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

Last year COVID-19 seemed simple. It was horrific, but the arguments about what to do were fairly straightforward.

On one side were people rightly horrified by its rapid spread who wanted us to stay at home and stay away from school and work and socialising in order to save lives.

On the other side were people concerned about the costs of those measures — to jobs, to education, to freedom, to mental health, and to other lives (because if we used too much of our health system fighting COVID-19, other lives might fall through the cracks).

And through it all came a kind of consensus.

The concern about non-COVID deaths turned out to be overblown. Last year Australia recorded fewer than normal doctor-certified deaths, in part because the COVID restrictions stopped deaths from influenza, and in part because they snuffed out COVID-19 early, ensuring hospitals weren’t overwhelmed.

Last year, we didn’t have to choose

Concern about jobs also turned out to be overblown. By locking down hard and early, and paying employers to keep on staff (through JobKeeper) we ensured the lockdowns would be short-lived, with light at the end of the tunnel.

In none of the states for which there is data was there an increase in suicides.

The insurance company ClearView told a parliamentary committee this June its research found things were better than expected in part because of the universal nature of the pandemic. Everyone knew “everyone was in this together”.

Another reason was telehealth. It was easier to get help than before.

Read more:
7 lessons for Australia’s health system from the coronavirus upheaval

And students returned to school sooner than they would have had the lockdowns had been weaker or started later, leaving much of their education intact.

The consensus was that by locking down hard and early we got the best of both worlds — near-elimination of COVID-19 and a quick return to normal life. Anyone who remembers Christmas last year remembers how normal it felt.

Economics is called the dismal science in part because it is about hard choices — situations where we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Last year it seemed as if COVID wasn’t one of them. Starving the virus early gave us both one of the world’s lowest death tolls and one of its shortest recessions.

Hard choices are back in sight

And then came Delta.

Far more contagious than the original, and with fewer immediate symptoms (making it harder to trace) the Delta variant became almost impossible to get on top of in the two big states where it took hold.

And without very high vaccination rates — in the view of the Grattan Institute significantly higher than either the NSW, Victorian or Commonwealth governments are targeting — it became all but impossible to reopen without condemning Australians to COVID deaths.

The new reality is plunging us back toward the territory economists call their own — the world of hard choices.

If the lockdowns don’t end (and there is no sign they can end any time soon without costing lives) education and mental health and jobs will indeed suffer.

There’s only so long businesses can hang on without pulling the pin.

We are getting closer to having to trade off lives against freedoms; getting closer to having to decide how many COVID deaths and how much COVID illness we are prepared to live with in order to return to something more like normal living.

Last week’s NSW “roadmap to freedom” implicitly made those tradeoffs.

Calculations prepared by the Treasury and the Grattan Institute make them more explicit.

There are few important things to note. One is that we might yet be able to get the best of both worlds.

We might yet be able to effectively eliminate the delta strand, restoring both health and freedoms (as we did with the earlier strand).

It won’t happen if we ease restrictions before transmission has stopped, as some states are planning to.

Lockdowns without end are unsustainable

Another is that unending lockdowns are untenable. While last year’s lockdowns didn’t do the psychological and health and educational damage that was feared, lockdowns without end would.

One type of damage clearly evident in the comprehensive report on last year’s lockdowns from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is family and domestic violence. The longer lockdowns continue, the longer elevated violence is likely to continue.

And another thing to note is that in a world where we have to make tradeoffs there are no particularly good options. Allowing the disease to spread in order to restore freedom of movement would itself curtail freedom of movement.

Read more:
Economists back social distancing 34-9 in new poll

An analysis across US states suggests 90% of last year’s collapse in face-to-face shopping was due to fear of COVID rather than formal COVID restrictions. That fear will grow if we lift restrictions and COVID spreads.

The Grattan Institute would lift lockdowns only when 80% of the entire population has been double vaccinated (not 70-80% of people aged 16+ as the NSW and national plans envisage, which amounts to 56-64% of the population).

Grattan believes its plan would cost 2,000-3,000 lives per year; a cost it believes the public would accept because it is similar to the normal toll from flu.

The NSW and national plans (Victoria’s isn’t spelled out) would cost much more.

No option is particularly good

The Commonwealth Treasury finds, perhaps counter-intuitively, that an aggressive lockdown strategy that saved more lives would impose lower economic costs (about A$1 billion per week lower) in part because it would end up producing fewer lockdowns.

They are the sort of calculations we hoped never to have to make.

There’s still a chance we might not. With a Herculean effort NSW and Victoria could yet join Taiwan, New Zealand and every other Australian state in being effectively COVID-free. But they are running out of time.

Read more:
NSW risks a second larger COVID peak by Christmas if it eases restrictions too quickly

Peter Martin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Delta is tempting us to trade lives for freedoms — a choice it had looked like we wouldn’t have to make – https://theconversation.com/delta-is-tempting-us-to-trade-lives-for-freedoms-a-choice-it-had-looked-like-we-wouldnt-have-to-make-167762

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Droogan, Senior Lecturer, Macquarie University

Despite cliched talk of a “graveyard of empires”, what we now call Afghanistan has for thousands of years been an important part of many sophisticated cultures.

Situated along the Silk Road — a tangle of Eurasian trade routes stretching back to the days of the Roman Empire — Afghanistan and its people have long served as a place of connection between Mediterranean, Persian, Indian and Chinese civilisations.

It has been home to Hellenistic cities populated by the successors of Alexander the Great, glittering Buddhist monasteries that served to transmit early Buddhism from India to far away China and Japan, and a series of Medieval Islamic kingdoms at the forefront of the literature and science of their day.

This dazzlingly diverse heritage is preserved in over 2,600 archaeological sites scattered across its rugged terrain, numerous regional museums and galleries, and, most famously, the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul. Refurbished in 2007, the museum holds a collection of over 80,000 artefacts from throughout the region.

All of this is now under renewed threat by Taliban forces, whose fanatical interpretation of Islam forbids representative imagery, and is particularly dismissive of anything it considers to be non-Islamic.

While remaining focused on the plight of the Afghan people, countries such as the US, UK, and Australia need to also start planning how they can reduce the coming assault on Afghanistan’s art, history and material culture.

A history of destruction

Afghanistan’s archaeological sites were previously systematically looted and destroyed during the period of Soviet occupation and warlordism that followed.

In the 1980s, whole ancient sites were illegally excavated with artifacts sold off under cover of war. The Hellenistic Greek city of Ai-Khanoum, dating from the 4th century BCE to the mid-2nd century CE and discovered in the 1830s, was destroyed, including its Greek theatre, gymnasium and temple to Zeus.

During Afghanistan’s civil war in the early 1990s, items from the 12th century palace of Mas’ud III were looted and distributed through international black markets.

The National Museum in Kabul, established in 1919, was extensively damaged and looted in the period immediately following the end of communist rule in 1992.

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asytreewwqqqaafgir — from as early as the 2nd century —

From 1996 to 2001, the Taliban outlawed almost all forms of art while systematically looting and destroying libraries and museums, and persecuting anyone considered to be an expert or academic.

The Taliban were ruthless in their destruction, but also strategic. They saw Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic art and culture as a resource to be used and abused where possible to aid their international objectives.

Most infamously, during their final year in power they glorified in the demolition of the 6th century Bamiyan Buddhas while also decimating the already weakened collections of the National Museum.

Just two years earlier, in 1999, the Taliban Minister of Culture had assured the international community Afghanistan’s Buddhist heritage would be safe under his custodianship. In 2001, they what the Bayiman Buddhas? were held hostage — and ultimately destroyed — while the Taliban demanded international recognition.

Read more:
Should Australia recognise a Taliban government?

What does this mean for Afghanistan today?

The Taliban are again claiming Afghanistan’s heritage will be safe under their rule.

Statements have been released instructing fighters to protect and preserve historical sites, halt the plundering of archaeological digs, and forbid the selling of antiquities on the black market. Guards have been posted at the National Museum to prevent looting.

However, this initial charm offensive could just be the opening move in a longer strategy in which Afghanistan’s history and heritage will be once again held hostage. Priceless cultural treasures may be threatened with destruction.

Archaeologists and curators responsible for preserving Afghanistan’s national heritage were caught off-guard by the Taliban’s rapid advance. Many are now seeking to flee the country or are going into hiding.

Read more:
The situation in Afghanistan is beyond horrifying: this is what you can do to help

The loss of these experts and custodians of Afghanistan’s rich heritage will mean there is nobody to protect its material past from neglect or looting. Nor will future generations of young Afghans be able to learn about their past from fellow citizens who have dedicated their lives to preserving it.

Australia’s part to play in stopping illegal trade

Looted antiquities make up a lucrative international black market. There is a proven connection between these back markets and international terrorist groups such as the Islamic State.

As has been seen in Iraq and Syria, the looting and sale of the archaeological heritage of Afghanistan could be used to fund international terrorism.

Markets for illegally looted artefacts only exist while international collectors — including museums and galleries — continue to acquire stolen antiquities.

Read more:
Illegal trade in antiquities: a scourge that has gone on for millennia too long

Afghanistan remains, first and foremost, a humanitarian tragedy and we must do what we can to assist the Afghan people.

But now is also the time for Australia and other liberal democracies to put in place stronger legal safeguards to prevent the trafficking of antiquities, in particular much stronger border security and customs measures for the detection and ending of this illicit trade.

Malcolm Choat receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Julian Droogan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. The Taliban’s rule threatens what’s left of Afghanistan’s dazzlingly diverse cultural history – https://theconversation.com/the-talibans-rule-threatens-whats-left-of-afghanistans-dazzlingly-diverse-cultural-history-167780

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Dare, Professor of Philosophy, University of Auckland

With COVID-19 causing extraordinarily intrusive and expensive lockdowns, vaccine “passports” or certificates are increasingly seen as key to getting out of them. Decision-makers and gatekeepers – from border guards to maître d’s – will have a means of knowing who can safely engage with others.

To that end, the New Zealand government aims to have one in place by year’s end. But vaccine passports have also prompted riots and protests overseas, and there are as yet unanswered questions about their use domestically.

A central concern is that they will cause or exacerbate inequality because access to a passport relies on access to vaccines, and access to vaccines has been unequal.

Internationally, citizens of some countries are more likely to have access to vaccines – and so to vaccine passports – than citizens of other countries. And within countries, some individuals and groups are more likely to have access to vaccines than others.

Furthermore, these inequalities track familiar and ethically troubling fault lines: New Zealand has struggled to lift Māori vaccination rates to match those of European New Zealanders, though Māori are more at risk.

And vaccine passports could compound existing inequalities, as those with them return to work and other activities while those without remain trapped.

Inequality and discrimination

But there are reasons to think these legitimate concerns don’t automatically mean vaccine passports are unethical.

Firstly, the need to contain COVID-19 justifies the significant restrictions of important liberties in lockdowns. But to the extent that vaccines work, that justification doesn’t apply to someone who has been vaccinated. The justification for curtailing liberties has gone (or at least, given the possibility of breakthrough cases, been considerably weakened), so for the vaccinated the curtailment should go too.

Secondly, distinguishing between people on the basis of their COVID immunity may be discrimination, but it’s not obvious it is unjustified discrimination.

Read more:
Vaccine passports are coming to Australia. How will they work and what will you need them for?

Whether someone is vaccinated or not is arguably legitimate grounds for discrimination. The unvaccinated (for whatever reason) pose a greater risk to others than the vaccinated. They are also more likely to suffer severe symptoms if they get COVID-19.

Thirdly, one reason to tolerate inequality is that sometimes it improves the position of the disadvantaged. We might tolerate doctors’ high incomes, for example, if the promise of a higher income led people to study medicine and we believed a good supply of doctors benefited the worst-off members of our community.

Vaccine passports might work the same way. They help get the economy going, so the government can support those still locked down. They’re also an incentive to vaccinate, and high vaccination rates are good for everyone — perhaps especially the unvaccinated.

An offer you can’t refuse

But the use of vaccine passports as incentives poses some real issues. How they are used is crucial. Under some proposals, vaccination passports are (like conventional passports) essentially another international travel document.

Increasingly, however, countries (including New Zealand potentially) are proposing their use to control access to a significant range of domestic activities, such as returning to work in person, dining out or going to concerts and sports events.

Read more:
Do vaccination passports take away freedoms? It depends on how you frame the question

In this context, it’s clear some incentives can be coercive: they might be an offer you can’t refuse.

There are some people desperate to travel overseas, perhaps for good family reasons. But most of us can still decide whether the incentive of the IATA Travel Pass is enough to motivate us to travel.

Justified coercion?

Many people, though, will simply not be in a position to refuse the incentive of a domestic vaccine passport. Getting back to work and a pre-COVID life will not be a discretionary matter. For them, domestic vaccination passports are likely to be coercive.

For now at least, the government insists vaccination will not be mandatory. But effectively it will be for those who have no choice but to get a vaccine passport to work or have access to non-discretionary domestic activities.

And that coercion will not apply equally. There will be much greater pressure on those who are already socially disadvantaged and less able to make a genuine choice.

Coercion is sometimes justified, and perhaps the threat posed by COVID-19 warrants it. However, we should be wary of accepting kinds of coercion that are discriminatory and inegalitarian.

Read more:
Why we need to seriously reconsider COVID-19 vaccination passports

Governments need to be clear

So what should we do about vaccine passports and vaccine incentives?

We could restrict them to more discretionary activities, such as international travel, concerts and restaurants. That would be an offer anyone could refuse, especially the already disadvantaged.

But this use of passports might be insufficient incentive — too many people might refuse to get one. That’s a problem if we think trying to increase vaccination rates is justified.

So we think governments have a choice: they should address concerns about vaccine passports by avoiding uses that are coercive, discriminatory and inegalitarian. Alternatively, they should acknowledge their position that COVID-19 justifies coercion, and make vaccination mandatory.

The second option would be less discriminatory, and seems less likely to threaten trust and co-operation than the surreptitious and uneven compulsion provided by wide-ranging requirements for domestic vaccine passports.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Why a domestic NZ COVID ‘passport’ raises hard questions about discrimination, inequality and coercion – https://theconversation.com/why-a-domestic-nz-covid-passport-raises-hard-questions-about-discrimination-inequality-and-coercion-167703

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

Multiple doctors’ organisations, led by the Australian Medical Association, and a major farm lobby have called on the federal government to boost Australia’s climate change ambition, as pressure mounts on Scott Morrison and Barnaby Joyce to finalise a deal ahead of the Glasgow conference.

In an open letter to the Prime Minister, the AMA, Doctors for the Environment Australia and many of the country’s medical colleges say: “Medical leaders across the country are calling on your government to urgently take much greater action to avert a further deterioration of the current climate crisis”.

Meanwhile, a report from economic consultants Ernst & Young commissioned by Farmers for Climate Action, which says it has more than 6000 farming supporters, lays out a pathway to zero emissions by 2040 without shrinking Australia’s agriculture, the cattle herd or the sheep flock.

The calls come as Morrison prepares to visit Washington next week for the meeting of the QUAD – leaders of the US, Japan, India and Australia – which will focus on security issues.

While there, Morrison will have a bilateral meeting with President Joe Biden at which climate change and the Glasgow conference would be expected to figure prominently.

Australia is under strong pressure from the US to embrace a net-zero by 2050 target, and to improve its short term ambition.

Morrison and Joyce are in negotiations about what Australia can put forward for Glasgow. But these are not expected to reach an outcome before Morrison leaves for Washington, according to sources.

The doctors’ letter says that with the conference weeks away, “Australia must significantly lift its commitment to the global effort to bring climate change under control in order to save lives and protect health”.

The letter is pointed in saying: “Australia must talk less about aspiration, and focus on firm and binding commitments that are aligned with the science”. The AMA and other medical groups are mapping a path towards emissions reductions in their sector.

“As doctors, we understand the imminent health threats posed by climate change and have seen them already emerge in Australia,” the letter says, referencing the 2019-20 bushfires, saying “that climate disaster” took more than 30 lives as a direct result of the fires.

