more difficult transition to employment than those who entered before, and whether it had long term impacts on their careers.

The Australian Socioeconomic Index is an occupational status scale last updated by researchers at the Australian National University in the late 2000s. It is a method for scoring occupations on a ladder based on educational requirements and average earnings.

Using data from the HILDA Household, Income and Labour Dynamics survey that began in 2001 we find that the average occupational score increased throughout the two decades that followed, but that after 2008 the likelihood that a university graduate would find a high-score job fell back.

Part of the reason is the big expansion in the number of university students and students in vocational education that followed the crisis.

Down several rungs

For many graduates that meant more competition to enter their chosen profession. They moved “down the ladder” of occupations.

Law graduates increasingly found themselves working as paralegals or in cafés. In turn, young people with vocational degrees were pushed further down.

At the bottom of the ladder, part-time and casual jobs garnered more takers. As a result average wages for workers under 35 fell between 2008 to 2018.

Outcomes varied a great deal. Some young workers found very high-scored jobs, while more were less lucky, obtaining jobs whose scores were well below what they would have expected in earlier years.

Hard to climb back

Were the lower rungs temporary? Were some of these unlucky young workers able to work their ways back to their desired occupations and pay levels over the years that followed? Not much.

We found that from 2008, if a recent graduate started in a less attractive job, it was harder to climb to a more attractive one than before.

Young people’s prospects and the growth in salaries were worse than those of young people prior to 2008.

Read more: Yes Ita, younger workers might actually be less resilient. But all workers should be thanked

The finding comes from studying transition probabilities: the probability that a young person can move from a lower quarter of the occupation score distribution to a higher quarter. It suggests that poor initial jobs for graduates have serious long-term consequences.

It pre-dates the COVID-19 recession, but it has heightened relevance for it.

More scars to come

Many young people pushed into unemployment by the recession and are likely to find it harder to get the jobs they could have once expected when jobs come back.

The scarring could last some time.

Some young people might choose to pursue further study in order to return to the job market later when conditions are better, but our report suggests that, even then, the competition for the jobs that follow study will be fierce.

A generation might be set to experience scarring once again – from unemployment, from low wages, from jobs that don’t fully use their skills, and from dashed hopes.

– ref. It really is different for young people: it’s harder to climb the jobs ladder – https://theconversation.com/it-really-is-different-for-young-people-its-harder-to-climb-the-jobs-ladder-143347

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Cothren, PhD Candidate, Flinders University

In our series Art for Trying Times, authors nominate a work they turn to for solace or perspective during this pandemic.

In times of stress, it is only natural to seek out comforting art that reaffirms our faith in humanity. Why, then, am I back to binge-watching the utterly irredeemable It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia?

Sunny is a cult sitcom about five friends who own Paddy’s Pub, a South Philadelphia dive bar in which customers arrive about as frequently as Godot. A lack of clientele means “the Gang” is free to drink, scheme and bicker their lives away.

The US show’s home video aesthetic and overlapping, semi-improvised dialogue recalls the “mumblecore” film subgenre, although “shoutcore” would really be more appropriate here. Each episode, available to stream in Australia, is essentially a 20-minute squabble in which everyone is under informed and over opinionated.

Inside Out for adults

Although the show began during the George W. Bush era, I’ve come to see each character as a partial reflection of current US president Donald Trump. Frank (Danny DeVito) is a wealthy bigot; Charlie (Charlie Day) is an illiterate savage; Dee (Kaitlin Olson) is a needy narcissist; Dennis (Glenn Howerton) is a psychotic womanizer; and Mac (Rob McElhenney) is a love-deprived zealot.

Through the prism of these assorted neuroses, the show filters every contemporary issue imaginable: gun control, racism, #MeToo, climate change, and so on. Occasionally, the gang stumbles upon some crude solution to a topical problem.

In one episode, the question of how to gender bathrooms is solved by taping an all-inclusive Animal Shithouse sign to each door. More frequently, though, episode titles such as The Gang Solves the North Korea Situation or The Gang Solves Global Warming are just wishful thinking.

The global warming episode – from season 14, which aired late last year – provides the perfect example of Sunny’s satirise-everyone approach. Conservative Mac shrugs off the crisis with “if God wants to roast us like turkeys, there’s got to be a good reason for it”. While progressive Dee buys recyclable shoes just to shame others on Instagram.

The show is less disgusted by any particular partisan viewpoint than it is by the bad faith discussions that occur between corrupt parties.

Read more: Happy birthday, Mr Bean! Celebrating 30 years of a major comedy character

It offers, hands down, the best replication of that clanking feeling one gets when encountering immovable ignorance online. “I’m an American”, Mac proudly declares, “I won’t change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me.

Anything for a laugh

Admittedly, this doesn’t sound like much of a tonic for our leaking garbage bag of a year. The idiots are everywhere; why should we be wasting our screen time with them? Because Sunny, as long as you can stomach its distinctive brand of filth, is the funniest thing around.

Over its 14 (and counting) seasons, it has evolved from a grimy Seinfeld xerox into a Monty Pythonesque carnival of the surreal and grotesque. The actors here are willing to do, or expel, anything for a laugh. If you loved Terry Jones vomiting in a high-class restaurant, might I suggest Charlie Day vomiting blood all over his posh date?

Obviously, sensitive gaggers need not apply. Nor those who are repelled by dumpster babies, glue-huffing, rat-bashing, sewer-diving, bed-pooping, or (and this is a crucial Sunny litmus test) a naked and sweaty Danny DeVito bursting forth from a leather couch.

If nothing else, I cherish Sunny for the way it has unleashed DeVito. The former Taxi star is an incredible comedic performer, but he was in danger of forever being defined as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s improbable twin. As Frank, he snorts and grunts through scenes like a rabid truffle pig with a bloodlust for depravity.

Read more: Was that joke funny or offensive? Who’s telling it matters

While Frank is the show’s rotten core, Charlie is its heart. Intellectually stunted, possibly molested, and living in abject poverty, Charlie nonetheless radiates twisted joie de vivre. His helium voice and vacant gaze always kill me, whether he is torturing leprechauns, boiling milk steaks, or getting rich off “kitten mittens”.

All together now

Charlie is also responsible for The Nightman Cometh, a bizarre musical in season four that has since become a live singalong show.

The casts’ theatre backgrounds have provided a number of surprisingly catchy songs over the years. This is no Glee though. Only a Sunny musical would make hay out of the slipperiness between “boy’s soul” and “boy’s hole”.

So why am I back in Paddy’s Pub once again? We are spoilt for choice when it comes to intelligent sitcoms filled with witty, warm-hearted characters who learn and grow.

If it’s escapism you’re seeking right now, shows like Schitt’s Creek, One Day at a Time, and The Good Place are ready to shelter you from the storm. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia provides a different, yet equally important, service.

By the time I emerge blinking from yet another session in its dank and derelict hidey hole, I find that the real world almost looks bearable in comparison.

– ref. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the funniest, filthiest comfort TV around – https://theconversation.com/its-always-sunny-in-philadelphia-the-funniest-filthiest-comfort-tv-around-143171

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fiona Russell, Principal research fellow, University of Melbourne

This week, most students in Melbourne and Mitchell Shire returned to remote learning for term 3.

Students whose parents can’t work from home are allowed to receive remote learning from school, as was the case during the first lockdown.

But this time, students in years 11 and 12, students in year 10 undertaking VCE or the applied learning equivalent, and specialist school students, are attending school for face-to-face learning.

This move recognises older students are more likely to be able to social distance than younger students, ensures senior students are supported during their VCE, and acknowledges the particular difficulties of remote learning for students with special needs.

In announcing this new model, the Victorian government also revealed daily temperature checks would be introduced for all students attending school face-to-face in term 3.

Read more: Students in Melbourne will go back to remote schooling. Here’s what we learnt last time and how to make it better

The details

The Victorian government pledged to supply schools in Melbourne, Mitchell Shire and surrounding areas with more than 14,000 non-contact infrared thermometers. These are the type of thermometer positioned from a distance, generally towards a person’s forehead, to take their temperature.

In the case a student records a temperature of 37.5℃ or above, the school will contact the student’s parent or guardian to take the child home, and encourage them get a COVID-19 test.

The temperature checks are designed to detect fever as an indicator of possible SARS-CoV-2 infection. But there are a couple of things we need to keep in mind when considering how useful temperature checks will be.

First, these types of thermometers won’t always reliably detect fever. And second, many children with COVID-19 won’t have a fever.

Sensitivity and specificity

A few key features are important when screening for disease. In the case of non-contact infrared thermometers, the “disease” we’re screening for is fever.

First, a tool should be able to correctly identify those with the disease (sensitivity). Second, a tool should correctly identify those without the disease (specificity). Third, a tool should have high probability that a person with a positive result does have the disease (positive predictive value, or PPV).

Testing of non-contact infrared thermometers has reported wide variation on each of these measures. One review found sensitivity ranged from 4%-89.6% and specificity from 75.4%-99.6%. Where one in 100 people had a fever, the PPV was between 3.55%-65.4%.

Read more: School is important, and so is staying safe from coronavirus. Here are some tips for returning seniors

Non-contact infrared thermometers measure skin (peripheral) temperature without physical contact, which offers a convenient option for temperature checking large numbers of children.

But their readings can be affected by factors such as outdoor temperature, where on the body you aim the thermometer, and distance from the subject.

We also need to remember fever reducing medications, such as paracetamol, can lower a child’s temperature.

Combined, these factors indicate non-contact infrared thermometers may not be very reliable in detecting a fever (regardless of whether or not the fever is related to COVID-19).

Do children with COVID-19 have fever?

A review of studies found fever was the most common symptom in children and young people under 21 with COVID-19, recorded in 47% of cases. Other symptoms include cough (37%) and diarrhoea (4%).

Two reviews explored asymptomatic infection in children, reporting 14% and 19% of children had no symptoms at all.

This means fever screening may miss more than half of infected children in schools, as they could either have no symptoms, have symptoms that don’t include fever, or have fever not detected by the non-contact infrared thermometers.

Do children transmit COVID-19 in schools?

Initial reports suggested children don’t transmit SARS-CoV-2 as much as adults, however evidence in this space is still evolving.

A NSW government report found no student-to-teacher transmission and very low student-to-student transmission.

Conversely, one of Victoria’s largest outbreaks to date occurred at a P-12 school; staff, students, and close contacts have tested positive. But it’s not yet clear how much transmission can be attributed to school activities as opposed to household and community transmission.

Read more: 8 tips on what to tell your kids about coronavirus

A recent study from South Korea found within the home, ten to 19-year-old children transmit the virus as much as adults, whereas children aged under ten transmit less than adults.

While this paper focused on household transmission, a recent study from Israel reported on an outbreak in a secondary school. It found overcrowded classrooms, lack of mask wearing and air conditioning use were likely to be contributing factors.

Schools around the world

Among countries that have now returned to school, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam have implemented fever screening.

France, Belgium, Germany and Israel have differing requirements for use of face masks among students and teachers.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends parents check their child’s temperature before or upon arrival at school.

Read more: Yes, we’ve seen schools close. But the evidence still shows kids are unlikely to catch or spread coronavirus

The use of non-contact infrared thermometers to identify children who could have COVID-19 may not be reliable.

But at the very least, this tool provides a visible important reminder to parents, staff and students of the risk of COVID-19, and for children to remain at home if they’re unwell.

– ref. Will school temperature checks curb the spread of coronavirus? – https://theconversation.com/will-school-temperature-checks-curb-the-spread-of-coronavirus-142999

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter O’Connor, Professor, Business and Management, Queensland University of Technology

Young workers lack resilience and “need hugging”, according to eminent Australian Ita Buttrose.

This week the 78-year old ABC chair told a forum of the Australia-United Kingdom Chamber of Commerce:

They’re very keen on being thanked and they almost need hugging. That’s before COVID of course, we can’t hug any more. But they almost need hugging […] they seem to lack the resilience that I remember from my younger days.

Not surprisingly, many young people have been unimpressed by her comments. They’ve found older allies too, such as 80-year-old department store king Gerry Norman, who said every generation believed younger people weren’t as tough.

So are younger people really less resilient at work? Or is this simply an example of older people holding negative stereotypes about younger people?

Read more: Young workers expect their older colleagues to get out of the way

Fortunately we have decades of research on personality change, mental health and even COVID-19 to answer this question.

Most research does clearly indicate younger people are – on average – less resilient than older people. They are more prone to stress, less emotionally stable and less tolerant of ambiguity than older people.

What drives these age-related differences is less clear. It is partly to do with maturity. People become more resilient as they age. A baby-boomer is likely to be more resilient than a millennial by the sheer fact of being older.

The bigger question is whether young people now are also less resilient than previous generations at the same age. On this the jury is still out, though some evidence does support Buttrose’s imputations.

A correlation, but it’s weak

In previous published research I have found younger people cope less well with work ambiguity, and more easily experience stress in response.

Read more: As work gets more ambiguous, younger generations may be less equipped for it

In recent months I have been collecting data on how Australian workers are coping with COVID-19 work changes. Preliminary analysis indicates younger people are more stressed and less satisfied than older workers – and these results are not due to the extra pressures experienced by young people (financial strains, having young children, etc).

However, it is important to note that while numerous studies confirm a “statistically significant” relationship between age and resilience, it’s comparatively weak.

In my data the correlations range from 0.1 to 0.3 (0 being no correlation and 1 being a perfect correlation). This indicated that while younger workers, on average, were less resilient than older workers, there were many exceptions. Some of the most resilient workers were young, and some of the least resilient were above 60.

So a young person can still be highly resilient.

Comparisons to past generations

As noted, the jury is still out on whether young workers today are less resilient than young workers in the past.

This is in part due to the methodological challenge of disentangling maturation from cohort effects, along with reconciling findings from studies conducted in different countries.

There is emerging research, however, that seeks to disentangle the maturation and cohort effects and suggests younger workers now are less resilient than young people used to be.

US psychology researchers Kenneth Stewart and Paul Bernhardt, for example, compared 2004-08 university students with pre-1987 undergraduates. They found the 2000s cohort had lower psychological health and higher narcissism – traits associated with low resilience.

Cross-sectional studies from Australia have reported similar patterns. Neuroticism seems to be increasing in younger generations, as does the need for recognition, whereas optimism is falling.

Products of coddling?

One explanation for why resilience might be declining in young people is outlined in the 2018 book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by psychologist Jonathan Haidt and co-author Greg Lukianoff. It argues good intentions from adults and three “great untruths” have hurt young people’s resilience. The untruths are:

1. what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker
2. always trust your feelings
3. life is a battle between good and evil people.

