Vaccine and drug development, artificial intelligence, transport and logistics, climate science — these are all areas that stand to be transformed by the development of a full-scale quantum computer. And there has been explosive growth in quantum computing investment over the past decade.
Yet current quantum processors are relatively small in scale, with fewer than 100 qubits — the basic building blocks of a quantum computer. Bits are the smallest unit of information in computing, and the term qubits stems from “quantum bits”.
While early quantum processors have been crucial for demonstrating the potential of quantum computing, realising globally significant applications will likely require processors with upwards of a million qubits.
Our new research tackles a core problem at the heart of scaling up quantum computers: how do we go from controlling just a few qubits, to controlling millions? In research published today in Science Advances, we reveal a new technology that may offer a solution.
What exactly is a quantum computer?
Quantum computers use qubits to hold and process quantum information. Unlike the bits of information in classical computers, qubits make use of the quantum properties of nature, known as “superposition” and “entanglement”, to perform some calculations much faster than their classical counterparts.
Unlike a classical bit, which is represented by either 0 or 1, a qubit can exist in two states (that is, 0 and 1) at the same time. This is what we refer to as a superposition state.
Demonstrations by Google and others have shown even current, early-stage quantum computers can outperform the most powerful supercomputers on the planet for a highly specialised (albeit not particularly useful) task — reaching a milestone we call quantum supremacy.
Google’s quantum computer, built from superconducting electrical circuits, had just 53 qubits and was cooled to a temperature below -273℃ in a high-tech refrigerator. This extreme temperature is needed to remove heat, which can introduce errors to the fragile qubits. While such demonstrations are important, the challenge now is to build quantum processors with many more qubits.
Major efforts are underway at UNSW Sydney to make quantum computers from the same material used in everyday computer chips: silicon. A conventional silicon chip is thumbnail-sized and packs in several billion bits, so the prospect of using this technology to build a quantum computer is compelling.
In silicon quantum processors, information is stored in individual electrons, which are trapped beneath small electrodes at the chip’s surface. Specifically, the qubit is coded into the electron’s spin. It can be pictured as a small compass inside the electron. The needle of the compass can point north or south, which represents the 0 and 1 states.
To set a qubit in a superposition state (both 0 and 1), an operation that occurs in all quantum computations, a control signal must be directed to the desired qubit. For qubits in silicon, this control signal is in the form of a microwave field, much like the ones used to carry phone calls over a 5G network. The microwaves interact with the electron and cause its spin (compass needle) to rotate.
Currently, each qubit requires its own microwave control field. It is delivered to the quantum chip through a cable running from room temperature down to the bottom of the refrigerator at close to -273℃. Each cable brings heat with it, which must be removed before it reaches the quantum processor.
At around 50 qubits, which is state-of-the-art today, this is difficult but manageable. Current refrigerator technology can cope with the cable heat load. However, it represents a huge hurdle if we’re to use systems with a million qubits or more.
The solution is ‘global’ control
An elegant solution to the challenge of how to deliver control signals to millions of spin qubits was proposed in the late 1990s. The idea of “global control” was simple: broadcast a single microwave control field across the entire quantum processor.
Voltage pulses can be applied locally to qubit electrodes to make the individual qubits interact with the global field (and produce superposition states).
It’s much easier to generate such voltage pulses on-chip than it is to generate multiple microwave fields. The solution requires only a single control cable and removes obtrusive on-chip microwave control circuitry.
For more than two decades global control in quantum computers remained an idea. Researchers could not devise a suitable technology that could be integrated with a quantum chip and generate microwave fields at suitably low powers.
In our work we show that a component known as a dielectric resonator could finally allow this. The dielectric resonator is a small, transparent crystal which traps microwaves for a short period of time.
The trapping of microwaves, a phenomenon known as resonance, allows them to interact with the spin qubits longer and greatly reduces the power of microwaves needed to generate the control field. This was vital to operating the technology inside the refrigerator.
In our experiment, we used the dielectric resonator to generate a control field over an area that could contain up to four million qubits. The quantum chip used in this demonstration was a device with two qubits. We were able to show the microwaves produced by the crystal could flip the spin state of each one.