The doctors’ organisations called on the government to:

• commit to an ambitious national plan to protect health by cutting emissions this decade, including “significantly increasing Australia’s Nationally Determined Contribution to the Paris Agreement … in line with limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

• develop a national climate change and health strategy to facilitate planning for future climate change health impacts

• establish a national Sustainable Healthcare Unit to support environmentally sustainable practice in healthcare and reduce the sector’s own significant emissions.

Medical colleges signing the letter were: The Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists, The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, The Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine, The College of Intensive Care Medicine of Australia and New Zealand, The Royal Australasian College of Medical Administrators, The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, The Royal Australasian College of Physicians, The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists, and the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine.

The Farmers for Climate Action group says in a statement that “farming families do not want to miss the opportunities good climate policy presents for them”.

The consultants’ report includes methods of reducing net emissions such as improved pasture management, selective breeding, feed supplements which reduce stock’s methane output, and “carbon and biodiversity” crops.

“Much of what needs to be happening – planting trees and ground cover on non-productive land and within productive systems, adopting best practice grazing management – is already underway. We just need to scale it up,” the group says.

A case study in the Queensland region of Maranoa (where deputy Nationals leader and agriculture minister David Littleproud has his seat) found an extra 14,000-17,000 jobs and $2 billion to $2.4 billion could be added to the local economy over the next decade while agriculture reduced its net emissions.

Farmers for Climate Action is urging:

• expanding payments to farmers for biodiversity work into a nationwide program

• funding research and development for methane emissions reduction technologies

• strong emissions cuts across energy and transport this decade, to allow all the abatement pathways to achieve their full potential.

Australia has about 83.000 farm businesses.

The group notes research by the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) showing climate change is already costing the average Australian farming family nearly $30,000 a year.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Doctors and farmers turn up heat on Morrison ahead of Glasgow – https://theconversation.com/doctors-and-farmers-turn-up-heat-on-morrison-ahead-of-glasgow-167891

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

As well as her interviews with politicians and experts, Politics with Michelle Grattan now includes “Word from The Hill”, where she discusses the news with members of The Conversation politics team.

In this episode, politics + society editor Amanda Dunn and Michelle discuss Christian Porter’s extraordinary “blind trust” – where generous benefactors (assuming there’s more than one) are helping out with his legal bills in his now discontinued ABC defamation case. Porter, it seems, doesn’t know who he should be thanking because the donors are anonymous.

Amanda and Michelle also canvass Gladys Berejiklian’s on-again-off-again media appearances, and Scott Morrison’s trip to the US next week, which is likely to include some interesting exchanges with President Biden on climate policy.

Additional audio

Gaena, Blue Dot Sessions, from Free Music Archive.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Podcast with Michelle Grattan: Christian Porter’s anonymous money pot – https://theconversation.com/podcast-with-michelle-grattan-christian-porters-anonymous-money-pot-167907

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Novitz, Lecturer, Writing, School of Media and Communication, Swinburne University of Technology

Email newsletters might be associated with the ghost towns of old personal email addresses for many: relentlessly accumulating unopened updates from organisations, stores and services signed up to and forgotten in the distant past. But over the last few years they have experienced a revival, with an increasing number of writers supplementing their income with paid newsletter subscriptions.

Most recently, Salman Rushdie’s decision to use the newsletter subscription service Substack to circulate his latest book has sparked conversation around this platform and its impact on the world of publishing.

What is Substack?

Launched in 2017, Substack allows writers to create newsletters and set up paid subscription tiers for them, offering readers a mixture of free and paywalled content in each edition.

Substack has thus encroached on the traditional territories of newspapers, magazines, the blogosphere – and now trade publishing. Though it is worth noting that until now it has been most enthusiastically adopted by journalists rather than authors.

Rather than monetising the service via advertising, Substack’s profits come from a percentage of paid subscriptions. Substack’s founders see the platform as a way of breaking from the ‘attention economy’ promoted by social media, allowing a space for more thoughtful and substantial writing that is funded directly by readers.

Read more:
Substack isn’t a new model for journalism – it’s a very old one

Not a radical disruption

Rushdie’s decision to publish via Substack signals a surprising inroad into one of the areas associated with trade publishing – literary fiction – and certainly makes for a good news story. He is the first significant literary novelist to publish a substantial work of fiction via the platform and Rushdie himself talks jokingly about helping to kill off the print book with this move.

However, the novella that Rushdie is intending to serialise will almost certainly be available in a more conventional format at some point in the future, given all Substack writers retain full rights to their intellectual property.

Other experiments with digital self-publication by prominent fiction authors, such as Stephen King’s novella Riding the Bullet (first published independently as an eBook), and the fiction first generated on Twitter by writers like David Mitchell and Neil Gaiman, have made their way to traditional publishers.

While this movement provides excellent publicity for Rushdie and the Substack service, it’s perhaps better understood as a limited term platform exclusivity deal than as a radical disruption of the literary publishing ecosystem.

Potentially more interesting is what the “acquisition” of Rushdie by Substack illustrates about their operation as a digital service. Throughout its history, Substack has offered advances to promising writers to support them while they cultivate a subscriber base.

This practice has now been formalised as Substack Pro, where selected writers, like Rushdie himself, are paid a substantial upfront fee to produce content, which Substack recoups by taking a higher percentage of their subscription fees for their first year of writing.

The exact sums paid vary between writers, but it is not dissimilar to a traditional advance on royalties. When coupled with some of the other services that are available to writers with paid subscriptions – like a legal fund and financial support for the editing, design, and production of newsletters – Substack can be seen as operating in a grey area between publisher and platform.

They pursue promising and high-profile writers, generate income, and provide services in ways that parallel the operations of trade publishers, but do not claim rights or responsibilities in relation to the content that is produced.

Although Substack do not see themselves as commissioning writers it could be argued they do play an editorial role in curating content on their platform through not terribly transparent Substack Pro deals and incentives.

The evolution of Substack

Recently Jude Doyle, a trans critic and novelist, has abandoned the platform. They note the irony of how profits generated by the often marginalised or subcultural writers who built paid subscriber bases in the early days of Substack are now being used to fund the much more lucrative deals offered to high-profile right-wing writers, who have in some cases exploited Substack’s weak moderation policy to spread anti-trans rhetoric and encourage harassment.

It could be argued Substack Pro is evolving into an inversion of the traditional (if somewhat idealised) publishing model, where a small number of profitable authors would subsidise the emergence of new writers. Instead, on Substack, profits generated from the work of large numbers of side-hustling writers are used to draw more established voices to the platform.

The founders of Substack have been unapologetic about their policies, considering the “unsubscribe” button to be the ultimate moderation tool for their users. They do, however, acknowledge Substack’s free-market approach may not appeal to all and anticipate competition from alternatives.

Ghost already exists as a non-profit newsletter platform with a more active approach to moderation, and Facebook’s Bulletin provides a carefully curated newsletter service from commissioned writers.

At this stage, the use of newsletters for literary fiction is an experiment, and it remains to be seen if it will be sustainable. As Rushdie puts it: “It will either turn out to be something wonderful and enjoyable, or it won’t.”

Julian Novitz does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Is Salman Rushdie’s decision to publish on Substack the death of the novel? – https://theconversation.com/is-salman-rushdies-decision-to-publish-on-substack-the-death-of-the-novel-167530

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Andrew Schmulow, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Wollongong

The implosion of Australia’s corporate watchdog, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, under the federal government’s new directions, has gone from tragedy to farce.

ASIC was described as “weak, hesitant and timid” in a 2014 Senate review of its performance. To be fair, that was before ASIC’s current leadership. Now any assessment could add “dazed and confused”.

Last week we got a dose of that in the doublespeak of ASIC’s new chair Joseph Longo and deputy chair Sarah Court in their “first significant media interview” — with the Australian Financial Review.

The pair were asked about ASIC’s commitment to the “why not litigate?” approach recommended in 2019 by the Hayne royal commission into misconduct in the financial services industry.

Following the litany of revelations where the corporate regulator had failed to take action against illegal behaviour, royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne made it clear that when ASIC saw a law broken, its obligation, in deciding on a response, was to first ask itself “why not litigate”?

“I love litigation,” Longo told the AFR. “It’s what I used to do and Sarah is an expert at it.”

But in the same interview Court — ASIC’s head of enforcement — said the why-not-litigate strategy “has had its day”.

Regulatory doublespeak

Confusion is to be expected when a regulator is told to both enforce and refrain from enforcing the law — which is effectively what the federal government did last month in the “statement of expectations” it handed ASIC.

The previous statement, issued in 2018, began with acknowledging “the independence of ASIC and its responsibility for market conduct regulation”.

The new statement begins by saying ASIC is expected to “identify and pursue opportunities to contribute to the Government’s economic goals”.

Read more:
Frydenberg’s directions to ASIC throw the banking royal commission under a bus

ASIC accepted the banking royal commission’s why-not-litigate recommendation in 2019. But the federal government’s view of this was underlined last Friday when Longo fronted the House of Representatives’ standing committee on economics.

The committee’s chair, Tim Wilson, slammed the “why not litigate” approach as binary, wrong-headed and farcical. He also disputed that ASIC was too close to regulated companies, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Return to enforceable undertakings

The answers Longo and Court gave the AFR also suggest ASIC is backing away from the Hayne royal commission’s recommendation on “enforceable undertakings” — by which transgressors negotiate a settlement without an admission of wrongdoing.

A regulator might think using enforceable undertakings was better than taking a company to court, Commissioner Hayne said in his final report.

But that view cannot be formed without having first given proper consideration to questions of deterrence, both general and specific. A regulatory response to a breach of law that does not deter, generally and specifically, will rarely be a more effective regulatory outcome.“

Court, however, told the AFR:

My own view is that an enforceable undertaking can be completely appropriate in the right circumstance. Infringement notices can be completely appropriate.

Royal commission’s fading influence

The impression gained is of an attempt to pay some lip service to the royal commission but also demonstrate fealty to the federal government.

The federal government repeatedly resisted the royal commission, then backed away from its commitment to act on all the recommendations. What has changed since the royal commission? Not much.

Read more:
Ideology triumphs over evidence: Morrison government drops the ball on banking reform

Last week the Federal Court fined Westpac A$10.5 million for deceptive behaviour towards members of the Westpac-owned BT Superannuation Fund – a ruling stemming from litigation initiated by ASIC in 2016. This is the same BT ordered two weeks ago by the Australia Prudential Regulatory Authority to advise about 500,000 members of its Retirement Wrap fund that they should leave the fund, so bad have their returns been.

In his judgement, Justice Michael O’Bryan criticised Westpac for failing to fix its compliance failures, tardiness in compensating customers and lack of apology: “Westpac has not expressed regret for the conduct, does not appear to have taken steps to remedy the compliance deficiencies and has been tardy in progressing a remediation plan.”

At least, though, ASIC litigated against Westpac — successfully pursuing an appeal when it lost its first case. What chance would there be of achieving a fair outcome for consumers from a “no-regrets Westpac” had it not gone to court? Not much.

Australia’s battered and bruised financial consumers have every right to say to the regulator, and the government: enforce the law, or get out of the way.

Andrew Schmulow is the founder & CEO, Clarity Prudential Regulatory Consulting, Pty Ltd, he is an Associate Partner, Senior Advisor & Thought-Leader on Financial Services to DB & Associates, a joint Australian-South African Consultancy, he is a member of the Independent Committee of Experts convened by the South African National Treasury for the drafting of the Conduct of Financial Institutions Bill, a Secretariat member for the All Party Parliamentary Group for Personal Banking and Fairer Financial Services, House of Commons House of Lords, a member of the European Banking Institute (EBI) research work-stream on EU financial supervisory architecture, and an independent consultant to Luis Silva Morais/Sérgio Gonçalves do Cabo – Law Firm, for the jurisdictions of Australia and South Africa. He has received funding from various universities, associations and think tanks, most notably CGAP (a division of the World Bank) and the Banking Association, South Africa. He is affiliated with ACAC and the Accountability Round Table. He serves on the Boards of two charities.

– ref. ASIC, now less a corporate watchdog, more a lapdog – https://theconversation.com/asic-now-less-a-corporate-watchdog-more-a-lapdog-167532

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

New South Wales plans to relax restrictions when vaccination targets of 70% and 80% of those aged 16 years and over are met.

The national plan was based on the assumption there would be just 30 cases when restrictions were lifted. However, NSW may have cases in the hundreds or thousands when restrictions are relaxed.

The current discussion has been around “the peak” occurring during current restrictions.

But modelling from my team at UNSW shows if current restrictions are relaxed while a large proportion of the community is unvaccinated, a larger, second peak may occur that may overwhelms our hospitals – unless countermeasures are taken to prevent that.

Read more:
Flattening the COVID curve: 3 weeks of tougher lockdowns in Sydney’s hotspots halved expected case numbers

What would a second peak look like?

The 70-80% adult vaccination targets correspond to 56-64% of the whole population, leaving plenty of room for the virus to spread among increasingly mobile people.

If the first relaxation of restrictions occurs around October 18, our modelling predicts a second, larger peak will occur between December 24-29 2021.

If restrictions are only relaxed around November 6 when the 80% target is met, the peak occurs later, between January 6-12 2022 instead of around Christmas day.

The current strategy of mass vaccination is vital to our exit plan. But vaccination alone cannot control an epidemic that began when fully vaccinated rates were extremely low.

This is because the virus spreads much faster (days) than the time taken to benefit from vaccine immunity after two doses (two months, with a six week interval between doses and two weeks after the second dose to get maximal immunity).

Also current vaccines are not as effective against the Delta variant due to a combination of vaccine escape (meaning they’re not exactly matched to the Delta strain) and waning immunity.

Read more:
Is Delta defeating us? Here’s why the variant makes contact tracing so much harder

The restrictions used in NSW since the end of June have kept a lid on it, but case numbers have continued to grow. We estimated the 70% target may be met around October 18, and case numbers at that time may be in the thousands.

Depending on what steps accompany that relaxation, many different scenarios are possible. Modelling allows us to look at best and worst case scenarios and ensure the worst never occurs.

Weighing the harms

Controlling an epidemic is like balancing a set of old fashioned scales. Imagine the virus as a bunch of metal weights sitting on one side, and the public health measures on the other.

The Delta virus is very heavy, so we need many public health “weights” to keep it from winning. Vaccination alone is not enough, as we have seen in the United States, United Kingdom and Israel.

The public health “weights” include:

• vaccination
• testing (identifying infected people and isolating them)
• rapid contact tracing (within 24 hours of identifying an infected person)
• restricting mixing and movement of people
• masks
• ventilation (safe indoor air).

Modelling can help us work out the effect of changes on either side of the scale. What if the epidemic is bigger? What if we remove movement restrictions?

That will tip the scales in favour of the virus, so we need to add more into the public health bowl to compensate for that removal. Maybe we can add more contact tracing, mask use or testing.

It’s a constant dance in trying to outwit the virus, and modelling helps by allowing to forecast the impact of different approaches to relaxing restrictions.

Vaccination alone isn’t enough

We already know that to relax restrictions, we need high vaccination rates. But because the vaccine is not enough against Delta, at the 70-80% adult targets (which correspond to 56-65% of the whole population) there is still plenty of scope for the virus to spread.

COVID-19 will find under-vaccinated pockets and communities, whether it be disadvantaged urban communities or remote Aboriginal communities like Wilcannia, which had a 7% rate of full vaccination when the Sydney outbreak arrived there.

So, our modelling shows that if you remove restrictions on movement, you need to add more weights to the public health bowl to stop the scales tipping in favour of the virus. This is the vaccine-plus and ventilation strategy recommended by OzSAGE, a new independent expert network I’m part of, which outlines a safe pandemic exit strategy.

It means when we open schools, we need to open classroom windows too, ensure clean air in classrooms, ensure parents and teachers are vaccinated, and have kids wearing masks.