Lukianoff and Haidt suggest these messages (from overprotective parents and others) have reduced children’s exposure to the challenges and stressors they need to develop and flourish. They have also increased the tendency to engage in black-and white thinking.

The authors make a well-reasoned case consistent with much of the existing evidence.

Read more: Is cancel culture silencing open debate? There are risks to shutting down opinions we disagree with

Improving workplaces

Buttrose noted younger workers “like more transparency” and “need more reassurance and they need to be thanked”.

But let’s distinguish these issues from the question of resilience. Employees of all ages appreciate recognition and psychological safety. Such expectations are not a sign a worker lacks resilience.

So yes, it appears younger people today are less resilient than previous generations. But generational differences in resilience are small and probably exist due to a range of factors young people have little control over.

We should take care not to write off a range of effective workplace practices as unnecessary actions to appease non-resilient young people.

– ref. Yes Ita, younger workers might actually be less resilient. But all workers should be thanked – https://theconversation.com/yes-ita-younger-workers-might-actually-be-less-resilient-but-all-workers-should-be-thanked-143277

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alan Finkel, Australia’s Chief Scientist, Office of the Chief Scientist

The events of 2020 are reshaping the way we live, work, teach and learn. And while we have all been affected differently, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women has been particularly significant.

A recent report by the Rapid Research Information Forum found the pandemic has left women facing disproportionate increases in caring responsibilities and disruptions to working hours and job security.

Read more: Isaac Newton invented calculus in self-isolation during the Great Plague. He didn’t have kids to look after

The hard-won gains made by women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) are at risk, especially if employers of people with STEM skills do not closely monitor and mitigate the gender impact of their decisions.

The pre-pandemic impact of caring for children and the uptake of flexible working arrangements are just two of the issues considered in the second edition of the STEM Workforce Report, released this week by the Office of the Chief Scientist. Drawing on 2016 Australian Census data, this report provides a comprehensive analysis of the STEM workforce in Australia.

It analyses the nearly 1.2 million people with vocational STEM qualifications and the roughly 700,000 people with university STEM qualifications in the Australian labour force in 2016. As such, it will enable informed decision-making to help plan our future STEM workforce needs.

Slow pace of change

Our analysis found that people with STEM qualifications work in a wide range of occupations and industries. On average, they earn more than those with non-STEM qualifications, and these incomes increase with qualification level. In 2016, 34% of employed STEM university graduates earned A$104,000 or above, compared with 24% of non-STEM university graduates. Of STEM university graduates, 32% of those with a bachelor degree, 34% of those with a masters, and 45% of those with a doctoral degree earned A$104,000 or above.

However, the pace of change towards a fairer and more diverse STEM labour force is still slow. In 2006, 27% of STEM university graduates in the labour force were women. A decade later, this had only risen to 29%.

Just 3.3% of Australian-born women with a university STEM qualification were unemployed, as of census night in 2016. But the corresponding figure for similarly qualified overseas-born women who arrived in Australia between 2006 and 2016 was 14.1%.

Women in STEM also have lower average pay than similarly qualified men, in both part-time and full-time roles. For full-time workers with university STEM qualifications, 45% of men earned A$104,000 or above, compared with 26% of women.

How to keep women in STEM

Women who pause their careers to have children often end up leaving the labour force or returning on reduced hours. Flexible work arrangements – including working part-time and working from home – are crucial tools for keeping parents in the labour force. Initiatives such as childcare subsidies and incentives for fathers to take significant parental and carer’s leave have proven effective in supporting equitable outcomes in the workforce.

Read more: Father’s days: increasing the ‘daddy quota’ in parental leave makes everyone happier

The flow diagram below represents labour force data for women aged 15-35 who did not have a child and were working full-time in 2011. When we reviewed the status of these women five years later, we found that STEM-qualified women who had children were less likely to still be employed, and more likely to be working part-time. In contrast, the work status of STEM-qualified men was largely unaffected by having children, and men with children tended to earn more than those without.

Our report found that STEM-qualified women also do more hours of unpaid domestic work than STEM-qualified men. Women working full-time were more than twice as likely as men (19% vs 8%, respectively) to do more than 15 hours’ domestic work per week. The recently reported experiences of women taking on a higher share of child care during the COVID-19 pandemic appear to support these findings.

Beyond census data

The census data can only tell us part of the story. The Women in STEM Decadal Plan, developed by the Australian Academy of Science and the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering, presented information from numerous sources to explore the breadth of women’s experiences. It showed that negative stereotypes dissuade women from pursuing STEM careers and “a significant cultural shift in workplaces is necessary to create gender equity for women in STEM”.

These findings are supported by research from the Male Champions of Change STEM group, which found women in STEM jobs experience significantly more barriers than men, including sexism, workplace culture, exclusion and a lack of career progression. Two-thirds of women reported having their voices devalued at work. Listening to and acknowledging the experiences of women and other disadvantaged groups in STEM is necessary to develop and implement meaningful actions for change.

Read more: Girls score the same in maths and science as boys, but higher in arts – this may be why they are less likely to pick STEM careers

We mustn’t allow the upheaval from COVID-19 to wipe out the small gains we have made in STEM-qualified women’s representation and participation in the workforce.

The pandemic has rapidly changed the way we work, showing that workplace flexibility is just one way to keep all of us working productively. Other profound changes to workplace culture should follow, or we risk yet another decline in women’s workforce participation.

– ref. Chief Scientist: women in STEM are still far short of workplace equity. COVID-19 risks undoing even these modest gains – https://theconversation.com/chief-scientist-women-in-stem-are-still-far-short-of-workplace-equity-covid-19-risks-undoing-even-these-modest-gains-143092

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Audrey Courty, PhD candidate, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University

Twitter has announced it’s taking sweeping action to limit the reach of content associated with QAnon. Believers of this fringe far-right conspiracy theory claim there is a “deep state” plot against US President Donald Trump led by Satan-worshipping elites from within government, business and media.

Twitter has banned more than 7,000 accounts tweeting about QAnon, citing violations of its multi-account policy, coordinated abuse targeting individual victims, and attempts to evade previous account suspensions.

The platform also said it would stop circulating QAnon-related content, including material appearing in trending topics, recommendation lists and the search feature. It will also reportedly block web links associated with QAnon activity.

These actions, which could impact as many as 150,000 accounts globally, are part of Twitter’s wider crackdown on misinformation and “behaviour that has the potential to lead to offline harm”.

However, according to CNN reporter Oliver Darcy, many of the actions are not being extended to “candidates and elected officials”. Regardless, history suggests the threat of online conspiracists is a difficult one to tackle.

How it all began

QAnon began in October 2017 when an anonymous user or group of users going by “Q” began posting on the online message board 4chan. Q claimed to have access to classified information about the Trump administration and its opponents.

More than two years and 3,500 posts later, “Q” has generated a sprawling but unfounded conspiracy theory claiming the existence of a global network of political elites and celebrities who want to take down Trump. These people also supposedly run a child sex trafficking ring, among other crimes.

QAnon believers predict the secret war between the Trump administration and the “deep state” network will eventually lead to “The Storm” – a day of reckoning where Trump’s opponents will be arrested or executed.

Recently, QAnon believers have also pushed a range of baseless coronavirus conspiracies. These include claims the virus is a hoax, or a Chinese bioweapon designed to hurt Trump’s re-election chances.

Online actors, real-world consequences

Twitter’s designation of QAnon activity as potentially harmful is partly driven by reports of the movement’s ties to dangerous real-world activities.

QAnon believers have also been linked to armed standoffs, attempted kidnappings, harassment and at least one killing since the conspiracy picked up steam in 2017.

Last year, the FBI issued a report on “conspiracy-driven domestic extremists” and identified QAnon as a potential domestic terrorist threat.

Although extremism driven by conspiracy theories isn’t new, the report states the internet and social media are helping such theories reach wider audiences.

It also says online conversations help determine the targets of harassment and violence for the small subset of individuals whose beliefs translate into real-world action.

One such example came from the Pizzagate conspiracy (seen by some as a precursor to QAnon), which motivated an American man to gun down a pizza shop that was supposedly a front for a child sex trafficking ring.

QAnon likely to stay

While it’s hard to say exactly how many QAnon believers there are, the movement has thousands of followers on social media.

A recent investigation of QAnon-related pages and groups on Facebook found there are about three million followers and members in total. But there is likely significant overlap among these accounts.

According to a New York Times report citing anonymous sources, Facebook is planning to enforce similar measures to limit the reach of QAnon content on its platform. One of the largest Facebook groups dedicated to QAnon currently has more than 200,000 members.

Given QAnon’s reach, it will be difficult for Twitter to stamp it out altogether.

Social media bans are hard to maintain. Content can be shared under new accounts. New code words and hashtags can be adopted which artificial intelligence algorithms can’t detect.

For example, many QAnon believers have tried to operate unnoticed on Twitter by using the number 17 to reference “Q” (the 17th letter of the alphabet), or by writing “CueAnon” instead of “QAnon”.

Human moderators may be needed to identify such circumvention attempts. And it’s hard to say how much human resource Twitter is willing or able to devote to moderating this content.

Banned users can also enlist virtual private networks (VPNs) to change their IP addresses and bypass restrictions.

Furthermore, conspiracy theories such as QAnon are difficult to counter as they are “self-sealing”: any action against believers is interpreted as “evidence” of the theory’s validity.

This is because conspiracists often think agents of the conspiracy have unusual and extensive powers. Some QAnon believers are taking Twitter’s bans to be confirmation of a “deep state” plot against Trump.

That said, it’s possible Twitter’s measures will reduce QAnon’s visibility. A similar past crackdown by Reddit was effective in stemming QAnon activity. Before its ban in 2018, the largest QAnon subreddit had more than 70,000 members.

However, many of these users simply moved to other sites such as YouTube and Facebook – a common trend following bans.

Read more: Reddit removes millions of pro-Trump posts. But advertisers, not values, rule the day

All the stops

With QAnon followers expanding and folding new events into their narrative, the fringe movement has taken on a life of its own.

Numerous US Republican candidates for congress have promoted it. Trump himself has repeatedly retweeted QAnon accounts.

So if Twitter is serious about its newest tussle with misinformation, it will likely have to pull out all the stops.

Read more: QAnon conspiracy theories about the coronavirus pandemic are a public health threat

– ref. QAnon believers will likely outlast and outsmart Twitter’s bans – https://theconversation.com/qanon-believers-will-likely-outlast-and-outsmart-twitters-bans-143192

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nial Wheate, Associate Professor | Program Director, Undergraduate Pharmacy, University of Sydney

What do multiple sclerosis (MS) and the novel coronavirus have in common? Until this week, not much, but a recent clinical trial has shown a reformulation of a drug used to treat MS can potentially also be used to help patients infected with COVID-19.

SNG001 is an inhaled form of a drug called interferon-beta under development by the UK pharmaceutical company Synairgen. Interferon is normally prescribed for the treatment of symptoms relating to relapsing-remitting MS.

But the clinical trial, Synairgen found that when SNG001 was given to patients with COVID-19, it stopped the development of more severe symptoms, accelerated their recovery, and allowed them to leave hospital earlier.

Read more: Vaccine progress report: the projects bidding to win the race for a COVID-19 vaccine

Like other clinical trials for COVID-19 treatments, the results still need to be thoroughly checked before SNG001 is included as a standard treatment for coronavirus. The drug’s key risks (potential for severe depression) also need to be weighed against the potential benefits.

How does it work?

MS is a condition of the central nervous system. The nerve impulses between the brain and spinal cord get blocked or mixed up. It happens because the body’s immune system attacks the protective layers around nerve fibres. The result is a loss of muscle control and balance.

In contrast, COVID-19 is a viral infection that affects a patient’s ability to breathe due to inflammation putting pressure on their lungs.

What both diseases have in common is the activation of the body’s immune response, so a drug that modulates the immune system for one can potentially work for the other.

Interferon-beta (interferon), a naturally occurring protein in the body, is used as an immunotherapy drug to combat relapsing-remitting MS by reducing inflammation and easing the symptoms of the disease.

Scientists at Synairgen hypothesised it could also treat COVID-19 through initiating the body’s antiviral response and potentially reducing inflammation on the lungs.

It is believed some at-risk patient groups cannot produce interferon as effectively as other people, reducing their ability to fight the virus and resulting in more severe symptoms.

So giving those patients interferon, in theory, should help them fight the virus, alleviate their symptoms, and improve survival rates.

Take a breath

For the treatment of MS, interferon is given as a weekly injection into muscle tissue.

The SNG001 drug developed by Synairgen contains the same interferon therapy used for MS, but formulated as an inhaled product.

Originally, the company was developing SNG001 as a treatment for a different type of lung condition called chronic obstructive pulomary diease (COPD), but it saw the direct potential for COVID-19 as well.

Instead of an injection, SNG001 is given to patients via a nebuliser, a machine that transforms a water solution of interferon into a fine mist that can be breathed in by patients through a face mask.

Promising results, so far

Between March and May this year, Synairgen sponsored a clinical trial at University Hospital Southampton to test SNG001 for COVID-19 patients. Those eligible for the trial only needed to have mild symptoms of COVID-19.

Other clinical trials conducted in the past for different drugs, such as remdesivir and dexamethasone, required patients to be hospitalised before they were eligible for drug treatment.

In total, 101 patients in a hospital setting were enrolled in the SNG001 trial and were given the drug daily for 14 days. Compared with a placebo, those given SNG001 had a 79% lower risk of developing severe disease.

Patients given the drug were also twice as likely to recover from their infection and were discharged earlier from hospital than those given the placebo.

Before SNG001 becomes standard care for COVID-19 treatment the results of the clinical trial need to be checked by independent scientists.

In the past, trial results for hydroxychloroquine did not stand up to scrutiny after they were announced and the results were subsequently retracted by the research team.

The risks and benefits

If the latest results are shown to be reliable, before doctors decide to make SNG001 a part of the standard treatment for hospitalised COVID-19 patients they will need to weigh its benefits against the potential risks.

One of the most important side effects of the drugs is that it can induce depression.

As a result, interferon is used with caution in patients with pre-existing depression or who have suicidal thoughts. These conditions may already be heightened by the pandemic if a potential patient for the drug has lost their job or they are not dealing well with the isolation of social distancing.

This means doctors would need to undertake a comprehensive mental health screen of all patients they consider for SNG001 treatment.

Read more: Immunity to COVID-19 may not last. This threatens a vaccine and herd immunity

Other side effects relevant to interferon are that it can worsen seizure disorders or heart failures. So again, it needs to be used with caution in these patient groups.

The results of the SNG001 trial are very promising and potentially give us a treatment to prevent those people mildly infected with COVID-19 from developing more severe symptoms and needing hospitalisation.