Illustration of a crystal dielectric resonator producing a global control field in a spin quantum processor. Tony Melov
The path to a full-scale quantum computer
There is still work to be done before this technology is up to the task of controlling a million qubits. For our study, we managed to flip the state of the qubits, but not yet produce arbitrary superposition states.
Experiments are ongoing to demonstrate this critical capability. We’ll also need to further study the impact of the dielectric resonator on other aspects of the quantum processor.
That said, we believe these engineering challenges will ultimately be surmountable — clearing one of the greatest hurdles to realising a large-scale spin-based quantum computer.
Jarryd Pla receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is also an inventor on patents related to quantum computing.
Andrew Dzurak receives research funding from the Australian Research Council and the US Army Research Office. He is a member of the Executive Board of the Sydney Quantum Academy and a member of the Executive of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology. He is also an inventor on a number of patents related to quantum computing.
By joining the Government, the Greens promised to give Labour the spine it needed to act decisively on housing, inequality, climate change and other pressing issues. This hasn’t happened. In fact, rather than being the progressive backbone of the current government, some allege the Greens are helping to “greenwash” Jacinda Ardern’s administration. This issue was discussed in secret at the party’s AGM last weekend. One activist even challenged James Shaw for his leadership, claiming the party had simply become “Labour’s little helper”.
What’s happened to the Green Party in power?
The question for those on the progressive side of politics, including some supporters and activists, is whether the Greens are actually achieving enough in power. The party has been taking a very low-key approach this year, decidedly not rocking the boat too much for Labour.
This approach, in which the Greens don’t pressure the Government and keep out of some of the big debates (such as the hate speech proposals), is appreciated by the Labour Party. It also hasn’t hurt the Greens’ popularity. Their last two poll results have been relatively high – 8.5 and 10 per cent. Just by existing, the Greens seem to function as a home for progressive voters who are less impressed with Labour’s continued centrism.
However, for some supporters that’s simply not enough. There have been growing questions about whether the Greens have been silenced in Government and have enabled Labour to govern in their centrist manner without any significant gains for the Green agenda. This was what many progressives, especially inside the party, feared when the Greens decided to support the new Government in exchange for ministerial jobs – see my roundup column from last year: The Green Party’s fraught decision.
Since then, there have been numerous signs that the new coalition arrangement hasn’t yielded much progress for the party and its two ministers. Co-leader Marama Davidson has struggled in her homelessness housing portfolio. In March, for example, it was revealed that in the first five months during which she had held the portfolio, she had not taken a paper to a Cabinet committee, nor issued a press release, nor engaged with the community – see Jenna Lynch’sRevealed: The multimillion-dollar cost of the Government’s emergency motel policy.
Commenting on this, Heather du Plessis-Allan questioned Davidson’s work output. Du Plessis-Allan argues that having Davidson as a minister is all about appearances for the Greens, rather than actually fixing anything for those in need – see: What’s going on with Marama Davidson?. And she draws attention to Davidson’s $250,000 ministerial salary, saying “It turns out that you don’t have to do the mahi to get the treats.”
Yet Shaw continues to suggest that the failures to deal with climate change are someone else’s fault – see for example his opinion piece today: For decades, politicians have failed on climate. Now we face our last chance. Like the old joke goes, once Shaw finds out who the current Minister for Climate Change is, he’s going to give them a piece of his mind.
Political journalist Bernard Hickey is clear that the Greens are actually helping to “greenwash” the Labour Government, and have become a “party of government launderers”. He recently argued that James Shaw “is giving Labour an excuse and a means to do nothing significant on climate”, and that “Green voters are belatedly realising their votes were wasted”.
Hickey also tweeted this challenge to Green supporters: “How has the Greens in/with Labour changed the Govt’s policies?” He offered up his own scathing answer: “No capital gains tax. Barely any welfare reforms. Mean policies on temporary migrants. More road building. No light rail. No meaningful climate action. Delayed water standards. Cosy deals with dairy farmers. Massive increase in homelessness. 30-40% rise in house prices. Rents rising faster than wages. Barely any mental health change. Reneging on student fees promise. Less cycling/pedestrian spending. Only major achievement is $20/hr min wage. Which NZ First demanded.”