Read more:
From vaccination to ventilation: 5 ways to keep kids safe from COVID when schools reopen

We estimated the NSW capacity to rapidly trace contacts dropped off in mid-August.

So, in preparation of increasing mixing of people, we could massively scale up contact tracing capacity using digital methods. This would be adding more weight to the public health bowl.

We need to make sure testing capacity remains high and think about making rapid testing more widely available in schools, workplaces and homes.

We could also retain the outdoor mask mandate to ensure at least the protection of masks is not also reduced in the public health bowl (the current roadmap indicates outdoor mask mandates will be dropped).

How bad could it get?

We modelled six different scenarios and ways of adjusting the weights in the scales to ensure we do not overwhelm the health system.

We used the NSW definition of “code black” – when there are not enough ICU beds and alternative models of care are needed. We used this to forecast scenarios that could cause or avoid code black conditions.

The best case scenarios would only have a single relaxing of restrictions and retain high mask use, scale up contact tracing, and retain some reduction of mixing between people.

On the other hand, relaxing restrictions progressively between the 70% and 80% targets, or drastically increasing mixing, while reducing mask use at the same time, and not improving contact tracing, will be taking too many weights out of the public health bowl. This would allow the virus to overwhelm the health system.

In the worst case scenario, there may be five weeks of code black conditions. In the best case scenario, code black is avoided.

If ICU care cannot be provided, the death rate will increase because all people who need ICU cannot receive it. So it’s essential we avoid code black conditions.

Read more:
We’re two frontline COVID doctors. Here’s what we see as case numbers rise

There are an infinite number of scenarios we could model, but the general trade-off between both sides of the scales are demonstrated by the model.

All models have uncertainty in them. Models predict a range of possibilities under different conditions, and worst-case scenarios usually do not eventuate, because authorities use the models to inform the prevention of severe scenarios. They may also reinstate restrictions if the health system is under threat.

Models are a valuable tool to guide and provide transparency to decision-making. At the moment, the choices in NSW are between “not great” and “terrible”. But that will change.

In time, we will have better vaccines (matched to Delta), boosters and higher vaccination rates in all Australians including children. These will add more weight to the public health side of the scales, and hopefully prevent the virus from winning.

C Raina MacIntyre receives funding from NHMRC, MRFF and is a member of OzSAGE, which is a voluntary, unpaid role.

– ref. NSW risks a second larger COVID peak by Christmas if it eases restrictions too quickly – https://theconversation.com/nsw-risks-a-second-larger-covid-peak-by-christmas-if-it-eases-restrictions-too-quickly-167877

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

Climate explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

How are fossil fuels formed, why do they release carbon dioxide and how much of the world’s energy do they provide? And what are the renewable energy sources that could replace fossil fuels?

Fossil fuels were formed over millions of years from the remains of plants and animals trapped in sediments and then transformed by heat and pressure.

Most coal was formed in the Carboniferous Period (360–300 million years ago), an age of amphibians and vast swampy forests. Fossilisation of trees moved enormous amounts of carbon from the air to underground, leading to a decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels — enough to bring the Earth close to a completely frozen state.

This change in the climate, combined with the evolution of fungi that could digest dead wood and release its carbon back into the air, brought the coal-forming period to an end.

Oil and natural gas (methane, CH₄) were formed similarly, not from trees but from ocean plankton, and over a longer period. New Zealand’s Maui oil field is relatively young, dating from the Eocene, some 50 million years ago.

Read more:
Climate explained: why carbon dioxide has such outsized influence on Earth’s climate

Burning buried sunshine

When fossil fuels are burnt, their carbon reacts with oxygen to form carbon dioxide. The energy originally provided by the Sun, stored in chemical bonds for millions of years, is released and the carbon returns to the air. A simple example is the burning of natural gas: one molecule of methane and two of oxygen combine to produce carbon dioxide and water.

CH₄ + 2 O₂ → CO₂ + 2 H₂O

Burning a kilogram of natural gas releases 15kWh of energy in the form of infrared radiation (radiant heat). This is a sizeable amount.

To stop continuously worsening climate change, we need to stop burning fossil fuels for energy. That’s a tall order, because fossil fuels provide 84% of all the energy used by human civilisation. (New Zealand is less reliant on fossil fuels, at 65%.)

There are many possible sources of renewable or low-carbon energy: nuclear, hydropower, wind, solar, geothermal, biomass (burning plants for energy) and biofuel (making liquid or gaseous fuels out of plants). A handful of tidal power stations are in operation, and experiments are under way with wave and ocean current generation.

But, among these, the only two with the capacity to scale up to the staggering amount of energy we use are wind and solar. Despite impressive growth (doubling in less than five years), wind provides only 2.2% of all energy, and solar 1.1%.

The renewables transition

One saving grace, which suggests a complete transformation to renewable energy may be possible, is that a lot of the energy from fossil fuels is wasted.

First, extraction, refining and transport of fossil fuels accounts for 12% of all energy use. Second, fossil fuels are often burnt in very inefficient ways, for example in internal combustion engines in cars. A world based on renewable energy would need half as much energy in the first place.

The potential solar and wind resource is enormous, and costs have fallen rapidly. Some have argued we could transition to fully renewable energy, including transmission lines and energy storage as well as fully synthetic liquid fuels, by 2050.

One scenario sees New Zealand building 20GW of solar and 9GW of wind power. That’s not unreasonable — Australia has built that much in five years. We should hurry. Renewable power plants take time to build and industries take time to scale up.

Other factors to consider

Switching to renewable energy solves the problems of fuel and climate change, but not those of escalating resource use. Building a whole new energy system takes a lot of material, some of it rare and difficult to extract. Unlike burnt fuel, metal can be recycled, but that won’t help while building a new system for the first time.

Research concluded that although some metals are scarce (particularly cobalt, cadmium, nickel, gold and silver), “a fully renewable energy system is unlikely to deplete metal reserves and resources up to 2050”. There are also opportunities to substitute more common materials, at some loss of efficiency.

But many metals are highly localised. Half the world’s cobalt reserves are in the Democratic Republic of Congo, half the lithium is in Chile, and 70% of rare earths, used in wind turbines and electric motors, are in China.

Wasteful consumption is another issue. New technologies (robots, drones, internet) and economic growth lead to increased use of energy and resources. Rich people use a disproportionate amount of energy and model excessive consumption and waste others aspire to, including the emerging rich in developing countries.

Read more:
Renewable energy can save the natural world – but if we’re not careful, it will also hurt it

Research analysing household-level emissions across European countries found the top 1% of the population with the highest carbon footprints produced 55 tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions each, compared to a European median of 10 tonnes.

Scientists have warned about consumption by the affluent and there is vigorous debate about how to reduce it while preserving a stable society.

One way of turning these questions around is to start from the bottom and ask: what is the minimum energy required for basic human needs?

One study considered “decent living” to include comfortable housing, enough food and water, 10,000km of travel a year, education, healthcare and telecommunications for everyone on Earth — clearly not something we have managed to achieve so far. It found this would need about 4,000kWh of energy per person per year, less than a tenth of what New Zealanders currently use, and an amount easily supplied by renewable energy.

All that carbon under the ground was energy ripe for the picking. We picked it. But now it is time to stop.

Robert McLachlan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Climate explained: how much of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels and could we replace it all with renewables? – https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-how-much-of-the-worlds-energy-comes-from-fossil-fuels-and-could-we-replace-it-all-with-renewables-167190

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bronwyn Carlson, Professor, Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University

Last week’s National Summit on Women’s Safety was intended to gather input from stakeholders as the government finalises the next National Plan to Reduce Violence Against Women and their Children in 2022. A series of invite-only virtual roundtables was also held prior to the summit.

The catalyst for the spotlight on violence against women and the calls for the prime minister to act was the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in Parliament House and the violent deaths of Hannah Clarke and her children last year.

Read more:
Politics with Michelle Grattan: Linda Burney on the treatment of Indigenous Women

On average in Australia, a woman is killed by her partner every week and a quarter of all women have experienced violence by an intimate partner.

As the prime minister addressed the summit, he conceded that Australia does have a problem.

There is indeed a problem with gender-based violence in Australia, but concern is not afforded in the same way to all groups. Violence experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women does not produce the same alarm.

The horrific statistics of violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are not unknown to the government. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been calling for a separate national plan (among other initiatives) to address family, domestic and gender-based violence for a long time.

Read more:
No public outrage, no vigils: Australia’s silence at violence against Indigenous women

Violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women is ignored

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women experience violence at horrifying rates and are 32 times more likely to be hospitalised and 11 times more likely to die from gender-based violence.

Dr Hannah McGlade, Dr Marlene Longbottom and I wrote an open letter to Our Watch, a group that works to prevent violence against women and children in Australia. We shared our frustration about the lack of outrage regarding violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, which we argue has been normalised and rendered invisible.

We also called for a national Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander council on violence against Indigenous women, as we know the issues facing Indigenous women require our own leadership and direction.

We are constantly calling for Indigenous-led solutions, adequate resources and flexibility over programs to take into account the diversity of our communities. Instead, we continue to be excluded from these conversations.

A polarising example is non-Indigenous women and criminologists supporting the criminalisation of coercive control — even though Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts have demonstrated how this would cause us harm.

As Longbottom and Dr Amanda Porter have outlined in their submission to the Queensland Women’s Safety and Justice Taskforce:

there is a need to investigate the impact of state-based violence and how the state along with those employed within the system apply coercive control in their surveillance of Indigenous community members.

‘Nobody listens to us’

During the Women’s Safety Summit, as I listened to Professor Marcia Langton, June Oscar, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social justice commissioner, and Sandra Creamer, chair of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Council, I was reminded of just how long we’ve been making the call for our own leadership.

As Langton told the summit,

Let me be very clear about this. Nobody listens to us.

And Oscar said,

We have always experienced being an afterthought, add on or linked-in measure. We have got to stop that practice.

As Langton further noted, no national plan has ever worked for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities.

There has also been criticism of the summit’s processes, especially in relation to the invite-only roundtables. Many felt excluded from the consultation, particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers who work in this area.

This is problematic because Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have been the focus of much research generally led by non-Indigenous people. We are often cited as being over-researched in this way.

We will always need our own researchers producing the evidence we need to develop solutions that work for us.

The summit also revealed a lack of statistics on the experiences of LGBTQIA+ Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who experience gender-based violence. While the summit did include a private LGBTQIA+ roundtable, the event was still framed as the “Women’s Safety Summit”, which excludes many.

Read more:
LGBTQ+ people are being ignored in the national discussion on family and sexual violence

A national summit to end gendered violence was suggested as an alternative. This would be more inclusive and address the breadth of the issue.

Throughout the event, there were also multiple calls for a separate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander national plan to address violence against women and their children. This resulted in the Women’s Safety Minister Anne Ruston agreeing to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to develop one.

There are, however, concerns about whether this is another plan that never achieves anything. Or a plan putting the responsibility on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities, but not the power or resources required to do the work.

Bronwyn Carlson is a member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Council to inform the next National Plan to end family, domestic and sexual violence.

– ref. We need a national plan to address family violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – https://theconversation.com/we-need-a-national-plan-to-address-family-violence-against-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander-people-167640

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Allan Saul, Senior Principal Research Fellow (Honorary), Burnet Institute

In a pandemic, you expect that as new public health measures are introduced, there’s an observable impact on the spread of the disease.

But while that might have been the case in Melbourne’s second wave last year, the highly contagious Delta variant is different. In Sydney’s current second wave, none of the increased restrictions seemed to directly decreased the spread of COVID-19. Until now.

Our modelling shows the curfew with the other restrictions introduced on the August 23 in the 12 local government areas (LGAs) of concern has worked to halt the rise in cases.

And this wasn’t due to the level of vaccinations achieved so far. It suggests other LGAs with rising case numbers should not rely solely on vaccination to cut case numbers in the short to medium term. They may need to tighten restrictions to get outbreaks under control.

What are the tighter restrictions?

Restrictions across Sydney have been in place in various forms since June 23. But daily case numbers only plateaued in the 12 LGAs after the latest round of restrictions were introduced on August 23.

These included:

• a curfew from 9pm to 5am, to reduce the movement of young people
• restricting public access to hardware, garden supplies, office supplies and pet stores to click-and-collect only
• closure of face-to-face teaching and assessment in most educational institutes that remained open
• limiting outdoor exercise to one hour a day.

These came on top of the existing restrictions in these 12 LGAs: only four reasons for leaving home (work/education, care/compassion, shopping for essential supplies, and exercise), 5km travel restrictions and the closure of non-essential shops.

Read more:
A tougher 4-week lockdown could save Sydney months of stay-at-home orders, our modelling shows

What impact did these restrictions have?

There was a marked and significant decrease in the growth of the outbreak in the 12 LGAs of concern, starting a week after restrictions were introduced.

The expected growth rate of the Delta variant, in the absence of any controls, has a R0 between 5 and 9. This means one infected person would be expected to pass the virus on to five to nine others.

In the 12 LGAs, the Reff — which takes into account how many others one infected person will transmit the virus to with public health measures in place — reduced from 1.35 to 1.0. That means one case currently infects just one other person.

Cases numbers went from doubling every 11 days to case numbers being constant.

Without the additional restrictions introduced on August 23, the outbreak would have continued with close to an exponential increase (see the dashed orange line in Figure 1 below).

Without these stricter measures we expect about 2,000 cases per day by now and about 4,000 per day by the end of the month instead of the 1,000 per day currently in these 12 LGAs.

It’s not possible to assign which specific part or parts of the restrictions package were important, or how they functioned. Nevertheless, it’s encouraging to see a direct association of restrictions and impact on COVID-19 cases.

Vaccination rates have risen, but that’s not the reason

Vaccination rates have steadily risen in the 12 LGAs of concern. Currently, 74-86% of those aged 16 and over have had least one dose, and 34-42% have had both doses.

These vaccination levels have increased substantially in the past month from about 45% with at least one dose and only 22% fully vaccinated.

Read more:
Pfizer vaccinations for 16 to 39-year-olds is welcome news. But AstraZeneca remains a good option

However, taking into account that it takes about two weeks for vaccination to be fully effective, we calculate that from August 23 to September 9, the increased vaccination rates will have only reduced the transmission of COVID by about 9% in the these LGAs. This is nowhere near enough to account for the dramatic change in the case numbers.

Interestingly, outside these 12 LGAs, there was a gradual slowing of the growth rate that very closely matched the decrease in growth expected from increased vaccine coverage – but no sign of the abrupt change seen in the 12 LGAs of concern.

What does this mean for other parts of Sydney?

The gains associated with the more stringent restrictions are readily reversible. If they are lifted before vaccination can permanently reduce growth, COVID-19 cases could rapidly increase again in these 12 LGAs.

Meanwhile, COVID-19 cases outside the 12 LGAs of concern continue to grow strongly. With the current restrictions in place, cases in the rest of Sydney will soon overtake the cases within these 12 LGAs.

Having slowed the growth in the 12 LGAs of concern, it would be devastating if the strong growth in the rest of the state resulted in hospitals being further overloaded and a substantial increase in severe disease and deaths.

It may be necessary to impose greater restrictions — such as curfews and restricting retail outlets such as hardware stores to click-and-collect only — in at least in some of the LGAs with higher growth rates to curb this growth.

Why we need a vaccine-plus strategy

Increased levels of vaccination remains both crucial and urgent to prevent death and severe disease from COVID-19. But we are some way from vaccination levels that can allow us to relax.

While the national plan aims for 70% and 80% initial vaccination coverage it’s not yet clear how vaccination levels will impact on case numbers, given we still don’t know how well vaccines reduce transmission of the Delta variant.

Our ability to keep case numbers in check will be highly dependent on the efficiency of ongoing public health measures such as the contact tracing.

Read more:
What is life going to look like once we hit 70% vaccination?

As low case numbers remain a crucial component of a safe exit, “lockdown” restrictions will be important for some time yet to maintain these lower levels in NSW and Victoria.