But the results need to be checked by independent scientists first, and the drug’s benefits need to be weighed against its risk, as the ability to induce severe depression could cause a wave of mental health problems that make matters worse rather than better.

– ref. Multiple sclerosis drug may help treat COVID-19 and lead to faster recovery – https://theconversation.com/multiple-sclerosis-drug-may-help-treat-covid-19-and-lead-to-faster-recovery-143090

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lana D. Hartwig, Research Fellow, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University

Water management in the Murray-Darling Basin has radically changed over the past 30 years. But none of the changes have addressed a glaring injustice: Aboriginal people’s share of water rights is minute, and in New South Wales it is diminishing.

In the 1990s, governments tried to restore the health of rivers in the basin by limiting how much water could be extracted. They also separated land and water titles to enable farmers to trade water.

Read more: Aboriginal voices are missing from the Murray-Darling Basin crisis

This allowed the recovery of water for the environment and led to the world’s biggest water market, now worth billions of dollars. For a range of reasons, Aboriginal people have largely been shut out of this valuable water market.

Our research, the first of its kind, shows Aboriginal water entitlements in the Murray-Darling Basin are declining, and further losses are likely under current policies. This water injustice is an ongoing legacy of colonisation.

An unjust distribution of water

A water use right, also called a licence or entitlement, grants its holder a share of available water in a particular waterway. Governments allocate water against these entitlements periodically, depending on rainfall and water storage. Entitlement holders choose how to use this water. Typically, they extract it for purposes such as irrigation, or sell it on the temporary market.

We mapped Aboriginal water access and rights in NSW over more than 200 years, including the current scale of Aboriginal-held water entitlements.

Read more: Water in northern Australia: a history of Aboriginal exclusion

Across ten catchments in the NSW portion of the Murray-Darling Basin, Aboriginal people collectively hold just 12.1 gigalitres of water. This is a mere 0.2% of all available surface water (as of October 2018).

By comparison, Aboriginal people make up 9.3% of this area’s population.

The value of water held by Aboriginal organisations was A$16.5 million in 2015-16 terms, equating to just 0.1% of the value of the Murray-Darling Basin’s water market.

We wanted to understand how these limited water rights affect Aboriginal people today, and the challenges, if any, they face in holding onto these entitlements. This required examining Australia’s water history and its systems of water rights distribution.

Read more: No water, no leadership: new Murray Darling Basin report reveals states’ climate gamble

What we found were key moments when governments denied Aboriginal people water rights and, by extension, the benefits that now flow from water access. This includes the ability to use water for an agricultural enterprise, or to temporarily trade water as many other entitlement holders do. We describe these moments as waves of dispossession.

The first wave of dispossession

Under colonial water law, rights to use water, for example for farming, were granted to whoever owned the land where rivers flowed. This link between water use and land-holding remained in place until the end of the 20th century.

As a result, Aboriginal people, whose traditional ownership of land (native title) was only recognised by the Australian High Court in 1992, were largely denied legal rights to water.

The second wave

During the last quarter of the 20th century, governments introduced land restitution measures, such as the NSW Aboriginal Land Rights Act (1983), to redress or compensate Indigenous peoples for colonial acts of dispossession.

We found water entitlements were attached to some of the land parcels that were transferred to Aboriginal ownership under these processes – but this was the exception.

Read more: 5 ways the government can clean up the Murray-Darling Basin Plan

Land restitution processes intentionally restricted what land Aboriginal people could claim. They were biased against properties with agricultural potential and, therefore, very few of the properties that were returned to Aboriginal ownership came with water entitlements.

At this crucial juncture in land rights reform, federal and state governments entrenched the inequity of water rights distribution by increasing the security of the water rights of those who historically held entitlements. Governments have yet to pay serious attention to the claims of Aboriginal people who see a clear connection between the past and the present in the distribution of water entitlements.

The native title framework has not helped the situation either. Native title is the recognition that Indigenous peoples have rights to land and water according to their own laws and customs.

But it’s difficult for those making a native title claim to get substantial interests in land and waters. The Native Title Act 1993 defined native title to include rights to water for customary purposes and courts are yet to recognise a commercial right to water.

The third wave

We also identified a third wave of dispossession, now underway. From 2009 to 2018, the water rights held by Aboriginal people in the NSW portion of the Murray-Darling Basin shrunk by at least 17.2% (2.0 gigalitres of water per year). No new entitlements were acquired during this decade.

The decline is attributable to several factors, the most significant being forced permanent water (and land) sales arising from the liquidation of Aboriginal enterprises.

Read more: Australia’s inland rivers are the pulse of the outback. By 2070, they’ll be unrecognisable

With water rights held by Aboriginal people vulnerable to further decline, the options for Aboriginal communities to enjoy the wide-ranging benefits of water access may further diminish.

We expect rates of Aboriginal water ownership to be even smaller in other parts of the Murray-Darling Basin (and in jurisdictions beyond the Basin). Research is underway to explore this.

Australia urgently needs a fair national water policy

The Productivity Commission is now reviewing Australian water policy, and must urgently address the injustices faced by Aboriginal people.

In developing a just water policy, governments must work with First Nations towards the twin goals of redressing historical inequities in water access and stemming further loss of water rights. Treaty negotiations may offer another avenue for water reform.

Read more: While towns run dry, cotton extracts 5 Sydney Harbours’ worth of Murray Darling water a year. It’s time to reset the balance

Over recent decades, Australia has been coming to terms with its colonial history of land management, returning more than a third of the continent to some form of Indigenous control under a “land titling revolution”.

But a water titling revolution that reconnects water law and policy to the social justice agenda of land restitution is long overdue. Indigenous peoples must have the opportunity to care for their land and waters holistically, and share more equitably in the benefits of water use.

– ref. Australia has an ugly legacy of denying water rights to Aboriginal people. Not much has changed – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-an-ugly-legacy-of-denying-water-rights-to-aboriginal-people-not-much-has-changed-141743

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Deakin University

Most Australians — aside from a few groups dedicated to reenacting American Civil War battles and history buffs including Bob Carr and Kim Beazley — were not familiar until recently with the charged history of the flag of the Confederate States of America.

Now the flag is in the Australian news with reports SAS military in Afghanistan in 2012 used the bold red, blue and white flag to guide in a US helicopter. Two SAS personnel also posed for a photograph with the flag.

Why do these images of Australian soldiers posing with a flag from another country’s long-ago war provoke such strong reactions? Because the flag has long symbolised defiance, rebellion, an ideal of whiteness and the social and political exclusion of non-white people — in a word, racism.

The Confederacy defeated, but not punished

The flag represents the Confederate States of America (CSA or Confederacy), created in 1861 when 11 states seceded from the 85-year-old nation. This rebellion was prompted by the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. Lincoln argued slavery should not be extended to new territories the United States was annexing in the west. Southern enslavers feared slavery in their established states would be Lincoln’s next target.

The ensuing four-year Civil War between the CSA and US was resolved in 1865 with the defeat of the Confederacy and the near-abolition of enslavement.

In the aftermath of the war, a longer battle began: how to interpret the war. For 155 years, this struggle has turned largely on the contradiction that although the US fought to end slavery, most white Americans, including in the North, had little commitment to ending racism.

Read more: The Confederate battleflag comes in waves, with a history that is still unfurling

After a decade of military occupation of the South, known as the period of Reconstruction, the US military withdrew its forces. White Southerners, who had retained their land, implemented unjust legal and labour systems, underpinned by violence and racist ideas about black people’s inferiority.

Memorials of war

The reembrace of white Southerners into the nation showed a desire to “heal” the nation by downplaying the horrors of enslavement and the struggle to end it.

New narratives depicted the war as a righteous, though tragic, struggle over “states’ rights”. By avoiding a conversation as to what those rights were about — that is, enslavement — by the 1890s, they remade the meaning of the war.

Read more: From Louisiana to Queensland: how American slave owners started again in Australia

Confederate flags were a powerful symbol in reinterpreting the War of the Rebellion. In the 1915 box-office hit feature film, The Birth of a Nation, for example, the central battle scene involves a key character, Ben Cameron of South Carolina, ramming the pole of a Confederate flag down a United States army cannon.

In the very next shot, however, the injured Cameron is rescued from the no-man’s land between trenches by his longtime family friend, Northerner and US Army commander, Phil Stoneman.

The movie’s second half cemented the theme of reconciling white Southerners and white Northerners. As it stated in an intertitle, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright”. It even became a tool to recruit new members to the Ku Klux Klan.

The war, in this telling, was a struggle between white and Black Americans, not between the US and the rebel Confederacy.

Blowing in the wind

The Confederate flag featured prominently in Gone with the Wind (1939), another immensely popular film that again glorified the way of life of white Southerners during and immediately after slavery. In this case, however, Hollywood used the more visually striking Confederate Battle Flag, which General Robert E. Lee had flown during the war, rather than any of the CSA’s national flags.

As Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) arrives at a makeshift hospital, the camera pans back to a field of hundreds of wounded and dead soldiers. The scene shifts only once those soldiers are framed by a Confederate flag, blowing majestically in the breeze.

These two films buttressed a political economy that relied on a cheap labour force of disenfranchised Black Americans. But as African Americans began to make headway in the fight for civil rights, starting during World War II, symbols such as the Confederate flag became even more important to those who felt affronted by their gains.

Read more: I am not your nice ‘Mammy’: How racist stereotypes still impact women

Enter the ‘Dixiecrats’

In the late 1940s, a new political party of Southerners opposed Harry S. Truman and the Democratic Party’s relatively sympathetic stance on civil rights.

These “Dixiecrats” adopted the Confederate battle flag as their party’s emblem. From that point, the flag was clearly associated with racist opposition to civil rights and with umbrage at perceived government intrusion into the lives of individuals.

When civil rights activism was at its most visible, in the 1950s and 1960s, many white Southerners became firmly attached to the flag.

The state of Georgia, where resistance to desegregation was fierce, adopted a new state flag that incorporated the Confederate flag.

A few years later, in 1961, neighbouring state South Carolina began flying the Confederate flag above its state Capitol.

Banning the flag

In 2000, after years of protest, South Carolina legislators moved the Confederate flag to the State House’s grounds. Then, after white supremacist Dylann Roof endorsed the Confederate flag and murdered nine black churchgoers in 2015, activist Bree Newsome shimmied up the pole and removed it in a galvanising act of civil disobedience.

Two weeks later, the flag in South Carolina’s house of government was finally removed for good. In the years since, hundreds of Confederate flags, statues and memorials have disappeared, including in the national Capitol.

In 2016, recognising the flag’s toxic history, major retailers announced they would no longer sell the flag.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the removal of Confederate symbols has accelerated. In recent months, Southern company Nascar has banned the flag and the Department of Defense has effectively done so, too.

In a polarised political and media environment, many white Southerners continue to defend their allegiance to the Confederate flag.

They claim the battle flag represents their Southern heritage, as if that heritage comprises an innocent history of mint juleps and church-going. The problem with that claim, as the history of the use of the flag demonstrates, is that the heritage it symbolises is also that of enslavement, inequality, violence and gross injustice.

– ref. Why is the Confederate flag so offensive? – https://theconversation.com/why-is-the-confederate-flag-so-offensive-143256

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Clare Corbould, Associate Professor, Deakin University

Most Australians — aside from a few groups dedicated to reenacting American Civil War battles and history buffs including Bob Carr and Kim Beazley — were not familiar until recently with the charged history of the flag of the Confederate States of America.

Now the flag is in the Australian news with reports SAS military in Afghanistan in 2012 used the bold red, blue and white flag to guide in a US helicopter. Two SAS personnel also posed for a photograph with the flag.

Why do these images of Australian soldiers posing with a flag from another country’s long-ago war provoke such strong reactions? Because the flag has long symbolised defiance, rebellion, an ideal of whiteness and the social and political exclusion of non-white people — in a word, racism.

The Confederacy defeated, but not punished

The flag represents the Confederate States of America (CSA or Confederacy), created in 1861 when 11 states seceded from the 85-year-old nation. This rebellion was prompted by the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. Lincoln argued slavery should not be extended to new territories the United States was annexing in the west. Southern enslavers feared slavery in their established states would be Lincoln’s next target.

The ensuing four-year Civil War between the CSA and US was resolved in 1865 with the defeat of the Confederacy and the near-abolition of enslavement.

In the aftermath of the war, a longer battle began: how to interpret the war. For 155 years, this struggle has turned largely on the contradiction that although the US fought to end slavery, most white Americans, including in the North, had little commitment to ending racism.

Read more: The Confederate battleflag comes in waves, with a history that is still unfurling

After a decade of military occupation of the South, known as the period of Reconstruction, the US military withdrew its forces. White Southerners, who had retained their land, implemented unjust legal and labour systems, underpinned by violence and racist ideas about black people’s inferiority.

Memorials of war

The reembrace of white Southerners into the nation showed a desire to “heal” the nation by downplaying the horrors of enslavement and the struggle to end it.

New narratives depicted the war as a righteous, though tragic, struggle over “states’ rights”. By avoiding a conversation as to what those rights were about — that is, enslavement — by the 1890s, they remade the meaning of the war.

Read more: From Louisiana to Queensland: how American slave owners started again in Australia

Confederate flags were a powerful symbol in reinterpreting the War of the Rebellion. In the 1915 box-office hit feature film, The Birth of a Nation, for example, the central battle scene involves a key character, Ben Cameron of South Carolina, ramming the pole of a Confederate flag down a United States army cannon.

In the very next shot, however, the injured Cameron is rescued from the no-man’s land between trenches by his longtime family friend, Northerner and US Army commander, Phil Stoneman.

The movie’s second half cemented the theme of reconciling white Southerners and white Northerners. As it stated in an intertitle, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright”. It even became a tool to recruit new members to the Ku Klux Klan.

The war, in this telling, was a struggle between white and Black Americans, not between the US and the rebel Confederacy.

Blowing in the wind

The Confederate flag featured prominently in Gone with the Wind (1939), another immensely popular film that again glorified the way of life of white Southerners during and immediately after slavery. In this case, however, Hollywood used the more visually striking Confederate Battle Flag, which General Robert E. Lee had flown during the war, rather than any of the CSA’s national flags.

As Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) arrives at a makeshift hospital, the camera pans back to a field of hundreds of wounded and dead soldiers. The scene shifts only once those soldiers are framed by a Confederate flag, blowing majestically in the breeze.

These two films buttressed a political economy that relied on a cheap labour force of disenfranchised Black Americans. But as African Americans began to make headway in the fight for civil rights, starting during World War II, symbols such as the Confederate flag became even more important to those who felt affronted by their gains.

Read more: I am not your nice ‘Mammy’: How racist stereotypes still impact women

Enter the ‘Dixiecrats’

In the late 1940s, a new political party of Southerners opposed Harry S. Truman and the Democratic Party’s relatively sympathetic stance on civil rights.