States and regions that have no community transmission should fiercely protect that status until vaccine levels reach very high levels or else they may also face stringent restrictions.

But lockdowns are clearly not sustainable in the long term. At best, they give health services a temporary breathing space until we get high levels of vaccine coverage.

The Burnet Institutes receives funding from the NSW Government for COVASIM modelling. Brendan Crabb receives funding from state and federal government for other projects. He is a member of the National COVID-19 Health and Research Advisory Committee research advisory committee and OzSAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies).

Mark Stoové is a recipient of a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Senior Research Fellowship and has received investigator initiated research funding from Gilead Sciences and AbbVie, and consultant fees from Gilead Sciences, for activities unrelated to this work. He has also received funding to support research and program activities from the Commonwealth and Australian jurisdictional governments.

Allan Saul does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Flattening the COVID curve: 3 weeks of tougher lockdowns in Sydney’s hotspots halved expected case numbers – https://theconversation.com/flattening-the-covid-curve-3-weeks-of-tougher-lockdowns-in-sydneys-hotspots-halved-expected-case-numbers-167778

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma F. Jackson, PhD Candidate, Department of Psychology, Macquarie University

A newly released report by a NSW parliamentary inquiry ignores scientific research in supporting changes to the Education Act. These changes are likely to add to the risks of harm that transgender and gender-diverse young people face.

Schools need to provide appropriate care to all students. The proposed changes to the law will prevent staff from doing that for transgender and gender-diverse young people. By further marginalising them, the changes could increase their already high rates of bullying, mental illness and suicide.

Read more:
Supporting trans people: 3 simple things teachers and researchers can do

The Education Committee’s report ignored scientific research findings and recommendations presented in submissions to its inquiry into the Parental Rights Bill. One Nation MP Mark Latham, who introduced the bill to parliament last year, chaired the committee. Its report endorsed proposed amendments to the Education Act 1990 and Bulletin 55: Transgender Students in Schools that will prevent schools from teaching that gender and sex are distinct concepts.

The amendments may also prevent school staff from affirming and supporting their transgender students until consent has been gained from potentially unsupportive parents, and lengthy, expensive medical procedures have been completed. By preventing appropriate care for all students, such changes will further alienate and marginalise transgender and gender-diverse young people.

What does the science say about sex and gender?

Scientific research has for many decades regarded sex and gender as distinct, but related. Sex refers to the biological and anatomical characteristics attributed to males and females. Gender encompasses the social and cultural characteristics of men and women – for example, personality, stereotypical interests, and behaviour.

Researchers recognise that sex and gender can be more related for some individuals and less related for others.

Scientific research also acknowledges that neither gender nor sex is binary. The physiological characteristics used to define sex, such as chromosomes and external genitalia, can display variation outside a clear division of male and female.

Moreover, both cisgender (sex and gender are in alignment) and transgender (sex and gender do not align) people may engage in gender nonconformity through their styles of dress, interests and behaviours. Nonbinary individuals can also have characteristics of both men and women, change between the categories, and/or see themselves as being outside the binary of male and female.

What are the risks of harm?

Rates of mental health problems are much higher in gender-nonconforming youths. In Australia, up to three in every four of these youths have been diagnosed with depression and/or anxiety. Much of this is due to school experiences such as peer rejection and bullying.

Read more:
Bullying linked to gender and sexuality often goes unchecked in schools

Alarmingly, one in two transgender and gender-nonconforming youths have attempted suicide. And about four in five report self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Those who experience victimisation in school are four times more likely to attempt suicide than those who are not victimised.

Schools have a vital role to play. Support and acceptance from teachers and peers are important protective factors in reducing rates of mental health concerns and suicidality. Support for gender-nonconforming young people significantly reduces their risks of depression and suicidality.

A positive classroom climate increases the academic success as well as the safety of these students.

Read more:
Why education about gender and sexuality does belong in the classroom

Report ignores science

According to the committee report, teaching about gender diversity should be avoided due to concerns of a “social contagion” effect. In 2018, a research paper examining gender dysphoria (the experience of distress due to incongruence of gender and sex) suggested social contagion might explain why some parents surveyed reported that more than one young person within their child’s friendship group began identifying as transgender at a similar time, despite the overall low prevalence of transgender children in the population.

Criticism of this paper and its methodology led to it being corrected. The paper was republished alongside additional text that noted the significant weaknesses of the study design and the limitations of the findings.

An earlier study showed siblings of transgender children displayed flexibility in their gender stereotype knowledge while retaining their sense of gender as cisgender. Thus, we currently have no strong scientific reason to believe that learning about gender diversity leads to people misattributing their gender.

Some parents may be concerned their children may incorrectly claim a transgender identity. However, comprehensive education about gender will ensure students are well equipped to understand and determine their gender.

Read more:
Crossroads program: should we teach children that gender identity is fluid? Here’s what the research says

This education also will provide a supportive environment for all students to explore their interests without fear of judgement by peers or punishment by schools. Students will be inspired to take part in activities that were once stereotypically gendered. For example, more girls may pursue science and technology while more boys may consider teaching.

What should schools be able to do?

Rather than prohibit the accurate teaching of gender and sex and restrict the support available to transgender students, the law should empower schools to employ strategies that support the safety and well-being of all students. Such strategies should include:

• teaching about gender in a scientifically informed, inclusive manner

• using correct pronouns

• training teachers in how to support gender-nonconforming students.

School staff require training in how to:

• combat transphobic language and behaviour

• provide inclusive and accurate sex education

• advocate for inclusive and protective policies for gender-nonconforming students.

Every child deserves a supportive, quality education based on science. Equality Australia has made it easy for you to convey this sentiment to your political leaders.

If this article has raised issues for you or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or beyondblue on 1300 22 46 36.

Emma F. Jackson is affiliated with the Academic Senate of Macquarie University.

Jonathan David is an employee of Twenty10 inc GLCS NSW and President of Dayenu – Sydney’s Jewish LGBTQ+ Community.

Melissa Norberg is the Deputy Director for the Centre for Emotional Health (CEH) and the National President for the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behaviour Therapy (AACBT).

Veronica Sheanoda is a Consumer Advisory Committee member for her local Primary Health Network.

– ref. NSW inquiry rejects expert advice on Parental Rights Bill, and it will cause students to suffer – https://theconversation.com/nsw-inquiry-rejects-expert-advice-on-parental-rights-bill-and-it-will-cause-students-to-suffer-167539

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matthew Luskin, Lecturer in Conservation Science, The University of Queensland

For more than 40,000 years, Indigenous communities in Borneo have hunted and eaten bearded pigs – huge, nomadic animals that roam the island in Southeast Asia. These 100kg creatures are central to the livelihood and culture of some Bornean peoples – in fact, some hunters rarely talk of anything else.

But this ancient relationship is now at serious risk. Oil palm expansion and urbanisation are forcing changes to hunting practices in Sabah, a Malaysian state in Borneo. Our research examined these changes by focusing on Indigenous Kadazandusun-Murut hunters, for whom bearded pigs are a favourite game animal.

The oil palm industry has cleared much of Borneo’s lowland tropical rainforests to make way for plantations. And a shift to a more agrarian and urbanised life means many people hunt less than they used to.

Hunting is one of the most fundamental and enduring of human–wildlife relationships. But the changing dynamic between Borneo’s pigs and Indigenous peoples is a powerful reminder of the fragility of these connections. There is much at stake right now, for both the hunted and the hunter.

Changing times

As its name suggests, the bearded pig has a prominent beard. It’s a large species thought to move up to 650km in search of food, in large herds of up to 300 individuals.

Wild meat can contribute to as much as 36% of meals in Indigenous Bornean societies, and bearded pig meat accounts for 54–97% of this by weight. Bearded pig hunting is also central to recreation, gift-giving and social practices in many of Borneo’s Indigenous communities.

But widespread deforestation and agricultural expansion (primarily oil palm and rubber plantations) has drastically reduced bearded pig habitat in recent decades. The bearded pig is now listed as vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List.

Sabah has been on the front lines of the oil palm boom since the late 20th century. As of 2015, roughly 24% of Sabah’s land area was covered by oil palm or pulpwood plantations.

Sabahans sometimes take work with oil palm companies, own their own oil palm smallholdings or move to urban areas for relatively well-paying jobs in manufacturing and retail.

Those who remain in rural parts of the state have reduced access to croplands and forests in some areas which, among other negative impacts, restricts their ability to hunt game.

Read more:
Human progress is no excuse to destroy nature. A push to make ‘ecocide’ a global crime must recognise this fundamental truth

‘This is our life’

We investigated how the above land-use changes have affected pig hunting practices of the Kadazandusun-Murut ethnic group, including 38 interviews with bearded pig hunters.

Hunters are adapting new methods to pursue pigs inside plantations. Respondents reported that hunting in oil palm plantations was easier overall than hunting in forests – because the walking was generally less tiring (and they could sometimes hunt from a car), it was easier to see pigs and foraging locations were more predictable.

Five respondents noted a difference between the taste of meat from pigs in oil palm plantations as compared to forest. One said:

The pig from the forest is much tastier, it’s more fit. If the pig eats oil palm its fat isn’t as sweet.

Many hunters said bearded pigs were “wilder”, “smarter” and more skittish than they had been in the past. Comments included:

The pigs can smell man; they are getting more wild because they are always getting shot by men.

Another participant said:

In the past pigs only looked, but now they run away. Now the pig has got a high school certificate.

Among hunters who had started hunting before 1985, 71% noted this increased flight response, whereas only 26% of those who began hunting after 1985 mentioned this behavioural change.

Respondents consumed wild bearded pig meat more frequently in rural villages than in urban contexts, indicating an important shift in dietary patterns. Some respondents also hunted less frequently when living in urban environments, due to having less time, increased distance to the forest, lower energy because of having to work or other factors.

But despite these substantial changes in hunting practices, much has remained the same over the last few decades.
Hunting with guns has remained the primary technique over the past two generations, and meat provision is the primary motivation to hunt.

One respondent said his father taught him:

This is our life. We live in the forest; this is our food.

Cultural practices, such as gifting the meat for community events, provided additional motivations to hunt. Some considered weddings, festivals and church events to be incomplete without bearded pig meat.

Preserving a fragile relationship

Our results show both the persistence and malleability of hunting practices among Kadazandusun-Murut people in Sabah. The challenge now is how best to manage bearded pig hunting in the face of ongoing oil palm expansion, urbanisation and broader political–economic changes.

The onslaught of African Swine Flu is complicating matters. For the pigs, the deadly virus is an extra burden for a species already in decline. For some Indigenous hunters, it threatens their food security and livelihoods.

The loss of bearded pigs also erodes traditional celebrations and family gatherings, and the passing down of ancient customary hunting practices to children.

Environmental governance initiatives should support the cultural traditions of Borneo’s Indigenous communities, and any new regulation should be devised in collaboration with local people and tailored to their needs. At the same time, these initiatives must ensure the long-term conservation of bearded pig populations and their habitat.

Read more:
Orangutans, gibbons and Mr Sooty: what the origins of words in Southeast Asia tell us about our long relationships with animals

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. ‘The pigs can smell man’: how decimation of Borneo’s ancient rainforests threatens hunters and the hunted – https://theconversation.com/the-pigs-can-smell-man-how-decimation-of-borneos-ancient-rainforests-threatens-hunters-and-the-hunted-166895

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hugh Breakey, President, Australian Association for Professional & Applied Ethics. Senior Research Fellow, Moral philosophy, Institute for Ethics, Governance & Law, Law Futures Centre., Griffith University

COVID lockdown rules have thrust “dobbing” into the spotlight, with some asking whether Australia is a nation of dobbers.

But when is dobbing ethical and when is it wrong? This is a tricky question for adults and kids alike.

There is clearly a place for reporting wrongdoing — it can halt bad behaviour, see wrongdoers punished, help set societal expectations and prevent harm.

Still, there are reasons to be cautious about dobbing. It isn’t always the right thing to do.

A lot of our ideas about dobbing are formed in childhood — and as any parent, carer or teacher knows, not all dobbing is warranted.

Here are five questions worth thinking about before blowing the whistle — and how to talk to kids about dobbing.

1. Is it a clear violation?

Think carefully about exactly what behaviour you’re dobbing on, what rule it breaks and be sure you haven’t made assumptions.

There is no point calling authorities if the behaviour you’re dobbing on has a reasonable explanation.

For example, there may be ambiguity in the rules that you’ve failed to consider.

Or perhaps what you assumed was a violation wasn’t ever one at all, because the person had a valid exemption (such as a medical reasons for not wearing a mask).

Think before you dob.

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

2. Is there a risk of genuine harm?

There are plenty of rule violations we typically don’t report. You probably don’t call the police when you see someone jaywalking, or a car parked improperly. You might even think it’s “none of my business”.

When someone reports us to the authorities, they essentially take a position of authority. They aren’t the police, but they are policing our behaviour. Widespread dobbing can also make us feel like we are continually being watched. So it’s perhaps no surprise many of us find dobbing for low-level breaches somewhat affronting.

However, these reasons shouldn’t stop us reporting if there is a real risk of harm.

In a pandemic, rule breaking can have grave or even deadly consequences, especially for vulnerable populations.

On this basis, repeated and flagrant violations are especially worth reporting. Such violations are also unfair; it is frustrating to see a person refuse to be bound by the rules the rest of us must accept.

For example, if a neighbour who is self-quarantining because they have tested positive to COVID seems to be having friends over, the authorities should be contacted. The risk of harm to others is very high.

3. What’s my relationship to the person I am dobbing on?

If you have an important relationship with the rule-breaker, that could be a reason to be cautious about reporting. For example, you might think carefully about poisoning an otherwise good relationship with a neighbour over a one-off or minor infraction.

But it’s also worth reflecting on whether you have a bad relationship with the person, or dislike them. If you’re dobbing on someone primarily because you don’t like them, or want them to get in trouble, you should examine your motivations closely.

This factor may play a role in public reporting on politicians’ mask wearing.

If the community is taking on a reporting role, it needs to be done fairly.

4. Can I resolve this informally?

Most of us have, at least once, forgotten to grab a mask, or to put it on.

Sometimes, a gentle reminder might be all that’s required. If you think an informal approach is likely to work, that may be a better option.

Just as children should learn to try to resolve their differences before seeking out an adult adjudicator, many of us could do more to find informal resolutions before involving authorities.

Of course, people can respond unpredictably and aggressively, even to good-natured approaches. An obligation to report doesn’t require putting yourself in harm’s way.

If you’re unsure about your safety, I think it’s ethically defensible to go straight to a higher authority.

(And if you’re the person being dobbed on and you think “Why couldn’t they have just said something to my face? I would have been fine about it,” just remember: it may have been impossible for your accuser to know that.)

5. What are my motivations?

There is a little bit of the self-righteous busybody in most of us. Dobbing can deliver a sense of authority and power (especially to those, like younger siblings, who may crave a fleeting sense of power because they have relatively little of it in their day to day life).

While it’s not easy to objectively survey your own motivations, it’s worth trying to make sure your heart’s in the right place.

Talk to children about the difference between dobbing and whistleblowing

We all learned about “dobbing” in the schoolyard. Children might encourage a social norm against dobbing because they think the rules are unfair, or because since they all break some rules, everyone is better off if nobody dobs.

But parents too can be frustrated by dobbing, such as when children seem to delight in getting a sibling into trouble.

Talk to your children about the difference between dobbing and whistleblowing. If the rule-breaking is clear and someone could be harmed, it’s important children know they should come forward. It’s always right to tell someone if you feel unsafe, or if someone is making you feel scared.

Equally though, not everything in life requires reporting to authorities. We all need to learn how to manage relationships with friends and siblings, and to resist the thrill of getting others into trouble.

When you’re the one getting dobbed on

An article on dobbing wouldn’t be complete without mentioning human beings are enormously clever about justifying rule-breaking.

We tell ourselves elaborate stories about how our “special” circumstances mean the rules shouldn’t apply to us.

When someone reports us, it can be tempting to feel outraged. But in doing so, we may avoid facing up to our own culpability.

Just as there is an ethics of dobbing, there is also an ethics of accepting responsibility.

Read more:
Troublemakers and traitors – it’s no fun being a whistleblower

Hugh Breakey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. 5 questions to ask yourself before you dob — advice for adults and kids, from an ethicist – https://theconversation.com/5-questions-to-ask-yourself-before-you-dob-advice-for-adults-and-kids-from-an-ethicist-167789

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kewei Lyu, Postdoctoral Researcher in Ocean and Climate, CSIRO

Knowing how much sea levels are likely to rise during this century is vital to our understanding of future climate change, but previous estimates have generated wide ranges of uncertainty. In our research, published today in Nature Climate Change, we provide an improved estimate of how much our oceans are going to warm and its contribution to sea level rise, with the help of 15 years’ worth of measurements collected by a global array of autonomous underwater sampling floats.

Our analysis shows that without dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, by the end of this century the upper 2,000 metres of the ocean is likely to warm by 11-15 times the amount of warming observed during 2005-19. Water expands as it gets warmer, so this warming will cause sea levels to rise by 17-26 centimetres. This is about one-third of the total projected rise, alongside contributions from deep ocean warming, and melting of glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Ocean warming is a direct consequence of rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere as a result of our burning of fossil fuels. This results in an imbalance between the energy arriving from the Sun, and the energy radiated out into space. About 90% of the excess heat energy in the climate system over the past 50 years is stored in the ocean, and only about 1% in the warming atmosphere.

Warming oceans cause sea levels to rise, both directly via heat expansion, and indirectly through melting of ice shelves. Warming oceans also affect marine ecosystems, for example through coral bleaching, and play a role in weather events such as the formation of tropical cyclones.

Systematic observations of ocean temperatures began in the 19th century, but it was only in the second half of the 20th century that enough observations were made to measure ocean heat content consistently around the globe.

Since the 1970s these observations indicate an increase in ocean heat content. But these measurements have significant uncertainties because the observations have been relatively sparse, particularly in the southern hemisphere and at depths below 700m.

To improve this situation, the Argo project has deployed a fleet of autonomous profiling floats to collect data from around the world. Since the early 2000s, they have measured temperatures in the upper 2,000m of the oceans, and sent the data via satellite to analysis centres around the world.

These data are of uniform high quality and cover the vast majority of the open oceans. As a result, we have been able to calculate a much better estimate of the amount of heat accumulating in the world’s oceans.

The global ocean heat content continued to increase unabated during the temporary slowdown in global surface warming in the beginning of this century. This is because ocean warming is less affected than surface warming by natural yearly fluctuations in climate.

Read more:
Ocean depths heating steadily despite global warming ‘pause’

Current observations, future warming

To estimate future ocean warming, we need to take the Argo observations as a basis and then use climate models to project them into the future. But to do that, we need to know which models are in closest agreement with new, more accurate direct measurements of ocean heat provided by the Argo data.

The latest climate models, used in last month’s landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, all show ocean warming over the period of available Argo observations, and they project that warming will continue in the future, albeit with a wide range of uncertainties.

Read more:
Explainer: what is climate sensitivity?

By comparing the Argo temperature data for 2005-19 with the simulations generated by models for that period, we used a statistical approach called “emergent constraint” to reduce uncertainties in model future projections, based on information about the ocean warming we know has already occurred. These constrained projections then provided an improved estimate of how much heat energy will accumulate in the oceans by the end of the century.

By 2081–2100, under a scenario in which global greenhouse emissions continue on their current high trajectory, we found the upper 2,000m of the ocean is likely to warm by 11-15 times the amount of warming observed during 2005-19. This corresponds to 17–26cm of sea level rise from ocean thermal expansion.

Climate models can also make predictions based on a range of different future greenhouse gas emissions. Strong emissions reductions, consistent with bringing surface global warming to within about 2℃ of pre-industrial temperatures, would reduce the projected warming in the upper 2,000m of the ocean by about half — that is, between five and nine times the ocean warming already seen in 2005-19.

This would equate to 8-14cm of sea level rise due to thermal expansion. Of course, reducing emissions so as to hit the more ambitious Paris target of 1.5℃ surface warming would reduce these impacts even further.

Other factors linked to sea levels

There are several other factors that will also drive up sea levels, besides the heat influx into the upper oceans investigated by our research. There is also warming of the deep ocean below 2,000m, which is still under-sampled in the current observing system, as well as the effects of melting from glaciers and polar ice sheets.

This indicates that even with strong policy action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the oceans will continue to warm and sea levels will continue to rise well after surface warming is stabilised, but at a much reduced rate, making it easier to adapt to the remaining changes. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions earlier rather than later will be more effective at slowing ocean warming and sea level rise.

Read more:
If we stopped emitting greenhouse gases right now, would we stop climate change?

Our improved projection is founded on a network of ocean observations that are far more extensive and reliable than anything available before. Sustaining the ocean observing system into the future, and extending it to the deep ocean and to areas not covered by the present Argo program, will allow us to make more reliable climate projections in the future.

Kewei Lyu receives funding from the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR).

John Church receives funding from The Australian Research Council and the Centre for Southern Hemisphere Oceans Research (CSHOR), jointly funded by the Qingdao National Laboratory for Marine Science and Technology (QNLM, China) and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO, Australia).

Xuebin Zhang received funding from Pacific Climate Change Science Program (PCCSP) and follow-up Pacific-Australia Climate Change Science and Adaptation Planning program (PACCSAP), both of which were funded by the Australian Government’s International Climate Change Adaptation Initiative, and also from Australian Climate Change Science Programme (ACCSP), National Environmental Science Programme (NESP), and Centre for Southern Hemisphere Ocean Research (CSHOR).

– ref. How much will our oceans warm and cause sea levels to rise this century? We’ve just improved our estimate – https://theconversation.com/how-much-will-our-oceans-warm-and-cause-sea-levels-to-rise-this-century-weve-just-improved-our-estimate-166417

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Douglas Elliffe, Professor of Psychology, University of Auckland, University of Auckland

Can we toilet train cattle? Would we want to?

The answer to both of these questions is yes — and doing so could help us address issues of water contamination and climate change. Cattle urine is high in nitrogen, and this contributes to a range of environmental problems.

When cows are kept mainly outdoors, as they are in New Zealand and Australia, the nitrogen from their urine breaks down in the soil. This produces two problematic substances: nitrate and nitrous oxide.

Nitrate from urine patches leaches into lakes, rivers and aquifers (underground pools of water contained by rock) where it pollutes the water and contributes to the excessive growth of weeds and algae.

Nitrous oxide is a long-lasting greenhouse gas which is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. It accounts for about 12% of New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions, and much of this comes from the agricultural sector.

When cows are kept mainly in barns, as is the case in Europe and North America, another polluting gas — ammonia — is produced when the nitrogen from urine mixes with faeces on the barn floor.

However, if some of the urine produced by cattle could be captured and treated, the nitrogen it contains could be diverted, and the environmental impacts reduced. But how might urine capture be achieved?

We worked on this problem with collaborators from Germany’s Federal Research Institute for Animal Health and Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology. Our research is published today in the journal Current Biology. It forms part of our colleague Neele Dirksen’s PhD thesis.

Read more:
Feeding cows a few ounces of seaweed daily could sharply reduce their contribution to climate change

Toilet training (but without the nappies)

In our research project, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, we applied principles from behavioural psychology to train young cattle to urinate in a particular place — that is, to use the “toilet”

Behavioural psychology tells us a behaviour is likely to be repeated if followed by a reward, or “reinforcer”. That’s how we train a dog to come when called.

So if we want to encourage a particular behaviour, such as urinating in a particular place, we should reinforce that behaviour. For our project we applied this idea in much the same way as for toilet training children, using a procedure called “backward chaining”.

First, the calves were confined to the toilet area, a latrine pen, and reinforced with a preferred treat when they urinated. This established the pen as an ideal place to urinate.

The calves were then placed in an alley outside the pen, and once again reinforced for entering the pen and urinating there. If urination began in the alley, it was discouraged by a mildly unpleasant spray of water.

After optimising the training, seven out of the eight calves we trained learned to urinate in the latrine pen — and they learned about as quickly as human children do.

The calves received only 15 days of training and the majority learned the full set of skills within 20 to 25 urinations, which is quicker than the toilet-training time for three- and four-year-old children.

This showed us two things that weren’t known before.

1. cattle can learn to attend to their own urination reflex, because they moved to the pen when ready to use it
2. cattle will learn to withhold urination until they’re in the right place, if they’re rewarded for doing so.

The next stages

Our research is a proof of concept. Cattle can be toilet trained, and without much difficulty. But scaling up the method for practical application in agriculture involves two further challenges, which will be the focus in the next stage of our project.

First, we need a way both to detect urination in the latrine pen and deliver reinforcement automatically — without human intervention.

This is probably no more than a technical problem. An electronic sensor for urination wouldn’t be difficult to develop, and small amounts of attractive rewards could be provided in the pen.

Apart from this, we’ll also need to determine the optimal location and number of latrine pens needed. This is a particularly challenging issue in countries such as New Zealand, where cattle spend most of their time in open paddocks rather than barns.

Part of our future research will require understanding how far cattle are willing to walk to use a pen. And more needs to be done to understand how to best use this technique with animals in both indoor and outdoor farming contexts.

What we do know is that nitrogen from cattle urine contributes to both water pollution and climate change, and these effects can be reduced by toilet training cattle.

The more urine we can capture, the less we’ll need to reduce cattle numbers to meet emissions targets — and the less we’ll have to compromise on the availability of milk, butter, cheese and meat from cattle.

Read more:
Virtual fences and cattle: how new tech could allow effective, sustainable land sharing

Douglas Elliffe has received research funding from the Volkswagen Foundation.

Lindsay Matthews receives funding from VW Foundation. He is affiliated with Matthews Research International.

– ref. We managed to toilet train cows (and they learned faster than a toddler). It could help combat climate change – https://theconversation.com/we-managed-to-toilet-train-cows-and-they-learned-faster-than-a-toddler-it-could-help-combat-climate-change-167785

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wes Mountain, Multimedia Editor

COVID-19 has seen the world embrace sanitisers and formal hand washing procedures in our private lives like never before. But even as we’ve thought more and more about surfaces and the hands that touch them as vectors for disease, mobile phones have largely escaped scrutiny.

We carry them everywhere (including the toilet) but they’re rarely cleaned or sanitised, and we touch them with our hands many, many times per day.

Lotti Tajouri explains what his research team found when they surveyed hospital staff about their phone use, the bacteria, viruses and parasites they found on swabbed phones, and the very personal reason he began this research.

Transcript:

My name is Dr Lotti Tajouri, associate professor in molecular biology and genomics in health science medicine at Bond University. I’m also a member of the Dubai Future Council on Community Security. and the [biology and political] scientist committee.

The first time I actually got an interest in mobile phones as contaminated platforms was associated with my wife’s pregnancy. We came up to a situation where there was an emergency: my little girl was in breech while my wife was pregnant.

And we had to go very quickly to the theatre.

And what happened is when there was this preparation for the caesarean, I actually saw that there were some health care workers walking around with their mobile phones.

And really with the stress of the situation and knowing that I’m actually understanding clearly what is microbiology. I was really saying, “oh, there is a red flag here with some individuals, right there in the theatre, where there was my little girl about to be born”. Something was kind of wrong.

And of course, it’s nothing to blame the health care workers for, or how they do their job. The issue was that they don’t really know that mobile phones are actually contaminated with microbes.

So that was the very first time where I said to myself, “oh, I think I really need to do something about it”.

We did a survey within the hospital and we actually surveyed 165 health care workers, including doctors and nurses.

And we found something very interesting.

First of all, 98% of all those health care workers admitted that probably, indeed, their mobile phones are contaminated.

They are aware of that.

The other thing which was very interesting is their behaviour around mobile phones.

52% of them, out of 165 individuals used mobile phones in the bathroom and they used that for different reasons for media, social media, etc.

And the other very interesting statistic is that 57% of them never, ever washed their mobile phones.

We have also undertaken a massive amount of swabs of mobile phones.

And then what we wanted to do is, first of all, demonstrate that the microbes that are on the surface of mobile phones coming from health care workers, and if those microbes were viable or not.

After swabbing the mobile phones, we took around 30 mobile phones and we cultured them in different types of petri dishes.

It was very impressive.

If you look at the pictures that come up from those particular petri dishes, you see a huge amount of colonies coming out of it.

We found all sorts of types of bacteria: we found e.coli, demonstrating faecal contamination, we found pseudomonas aeruginosa (which is extremely resistant to different types of antibiotics), we found salmonella. We found listeria.

Even very, very interestingly, we found parasites, protozoa. One of them was, for example, entamoeba histolytica.

So those mobile phones are platforms that accommodate a huge panel, a huge spectrum of microorganisms that interact with each other and they are viable.

We started the video with me, for example, working in my office and holding the mobile phone and simulating a cough.

And with that cough, obviously, we deposited droplets on the surface of the mobile phone.

And then because we tend to text or touch our mobile phones, what would happen is that I would then obviously touch my keyboard, and do my whereabouts for my work, take a phone call or take a glass of water, etc.

And then after that, I decided, of course, to get out of my office and go, for example, to a kitchen.

And you will understand that because I touched my filthy mobile phone, I had actually the microbes on my hands.

And then when I went to the kitchen, and eat, and use whatever device I wanted to use, for example, the coffee machine. Well, the same again, you could see that spread going on again and again and disseminating itself in different areas.

Now, it will be natural for me once in a while to use the toilet. So then I decided to go to the bathroom. And same thing.

So in the bathroom, you’d touch different surfaces: the doors, the lid of the toilet.

So when you wash your hands, yes, your hands are clean. However, when you touch your filthy mobile phone, what happens is you contaminate yourself all over again.

The mobile phones are our third hand. Those ‘third hands’ needs to be ‘hand-washed or sanitised the same way as we ought to do with our two normal hands.

If we don’t decontaminate our mobile phones, it means that we negate the hand washing.

The solution is very simple.

At least, wipe off your mobile phone with a clean felt cloth, put a little bit of 70% isopropyl alcohol [on it]. But you have to be very careful when you wipe off your mobile phone with this type of material.

If you really want to clean your phone, never clean your phone when it is switched on, switch it off first. And the other advice I would tell you is probably to go back to your phone manufacturer recommendations, on how best you can clean your phone.

Our research, at Bond, is very clear. And this is also backed up by the literature. The best way forward [for public sector and industrial settings is] to sanitise your phone is by Ultraviolet C.

And there are some great technologies out there that do the job within 10 seconds, that will really be the solution for our community, for our health care workers and for any type of professional sector.

And my dream is to get the World Health Organisation, the CDC, etc. to embrace this technology.

To, first of all, understand that those mobile phones are actually probably transmitting diseases because those mobile phones are Trojan horses for the enemies that we carry with us all the time: all those germs.

– ref. WATCH: Our mobile phones are covered in bacteria and viruses… and we never wash them – https://theconversation.com/watch-our-mobile-phones-are-covered-in-bacteria-and-viruses-and-we-never-wash-them-167784

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

The latest figures available show there are 1,189 people admitted with COVID-19 to hospitals in New South Wales, with 222 of them in intensive care units (ICU), 94 needing ventilation.

This week there were over 9,700 people with new COVID infections. That means about one in every 10 people with COVID are sick enough to need admission to hospital.

Recently released modelling predicts COVID admissions in NSW will rise steeply over the coming weeks and will peak in mid-October. NSW has also just announced plans for some restrictions to ease once 70% of adults in the state are fully vaccinated, a date also expected to land in October.

Here’s what this will look like for patients admitted with COVID and for hospital staff caring for them.

Here’s what happens to the lungs

Healthy lungs are like soft, fresh sponge cake, wrapped in two layers of cling wrap (the pleura), all sealed in the cake tin of the chest wall.