These “Dixiecrats” adopted the Confederate battle flag as their party’s emblem. From that point, the flag was clearly associated with racist opposition to civil rights and with umbrage at perceived government intrusion into the lives of individuals.

When civil rights activism was at its most visible, in the 1950s and 1960s, many white Southerners became firmly attached to the flag.

The state of Georgia, where resistance to desegregation was fierce, adopted a new state flag that incorporated the Confederate flag.

A few years later, in 1961, neighbouring state South Carolina began flying the Confederate flag above its state Capitol.

Banning the flag

In 2000, after years of protest, South Carolina legislators moved the Confederate flag to the State House’s grounds. Then, after white supremacist Dylann Roof endorsed the Confederate flag and murdered nine black churchgoers in 2015, activist Bree Newsome shimmied up the pole and removed it in a galvanising act of civil disobedience.

Two weeks later, the flag in South Carolina’s house of government was finally removed for good. In the years since, hundreds of Confederate flags, statues and memorials have disappeared, including in the national Capitol.

In 2016, recognising the flag’s toxic history, major retailers announced they would no longer sell the flag.

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the removal of Confederate symbols has accelerated. In recent months, Southern company Nascar has banned the flag and the Department of Defense has effectively done so, too.

In a polarised political and media environment, many white Southerners continue to defend their allegiance to the Confederate flag.

They claim the battle flag represents their Southern heritage, as if that heritage comprises an innocent history of mint juleps and church-going. The problem with that claim, as the history of the use of the flag demonstrates, is that the heritage it symbolises is also that of enslavement, inequality, violence and gross injustice.

– ref. Seeing red: the problematic history behind the Confederate flag – https://theconversation.com/seeing-red-the-problematic-history-behind-the-confederate-flag-143256

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, Kirby Institute, UNSW

If you’re not sure whether wearing a face mask is worth it, or you need to wear a mask but are unsure which type, our new research should help you decide.

We took videos of what happens when you talk, cough and sneeze in different scenarios — while not wearing a mask, wearing two different types of cloth masks, or wearing a surgical mask.

The results, published today in the journal Thorax, are clear.

A surgical mask was the most effective at blocking droplets and aerosols from talking, coughing and sneezing. But if you can’t get hold of one, a cloth mask is the next best thing, and the more layers the better.

Here’s what we did and what we found

You can be infected with the coronavirus, but not show symptoms. So you cannot identify an infected person just by looking at them. And you may be infected (and infectious) but not know it.

So we wanted to compare how effective different types of masks were at preventing outward transmission of droplets while talking, coughing and sneezing. These are the types of masks the public might use to reduce community transmission.

We compared using no mask with two different types of cloth masks made from DIY templates provided online (one mask had a single layer of cloth; the other had two layers), and a three-layered surgical mask.

Read more: Which face mask should I wear?

To visualise the droplets and aerosols you may not otherwise see, we used an LED lighting system with a high-speed camera.

We confirmed that even speaking generates substantial droplets. Coughing and sneezing (in that order) generate even more.

A three-ply surgical mask was significantly better than a one-layered cloth mask at reducing droplet emissions caused by speaking, coughing and sneezing, followed by a double-layer cloth face covering.

A single-layer cloth face covering also reduced the droplet spread caused by speaking, coughing and sneezing but was not as good as a two-layered cloth mask or surgical mask.

We do not know how this translates to infection risk, which will depend on how many asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic infected people are around. However, it shows a single layer is not as good a barrier as a double layer.

What does this mean?

With mandated mask use in Greater Melbourne and the Mitchell Shire, we may face shortages of surgical masks. So it is important to understand the design principles of cloth masks.

We did not test more than two layers, but generally, more layers are better. For example, a 12-layered cloth mask is about as protective as a surgical mask, and reduces infection risk by 67%.

We acknowledge it’s difficult to sew together 12 layers of fabric. But there are steps you can take to make cloth masks more effective. You can:

• increase the number of layers (at least three layers)

• use a water-resistant fabric for the outer layer

• choose fabric with a high thread count (so a tighter weave, for instance from a good quality sheet is generally better than a fabric with a looser weave that you can clearly see light through)

• hybrid fabrics such as cotton–silk, cotton–chiffon, or cotton–flannel may be good choices because they provide better filtration and are more comfortable to wear

• make sure your mask fits and seals well around your face

• wash your mask daily after using it.

The evidence is mounting

In practice, we don’t yet know which has a greater effect — wearing masks to prevent infected people spreading to others or protecting well people from inhaling infected aerosols. Probably both are equally important.

In Missouri, two infected hairdressers kept working while infectious, but wore a mix of cloth and surgical masks, as did their 139 clients. No client was infected.

However, one hairdresser infected her household family members, as she did not wear a mask at home, and neither did her family.

This is reassuring evidence that infection risk is reduced when everyone wears masks.

Read more: 13 insider tips on how to wear a mask without your glasses fogging up, getting short of breath or your ears hurting

How to make your own cloth mask

During widespread community transmission, a mask or homemade face covering can make a difference — both by protecting well people and blocking infected aerosols and droplets from an infectious person.

So, as many Victorians start living with mandated face masks, research from our group and others suggests throwing a scarf over your face is not as protective as a well designed cloth mask with several layers.

The Victorian government provides instructions on how to make a good cloth mask. There are many videos showing how, including a no-sew method. There are also community groups making cloth masks and providing helpful information.

– ref. Which mask works best? We filmed people coughing and sneezing to find out – https://theconversation.com/which-mask-works-best-we-filmed-people-coughing-and-sneezing-to-find-out-143173

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vikrant Minhas, PhD candidate, University of Adelaide

China has launched its Tianwen-1 mission to Mars. A rocket holding an orbiter, lander and rover took flight from the country’s Hainan province yesterday, with hopes to deploy the rover on Mars’s surface by early next year.

Similarly, the launch of the Emirates Mars Mission on Sunday marked the Arab world’s foray into interplanetary space travel. And on July 30, we expect to see NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover finally take off from Florida.

For many nations and their people, space is becoming the ultimate frontier. But although we’re gaining the ability to travel smarter and faster into space, much remains unknown about its effects on biological substances, including us.

While the possibilities of space exploration seem endless, so are its dangers. And one particular danger comes from the smallest life forms on Earth: bacteria.

Bacteria live within us and all around us. So whether we like it or not, these microscopic organisms tag along wherever we go – including into space. Just as space’s unique environment has an impact on us, so too does it impact bacteria.

We don’t yet know the gravity of the problem

All life on Earth evolved with gravity as an ever-present force. Thus, Earth’s life has not adapted to spend time in space. When gravity is removed or greatly reduced, processes influenced by gravity behave differently as well.

In space, where there is minimal gravity, sedimentation (when solids in a liquid settle to the bottom), convection (the transfer of heat energy) and buoyancy (the force that makes certain objects float) are minimised.

Similarly, forces such as liquid surface tension and capillary forces (when a liquid flows to fill a narrow space) become more intense.

It’s not yet fully understood how such changes impact lifeforms.

How bacteria become more deadly in space

Worryingly, research from space flight missions has shown bacteria become more deadly and resilient when exposed to microgravity (when only tiny gravitational forces are present).

In space, bacteria seem to become more resistant to antibiotics and more lethal. They also stay this way for a short time after returning to Earth, compared with bacteria that never left Earth.

Adding to that, bacteria also seem to mutate quicker in space. However, these mutations are predominately for the bacteria to adapt to the new environment – not to become super deadly.

More research is needed to examine whether such adaptations do, in fact, allow the bacteria to cause more disease.

Read more: Bacteria found to thrive better in space than on Earth

Bacterial team work is bad news for space stations

Research has shown space’s microgravity promotes biofilm formation of bacteria.

Biofilms are densely-packed cell colonies that produce a matrix of polymeric substances allowing bacteria to stick to each other, and to stationary surfaces.

Biofilms increase bacteria’s resistance to antibiotics, promote their survival and improve their ability to cause infection. We have seen biofilms grow and attach to equipment on space stations, causing it to biodegrade.

For example, biofilms have affected the Mir space station’s navigation window, air conditioning, oxygen electrolysis block, water recycling unit and thermal control system. The prolonged exposure of such equipment to biofilms can lead to malfunction, which can have devastating effects.

Another affect of microgravity on bacteria involves their structural distortion. Certain bacteria have shown reductions in cell size and increases in cell numbers when grown in microgravity.

In the case of the former, bacterial cells with smaller surface area have fewer molecule-cell interactions, and this reduces the effectiveness of antibiotics against them.

Moreover, the absence of effects produced by gravity, such as sedimentation and buoyancy, could alter the way bacteria take in nutrients or drugs intended to attack them. This could result in the increased drug resistance and infectiousness of bacteria in space.

All of this has serious implications, especially when it comes to long-haul space flights where gravity would not be present. Experiencing a bacterial infection that cannot be treated in these circumstances would be catastrophic.

The benefits of performing research in space

On the other hand, the effects of space also result in a unique environment that can be positive for life on Earth.

For example, molecular crystals in space’s microgravity grow much larger and more symmetrically than on Earth. Having more uniform crystals allows the formulation of more effective drugs and treatments to combat various diseases including cancers and Parkinson’s disease.

Also, the crystallisation of molecules helps determine their precise structures. Many molecules that cannot be crystallised on Earth can be in space.

So, the structure of such molecules could be determined with the help of space research. This, too, would aid the development of higher quality drugs.

Optical fibre cables can also be made to a much better standard in space, due to the optimal formation of crystals. This greatly increases data transmission capacity, making networking and telecommunications faster.

As humans spend more time in space, an environment riddled with known and unknown dangers, further research will help us thoroughly examine the risks – and the potential benefits – of space’s unique environment.

Read more: With or without you: the role of the moon on life

– ref. As if space wasn’t dangerous enough, bacteria become more deadly in microgravity – https://theconversation.com/as-if-space-wasnt-dangerous-enough-bacteria-become-more-deadly-in-microgravity-141053

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Philip Dwyer, Professor, Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle

Stories of alleged unlawful killings by Australian special forces in Afghanistan continue to emerge in the media — now on a regular basis.

In the latest report by ABC this week, special forces are accused of mistakenly killing a civilian in 2013 with the same last name as a Taliban target.

This follows another ABC report last week on special forces allegedly killing up to 10 unarmed Afghan civilians during a 2012 raid in Kandahar Province.

Another allegation investigated by journalists Nick McKenzie and Chris Masters involves an SAS soldier stomping to death an Afghan civilian, also in 2012. A former SAS medic, Dusty Miller, went public about this incident and asked forgiveness of the family of the man who was killed.

And in yet another incident that same year, known as “the village idiot killing” among the SAS, a soldier is accused of killing two men, one of whom was intellectually disabled.

The soldier in question, now referred to as “Soldier C”, is also alleged to have killed another civilian in cold blood some months later. It took a Four Corners report for the allegations to surface, and for Defence Minister Linda Reynolds to refer them to the Australian Federal Police for investigation.

Read more: Explainer: how Australia’s military justice system works

A report tabled in parliament in February detailed 55 separate allegations of unlawful executions and abusing civilians and prisoners by Australian special forces in Afghanistan from 2005-16.

These allegations are now under investigation by the inspector-general of the Defence Force. Separately, the AFP has also sent officers to Afghanistan to gather evidence of possible war crimes.

All of these allegations are just now coming to light, in part, because the military failed in its duty to investigate them properly. Instead, the special forces have been accused of fostering a “culture of cover-up”, sweeping alleged abuses under the carpet.

Other militaries accused of atrocities

The SAS is not the only elite unit that has been accused of committing war crimes. In the US, one of the more notorious cases involved a Navy SEALs commander, Edward Gallagher. Accused by his own platoon members of shooting and stabbing civilians in Iraq in 2017, Gallagher was arrested and tried but never convicted. He retired from the Navy with full honours.

Other US forces, and even the CIA, are also alleged to have carried out war crimes in Afghanistan — the focus of a current investigation by the International Criminal Court.

Read more: Did the US commit crimes in Afghanistan? International prosecutors want to find out

Similarly, the British SAS has been dogged by dozens of accusations involving the deaths of 50 unarmed civilians in Afghanistan from 2009-11. Investigations into these alleged crimes were shut down by the government in 2017.

The New Zealand SAS and the Canadian army are grappling with allegations of misconduct and war crimes, as well.

Unlawful killings long a feature of war

If history tells us one thing, it’s that wherever the military interacts in close quarters with civilians during war and occupation, atrocities like these occur.

Vietnam is by far the worst example in modern times of American troops and their allies killing and abusing civilians. This included such crimes as torture, rape, baseless arrests, the destruction of property and livelihoods, forced displacement and imprisonment without trial.

The massacre at My Lai in 1968 was perhaps the most infamous case of indiscriminate killing, an atrocity that came to epitomise all that was wrong with the war. But it was just one of many, many massacres that never became public knowledge. The staggering cost in Vietnamese lives during the war has been estimated as high as 3.8 million.

Read more: Operation Burnham: inquiry underway to determine any wrongdoing by New Zealand troops in Afghanistan

Very few American troops were ever brought to trial. Generals, for one, were very reluctant to press charges. Even when court-martial proceedings did go ahead, the Pentagon did its best to drag them out until the public lost interest.

It would be naïve to think Australia has not committed similar abuses wherever our troops have been deployed. There is certainly enough evidence to suggest that suspected war crimes were committed by our troops in Korea and Vietnam.

In fact, war crimes have likely occurred in every war in which Australian troops have been involved, from Harry “Breaker” Morant and Peter Handcock murdering 12 prisoners in the Boer War to the killing of unarmed Japanese in the Second World War.

A moral failure of command and ‘othering’ of foreigners

The interesting thing about the allegations in Afghanistan – regardless of the nationality of the army – is they all involve special forces.

The Australian SAS itself is an elite force made up of highly trained, highly disciplined professional soldiers. There are all sorts of reasons why this discipline might break down during war, causing soldiers to commit unthinkable crimes against non-combatants.

For one, there is a suggestion our special forces have been “contaminated” by contact with the “kill cultures” of other special forces, such as the so-called American “Kill Team” platoon.

In almost all instances when killing and abuse occurs in wartime, there is also an “othering” that takes place, that is, the inhabitants are seen as less than human, as not like us. It enables troops to commit acts they would never otherwise contemplate.

In Afghanistan, this is helped by the fact the special forces are a closed club. Not only is there is a lack of transparency in their operations, but special forces consider themselves to be above the rest of the army.

Moreover, unlike other militaries, journalists are almost never embedded with Australian troops, so they are unable to report and act as witnesses. Whether this would make a difference is debatable, but since Vietnam, war is no longer televised into our living rooms. We usually only get to see what the army wants us to see.