But with severe COVID, people develop pneumonia. This is when the spongey lung fills with fluid and becomes stiff and the muscles we use to breathe are weakened by inflammation that rages in all tissues of the body. The major consequence of this is an inability to breathe properly, a reduction in oxygen levels and inadequate oxygen supply to the body.

Severe pneumonia is usually managed in the ICU. In this pandemic, the sheer number of critically breathless patients means the intensive level of respiratory care they require is being delivered outside ICU, in wards designed for patients with other health problems.

So most of the patients admitted to hospital with COVID are actually managed by lung specialists and infectious diseases physicians with a huge input from our junior doctors in training.

COVID pneumonia is what kills patients who develop severe COVID.

About one in five develop severe breathlessness. This is when the stiffened lungs are full of fluid and every breath requires extra effort.

This severe breathlessness is hard to explain until you experience it. But it’s relentless, exhausting and frightening. Patients describe it as like “an elephant on your chest”, “a suffocation”, or there not being “enough air in the room”.

Read more:
ICU ventilators: what they are, how they work and why it’s hard to make more

People with COVID pneumonia need oxygen but oxygen alone isn’t enough to help with severe breathing difficulties and COVID pneumonia. Those who are most unwell may need intubation. This is when we insert a tube into the lungs connected to a machine that does the work of breathing, via mechanical ventilation. This happens in the ICU.

Expert care in an acute COVID ward is critical. Patients successfully managed will have better odds of a shorter hospital stay and not needing intubation, with its increased risk of dying.

We’re also worried about filling up the available ICU beds — a clearly finite resource.

Read more:
We’re seeing more COVID patients in ICU as case numbers rise. That affects the whole hospital

We want to avoid intubation

As the pandemic has swept across the globe, we’ve rapidly learnt from our colleagues overseas about supporting the breathing of patients with COVID pneumonia.

Our treatments are aimed at helping patients recover more quickly and reduce the need for mechanical ventilation. Measures include:

• delivering warm and humid oxygen, which is more comfortable for patients, and protects the lining of the airways from further inflammation

• lying patients on their belly or “proning”, aims to prevent fluid from pooling at the bottom of the lungs. This improves oxygen levels and makes breathing more comfortable. It also reduces the need for mechanical ventilation. This is safe and cheap, and is comfortable for most people even those who are very overweight, and pregnant women

• continuous positive airway pressure or CPAP can also be used to help reduce the work of breathing for people with severe breathlessness. These machines are used to deliver oxygen via a mask and help by opening up fluid-filled, stiff lungs.

These treatments are labour intensive and have long been available in the ICU where nursing to patient ratios are higher.

However, in NSW, hospitals with the highest current numbers of patients with severe COVID (such as Liverpool, Nepean and Westmead) have had to rapidly adapt their wards to deliver this treatment outside the ICU.

The published modelling predicts such treatments will spill further into the COVID wards of every hospital in NSW.

Read more:
Opening with 70% of adults vaccinated, the Doherty report predicts 1.5K deaths in 6 months. We need a revised plan

We need the staff to manage this

Treatments like proning and CPAP are time-consuming and require experienced doctors, nurses and support staff.

Ideally, every patient with severe COVID pneumonia should have at least one nurse each for every hour of the day — a 1:1 nursing ratio.

Staff need to know when to start these treatments. They also need to know how to read the signs of deterioration that signal the patient, who despite everyone’s best efforts, will need intubation.

Fitting the CPAP mask and adjusting the oxygen requires experience and training. Staff help patients to eat and drink, go to the toilet. They administer complex medications, comfort the grieving, frightened and confused.

They do this while dressed in a hot gown, wearing goggles and gloves and a tight, fitted N95 mask. Every single clinical interaction is stressful and intense.

Read more:
‘Living with COVID’ looks very different for front-line health workers, who are already exhausted

Plans are under way

Plans are under way to manage the expected surge in cases.

Staff are being trained and we are preparing to get enough equipment where it’s needed. The problem is this will go on for many more weeks, staff will get tired, physically and emotionally, and we don’t want this to be any worse than it must be.

If you want to help, get vaccinated and stay at home. Please put up with the restrictions and lockdowns for a little longer.

Now is the time for everyone to come together so we come out of this in one piece and can continue to offer the best of medical care.

Peter Wark is affiliated with the Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand, National Asthma Council , Lung Foundation of Australia and Cystic Fibrosis Australia

Lucy Morgan is Director of the Board of Lung Foundation Australia. Thoracic Society of Australia and New Zealand.

– ref. We’re two frontline COVID doctors. Here’s what we see as case numbers rise – https://theconversation.com/were-two-frontline-covid-doctors-heres-what-we-see-as-case-numbers-rise-167195

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Lucas Walsh, Professor and Director of the Centre for Youth Policy and Education Practice, Monash University

Australian Education Minister Alan Tudge says he does not want students to leave school with “a hatred” of their country because the history curriculum for years 7 to 10 “paints an overly negative view of Australia”. The minister is critical of proposed changes to the Australian Curriculum. He sees teaching about the contested nature of Anzac Day and its commemoration as a particular concern.

Two interwoven threads run through current debates about the minister’s view.

First, public debates about the curriculum like this are arguably a sign of democracy at work. Suggesting that some things, such as Anzac Day, are sacred and beyond critical inquiry is not.

Second, at the heart of this discussion is how children should learn about history and how this relates to their development as Australian citizens.

Read more:
Gonski 2.0: teaching creativity and critical thinking through the curriculum is already happening

What is the Australian Curriculum?

The Australian Curriculum applies to all primary and secondary schools, affecting over 4 million students. It sets “the expectations for what all young Australians should be taught”.

Developed by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), the curriculum is reviewed every six years. In the current review, public consultations have ended and the revisions will be finalised by the end of 2021.

The history curriculum seeks to promote understanding and use of historical concepts. These concepts include:

• evidence – obtained from primary and secondary sources to support a hypothesis or to prove or disprove a conclusion

• historical perspectives – comprising the point of view, beliefs, values and experiences of individuals and groups at the time

• interpretations – contestable explanations of the past about a specific person, event or development, typically as a result of a disciplined inquiry by historians

• significance – assigned to an issue, event, development, person, place, process, interaction or system over time and place.

The minister’s response to the proposed revisions follows a recent tradition of objections to aspects of the curriculum. Critical exploration of Australia Day – perspectives of which vary depending on one’s point of view – has been another source of debate.

Read more:
Australia is only one front in the history curriculum wars

Three related issues arise in relation to Tudge’s concern.

History is neither static nor unproblematic

First, history is not static. This means one can expect the curriculum to change as new discoveries, insights and perspectives emerge over time.

Second, we would hope to foster learners who are curious, critical and well-informed about Australia’s rich (and sometimes troubled) history.

The Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration outlines education goals for all Australians. These goals include development of critical thinking and intercultural understanding. All education ministers signed the declaration.

Students should learn about events such as Anzac Day and Australia Day, their historical origins and different meanings when viewed from various perspectives. It’s a valuable way of developing both critical thinking and understanding of people who are different from ourselves.

Acknowledging this to an extent, Tudge told ABC Hack he is “not concerned” about the curriculum in relation to “the arrivals of the First Fleet, people should learn about that, and they should learn the perspective from Indigenous people at that time as well”. What he doesn’t like is that certain events are critically explored:

“Instead of ANZAC Day being presented as the most sacred of all days in Australia, where […] we commemorate the 100,000 people who have died for our freedoms […] it’s presented as a contested idea [but] ANZAC Day is not a contested idea, apart from an absolute fringe element in our society.”

Setting aside who that “fringe element” might be (some historians?), this implies a settled, uncritical view of history. Tudge suggests the curriculum is “asking people to, instead of just accepting these for the things which they are, such as ANZAC Day, to really challenge them and to contest them”.

Commemorating sacrifice is compatible with critically reflecting on the conditions in which that sacrifice occurred and how that sacrifice is memorialised. Further, the assertion that the challenging of ideas produces hatred is as problematic as uncritically accepting things for whatever the minister thinks “they are”.

Read more:
The past is not sacred: the ‘history wars’ over Anzac

“We’ve got a lot to be proud of,” Tudge said, “and we should be teaching the great things that have happened in Australia, as much as we should our weaknesses and flaws and some of the historical wrongs.”

History is often a messy contestation and confluence of violence and discovery. Pride has its place too, but pride can withstand critical inquiry, and perhaps even be strengthened by it.

Tudge says he wants “to make sure there’s a balance” of perspectives. That’s precisely the point of the revised curriculum.

Debate is a good thing

Finally, having a robust and vibrant debate about the curriculum, in which people take an active interest in what is taught, is a sign of healthy democracy. Such debate can only be strengthened when young people are encouraged to recognise that people have different points of view and history is not set in stone, as the curriculum seeks to do. It’s one key dimension of developing active, informed citizenship.

Read more:
Young people remain ill-equipped to participate in Australian democracy

The Australian Curriculum is founded on the idea that:

“Education plays a critical role in shaping the lives of young Australians and contributing to a democratic, equitable and just society that is prosperous, cohesive and culturally diverse.”

The minister’s objection to proposed changes to the curriculum inadvertently illustrates why it should be taught: it’s not about hatred, but a sign of healthy democracy while meeting Australia’s educational goals.

Lucas Walsh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Teaching a ‘hatred’ of Australia? No, minister, here’s why a democracy has critical curriculum content – https://theconversation.com/teaching-a-hatred-of-australia-no-minister-heres-why-a-democracy-has-critical-curriculum-content-167697

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

After months of holding out, Australia has at last joined other members of the World Trade Organisation in backing a waiver of patents and other intellectual property rights on vaccines, treatments, diagnostic tests and devices needed to fight COVID-19.

The organisation’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) requires WTO members to provide patent protection of at least 20 years for new inventions along with a slew of other intellectual property rights.

These rules make it difficult or impossible for developing nations to provide COVID-19 medical products, even where it would be straightforward to manufacture them.

TRIPS provides for exemptions, but the provisions are onerous and time-consuming. They apply only to patents, and don’t free up the rights to the information about the manufacturing process needed to make the treatments.

India and South Africa proposed the so-called TRIPS waiver in October 2020.

Later revised and sponsored by more countries, it would have enabled developing nations to manufacture diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines for COVID-19 during the pandemic without fear of legal action.

The United States, home to some of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, was at first hesitant until President Joe Biden backed a waiver — albeit limited to vaccines — in May.

Australia waited for the US, then waited

Australia held out longer than the US, even though US companies had more at stake. But unless Australia and other wealthy nations do more to merely vote for the waiver, “grotesque” vaccination gaps are set to continue for years to come.

Trade Minister Dan Tehan came out in support of the waiver at a meeting with several community organisations last Tuesday. He confirmed Australia’s changed stance in comments to The Guardian the following day.

Read more:
TRIPS waiver: there’s more to the story than vaccine patents

The shift raises the chances of the waiver proposal getting through, boosting the global supply of vaccines, treatments and testing kits — a move that would benefit every nation afflicted by supply shortages, including Australia.

More than 100 of the WTO’s 164 member nations support it. But there are still wealthy nations holding out — including Canada, Japan, Norway, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the European Union.

Why the world urgently needs a waiver

COVAX, the global program for distributing vaccines equitably, originally intended to deliver two billion doses of vaccine by the end of 2021. So far, it has delivered less than 260 million.

On September 8, it revised its forecast to only 1.4 billion doses during 2021.

The World Health Organisation says less than 20% of the doses administered have gone to low and lower middle income countries, and while high-income countries have on average administered 100 doses for each 100 people, low-income countries have only managed 1.5 doses for each 100 people.

Underlying the problem has been a global undersupply made worse by a mere handful of companies holding the exclusive rights to manufacture the vaccines and the right to keep other companies out.

Pfizer and Moderna have so far declined requests to enter into voluntary licensing agreements with low and middle-income countries.

Read more:
US support for waiving COVID vaccine IP is a huge step.

Unless rich countries including Australia support efforts to expand the global supply, many countries won’t achieve widespread vaccination coverage until at least 2023.

Variants emerging in areas of unvaccinated regions in the meantime could threaten the progress of the whole world in bringing the pandemic to an end.

Australia’s stance is complicated

In a letter to community organisations in August, trade minister Tehan indicated that while the Australian government was “focused on progressing discussions” in the World Trade Organisation, it saw voluntary mechanisms as the best chance for delivering broad access to COVID-19 vaccines.

The letter suggested that a scarcity of raw materials and lack of manufacturing capacity were the chief barriers to increasing vaccine production. It also pointed to the key role of intellectual property protections in encouraging the development of new vaccines and tests and treatments.

Right now there is probably little risk a TRIPS waiver would undermine the incentives needed to develop vaccines and drugs. There is an awful lot of money to be made from the well-off countries that would keep patents in place.

And the development of COVID-19 vaccines and therapeutics and testing kits has been underpinned by huge injections of public funding that are unlikely to dry up.

Shortages of inputs are certainly part of the problem, although these are themselves partly created by intellectual property rights that limit the number of companies with rights to provide those inputs.

One example is the bioreactor bags used to mix cell cultures and gasses in vaccine manufacturing. They are produced by a small number of companies and heavily protected by patents.

Waiving those patents could help end shortages.

While manufacturing capacity most certainly does need to be increased, there is a lot of it in less-developed countries such as Brazil, India and South Africa.

What matters is what Australia does next

The trade minister’s words have to be matched by actions at the World Trade Organisation. Unless Australia gets fully behind the TRIPS waiver in the negotiations set to climax in October, it mightn’t get up.

The head of the World Health Organisation has described the inequities in access to COVID-19 vaccines as “grotesque”. They are being made worse by hold-ups in allowing more countries to manufacture vaccines themselves.

Deborah Gleeson has received funding in the past from the Australian Research Council. She has received funding from various national and international non-government organisations to attend speaking engagements related to trade agreements and health. She has represented the Public Health Association of Australia on matters related to trade agreements and public health.

– ref. Australia has finally backed a plan to let developing countries make cheap COVID-19 vaccines — what matters is what it does next – https://theconversation.com/australia-has-finally-backed-a-plan-to-let-developing-countries-make-cheap-covid-19-vaccines-what-matters-is-what-it-does-next-167630

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jeremy Martens, Senior Lecturer, History, The University of Western Australia

In June, councillors in Perth’s City of Stirling decided not to change the name of their municipality, despite former Western Australian governor James Stirling’s leading role in the 1834 Pinjarra massacre.

That massacre, in which troops and colonists killed between 15 and 80 Noongar people, is widely known. Less recognised is Stirling’s encouragement of soldiers and settlers to flout the law and employ violence, including murder, against Noongar communities resisting colonial dispossession elsewhere in WA.

Stirling was WA’s first governor from 1829-39. My new research on the early history of pastoralism highlights how this industry’s success was built on the violent conquest of the Avon valley in the 1830s, during which Stirling condoned the unlawful killing of Noongar people by soldiers and settlers.

Read more:
WA’s first governor James Stirling had links to slavery, as well as directing a massacre. Should he be honoured?

In one case, for instance, he refused to prosecute a farm worker who killed an Indigenous man in cold blood.

This was despite his proclamation that all the settlement’s inhabitants, Indigenous and European, would be protected equally by British law.

He also argued authorities needed to deliver a decisive blow to “tranquilize” the district. Any balanced assessment of his career in WA should take these actions into account.

‘Liable to be prosecuted’

The proclamation declaring the establishment of Swan River in June 1829 explicitly extended the British legal system to the new settlement.

Indeed Stirling gave notice that if any person was “convicted of behaving in a fraudilent [sic], cruel or felonious Manner towards the Aboriginees of the Country” they would be “liable to be prosecuted and tried for the Offence, as if the same had been committed against any other of His Majesty’s Subjects”.

Yet his commitment to abide by the laws he had proclaimed was frequently tested, especially when colonists began to explore and occupy the Avon valley, 60 miles east of Perth. This area became the centre of the colony’s nascent pastoral industry.