Ultimately, when an atrocity is committed in times of war, and the army fails to respond adequately, it is due to a moral failure of command, as the special operations commander, Major-General Adam Findlay, recently put it.

Read more: Why Australia should face civil lawsuits over soldier misdeeds in Afghanistan

At least Australia, unlike the UK or Canada, is pursuing an inquiry into possible war crimes in Afghanistan, though whether charges will be laid remains to be seen. However, unless fundamental changes are made to the culture of cover-up in the special forces, or the way these allegations are handled internally, this will continue to be a problem.

The term “special” infers these forces have higher standards than might be expected from conventional soldiers. It’s possible the special forces may have let the wrong people slip into their ranks, but when things do go wrong, it’s because commanders have, for whatever reason, let it happen.

There is no simple solution to this complex issue, but it’s now time for the military to show the same moral courage as those veterans who have chosen to speak out.

– ref. It’s time for Australia’s SAS to stop its culture of cover-up and take accountability for possible war crimes – https://theconversation.com/its-time-for-australias-sas-to-stop-its-culture-of-cover-up-and-take-accountability-for-possible-war-crimes-142808

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert G. Patman, Professor of International Relations, University of Otago

News that the “bad boys of Brexit” have been hired by New Zealand First to work on the party’s social media strategy is simultaneously amusing and ominous.

Famous for the Leave.EU campaign in the UK, the duo of Aaron Banks and Andy Wigmore are unabashed far-right populists. Their hiring is another sign that New Zealand is not immune to forces that now shape politics around the world.

Their recruitment underlines the biggest foreign policy challenge this country is facing: the near breakdown of the international rules-based order.

Such an order is the foundation on which New Zealand’s diplomacy and economic prosperity rest. The COVID-19 crisis has confirmed it is in deep trouble but, paradoxically, has also created an opening to reinvigorate it.

The end of an era?

Since the end of the second world war, New Zealand has firmly supported the rules-based system of international relations embodied in institutions such as the United Nations and the principle of multilateralism.

The global pandemic, however, has highlighted the absence of an effective international crisis management system.

The UN Security Council has been largely marginalised and the World Health Organisation (WHO) significantly weakened by the withdrawal of Donald Trump’s America.

To be sure, the rules-based international order was under assault before COVID-19 – challenged by the authoritarian style of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China, and the rise of national populists such as Boris Johnson in the UK and Trump in the US.

In 2016, the Putin regime strongly backed the Leave campaign in the British EU referendum and Trump’s successful bid for the White House.

Read more: The dangerous new cold war brewing with China will test New Zealand even more than the old one

As some observers have concluded, COVID-19 reinforces those developments, reinvigorating nationalism at the expense of globalisation and internationalism.

According to this view, a post-COVID world will be characterised by de-globalisation, protectionism and the renewal of great power rivalry between the US, China and Russia – at the expense of the middle or smaller powers like New Zealand.

The great powers are outnumbered

There are three reasons to be sceptical about this, however. Globalisation is a structural change, powered by revolutionary developments in communication technology since the early 1980s. This interconnectedness shows no sign of being reversed.

Indeed, COVID-19 has accelerated connectivity and the digital revolution in many states.

Related to this, the claim that two or three great powers will run the world in the 21st century is self-serving and wholly unrealistic.

Today, all states are confronted by security, economic, environmental and health challenges that do not respect territorial borders and cannot be resolved unilaterally by great powers.

COVID-19 has only highlighted this. Instead of rallying the world against the virus, the US and China were reduced to squabbling with each other over a problem neither can control.

Finally, the mixed responses by countries to the pandemic clearly indicate the contours of the international transition we are living through.

Some of the highest death rates are found in states with populist governments such as the US, UK and Brazil.

These governments seemed initially indifferent to WHO warnings, disputed the advice of public health experts, and emphasised national exceptionalism in chaotic and slow responses to the threat of the virus.

In contrast, nations that have performed well in keeping deaths relatively low – including South Korea, Taiwan, Germany, Singapore and New Zealand – acted early on WHO advice, heeded scientific and health-care expertise, and were prepared to learn from each other.

Read more: Boris Johnson needs to show a ‘post-heroic’ style of leadership now

So, while the rules-based order on which New Zealand and the vast majority of states depend is under fire, the threat should not be exaggerated.

The alternative of a world “where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” is only acceptable to those few states that consider themselves great powers.

Towards a better world order

What can be done, then, to strengthen the multilateral system so the world can deal more effectively with the likes of a global pandemic or climate change?

It’s clear our traditional allies the US and the UK – currently led by populist governments – can no longer be relied upon to provide leadership in a multilateral setting.

So New Zealand must be prepared to work with other like-minded states to build a new global political grouping dedicated to advancing the rules-based order.

New Zealand could even help lead such a movement, given its global reputation for decisive and compassionate leadership after the Christchurch terrorist atrocity and during the pandemic.

By rejecting the politics of populism and isolationism, New Zealand can embrace a new form of bottom-up multilateralism that does not depend on great powers setting the agenda.

Much needs to be done. Constraining or abolishing the veto power of the five permament members of the UN Security Council and reforming the global economic system are among the reforms urgently needed to reduce global insecurity and inequality.

Foreign policy was rarely an election issue in the past, but COVID-19 makes this contest different. Voters need options to decide how New Zealand can best protect its core values and interests in a world where these are directly threatened.

– ref. When great powers fail, New Zealand and other small states must organise to protect their interests – https://theconversation.com/when-great-powers-fail-new-zealand-and-other-small-states-must-organise-to-protect-their-interests-142894

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joseph Ibrahim, Professor, Health Law and Ageing Research Unit, Department of Forensic Medicine, Monash University

As of July 22, the total number of COVID-19 infections nationally was 12,896, with 128 deaths. This figure includes 43 aged-care residents.

In Victoria, at least 45 aged-care facilities have now reported outbreaks, with about 383 positive cases in the sector overall (including among staff).

St Basil’s Home for the Aged in Fawkner and Estia Health in Ardeer have the largest number of cases: 73 and 67 respectively.

Although these outbreaks don’t compare to what we’ve seen internationally, the rising case numbers within Victorian aged-care homes are of grave national concern.

We’ll need a concerted community effort to arrest this looming disaster.

Read more: Why are older people more at risk of coronavirus?

Aged care was in crisis even before COVID-19

The interim report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety laid bare the system failures in the provision of aged care in Australia.

These deficits include workforce and skill shortages. A report on the sector’s performance between October and December 2019 found around 20% of facilities audited did not meet standards in “safe and effective personal and clinical care”, while 13% fell short on the measure of a “safe, clean and well-maintained service environment”.

This makes aged-care homes highly vulnerable to any external disaster.

Several other factors set the scene for infection transmission in aged care, including its design. Residential aged care is intended to provide a home-like physical environment. While this serves an important purpose, it means aged-care homes may be missing some clinical features needed for optimal infection control, such as prominent placement of multiple hand basins.

Communal spaces and a high volume of foot traffic (residents, staff, external contractors and visitors) also increase the risk of infection, while some residents have shared rooms and bathrooms.

And residents have a range of cognitive and physical disabilities that can make it difficult to adhere to the fundamental infection control measures of social distancing and handwashing.

COVID-19 and the elderly

We had early warning of the catastrophic effects of COVID-19 in aged-care homes in March and April from countries like Spain and Italy, which saw widespread outbreaks and deaths in nursing homes.

While roughly one-third of COVID-19 deaths in Australia so far have been aged-care residents, a review taking in 26 countries found this group has accounted for almost half of coronavirus deaths.

Read more: Banning visitors to aged care during coronavirus raises several ethical questions – with no simple answers

Severe illness and death from COVID-19 is more likely in older people because they tend to have lower immunity, less biological reserve and higher rates of chronic conditions such as type-2 diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure and renal disease.

One study found the case-fatality rate — the proportion of people who get COVID-19 who will die — is 33.7% for aged-care residents.

Avoiding disaster

We need a coordinated, standardised, compassionate, supportive response to prevent premature deaths, and to minimise psychological harm to residents, families and staff.

Different aged-care homes will need different strategies to suit their varying circumstances. For example, facilities located in areas without community transmission, such as South Australia, will be different to those where there’s community spread, like in NSW and Victoria. And the needs of those homes with an active outbreak, such as St Basil’s or Estia Health, will be different again.

But broadly speaking, I believe these four key pillars are applicable to all aged-care homes.

1. Stop COVID-19 entering

In areas where there’s community transmission, all aged-care homes should be put into lockdown, with tight controls at entry and exit points. This should be done as humanely as possible, for example by creating teams to keep residents connected to family and community, and with exceptions for essential visitors.

Staff should be tested routinely and counselled about limiting contact with other people outside the workplace. Staff should also only work in one facility, and be allocated the same group of residents (to minimise the number of contacts in the event of a confirmed or suspected infection).

Finally, the development and provision of specific guidance, training and support around the use of personal protective equipment (PPE) is essential. Individual homes should be supported to engage experienced infection control nurses to train staff if possible on site.

2. Be prepared in case it does

Every aged-care home in Australia should have a “risk and readiness” rating to determine the likelihood of a COVID-19 outbreak and the facility’s ability to prevent and manage an initial infection.

This would include factors such as the experience and size of the aged-care provider, location of the facility, the size and structure of the building, ventilation, access to open spaces, the residents’ profile, staff numbers and skills, and past performance in accreditation audits.

And each home should have designated vacant rooms to be ready for isolation of any suspected cases.

Finally, the government should establish a national rapid response and advisory team dedicated to the management of aged-care homes during COVID-19. This would strengthen existing public health response units and should include clinicians with expertise in aged care.

Read more: Our ailing aged care system shows you can’t skimp on nursing care

3. Respond quickly and decisively when an outbreak occurs

Aged-care homes along with public health units should have protocols for coordination of their on-site response, with clear lines of accountability for action and escalation.

They should rapidly separate residents when an outbreak occurs, rather than relying on a continued usual model of care with the addition of PPE.

Aged-care homes require productive partnerships with hospitals to ensure residents can get the specialised care they need. Wherever possible, all confirmed cases should be sent to a clinical setting such as an acute or sub-acute hospital.

And importantly, all homes should have dedicated communication channels to keep family members informed.

4. Learn from past experience

The two major aged-care outbreaks in NSW, particularly the one in Newmarch House, attracted national attention. But we’re still awaiting a public statement from government about the lessons learned.

There are also ongoing inquiries into COVID-19 in aged care by a senate committee and the Royal Commission. But neither are due to report for some time.

The government should release interim reports into the investigations of recent outbreaks which might give us valuable information about reducing transmission.

Eliminating COVID-19 outbreaks from aged-care homes reduces community transmission, the need for hospital care and reduces premature death. This benefits the whole nation.

Read more: Why prisons in Victoria are locked up and locked down

– ref. 4 steps to avert a full-blown coronavirus disaster in Victoria’s aged care homes – https://theconversation.com/4-steps-to-avert-a-full-blown-coronavirus-disaster-in-victorias-aged-care-homes-143177

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

By the end of August, the Morrison government wants Parliament to consider changes to Australia’s flagship environment law to help arrest nature’s steady decline.

The move follows the release this week of Professor Graeme Samuel’s preliminary review of the law, the 20-year-old Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Samuel described the law as “ineffective” and “inefficient” and called for wholesale reform.

At the centrepiece of Samuel’s recommendations are “national environmental standards” that are consistent and legally enforceable, and set clear rules for decision-making. Samuel provides a set of “prototype” standards as a starting point. He recommends replacing the prototypes with more refined standards over time.

Rushing the interim standards into law is a huge concern, and further threatens the future of Australia’s irreplaceable natural and cultural heritage. Here, we explain why.

Semantics matter

Samuel’s review said legally enforceable national standards would help ensure development is sustainable over the long term, and reduce the time it takes to have development proposals assessed.

We’ve identified a number of problems with his prototype standards.

First, they introduce new terms that will require interpretation by decision-makers, which could lead the government into the courts. This occurred in Queensland’s Nathan dam case when conservation groups successfully argued the term environmental “impacts” should extend to “indirect effects” of development.

Read more: Environment Minister Sussan Ley is in a tearing hurry to embrace nature law reform – and that’s a worry

Second, there’s a difference in wording between the prototype standards and the EPBC Act itself, which might lead to uncertainty and delay. Samuel suggested a “no net loss” national standard for vulnerable and endangered species habitat, and “net gain” for critically endangered species habitat. But this departs from current federal policy, under which environmental offsets must “improve or maintain” the environmental outcome compared to “what is likely to have occurred under the status quo”.

Third, the outcomes proposed under the prototype standards might themselves cause confusion. The standards say, overall, the environment should be “protected”, but rare wetlands protected under the Ramsar Convention should be “maintained”. The status of threatened species should “improve over time” and Commonwealth marine waters should be “maintained or enhanced”, but the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park needs to be “sustained for current and future generations”.

And fourth, the standards don’t rule out development in habitat critical to threatened species, but require that “no detrimental change” occurs. But in reality, can there be development in critical habitat without detrimental change?

Mind the gap

The escape clause in the prototype standards presents another problem. A small, yet critical recommendation in the appendix of Samuel’s report says:

These amendments should include a requirement that the Standards be applied unless the decision-maker can demonstrate that the public interest and the national interest is best served otherwise.

Which decision maker is he referring to here – federal or state? If it’s the former, will there be a constant stream of requests to the federal environment minister for a “public interest” exemption on the basis of jobs and economic development? If the latter, can a state decision-maker judge the “national interest”, especially for species found in several states, such as the koala?

Samuel says the “legally enforceable” nature of national standards are the foundation of effective regulation. But both he and Auditor-General Grant Hehir in his recent report found existing enforcement provisions are rarely applied, and penalties are low.

Federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley has already ruled out Samuel’s recommendation that an independent regulator take responsibility for enforcement. But the record to date does not give confidence that government officials will enforce the standards.

Temporary forever?

Both Ley and Samuel suggested the interim standards would be temporary and updated later. But history shows “draft” and “interim” policies have a tendency to become long-term, or permanent.

For example, federal authorities often allow a proponent to cause environmental damage, and compensate by improving the environment elsewhere – a process known as “offsetting”. A so-called “draft” offset policy drawn up in 2007 actually remained in place for five years until 2012, when it was finally replaced. And the federal environment department recently accepted offsets based on the 2007 “draft” rather than the current policy.

The best antidote is to ensure the first tranche of national standards is comprehensive, precise and strong. This can only occur if genuine consultation occurs, legislation is not rushed, and the government commits to improving the “antiquated” data and information systems the standards rely on.

Negotiation to the lowest bar

According to the Samuel report, the proposed standards “provide a clear pathway for greater devolution in decision-making” that will enable states and territories to conduct federal environmental assessments and approvals. This proposed change has been strongly and consistently criticised by scientists and environmental lawyers.

Ley also appears to be wildly underestimating the time and effort required to negotiate the standards with the states and territories.

Read more: Let there be no doubt: blame for our failing environment laws lies squarely at the feet of government

Take the Gillard government’s attempts to overcome duplication between state and federal law by establishing a “one-stop-shop” approvals process. Prime Minister Julia Gillard pulled the plug on negotiations after a year, declaring the myriad agreements being sought by various states was the “regulatory equivalent of a Dalmatian dog”.

The Abbott government’s negotiations for a similar policy lasted twice as long but suffered a similar fate, lapsing with the dissolution of Parliament in 2016.

Samuel warned refining the standards should not involve “negotiated agreement with rules set at the lowest bar”. But vested interests will inevitably seek to influence the process.

Proceed with caution

We have identified significant problems with the prototype standards, and more may emerge.

Ley’s rush to amend the Act appears motivated more by wanting to cut so-called “green tape” than by evidence or environmental outcomes.

Prototypes are meant to be stress-tested. But if the defects are not corrected before hurrying into negotiations and legislative change, Australia might go another 20 years without effective environment laws.

Read more: Environment laws have failed to tackle the extinction emergency. Here’s the proof

– ref. Court action, confusion and a big escape clause: here’s why changes to environment law shouldn’t be rushed – https://theconversation.com/court-action-confusion-and-a-big-escape-clause-heres-why-changes-to-environment-law-shouldnt-be-rushed-143136

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Dickinson, Professor, Public Service Research, UNSW

Only 22% of family members and carers of students with a disability agreed they had received adequate educational support during the pandemic. Many respondents in our new research, and survey, on behalf of Children and Young People with Disability Australia (CYDA) reported being forgotten in the shift to remote learning, or being the last group to be considered after arrangements had been made for the rest of the class.

A number of parents and carers said the pandemic period gave them an insight into the level their child was working at. This occasionally came as a surprise, as parents discovered with adequate support their child could complete work at a much higher level than the school had recorded.

For others, this period illustrated how little progress their child had been making and the lack of support they were receiving at school. Several respondents said they were considering changing schools or home schooling their children as a result.

Read more: What is homeschooling? And should I be doing that with my kid during the coronavirus lockdown?

Still left behind

Our survey was launched on April 28, 2020 and remained open until the June 14, 2020 (nearly seven weeks). It asked questions on the experiences of students with disabilities and their families when schools across Australia had mostly closed.

It also covered the period of transition back to face-to-face teaching for the majority of students.

We received more than 700 responses and 1,145 text comments. The responses mainly came from family members of children with disability. Around 5% of respondents were students with disability, and of those most were high school or university age.

Nearly 80% of respondents said responsibility for education shifted from teachers and schools and onto parents during the survey period.

More than half of respondents said the curriculum and learning materials didn’t come in accessible formats. Parents reported having to do significant work to translate learning materials into a useful format for their children.

Read more: Excluded and refused enrolment: report shows illegal practices against students with disabilities in Australian schools

Some reported receiving exactly the same materials and support as those provided to students without disability, with the onus entirely on parents to make the necessary adjustments.

This caused some family members to feel they were letting students with disability down because they did not have the skills required to adjust the materials appropriately.

One young person said:

Only one special education teacher was modifying learning material and in regular contact and encouragement from the special education department in high school.

Some children were unable to engage online and so missed out on being part of a learning community. Others felt schools had not done enough to facilitate access to this. Many respondents said the usual supports they received dropped off, most notably in terms of supervision, social supports and individual support workers.

Nearly three quarters of respondents said students with disability felt socially isolated from their peers. Many said this and other consequences of the pandemic were having a significant impact on their mental health.

Just over half of respondents indicated a negative impact on the mental health and well-being on either themselves or the child or young person with disability under their care.

Cracks in the system

Some families used funding from the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) to help support remote learning. They redeployed support workers from personal care into helping children engage in learning, risking they may not have enough support worker hours left at the end of their plans.

Others had requests for more funding turned down by the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) on the basis education supports should be covered through mainstream services. Overall there was a lack of clarity about how the NDIS could be used to support remote learning.

As one parent reported:

I was lucky enough to have had funding to support in-home supports, which I used to assist with schooling during COVID-19. I am the sole parent of two children with disability, plus an essential worker. Without this support my children would have received no quality schooling at all during the school-closures.

Others felt the support was no worse during the pandemic, but this was mostly because they had not been well supported beforehand. Where support had been received, it was often in response to advocacy work done by parents who had contacted schools (sometimes repeatedly) and requested the materials and adjustments their children required.

What have we learnt?

We found children who received one form of support were 24% more likely to feel part of a learning community and 36% more likely to say they received adequate support in their education.

And the more support received, the better. For those who received two or more types of support, they or their parents were

• 88% more likely to say they felt part of a learning community

• more than twice as likely to report adequate support in their education

• 48% more likely to say report engagement in their learning

• 18% less likely to report feelings of social isolation.

Social supports had the strongest association with students feeling supported, part of a learning community, engaged in learning and feeling less socially isolated.

Our research shows that, with careful planning and effort by education systems and teachers, students with disability can thrive through the pandemic.

But the support should

• ensure students are made to feel part of a learning community through connecting them with their peers

• ensure learning materials are accessible and specific to the needs of students

• teachers provide reasonable supports in partnership with children and families – it should not be left to families or students to navigate

• ensure the support from the NDIS and the education system are complementary.

Read more: Students in Melbourne will go back to remote schooling. Here’s what we learnt last time and how to make it better

– ref. Only one fifth of school students with disability had enough support during the remote learning period – https://theconversation.com/only-one-fifth-of-school-students-with-disability-had-enough-support-during-the-remote-learning-period-143195

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sandra Carrasco, Teaching Assistant and Research Fellow, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne

The toughest lockdown imposed on residents of public housing in Australia has been lifted, but their COVID-19 ordeal isn’t over – and recovering from their traumatic experience will take time. Recent events have highlighted the inequalities that make residents of the locked-down Melbourne housing towers highly vulnerable in the COVID-19 emergency. Nearly 350 residents have been infected to date.

Read more: Melbourne tower lockdowns unfairly target already vulnerable public housing residents

This article draws on our interviews with residents and community and religious leaders after the buildings were locked down. The interviews followed a two-year study of the housing conditions of migrants from the Horn of Africa living in inner Melbourne estates.

These are places of social and economic disadvantage. The current crisis has laid bare the conditions that endanger this community. These include large extended families (up to nine people), low incomes, high unemployment, limited access to education, challenges of communicating in English and poor internet access.

COVID-19 doesn’t discriminate, but its impacts do in ways felt far beyond the health sector. Studies of disasters and emergencies have shown events like these hit the poor hardest. Recent studies in the US confirm the COVID-19 pandemic is exposing existing inequalities and vulnerabilities of lower-income groups and ethnic minorities.

Voices from the towers

African residents of the Melbourne public housing estates raised their voices during the lockdown, despite their fears and sense of exclusion.

Read more: Paris? Melbourne? Public housing doesn’t just look the same, it’s part of the challenges refugees face

Anisa, a Somali-Australian resident of a North Melbourne tower, told us:

The enforced lockdown is a direct reflection of the systematic inequalities [people face] in public housing.

The lockdown brought back wartime memories of dispossession and the sense of persecution they still feel. Iman, a Somali resident of one of the affected towers, said:

This community is made up of many people who have fled war, who have complicated mental health issues, whose families have been racially profiled and targeted by police.

Anisa told us:

We need a health response, not a police response, at the end of the day.

Lack of communication between residents and authorities is the result of a pre-existing disconnection and lack of mutual trust.

Read more: Voices of residents missing in a time of crisis for public housing

This explains residents’ claims that initial government support was incompatible with their values. Awatif, a Sudanese resident of the Flemington towers, said:

Many people [here] are Muslims. They [the government] brought non-halal food, they do not understand what we eat.

The precarious living conditions of public housing have also been exposed. Issues such as poor ventilation already affected people’s health. Muhubo, a Somali resident of Carlton’s public housing estates, said:

I have asthma and I need to take fresh air because inside the houses sometimes it is stuffy. Ventilation inside is not good enough.

Overcrowding makes isolation of ill residents impossible, and there other, related challenges. As Muhubo said:

In many families only the mother lives with the children. If she gets sick it will be difficult for the children, especially if they are small.

Read more: ‘Vertical cruise ships’? Here’s how we can remake housing towers to be safer and better places to live

Adding to residents’ problems

The lockdown made existing problems worse. Tewelde Kidane, who chairs the Melbourne Eritrean United Community, spoke of family tensions increasing in confined spaces, which combined with lack of privacy results in increases in domestic violence. Sultan Abdiwali, the imam of the North Melbourne mosque at the heart of the Australian Muslim Social Services Agency (AMSSA), also referred to increased family violence and drug use, as did Awatif:

Some young people get sometimes drunk, scream at night, [and use] drugs.

However, the lockdown also showed the community’s capacity to support their fellows in need. “We have been receiving support and help from our local community even before this extreme lockdown,” the resident Iman said.

Asked how the African communities were supporting their members, the imam said:

[A] Somali community group collected donations and provided help to public housing residents. Other groups found it hard to manage such activities.

Most residents do not question the lockdown, but object to the lack of information. Anisa said:

I do know that if we, the residents, were treated with some decency and respect and received enough information on the lockdown, our concerns would be a lot more at ease than they are now.

Carlton estate residents volunteered to assist health professionals with door-to-door COVID-19 testing. The volunteers helped overcome language and cultural barriers. Muhubo explained:

People are scared about being ill so they are happy to get tested. People know that they need to get tested and they help with that.

Read more: We could have more coronavirus outbreaks in tower blocks. Here’s how lockdown should work

Residents use social media, WhatsApp and Zoom to maintain communication within the community. However, many lack internet access. Muhubo said:

[…] for the families that do not have the internet at home and have kids it is difficult. The school gave some kids a small modem with some internet access, but it is slow and the data is limited.

Good communication between authorities and residents is crucial to understand and manage the risks, but this requires proper risk governance. As Tewelde explained:

Many people just live here and rely on the community and don’t know what happens in the rest of the city. We sometimes feel disconnected from the rest.

Language barriers and low literacy in our community members is a big issue. Some people might even have troubles calling emergency numbers like 000.

Building trust will take time

Mutual trust must be built. Yet, surprisingly, government agencies often do not communicate directly with residents.

These days the Carlton public housing residents receive regular communication from Carlton Neighbourhood Learning Centre (CLNC). The centre has gained their trust by working with vulnerable communities for many years. Muhubo said:

Even now we do not get more information from the housing commission. These days we get messages and updates from the school [CNLC], although most of the messages are in English.

Community members’ social networks are part of what has been called an “economy of affection”, a collective support structure characteristic of African communities.

Government agencies need to start building communication channels that acknowledge existing community leaders and networks. Awatif said:

They [the government] need to link the leader and community workers to work with them, teach people how to use sanitisers, make them aware of social distancing, bring professional cleaners.

Understanding these communities and the risks they face will lead to better and more inclusive prevention, response and recovery from COVID-19.

– ref. Our lives matter – Melbourne public housing residents talk about why COVID-19 hits them hard – https://theconversation.com/our-lives-matter-melbourne-public-housing-residents-talk-about-why-covid-19-hits-them-hard-142901

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Warren Hogan, Industry Professor, University of Technology Sydney

Thursday’s economic statement is the government’s first attempt to quantify the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on government finances and should be treated with caution.

The near A$300 billion hit to government finances over two years is, as the treasurer says “eye-watering”, but that forecast is as good as it’s going to get.

In all likelihood the impact of the virus on the economy and government finances will be much worse. The health crisis will most likely take longer than assumed to get on top of and the economic recovery will take more government policy than assumed to get out of.

We should be prepared for much bigger deficits than predicted this financial year and potentially a very large deficit once again in 2021-22.

Read more: Five things you need to know about today’s economic statement

This is fine. With government debt projected to rise to 45% of GDP over the year ahead, we’ve still plenty of “fiscal space”; that is, room for the government to spend more in order to ensure a recovery.

The average debt level across members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is 100% of GDP.

Optimistic about both health and the economy

The statement reveals the pandemic knocked $33 billion off budget revenues last financial year and should knock $56 billion off this financial year.

The cost of the emergency measures is even bigger, $58 billion last financial year and $118 billion this financial year. The result is a $90 billion budget deterioration in 2019-20 followed by a $190 billion deterioration in 2020-21, a total of about $300 billion.

That’s the relatively good news. The bad news is these numbers are based on something close to a best-case scenario. If they change, there is very little chance it will be for the better. We would need to see something like a near-immediate discovery of a vaccine and its distribution within months.

Read more: These budget numbers are shocking, and there are worse ones in store

The list of things that could go wrong is much longer, chief among them continued outbreaks and lockdowns like the one in Melbourne and worse news from overseas.

Treasury’s assumptions include:

• an end to all domestic restrictions including the four square metre rule by the end of the year

• an end to Melbourne’s lockdown after six weeks followed by a staged re-opening

• no reimposed restrictions in other states

• international borders gradually opened from January and fully opened by next July.

Given these assumptions, the short-term economic forecasts are reasonable and not too far out of line with what would be the consensus of economists.

They include a 7% drop in GDP in the three months to June followed by a 1.5% rebound in the three months to September and gradual improvements after that. The unemployment rate is expected to peak at (only) 9.25% within months.

Read more: Budget deficit to hit $184.5B this financial year, unemployment to peak at 9.25% in December: economic statement

But unemployment typically peaks at about 11% in a recession, and the government itself has said that taking hidden employment into account the rate is probably closer to 13%.

With the virus running riot across the Americas and surging in Africa the downside risks outweigh the others. The treasury forecasts eschew the traditional approach of charting a middle path through upside and downside risks.

But finances aren’t a problem

The update is telling us the pandemic will cost the government about $300 billion over the two years.

The eventual number is likely to be much higher, by 2022 probably closer to half a trillion dollars. It is a perfectly reasonable sum.

Read more: Frydenberg’s three-stage economic recovery is abominably hard to get right

Even if the deficits and debt associated with the pandemic end up being twice what the government is projecting our government debt will still be just over 60% of GDP, a level that would be the envy of most other countries, many of which don’t have the potential to grow and recover that Australia does.

For our government, the investment is well worth the money.