The conquest and settlement of the Avon district by pastoralists and farmers in the 1830s was especially bloody. The Noongar people of the Ballardong region, who owned this well-watered and fertile country, bravely resisted the settler incursion.

In 1836, Stirling dispatched ten soldiers to the town of York under the command of Lieutenant Henry Bunbury. This young officer (for whom the city of Bunbury south of Perth is named) was instructed by the governor “to take the most decisive measures”. Bunbury took this to mean he had been “ordered over here with a detachment to make war upon the Natives”.

During 1836 and 1837, Bunbury committed several atrocities, freely admitted to in letters and journals. People sleeping at night were killed without warning. A Noongar man running away from his mounted party was killed, also at night.

Bunbury knew his actions were illegal, but claimed in a letter to Stirling that “severe measures” were necessary. Stirling expressed his satisfaction with Bunbury’s “promptitude”.

In a public notice he explained “a decisive blow” at York was necessary “to tranquilize that District”.

The “boldness” of the Ballardong Noongar resistance meant that nothing would suffice, wrote Stirling, except

an early exhibition of force, or […] such acts of decisive severity, as will appal them as a people for a time, and reduce their tribe to weakness.

Settler killings

Stirling actively condoned the killing of Noongar people by Avon settlers. One particularly egregious atrocity occurred in September 1836 when the pioneering pastoralist Arthur Trimmer ordered a worker to murder a Noongar man “in cool blood”.

The employee, Edward Gallop, was instructed to hide in a barn loft with a gun. The doors of the barn, which contained flour, were intentionally left open and as soon as three men entered to take some, Gallop shot one of them in the head.

Stirling made no public statement condemning this premeditated murder. In a letter to his bosses at the Colonial Office in London, he openly defended settlers’ use of extrajudicial violence.

While expressing his “displeasure and regret at the loss of the Native’s life”, Stirling decided not to prosecute Gallop. He believed that

in cases where the law is necessarily ineffectual for the protection of life and property the right of self protection cannot with justice be circumscribed within very narrow limits.

On several other occasions colonists murdered Noongar people without cause, and in some cases mutilated their bodies. For example, another of Trimmer’s employees named Souper boasted of shooting a woman while hunting in the forest; soldiers under Bunbury’s command later mutilated her body.

When Stirling was asked to investigate and prosecute these crimes by the missionary Louis Giustiniani, he ignored them.

The perpetrators never faced justice.

Jeremy Martens receives funding from the Australian Research Council via the Legacies of British Slavery in Western Australia Discovery Project.

– ref. New research shows WA’s first governor condoned killing of Noongar people despite proclaiming all equal under law – https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-was-first-governor-condoned-killing-of-noongar-people-despite-proclaiming-all-equal-under-law-165871

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Blair Williams, Research Fellow, Global Institute for Women’s Leadership (GIWL), Australian National University

This week, a new Australian political biography will appear on bookshelves. This is The Accidental Prime Minister, an examination of Scott Morrison by journalist Annika Smethurst.

While a prime minister makes for an obvious – and worthy — biographical subject, it also continues Australia’s strong tradition of focusing on the stories of men in politics.

History as a discipline may have been grappling with gender issues since the 1970s, but political history has been especially resistant to questions about women and gender.

In a recent study for the Australian Journal of Biography and History, I looked at Australian political biographies over the past decade. I found female political figures are almost always ignored.

Why biographies matter

Political biographies add life, colour and depth to historical events and personalities. They can shape the legacies of politicians long after they’ve left politics. They also show us who is worthy of being written about and who is overlooked in the pages of history.

However, most Australian political biographies have been written about men, particularly male prime ministers.

This inevitably calls to mind the enduring myth of the “Great Man” as the architect of historical change. This is best described by 19th century historian Thomas Carlyle, who believed “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”.

As women were largely excluded from politics until the end of the 20th century, it could be argued they simply haven’t had the opportunity to be seen as “great politicians” worthy of literary examination.

Yet, as political biographies define which personal and political qualities suggest “greatness”, it could also be argued we tend to associate these qualities with men and masculinity. Male leaders’ gender is never discussed or explored in their political biographies. Masculinity is portrayed as the unseen norm while gender is an attribute only ever identified with women.

This argument gains further support from the fact there are more women in Australian politics than ever before, yet there remains a notable lack of political biographies covering their lives and stories. In my study, I examined Australian political biographies published in the past decade. Only four out of 31 were on women politicians.

This small minority includes Margaret Simons’ Penny Wong in 2019 and Anna Broinowski’s 2017 biography of Pauline Hanson, Please Explain.

Why are women ignored?

There are three key factors that can explain the lack of biographies written on Australian women politicians.

First, as previously noted, there is the lack of gender parity in Australian politics. The 1990s saw a surge of women enter politics, partly due to Labor’s gender quotas. Yet at the moment, only 31% of the House of Representatives are women and all major leadership positions are held by men.

Read more:
Why is it taking so long to achieve gender equality in parliament?

Second, Australian political biography itself has a role to play here — the Great Man narrative is an enduring problem. It leads to an overemphasis on so-called “foundational patriarchs” and overlooks the impact of political players who don’t conform to this stereotype.

In the past decade, two biographies each were written on former Labor prime ministers Paul Keating and Bob Hawke and former Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies. Another biography on former Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam added to the ever-growing stack of tomes dedicated to these leaders.

Third, women politicians might be more hesitant to expose their private lives to the same extent as their male counterparts. Women politicians frequently experience sexist media coverage that often scrutinises their personal choices as a reflection of their professional capabilities. It is hardly shocking that they might be hesitant to cede agency over their own story and endorse an official biography.

So, there are several glaring omissions in Australian political biography. Where is the biography of our first woman prime minister, Julia Gillard? Former deputy prime minister Julie Bishop is another that comes to mind.

There is also pioneering former Labor minister Susan Ryan, who was pivotal in the passing of the Sex Discrimination Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act and the Affirmative Action Act. And Natasha Stott Despoja, the youngest woman to sit in the Australian parliament and former leader of the Australian Democrats.

Sisters must do it for themselves

So where are all the great women political figures? Well, they’re in the memoir section.

Through my research, since 2010, I found 12 autobiographies and memoirs have been published by women premiers, party leaders, federal and state MPs and senators, lord mayors and, of course, our first and only woman prime minister (though I also counted over 30 written by male politicians).

Read more:
Julia Banks’ new book is part of a 50-year tradition of female MPs using memoirs to fight for equality

Autobiographies can be a valuable way for women politicians to recover their voices, reassert their agency and reclaim their public identity by telling their own life story.

An ambition to take charge of their public image is a common thread running through these books, usually paired with a desire to expose sexism. Gillard’s autobiography My Story, published in 2014 (the year after she left politics), is a notable example of this, holding her opponents and the media to account for their frequently sexist behaviour.

Many women from across the political spectrum have now published comparable memoirs, including Labor MP Ann Aly, former Greens leader Christine Milne and former independent MP Cathy McGowan.

This year, former Labor cabinet minister Kate Ellis’ Sex, Lies and Question Time and former Liberal MP Julia Banks’ Power Play have provided two more examples of how women politicians — particularly those who’ve left politics — use the power of memoir to reclaim their stories and critique the sexist culture in parliament.

History/herstory

While it’s great women are using memoirs to voice their stories, we should not give up on conventional political biography.

As this genre continues to shape our understanding of political culture and history, it is more important now than ever that women are included to dispel once and for all the myth that their stories are not worth recording.

Rather than adding to the sexist speculation that women politicians experience, political biographers should offer their support for these stories to be told in a consensual and meaningful manner.

Blair Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. I studied 31 Australian political biographies published in the past decade — only 4 were about women – https://theconversation.com/i-studied-31-australian-political-biographies-published-in-the-past-decade-only-4-were-about-women-167448

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charith Rathnayaka, Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, University of the Sunshine Coast

Potatoes can become more brittle, apples may be harder to dehydrate, and sultanas might be off the menu altogether — these are possible outcomes of recurring and intensifying droughts under climate change in Australia.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but drier conditions can affect the quality of fruit and vegetables at a cellular level, making them harder to process into dried foods. This has big implications for Australia’s food security and economy.

Dried foods account for a significant portion of our diet, and Australia exports around 70% of its produce, which is valued at close to A$49 billion per year. Dried produce make up an important part of this — for example, the export value of sultanas, currants and raisins alone in 2018-19 was $25.1 million.

If the taste, quality or availability of dried foods declines, we risk losing these lucrative markets. But my ongoing research on advanced drying methods aims to help overcome this challenge by carefully controlling how cells change their shape and structure.

Droughts are set to get worse

The most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned Australia will become more arid as the world warms, bringing more droughts, drier soils, mass tree deaths and more.

The recent droughts across much of eastern Australia have already shown how climate change can wreak havoc on plant produce, as well as society and economy. For example, due to climate change impacts, agricultural profits fell by 23% over the period 2001-2020, or around $29,200 per farm, compared to historical averages.

Further, the COVID-19 pandemic has shown that uncertain environmental, social and economic conditions can lead to panic buying, highlighting the importance of food security and the stability of food supply.

It’s important to ensure our dried food supply is up to future stockpiling challenges, as chips and dried fruits are a staple of many diets in Australia. In 2019-2020, dried fruit such as sultanas, dried apple and apricots accounted for 12% of total fruit serves in the country.

Read more:
Climate change has already hit Australia. Unless we act now, a hotter, drier and more dangerous future awaits, IPCC warns

How drought affects dried foods

Australian produce can be dried either in Australia or overseas, depending on the food type, manufacturer and the associated costs.

During the drying process, the cellular structure of fruit and vegetables go through significant changes. Cells and tissues can change their shape while shrinking into more compact forms.

If the drying process is not carefully controlled, it can lead to undesirable properties affecting the food’s taste and appearance, potentially reducing the market value and nutritional quality.

This is how drought makes things difficult. We know drought leads to water shortages in lakes and rivers, but research suggests it also dries out small plant cells and tissues.

If the absence of water in cells is ongoing — due to repeating droughts — the micro-properties of plants and their produce can change in the long term, whether the plants are grown in a large farm spanning hectares or in a small pot in your backyard.

Recurring droughts can make fruit and vegetables “fatigued” even before they’re harvested. This means the structure of the plant weakens with every drought, a bit like how bending a metal wire repeatedly eventually causes it to break.

For example, droughts can make plants, such as apples, more brittle and therefore un-processable. Droughts can also directly lead to smaller plants and respective harvests.

If the drought conditions are extreme, the moisture loss in the plants can be severe and the cells can naturally get damaged even without any further processing. In other words, if the recurring drought conditions are here to stay, dried foods such as potato chips, sultanas and dried apple as we know them could change for good.

Solving this problem with supercomputing

So, we know produce affected by drought is not as easy to process, often tastes different and is sometimes not usable at all. But what can we do about it?

Obviously, if climate change and subsequently recurring droughts could be avoided, the adverse effects on the dried food could also be dodged. First and foremost, global emissions must be rapidly and urgently cut.

Read more:
Climate change means Australia may have to abandon much of its farming

But what if we can’t avoid it? In this case, we will need a sound Plan B.

One of the promising questions Australian researchers and engineers like me have asked is: can we modify the drying processes to match the changed properties of drought-affected produce? Doing so might enable the dried food processing industry to maintain the quality, taste, appearance and market value of its products.

But it won’t be easy. First, we need to correctly understand the exact nature of shape and size changes in plant cells, as affected by the lack of water. This is challenging, and requires computer simulations and supercomputing technologies.

Through these simulations, it’s possible to estimate if the cells are going to be damaged when they go through the drying process. If we find there’ll be serious damage, the simulations can provide information on the ideal drying conditions. This means we can optimise the temperature, pressure, humidity and drying time to minimise the adverse effects.

This approach can lead to significant savings of time, money and energy while leading to increased quality and shelf life of dried food. With more research, extended computer modelling and simulations can lead to advanced drying on an industrial scale, leading to stronger food security and stability.

So, even if we will have to deal with more frequent and more intense droughts in the near future, the taste of your potato chips might be as good as ever, after all.

Read more:
Land of opportunity: more sustainable Australian farming would protect our lucrative exports (and the planet)

Charith Rathnayaka is also affiliated with QUT (Queensland University of Technology) as an Adjunct Lecturer in the School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering.

– ref. Climate change is coming for your snacks: why repeated drought threatens dried fruits and veggies – https://theconversation.com/climate-change-is-coming-for-your-snacks-why-repeated-drought-threatens-dried-fruits-and-veggies-166826

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tim Olds, Professor of Health Sciences, University of South Australia

For most of our lives, the rhythms of our days are governed by crystallised routines: we get up, have breakfast, go to school or work, have lunch, dinner, watch TV, go to bed. For families, weekly routines often revolve around kids’ sport or active hobbies.

Then there are times in life when our routines are upended. Mostly these are life transitions like starting school or retiring. Less often, disruption stems from individual crises like sickness or job loss. Even rarer are social upheavals. The COVID pandemic is certainly one of those.

A number of surveys report changes in parents’ and kids’ physical activity and screen time during lockdowns. But what will this mean for their long term health and fitness?

Kids’ activity down, screentime up

According to the Royal Children’s Hospital’s National Child Health Poll last year 42% of parents said their kids had been less active, while only 13% said they had been more active.

The most recent report from Growing Up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) yielded similar results: 39% of kids said they had been less active, 29% more active.

An AUSPLAY survey of 20,000 Australians over 15 found 44% of adolescents participated in fewer sports, compared to 31% being involved in more sports. In 2020, out-of-school sports participation at least once a week dropped nationally from 55% to 43% compared to 2019.

One good marker of how active kids are is how much time they spend outdoors. In the National Child Health Poll 42% of parents said their kids spent less time outdoors, compared to 14% who said they spent more time outdoors. Since outdoor time is often limited to one hour during lockdown, the more active kids likely had their time curtailed.

Unsurprisingly, screen time has rocketed. Over half of parents in the same survey said their kids were spending more time using screens and digital media, even when online learning was excluded. Only 5% said their kids were getting less.

Parents fared better, especially mums

The story is quite different for parents: 29% say they are getting more moderate physical exercise, slightly more than those who say they are getting less (24%).

The AUSPLAY surveys show an increase in overall levels of physical activity in adults. But these increases are driven almost entirely by women, and mainly middle-aged women. Perhaps women in this age group who have taken on more of the housework and home-schooling burden are using the time they used to spend commuting to go outside for a walk, take a break and socialise.

Under lockdown, some of the important venues for sports traditionally undertaken by men were closed, so team sports were down 40–50% and gym activities were down 36% (though some undertook workouts at home). Meanwhile, common forms of physical activity for women were up — jogging (up 40%), yoga and home exercises (up 39%), walking (up 33%) — as they remained feasible.

Some 58% of parents are doing more exercise with their kids. The 35–54 year-old age group increased this kind of participation by 19–23%.

Read more:
Kids at home because of coronavirus? Here are 4 ways to keep them happy (without resorting to Netflix)

Will it matter in the long term?

Physical inactivity has a myriad of negative health effects, such as lower mood, poorer cognition and mental health, weaker bones and muscles and poorer cardiovascular fitness.

Over the long term, physical inactivity increases the chances of becoming overweight and of obesity. It increases the likelihood of early onset for chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, many cancers and mental illness.

If the lockdown trends for lessened physical activity are sustained, it’ll be bad news for our children’s health. The question is, once restrictions ease, will children’s activity levels return to normal?

Children get their physical activity in three main ways: play, active transport (walking, running, cycling and scooting to get somewhere) and sport.

Much of their play happens at school, so will presumably rebound once school’s back. But there have been decades-long declines in children’s active transport (though such activities have enjoyed a renaissance during COVID while families stay within their local neighbourhood).