– ref. Eye-wateringly bad, yet rosy: why these budget numbers will get worse – https://theconversation.com/eye-wateringly-bad-yet-rosy-why-these-budget-numbers-will-get-worse-142840

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

Most people agree there are services government should pay for. Primary and secondary education, a dignified level of health care, emergency services and the military come to mind.

What is less clear is what services government should directly provide, and what it can safely contract out.

Past experiments in privatisation include the running of prisons and detention centres, and hiring private military contractors to guard embassies.

We have just witnessed a real-time experiment with the Victoria government’s hotel quarantine debacle.

Read more: Melbourne’s hotel quarantine bungle is disappointing but not surprising. It was overseen by a flawed security industry

This week an inquiry headed by former Family Court of Australia judge Jennifer Coates began into failures in Victoria’s hotel quarantine system, believed to be responsible for Melbourne’s second-wave viral outbreaks.

But what can economics tells us about why this happened?

Thanks to the literature on “incomplete contracts” that led to a Nobel Prize for Harvard University economist Oliver Hart, quite a bit.

Using private contractors for hotel quarantine was destined to fail. It all boils down to a trade-off between costs and quality.

Using private providers is a good option when keeping costs low is more important than high quality. This was not such a case.

Incomplete contracts

Hart’s classic 1997 paper on “The Proper Scope of Government” (co-authored with Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny) mostly considers privatisation in theoretical terms, with some discussion of prisons, garbage collection, schools, health care, policing and a few other things.

The animating idea behind the “incomplete contracts” approach is that there are some contingencies that contracts, no matter how detailed, can’t cover.

This could be because parties can’t conceive of all future contingencies. Or perhaps they understand what’s at issue but it is hard to codify that in a way a non-specialist court could understand.

For instance, a famous legal case concerned the definition of a chicken, with the judge writing:

The issue is, what is chicken? Plaintiff says ‘chicken’ means a young chicken, suitable for broiling and frying. Defendant says ‘chicken’ means any bird of that genus that meets contract specifications on weight and quality …

Philippe Aghion and I expanded on incomplete contracts and prisons as well as many other applications in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2011.

To keep things simple, imagine there are two things someone running a prison can put effort into: reducing costs or improving quality.

Improvements in quality could involve increasing rehabilitation rates, reducing violent incidents and or minimising escape risks. Lower costs lead to lower quality. For example, employing fewer guards might result in more escape attempts or prisoner-on-prisoner violence.

Read more: People have lost faith in privatisation and it’s easy to see why

Cost versus quality

When the government owns the prison and employs a warden to run it, it doesn’t have to rely just on an written contract to get what it wants in terms of investment in quality. It can tell the warden what to do, and replace them if they don’t produce the goods.

If it’s serious about quality, though, the government will likely have to provide more resources. Quality costs.

When a prison is privatised, the government’s control over how the operator acts is limited to its contract.

In a perfect contract, the government could stipulate how much the private contractor is allowed to reduce costs and how much it must improve quality.

But these things are difficult to write into contracts. Wherever there are gaps, any contractor providing a fixed-price service will look to cut costs instead of improving quality.

So that’s the trade-off. When low cost is very important, private contracting is best. But when quality is more important, government ownership is optimal.

The Victorian quarantine

What’s more important in hotel quarantine during a pandemic: cost or quality?

The Hart-Shelifer-Vishny rationale tells us the Melbourne hotels should not have been policed by private security contractors, because the highest possible standards were paramount.

Moreover, even if one could write a complete contract, it doesn’t really matter. There’s no real recourse in this case for a breach of contract. The cost is billions of dollars in damage to the economy already. What good is a contract with a bankrupt contractor?

Read more: Victorian COVID crisis to deliver $3.3 billion hit to nation’s growth in September quarter

Of course, police (and other public servants) aren’t always perfect either. But at least there is more training, a code of conduct, a sense of duty and a whole apparatus for disciplining misbehaviour.

The Coate inquiry may uncover valuable details about where and how the quarantine system failed, but economics can already point us to why it was destined to fail.

When high quality matters more than low cost, governments shouldn’t outsource unless absolutely necessary.

The choice for hotel quarantine should have been clear.

– ref. Vital Signs: Victoria’s privatised quarantine arrangements were destined to fail – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-victorias-privatised-quarantine-arrangements-were-destined-to-fail-143169

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anna Haebich, Senior Research Professor, Curtin University

It is not widely known that many Australian colonial natural history collections are represented in German museums and herbaria, nor that there are initiatives to transform these artefacts of colonial heritage and science back into objects from living cultures with living custodians and their own stories to tell.

Dr Johann August Ludwig Preiss (1811–1883) played a significant role in this evolving story as the first professional botanist to collect systematically in the Colony of Western Australia from 1838 to 1842.

His collections of flora and fauna were pivotal in opening this globally significant region of biodiversity to the world — and he beat the British at their own game by bringing their new colony’s botanical wonder to scientists, nurserymen and gardeners in Europe.

Read more: Botany and the colonisation of Australia in 1770

Despite his unusually long sojourn collecting in Western Australia, Preiss has been largely forgotten – unlike his contemporary, the naturalist and explorer Ludwig Leichhardt (1813–1848), well known for his work in northern and eastern Australia and his ill-fated 1848 expedition to cross the continent; and the globally active science visionary Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), whose birth anniversaries were celebrated in Germany and Australia in 2013 and 2019 respectively.

Preiss held no important posts in exploration, science or public office and left only a small selection of archived letters and some strangers’ impressions. So, we are left to speculate about the negative spaces between the known fragments of Preiss’s life and the agents – human and non-human – of the worlds he moved through.

The natural sciences in Germany and Britain in the 19th century shared much common ground: there were royal dynastic connections, cultural ties, migrations to Australia and complementary interests in advancing the natural sciences.

The British Empire, however, had the edge over Germany, with global networks plugged into the nerve centre of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew – an oasis of collecting, classifying, storing, propagating and dispersing exotic and useful plants in Britain and the colonies.

Germany had more diffuse networks of scientists, across scattered institutions – universities, herbaria and botanical gardens – focused on classifying and documenting the diversity of flora and fauna into rigid systems, using dried, preserved and some live specimens.

In Preiss’s time Germany had no colonies to draw on but collected on others’ turf. In British colonies this seemingly innocent practice was supported by their structures of privilege and violence.

While there were no legal prohibitions on German naturalists collecting in British colonies, Preiss irritated his hosts by staying so long, collecting so much and transporting most of it back to Germany, not London.

A botanising craze

Preiss came from humble origins in the small village of Herzberg am Harz, in the Harz Mountains of the Göttingen district of Lower Saxony. When I visited there in 2018 to learn about Preiss’s family and early life, the council archivist Dieter Karl Wolfe explained there was little local information known about his family.

Preiss was the eldest surviving son of 12 children, and his father was a master saddler (like his father before him), a vinegar brewer and land owner. His cousin Gustav Friedrich Preiss (1825–1888) was the family success: he printed the local daily newspaper Kreiss Zeitung from 1848, became the village mayor and built a fine home. There are portraits of him and his wife in the council archive.

Another more internationally minded relative helped start the town’s Esperanto Society in the early 1900s. Friendly Esparantists showed me public monuments for Esperanto and its Polish founder, Ludwik Zamenhof (1859–1917) – but there was nothing to commemorate Preiss, their local botanical achiever.

Speculating on why Preiss took up botanising in far distant lands, Wolfe extolled the benefits of Germany’s advanced education system for gifted youths of limited means – like Preiss and Leichhardt.

The ideal was a humanistic education to equip children with the foundations of learning and intellect, allowing students to build further knowledge and expertise in adult life. The curriculum included science and languages.

Preiss probably followed the same schooling trajectory as Leichhardt: boarding school, gymnasium, university. Preiss was university educated and held a German DPhil doctorate. This was more like a degree with an original research component than today’s formal doctorate qualification.

Preiss’s faculty “promoter” was probably Professor Johann Georg Christian Lehmann (1792–1860), director of Hamburg’s botanic garden, who sent Preiss to the Western Australian Colony.

The craze for botanising gripped both scholars and amateurs and opened new opportunities for serious study, teaching and collecting – assisted by new equipment, including the vasculum (a botanical tin case for collecting in the field), drying papers for preparing specimens, Wardian cases (ensuring safe transportation back to Europe) and glass houses for cultivating living plants.

Read more: How the Wardian case revolutionised the plant trade – and Australian gardens

In the 1830s, the botanical world was abuzz with news of Western Australia’s unique floral diversity. Transport of plants to London was still in its early days in 1836 when Lehmann first recognised the chance for expansion through the 25-year-old Preiss.

Preiss recalled being instructed to collect everything – flora, fauna, minerals and fossils – and hoped to “collect the products of [natural history] and arrange those products in a useful way for the purpose of Science”.

Lehmann and his wealthy friend, Wilhelm von Winthem (1799–1847), a private collector and entomologist with extensive collections, organised funds for him through a form of venture capital under which the von Winthem family company publicised and sold shares to private citizens and collecting institutions.

On Preiss’s return, investors would choose items from his collections equal to the value of their shares.

Rich wilderness

Arriving in Perth in late 1838, a dusty village huddled between vast expanses of sea, bush and hinterland, Preiss encountered a parochial society.

Local collectors who worked with London’s botanical elite guarded their status jealously. Most colonists were disillusioned by false promises of rich farming lands and worn out by the struggle to survive.

I imagine Preiss as lonely and friendless.

The local landscape would have been so strange for Preiss, humanised by millennia of Nyungar curation but an apparent wilderness to the colonists’ eyes.

Botanical scientist Steve Hopper has revealed how the deep time of the region’s unusually stable environmental evolution both helped shape the unique floristic richness and endemism of this area and enhanced Nyungar people’s deep knowledge (kartijin) of their country – enabling them to live well off the diversity of plant foods they cultivated and nurtured with practices they adapted to the environment and passed down over many thousands of years.

This richness drew Preiss in.

Preiss began collecting immediately. In contrast to local British collectors he had the freedom of sufficient funds and no domestic encumbrances or civic duties. He also had no rights to own land.

His extensive collecting implicated him in the process of multispecies destruction and dispossession. The Indigenous Nyungar people were already in a state of crisis as colonists destroyed their ancient accommodations to the land and replaced them with their own hasty adaptations of species and farming.

The destruction intensified during the 20th century with the clearing of 90% of the region for wheat farming. In fewer than 200 years this encounter between Old and New World ecosystems transformed the landscapes of exceptional floral riches into a canary in the coalmine for climate change.

Read more: Writing the WA wheatbelt, a place of radical environmental change

A new critical approach to Australian 19th century natural history collections in German institutions has been prompted by concerns about their colonial provenance and reports of environmental damage.

In 2018 in Berlin, curators and scholars attended an international conference on the politics of natural history and decolonising of collections and museums.

There were calls to open conversations with Indigenous custodians and reflect on issues of climate change. Environmental knowledge in Preiss’s field notebooks, now missing, could have made an important contribution.

In a report on the colony published in Flora (1842), Preiss wrote that he “recorded [information] about specimens he observed and learned accurately from the Aborigines”.

The field books from his 1841 survey commission held in the State Records Office in Perth suggest the extent of the loss, being richly illustrated with botanical and landscape features and detailed annotations of measures and calculations.

They speak eloquently today of how seriously Preiss took this colonial project to map “the significance of the earth … as a space to be occupied”.

Preiss wrote that he “traversed this land in all directions … [and] observed the greatest diversity of plants”. It seems he had no transport or equipment for long surveys, so often walked lengthy distances alone.

This was an intimate way for Preiss to come to know the bush. His proximity to plants and the earth sharpened his eye for shapes and colours as well as his capacity to interpret signs along bush pathways. He sometimes travelled with colleagues, and visited Rottnest Island with the colony’s chief botanist James Drummond and John Gilbert, who collected for British ornithologist John Gould.

And he relied on the hospitality of homesteaders and assistance from Nyungar people. The colony’s Advocate-General George Fletcher Moore noted an instance, perhaps disapprovingly, of Preiss walking out of the bush with a Nyungar woman, both of them loaded down with plants.

He added that “the natives seem quite surprised at his collecting the jilbah [shrubs] and are very curious to know what he does with them”, suggesting that Preiss was following the colonial practice of collecting without their permission.

Despite being the colony’s best qualified botanist, Preiss was never invited to join its British collecting networks. Instead, Preiss built his own networks in London and Germany.

Drummond became his occasional helper and nemesis. He warned his London patron, Sir William Hooker (1785–1865), that the new German botanist was collecting for the Russian, Prussian and some German states.

The German botanist Dr Ludwig Diels (1874–1945), who collected in the area in 1906, imagined the two men as benign opposites: the older “bushman, always in the saddle” out collecting rather than “arranging his specimens in order” and young Preiss, the “cultured scientist of old Europe” and first collector in the colony to have “each item in his collection carefully labelled, giving the locality and other data”.

However, simmering resentments erupted after Preiss challenged Drummond’s identification of a poison plant killing stock and quaffed an infusion of its leaves to prove his point. Preiss survived the ordeal but lost the argument after Drummond proved the plants’ toxicity for stock.

The more Preiss wore out his welcome in the colony, the more determined he became to stay and in 1839 he decided to try his luck as a British subject, with all the benefits and moral compromises this bestowed.

In 1839 he wrote to the colonial governor requesting naturalisation as a British subject, referring to British connections with the kingdom of Hanover near his birthplace.

He outlined his intention to return to Germany to raise funds for expeditions into the northern interior to explore, collect and open up the land and then become a farmer.

He proposed to sell his collections to the British government for £3,000 – “being produce of a British territory” – and added, “I flatter myself that such a collection has never been sent from this country to England” and there were many new species “not known in Britain and Europe”.

He also proposed a German immigration scheme to help resolve labour shortages in the colony, suggesting that 50 young farming families be enticed from Saxony and the Rhine Province in a payback arrangement with other settlers and for his own farming needs, with government land grants payable for bringing out workers.

If his proposal was not accepted he would seek Prussian and Russian funding to explore the north coast.

The British government refused Preiss’s offers, preferring to acquire from established British collectors such as Gould and Gilbert. His request for naturalisation was finally granted in 1841. The next year he travelled back to Europe, taking with him the largest collection then to leave the colony.

Lauded at the time, Preiss’s actions of taking Indigenous plant material and knowledge without consent for scientific gain would now be condemned as bio-piracy.

The collection included 200,000 plants with around 2,500 species and collections of algae, fungi, lichens, bryophytes as well as species of birds, reptiles, mammals, shells and more, as well as his copious notes.

Packed firmly in tin-lined boxes, they travelled well. Ironically, Preiss’s boxes left no space on board for Drummond’s collection of seeds and specimens to be sent to London. Delays in its passage meant that nurseries lost an entire season for planting – while Preiss’s quality collections and duplicate plants entirely spoiled the market for Drummond.