Read more:
From vaccination to ventilation: 5 ways to keep kids safe from COVID when schools reopen

The long-term impact on sport is less clear. In June 2020, 32% of parents reported concern about their kids going back to sport after the pandemic, due to ongoing fear of COVID infection. Furthermore, many families are reporting enjoyment of a slower pace of life under COVID with less rushing to sporting games, classes or practice. It is possible that COVID may speed up a decades-long shift in participation for both adults and kids from organised group sports (such as football, basketball and surf lifesaving), to more informal and individual activities (such as cycling, running and surfing).

Read more:
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Wait and see

As a society, it will be imperative that we closely observe trends in children’s (and adults’) activity, as these COVID trends have the potential to leave lasting scars with long-term health consequences.

Targeted efforts to address lockdown-related declines in physical activity may be needed. For now, there is cause for quiet optimism, with vaccination numbers growing, an easing of restrictions in sight, as well as the warmer, longer days of summer ahead.

Tim Olds receives funding from the NHMRC and ARC.

Carol Maher receives funding from the NHMRC and the Medical Research Future Fund

Verity Booth is a member of Exercise and Sports Science Australia

– ref. Kids’ fitness is at risk while they miss sport and hobbies — but mums are getting more physical – https://theconversation.com/kids-fitness-is-at-risk-while-they-miss-sport-and-hobbies-but-mums-are-getting-more-physical-167433

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Egliston, Postdoctoral research fellow, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology

In partnership with eyewear brand Ray-Ban, Facebook has released its first pair of smart glasses, offering wearers the ability to capture photos and videos without even needing to pull out their phone.

The glasses, called Ray-Ban Stories, are now available for A$449 and are functionally similar to devices already on the market, such as SnapChat Spectacles. They allow users to capture images and video and upload them to their social media accounts, via an app called Facebook View.

Users will be able to share content on Facebook and other Facebook-owned platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, as well as non-Facebook apps such as Twitter, TikTok and SnapChat. Besides two 5-megapixel cameras, the glasses have three microphones and built-in speakers, so they can respond to voice commands and also be used for calls.

The glasses are the latest step in Facebook’s initiative to develop wearable tech. As chief executive Mark Zuckerberg puts it, such devices represent “a future where phones are no longer a central part of our lives”.

It’s not augmented reality (yet)

Facebook has stressed the glasses do not have any augmented reality (AR) functionality – that is, the ability to overlay one’s view of the physical world with digital images.

That said, during his product launch video, Zuckerberg presents the glasses as a stepping-stone to more fully realised forms of wearable AR — something Facebook has repeatedly hinted at over the past few years. As he puts it, “glasses are going to be an important part of building the next computing platform”.

With its 2014 acquisition of virtual reality (VR) company Oculus – and numerous other startups in areas such as computer vision – Facebook’s VR and AR development wing, Facebook Reality Labs, has grown so much it now reportedly employs 20% of Facebook’s workforce.

As we argued in a recent paper, Facebook sees AR and VR as a central component of its future, and envisions this technology having a similar impact to the mobile computing revolution of the past decade or so.

This was most recently exemplified in the company’s framing of its social software and hardware in terms of the “metaverse” — a seamless blending of the real and virtual worlds.

Read more:
What is the metaverse? A high-tech plan to Facebookify the world

These future computing platforms might look something like the company’s announcement of Project Aria — an internal Facebook research project testing the viability of wearable AR smart glasses. Facebook has also been attempting to further integrate AR features into its Oculus VR technology.

One problem for prospective users is that these technologies will require intensive data capture and processing of our bodies, homes and other intimate data.

‘Designed with privacy in mind’

Even without AR functionality, there are still clear privacy concerns associated with a Facebook device that can record whatever you’re looking at.

Perhaps attempting to pre-empt a backlash, Facebook has developed a dedicated privacy policy for the new technology, assuring us:

Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses and Facebook View are ads-free experiences, so you won’t see ads when using the glasses or app. And we don’t use the content of your photos and videos for personalised ads. If you share content to any other app, that app’s terms will apply.

But as with previous forms of smart glasses, such as the widely derided Google Glass, the main privacy issue isn’t protecting yourself from unwanted ads, but protecting other people from being surreptitiously recorded.

Ray-Ban Stories features a small light on the side of the frame, which is illuminated when recording. But it can easily be covered over, and while this would violate Facebook’s terms of service, it’s hard to see how Facebook would realistically stop anyone doing it.

Ultimately, Facebook has put the onus on users to behave responsibly. As outlined in the Stories privacy page, Facebook’s suggested “best practices” include not using the device in private spaces, and advising users not to “engage in harmful activities”. (Facebook’s responsible innovation principles for its AR development staff are similarly vague.)

What does Facebook expect to achieve?

Smart glasses have always been a tricky sell. Google Glass was an abject commercial failure because of privacy concerns. Despite being just down the road from Silicon Valley, some bars in San Francisco reportedly banned anyone wearing them, and some residents even reacted with violence.

Given this ignominious track record, what is Facebook hoping to achieve here? We believe — based on Facebook’s broader investments in VR and AR technologies — the ultimate aim is to gradually normalise wearable surveillance technology many people currently have deep and understandable reservations about.

Read more:
Shadow profiles – Facebook knows about you, even if you’re not on Facebook

By branding them as a Ray-Ban product rather than a Facebook one, with classic styling rather than a high-tech look, and able to upload to many different social media platforms, the company is trying to sell us on the concept of “smart glasses”, rather than “Facebook glasses”. But if video Ray-Bans become mainstream, who knows what other data-intensive gadgets are lurking just around the corner?

Marcus Carter has received funding from Snapchat, Inc.

Ben Egliston does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Ray-Ban Stories let you wear Facebook on your face. But why would you want to? – https://theconversation.com/ray-ban-stories-let-you-wear-facebook-on-your-face-but-why-would-you-want-to-167708

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Annamarie Jagose, Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and Pro-Vice-Chancellor, University Schools, University of Sydney

Our writers nominate the TV series keeping them entertained during a time of COVID.

Those who, like us, grew up gay in the era before narrow-cast television have long been attuned to the queerness of those supporting characters who exist just beyond the limelight.

Less tied than the leads to the heteronormative story arc underpinning most generic product, these peripheral figures have assisted and thwarted straight romance since Hollywood passed its classic three-act narrative structure to broadcast television.

Think of Agnes Moorehead’s Endora, the witchy mother-in-law relentlessly undermining Samantha’s marriage to mere-mortal Darren in season after season of Bewitched (1964-72), or Nancy Jane Kulp’s Miss Jane Hathaway, the bird-watching spinster who made 246 episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies queerly watchable.

Abetted by the popularisation of cable television, in the 1990s, gay characters left the sidelines for centre stage. But, even then, queer sidekicks kept up a running commentary on the absurdity of human sexual behaviour. Often, these wayward characters were more memorable than the leads they ostensibly supported.

Like many, we have been seeking reliable distraction to see us through the charmless experience of lockdown. This is less a matter of relieving tedium than of ensuring the everyday calibrations of novelty that make coupled living — and now also working together — fun.

We continue to watch TV as if it were only available on schedule. We restrainedly dole out one or two episodes of carefully curated series per evening, an anti-binge practice (much like our alcohol consumption — or so we maintain to our GPs) in keeping with the demands of our professional lives.

Recently, we found ourselves turning to Master of None, the Aziz Ansari vehicle that marked his transition from ethnic supporting character in Parks and Recreation to post-romantic lead and showrunner in an observational comedy built around his character, Dev Shah.

A first-generation, South Asian actor-foodie living among his kind in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Dev is impeccably turned out and ahead of the hipster curve. Yet he lacks social radar, particularly in relation to gender and sexual rapprochement of any kind, which is largely what the program is about.

Interestingly uncomfortable viewing

Citing cinematic masterpieces and multi-camera sitcom classics with equal reverence, Master of None’s blend of satirical send-up and earnest search for romance makes for interestingly uncomfortable viewing. We are often unsure whether we should be invested in getting Dev and his love-object together, or in keeping them apart.

Again and again, the romantic scenarios on screen register as sexually off, even as they drive the normative rom-com plot onwards. Throughout season one (2015) and two (2017), Dev’s romantic adventures are abetted by his male wingman, Arnold (Eric Wareheim), a Jewish guy as tall and bulky as Dev is small. The role of cynical observer is ceded to his equally oversized butch Black friend, Denise (Lena Waithe).

Playing a classic queer supporting character with her low-key, almost affectless presentation, Waithe steals every scene she is in, however few her lines. No surprise then, that after the long hiatus brought about by the well-publicised sexual misconduct allegation against Ansari, he and fellow creator Alan Yang relaunched the series in 2021 by focusing almost exclusively on Waithe’s character.

Completely surprising, however, was the format itself. Titled Moments in Love, season three of Master of None pays homage to Ingmar Bergman’s landmark 1973 television miniseries, Scenes from a Marriage.

Bergman’s observational drama followed the breakdown of an established marriage in the wake of an affair, which barely commands screen time. The real interest is in how the original and irretrievably broken coupling nonetheless persists across the advent of new partnerships and the passing of time.

When it first screened, the six episodes of Bergman’s series were said to have emptied the streets of Stockholm and raised divorce rates in Europe as previously shtum couples learned to express their feelings. (A HBO reboot of this series is about to drop. Husbands and wives, be warned.)

Flat caps and drop-crotch pants

In Master of None’s third season, this Bergmanian story plays around Denise. Since season two, she has socially overtaken Dev by publishing an award-winning book and securing a massive advance for a second (a story arc belonging to Ansari in real life).

This financial windfall has enabled her to purchase a colonial-era cottage in upstate New York, which is where, in the season opener, we find her and her girlfriend, Alicia (played by British actor Naomi Ackie), an interior designer specialising in Black antiques and art.

Across five “chapters” varying in length from 55 to 20 minutes, all co-written with Waithe, we simultaneously dwell in and fast forward through Denise and Alicia’s relationship. From the honeymoon period, through emotional and career tensions, the things that lesbians go through to have babies with and without each other, and finally, years later (when both have other wives), to a sexual reunion on the down-low in the same cottage, now rented out via AirBnB from a straight couple with poor taste in furnishings.

Across the series, everything from storyline to mise-en-scène gets the Bergman treatment, including the frame itself: no longer the letterboxed format of television circa 2020, but the squarer 4:3 aspect ratio of the 1970s, the decade of our media adolescence.

This boxy retro format captures the boundedness of relationships and situations to which there seems no outside or alternative. The camera is static. Characters wander into shots that seem to anticipate them. Dialogue is measured in pauses not beats.

Unlike the earlier seasons, in which Dev’s Woody Allenish romantic tribulations play out across Italy and New York, the third season was filmed in the UK during lockdown.

Created on a sound stage, the make-believe cottage captures the emotional feel of domestic life in the pandemic, when the dimensions of your dwelling assert spatial and temporal pre-eminence over life as it used to be lived.

But Lena Waithe’s Denise, with her flat-billed caps, drop-crotch pants and high-end sneakers, is also a reminder of how the lesbian world continues to expand its televisual co-ordinates, calling up the old to deliver the poignantly new. How our locked-down, lesbian world continues to expand, night in after night in.

Master of None is available to screen on Netflix.

Annamarie Jagose receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Lee Wallace receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

– ref. How we fell for Master of None and its queer retelling of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage – https://theconversation.com/how-we-fell-for-master-of-none-and-its-queer-retelling-of-ingmar-bergmans-scenes-from-a-marriage-166964

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Graeme MacRae, Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Massey University

The arrival of the Delta variant in Indonesia has plunged Bali, one of the country’s richest provinces, into an economic crisis and a conflict between beliefs and public health measures.

Mask wearing is now mandatory and a partial lockdown is in place. But many Balinese see the virus as something caused by forces we cannot apprehend and require ritual to appease.

The English word supernatural does not do justice to the depth of this understanding of causation. The Balinese word niskala refers to another level of reality which underlies the everyday reality known as sekala.

The solution therefore lies (at least partially) in ritual, but Balinese ritual is inherently collective – hundreds or thousands of people making offerings and praying together – especially to address a problem on this scale. While this makes sense in niskala terms, in the sekala world of public health it is dangerous.

Last month, the official organisation of Balinese Hinduism (Parisada Hindu Dharma) and the council of customary villages (Majelis Desa Adat) issued a joint statement urging people to restrict the scale of essential ritual observances and the number of people attending. The military and police would be “supporting” the request.

Collapse of tourism sector

Bali hotels and restaurants are all but empty and employees have been laid off or put on minimal salaries. The tiny street-side businesses selling cheap trinkets for tourists have either disappeared or moved into survival mode by selling cheap food for locals.

The secondary layer of industries that once served the now collapsed tourism sector, including building and agriculture, have likewise lost most of their incomes. Official estimates (probably underestimates) are of 100,000 jobs lost.

A complicating factor is that for most people the main concern still appears to be the impact of economic ill health — and getting tourism flowing again. This is obviously desirable in the short term, but does not address the longer-term risks of an economy based almost entirely on a single sector.

Since March 2020, international tourist arrivals fell from around 15,000 per week to a handful. The drop in domestic figures was only slightly less dramatic. Between 2019 and 2020, the number of international visitors dropped by 79%, and by 66% for domestic travellers.

The overall economic impact was from more than 5% annual growth to more than 10% contraction.

Low levels of testing and systemic under-reporting have long obscured real numbers in Indonesia. But when the Delta variant arrived in July, Indonesia became one of the new frontlines — described by some as the next India.

The government consistently tried to minimise the perception of risk and prioritised the economy over public health, but it was finally forced to accept reality and impose (relatively modest) restrictions.

Bali especially had relatively low numbers of infections, even allowing for under-reporting. The main impact was the economic distress caused by the sudden and prolonged collapse in tourism.

Read more:
How Bali could build a better kind of tourism after the pandemic

Many people had to return to their villages to survive off an already strained subsistence economy. This is a time-honoured safety net whenever tourism has one of its periodic crises and it works — for a while.

But now, many people have been without incomes for well over a year. Support from family, friends or charities is not sustainable indefinitely. People with unpaid debts (usually for motor vehicles or investment in tourism businesses) are in especially difficult situations as interest rates are high and many are selling off assets cheaply to repay loans.

Bali as digital island hub

While there have been some success stories of people rediscovering agriculture, they are exceptions. Most people are waiting and praying for tourism to resume.

The government has been praying too, by sponsoring major rituals in temples of island-wide significance, ostensibly for protection from the pandemic, but also, as the deputy governor put it, for Bali to get “back to normal”.

But it also has more pragmatic plans. Vaccination is a priority, with official figures claiming “100% coverage” with first vaccination and about 36% second vaccination.

Early in 2021, the Indonesian government initiated a plan for 25% of the staff of seven ministries to return to Bali and work remotely from there. There is also a plan for a new five-year visa to attract digital nomads, many of whom have been operating less than legally.

Read more:
Five ways to turn Bali into a ‘Zoom island’ for global remote workers

Another key element is an accreditation program for hospitality businesses and tourism attractions to send a message that Bali is ready to welcome tourists, but with strict health protocols.

Until recently, the island remained open to domestic arrivals, but from Java this carries a high risk of infection. There have been plans for re-opening the island to international tourism, but each has been postponed because of new developments.

Since the partial lockdown in July, a further 3,500 hotel employees have been laid off and hotels and restaurants (at least 48 at last count) are now for sale. Hospitals on the island have been overwhelmed, oxygen supplies are low and many expatriates who had ridden out the first wave are now trying to leave.

These risks of relying on tourism have been made glaringly obvious by a series of disruptions over the past decades, beginning with the 9/11 attack in US and including volcanic eruptions and less dramatic epidemics.

The government may finally be persuaded to act on strong advice from the Bank of Indonesia to reduce the dependence on tourism by developing “other sectors such as agriculture, creative economy, digital economy and education”. Such solutions may appear obvious, but are easier said than done.

Graeme MacRae received funding from an ARC Discovery grant from 2017 to 2019.

I Nyoman Darma Putra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. As the Balinese respond to the collapse of tourism, ritual is important — and dangerous – https://theconversation.com/as-the-balinese-respond-to-the-collapse-of-tourism-ritual-is-important-and-dangerous-166812