Diels lavishly praised Preiss’s collections for the sheer quantity of specimens he had collected in such a short period, the range of plant specimens, detailed information to identify flowers and plants and his collecting sites, the overall presentation that made his collections and notes so useful to science, and the outstanding achievement of producing the first West Australian collection for Europe’s leading herbaria.

Australian naturalist Rica Erikson (1908–2009) observed that his collections were “far superior to others being offered for sale in England”, but that British botanists “were prejudiced in favour of collectors of their own nationality”.

Troubled returns

Preiss’s return to Germany via London was troubled – although he did manage to sell some plants and seeds to fund his journey across to Hamburg. But the situation he found there was disastrous.

The Great Fire of Hamburg in May 1842 had killed more than 50 people and destroyed many public and private buildings. The huge costs of rebuilding would cripple the state – and plans for the natural history museum that would have housed Preiss’s collections were shelved, along with their purchase.

Preiss was now forced to advertise the collections for sale – both to cover his debts from the trip and to offload the sheer quantity of material remaining after his investors’ selections.

He placed advertisements praising the excellence of his collections in botanical and gardening journals, wrote letters to institutions and private collectors, and published his report in the Flora with observations of natural features of the colony.

He also announced his intention to make a second longer journey in Australia from the Gulf of Carpentaria across country to the Swan River Colony. A portion of the current collections, he said, would be delivered to Lehmann “as soon as they are generally arranged, and … description and publication [entrusted] to him and other celebrated natural historians”.

Preiss’s expedition never eventuated, but the book hinted at in his report was a triumph. The two-volume publication named Plantae Preissianae (1844– 1847) was compiled by Lehmann with leading German botanists working from the collections, all with extensive publications on Australian species.

This was the first major reference book on Western Australian flora, and preceded by decades the British seven-volume Flora Australiensis (1863–1878) compiled by botanist George Bentham (1800–1884) – although that work, too, featured several of Preiss’s specimens.

There were further honours for Preiss: he was commemorated in the names of around 100 plants – a matter of considerable status; in 1843 he was elected to membership of the National Academy of Germany; and in the same year his name was added to the registry of the Regensburg Royal Botanical Society.

And his collections began their own journeys. Splitting them for sale dispersed them into private collections and an estimated 35 European herbaria, with the “original” or standard reference set of specimens for Plantae Preissianae passing from Lehmann to his widow, and eventually to its final resting place in the Lund herbarium in Sweden when Germany declined to buy it.

Preiss’s extensive zoological collections of mammals, birds, reptiles, insects and other material did not fare so well.

Some were sold to European museums or dealers but many simply disappeared or can no longer be identified as his. Credit for his “discoveries” of new species was given to other collectors.

His entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography laments that “had Preiss the backing of an ambitious and enterprising zoologist, as Gilbert had in Gould, it is certain that he would have been much better known today”.

Despite the success of the book and his standing among Europe’s natural historians, in 1843 Preiss suddenly announced that he was leaving Hamburg along with his collections – at the “urgent wishes of my father” – and that all future letters should be sent to him at Herzberg.

He gave no further explanation for this; in the modern parlance, it seems he just “left the building”.

This sudden shift by Preiss from a very public life to a very private one remains an unsolved mystery. Preiss’s legacy, however, is enduring.

His remarkable achievements in the few years between 1838 and 1843 created a permanent link between the botanical sciences in Western Australia and Germany. His sudden withdrawal opened a space for others to lead.

But how will the collections fare under the well-deserved critical scrutiny of their colonial origins and histories in German institutions? Can they be decolonised to take on new tasks relevant for today?

A couple of years ago, sitting with Preiss’s dryandra specimens at the Göttingen herbarium, I was inspired to see them as potential message sticks with agency to bring people together.

Now I’m part of a new project, Healing Land Healing People, based at Dryandra Woodlands south-east of Perth in the country of our project leader, Nyungar Elder Darryl Kickett.

We are working with the knowledge of Nyungar families, botanists, historians and artists to restore the biodiversity of the land and community cultural strengths. We work with similar projects at other sites in the south-west region.

In Germany we are linked with the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Cologne and the Rachel Carson Center at the University of Munich. My role is to identify other collections from the region in European museums and herbaria and their curators.

With Nyungar Elders and curators sharing their knowledge and stories we can map the journeys of the message sticks from the sites where they were collected to their present locations.

With our German colleagues we can weave new narratives of biodiversity loss and restoration to engage the public, heal the past and ensure a future for our corner of Western Australia and other global biodiversity hotspots.

This piece is republished with permission from GriffithReview69: The European Exchange, edited by Ashley Hay and Natasha Cica, and published in partnership with the Australian National University griffithreview.com

– ref. Friday essay: the forgotten German botanist who took 200,000 Australian plants to Europe – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-forgotten-german-botanist-who-took-200-000-australian-plants-to-europe-143099

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

Josh Frydenberg, a Victorian, wore a surgical mask as he walked from his parliament house office to a committee room to deliver the government’s economic statement.

The treasurer had already had to obtain permission from the ACT government to be in Canberra.

Symbolic reminders, as if anyone needed them, that Victoria holds the key to whether the dire budget numbers Frydenberg presented on Thursday represent the floor under this crisis, or they’re just a prelude to an even scarier set.

Frydenberg describes the numbers, including a projected deficit this financial year of $184.4 billion, as “eye-watering”.

For the millions of people either jobless or being precariously supported by JobKeeper, the most frightening figure will be 9.25% – the expected peak in the unemployment rate, coming by year’s end. (Of course that will be an understatement – Frydenberg told us the other day that already the real unemployment level has topped 11%.)

For these people, as well as the many others on squeezed incomes, it will be the bleakest Christmas imaginable.

Read more: Five things you need to know about today’s economic statement

But in this pandemic, Christmas is an eternity away, because so much is up in the air, as the economic statement indicates. Crucially, it assumes Victoria’s lockdown lasts just its scheduled six weeks. If things deteriorate, that could be extended; at worst, the lockdown could be toughened.

Then there’s NSW, which is holding the line on cases, but sits on a knife edge.

With Victoria exposed as the weak link in the nation’s health response, the Andrews government is under deserved criticism. It failed on quarantine; its tracing effort has been inadequate; there’s been conflicting information on isolating.

The virus is running through Victorian aged care facilities, both staff and residents. Indeed the inability to protect this sector raises questions at a national level, given the likely problems with its workforces should have been addressed earlier and better.

If Victoria’s crisis deepens, the numbers in the economic statement will have to be drastically overhauled in the October budget, and more money spent.

Even if the health situation doesn’t worsen, it will be incredibly tough for many people as they compete for a limited pool of jobs, and for many businesses, some of which won’t make it to that “other side”.

Scott Morrison has won deserved praise for his handling of the pandemic and, as the situation stands, this week’s decisions appear appropriate.

Despite the government’s earlier hopes of “snapback”, extensions of JobKeeper and the Coronovirus Supplement to JobSeeker were vital to avoid the economy falling of that much-feared “cliff”.

After October the government is building in step-downs to lower payments; also, JobKeeper will be two-tiered.

Critics say the reductions will be premature, but on the assumption the economy will be transitioning, some winding back is reasonable. If the virus gets away from us, it will be another story.

The economic statement embraces, of necessity, debt and deficits of massive proportions. Net debt is forecast to increase to $677.1 billion by mid next year, 35.7% of GDP (in 2018-19 it was under 20%).

If anyone had told the Coalition when it was elected in 2013 that it would be presiding over such a debt level, let alone arguing its virtues, they’d have been laughed out of court.

But as Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said, “what was the alternative?” Australia is also in a much better position than many other countries to handle debt, given it started with it a low proportion to GDP. Moreover the funds can be borrowed extremely cheaply.

A pragmatic Morrison isn’t fretting about retiring that old “debt truck” to the junk yard, its tyres blown off, now it’s unfit for purpose.

In purely political terms, Morrison is well placed (which isn’t to say this will necessarily last). During the pandemic, people have looked to governments; historically low levels of trust have risen. It mightn’t stay like that on the long road ahead but this has helped the government so far.

The Morrison government does face criticism but it is muted or, to an extent, impotent.

Read more: Budget deficit to hit $184.5B this financial year, unemployment to peak at 9.25% in December: economic statement

The muted version comes from Labor, which picks around the edges of the government’s actions, while endorsing the headline measures. That’s about the only course Albanese’s opposition can take; in these desperate times, Labor is forced to the margins of relevance.

More interesting perhaps is the discontent on the right, which includes the government’s hardline supporters in the commentariat.

Many of these critics have been beside themselves, claiming the government has massively over-reacted to the virus. They would have the scales weighing health and economy reset to heavily favour the latter. The threat of COVID-19 has been much exaggerated, they insist, emphasising the mildness of the disease for most who get it. For these critics, the numbers in the economic statement are horrific.

The argument of those on the right is flawed in policy terms, and certainly not where the mainstream public sit. If COVID-19 produced a large death toll, the economy would tank a lot further. It’s fanciful to think activity and investment would swing along merrily.

Morrison has his eyes firmly on pushing ahead with a return to some sort of economic normality. But he also accepts the health imperative when circumstances force that. He didn’t attack Victoria’s new lockdown. Indeed, he has stopped chastising journalists for using the term “lockdown” (of which there are various versions).

With the economic statement out, attention will turn to the budget, and the reform agenda.

This week we received a fresh strong signal on the latter, with Morrison again flagging he’s determined to leverage the crisis to achieve long term industrial relations flexibility.

He has underway a negotiating process on workplace relations bringing together business, unions and government. While he’s looking for some agreement, this is also about legitimising the pursuit of change.

“We’ve been adopting a highly consultative approach,” he said. “But none of us are so naive to think that this will result in a complete agreement on all measures.

Read more: These budget numbers are shocking, and there are worse ones in store

“I can assure you, we’ll put forward what we think is best for the Australian economy and for the Australian people. … We’ll seek to legislate that through the parliament.”

Morrison insists the economic statement is not a mini-budget. He’s right. It is an update of budget numbers – albeit like no other we’ve seen – plus the extension of existing programs. The decisions ahead will actually be harder to make than this week’s, and in some instances, a lot more difficult to sell.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Pandemic has blown the tyres right off that old Coalition debt truck – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-pandemic-has-blown-the-tyres-right-off-that-old-coalition-debt-truck-143275

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Danielle Wood, Chief executive officer, Grattan Institute

Australia is living through the biggest economic and social disruption since the second world war. Today’s budget update provides a stark reminder of just how big the economic and budgetary fallout really is.

If you don’t have the appetite to wade through the 180-page economic statement, here are the five big takeaways.

1. The economy will be in the doldrums for a while yet

Australian gross domestic product is expected to fall by 3.75% in 2020, before rebounding to grow by 2.5% in 2021, leaving GDP still 3% below pre-COVID levels mid next year.

The global outlook is bleaker.

Global GDP is forecast to contract by 4.75 per cent in 2020, the worst decline since the Great Depression in the 1930s, before rebounding to grow by 5% in 2021.

Australia’s official unemployment rate is now expected to rise from 7.4% today to a peak of 9.25% by Christmas, as most firms move off JobKeeper and many Australians who are without work start looking again.

Yet even this bleak set of numbers takes on a rosy hue against the backdrop of the worsening COVID-19 outbreaks in Victoria and NSW.

Treasury assumes the lockdown in Victoria will last just six weeks and outbreaks in NSW will remain localised. Neither outcome is assured, or even likely.

Meanwhile renewed outbreaks across the United States, Europe, and much of Asia point to the difficulty of reopening our economy safely while the virus remains active in the community.

2. Red is the new black

The headline deficits of A$85.8 billion last financial year and $184.5 billion this financial year are indeed “eye-watering” as the treasurer says.

The turn-around from the $5 billion surplus expected in December is a stark reminder never to count your chickens before they hatch.

But no one could have predicted a global pandemic.

The government has rightly spent big to support households and businesses through the crisis ($162 billion in 2019-20 and 2020-21). Shutdowns have hurt revenue too, with lower than expected company tax and goods and services tax collections, and a big drop in the forecast for personal income tax receipts because of the jump in unemployment.

Read more: These budget numbers are shocking, and there are worse ones in store

Net debt is expected to reach 35.7% of GDP this financial year, the highest level since World War II. But it is worth remembering that debt reached more than 100% of GDP in the 1940s, and Australia’s debt levels have held at remarkably low levels by international standards since the 1970s, and remain relatively low even now.

3. The fiscal cliff is still steep

Until this week, all of the government’s major crisis supports – including JobKeeper, the coronavirus supplement, and regulatory supports for businesses and households – were due to end abruptly in October, creating a fiscal cliff.

The government announced on Tuesday that it would extend the coronavirus supplement to December and JobKeeper to March, but both supports will be less generous, and JobKeeper will be more targeted. This means a cliff still looms in October, albeit with a slightly less deadly drop off.

Fiscal support will be $18 billion a month on average (10.7% of monthly GDP) until October, but this drops to $3 billion a month on average (1.9% of GDP) for the six months beyond. This will leave a big hole in economic activity, unlikely to be entirely filled by the private sector recovery.

4. The government missed an opportunity to announce more

As bleak as today’s economic forecasts are, the lack of any new fiscal stimulus announcements is even more striking.

The government has missed a golden opportunity to commit to new stimulus measures to support the recovery – something that most economists agree is needed.

Last month Grattan Institute estimated that $70-$90 billion in stimulus would be required over the next two years to bring unemployment down to below 5% and get wages growing again.

Today’s forecasts of a slower economic recovery, and the prospect of a worsening outbreak in Victoria, makes that stimulus even more urgent.

Stimulus takes time to roll out. Waiting for the October budget when we have already passed the cliff face means that money won’t hit the economy as fast as it needs to.

5. Don’t panic

Despite the big headline deficits, now is not the time to panic about higher debt.

This is a once-in-a-century shock and using the balance sheet to cushion the blow, as the government has done, helps to ensure the costs of this crisis are more evenly shared across society and over time.

With interest rates at record lows, the interest burden is less than you might think.

The Commonwealth government can borrow for 10 years at an interest rate under 1%.

This means the additional $394 billion in net debt over the next two years will increase net interest payments by less than $4 billion a year, comfortably manageable within the current budget envelope.

Indeed, interest repayments are expected to remain lower than after the 1980s and 1990s recessions.

These debt levels are manageable over time in a growing economy. The bigger concern is that the government has not yet done enough to get the economy back on track.

Read more: Budget deficit to hit $184.5B this financial year, unemployment to peak at 9.25% in December: economic statement

– ref. Five things you need to know about today’s economic statement – https://theconversation.com/five-things-you-need-to-know-about-todays-economic-statement-143088