A quiet conference of defence and challenge
Surrounded by questions about the lack of Green achievements, the party went into its annual conference last weekend. With the possibility of serious dissent being aired, conference organisers chose to close the conference off from any outsiders – the media were barred from observing the weekend conference.
The bar on the media was temporarily lifted, of course, to allow journalists to watch the set-piece publicity speeches from the co-leaders. You can read the two co-leader speeches here, both of which aimed to convince voters that the party really is achieving progress: James Shaw’s full Green Party AGM speech, and: Marama Davidson’s full Green Party AGM speech.
Reporting on the speeches, the NBR’s Brent Edwards noted in his column yesterday that the “Greens have some dissension within their ranks” about the lack of progress, and so Shaw “reminded party members that to make a difference, the Green Party had to be in government” – see: National, Greens both seek togetherness – but in very different ways (paywalled).
Shaw’s speech is quoted: “If we are going to build a better future for Aotearoa, then we need to be at the table, shaping the decisions that will determine the type of world our children and grandchildren grow up in”. And according to Edwards, Shaw “made it clear that he, even as Climate Change Minister, was as frustrated as some party members by the slow progress on climate change.”
According to this account, Shaw outlined the party’s achievements so far: “passing the Zero Carbon Act; charging the biggest polluters nearly $50 a tonne for their climate warming pollution; investing in rail, buses, walking and cycling; introducing the clean car discount; and providing more dry, warm homes. But more was needed”.
Like Judith Collins at her National Party conference, the co-leaders were under pressure from activists, and hence resorted to a call for unity. According to Brent Edwards: “It seems uncanny that, despite giving such different speeches to their respective annual conferences, National leader Judith Collins and Greens co-leader Marama Davidson ended almost exactly the same way. Collins told her party followers: ‘And remember we are better together.’ Davidson finished her speech with: ‘We get further, and we get there faster, when we move together’.”
When she wasn’t talking up the Greens’ achievements, Davidson chose in her speech not to criticise Labour’s lack of progress in government, but instead to focus her firepower on the less relevant National Party, especially in terms of “culture war” issues. See, for example, Derek Cheng’sGreen co-leaders unleash scathing attack on National Party.
Left-wing commentator Steven Cowan was less than impressed with Davidson’s speech and its simplistic allegations of racism, labelling it “a string of ‘woke’ buzzwords”, and explaining that her adherence to “race reductionism dovetails nicely with the Green’s centrism” – see: Marama Davidson: What’s class got to do with it?. He complains that the Greens have become subservient to Labour, and are failing to put forward alternatives that might benefit the working class, instead focusing on woke concerns.
Also writing from the left about the conference, Martyn Bradbury lampooned the fact the Greens were having such a zen conference when they were in a government failing to deal with some big problems: “Marama soothed, James soothed, we all soothed. It was less a party conference and more a yoga session focused on deep breathing. Only middle class people enjoy being this present. It was so soothing you would be forgiven into thinking that we don’t have 190 000 kids in poverty, 4000 in motels, 22512 on emergency housing wait lists, a spike in inequality not seen since feudal times, generations locked out of home ownership and a planet on fire” – see: Green conference vs Blue conference 2021: So many feelings.
A left-wing challenge to James Shaw
Shaw was challenged for his male co-leadership position at the conference by Dunedin software developer James Cockle, and unsurprisingly this failed. For details of why Shaw was being challenged, see Alex Braae’s James Shaw facing Green co-leadership challenge from Dunedin activist.
According to this, “the challenge reflects wider rumblings of discontent within the party membership over the pace of action on climate change and social justice issues, particularly with the Greens playing a subordinate role to the governing Labour Party.” Shaw’s challenger “says the party has become too timid on the great challenges facing humanity.” Cockle declared his intentions for the Green Party: “I’m running to pull it back to the left.”
The conference vote was 116 for Shaw, 4 for Cockle, and 20 abstentions – see Derek Cheng’sChallenge to James Shaw’s Green Party co-leadership fizzles at AGM. As Shaw himself explained, the combined 24 abstention and Cockle votes were about the same proportion as the number of members who voted last year against the Greens going into coalition with Labour.
Green leaders promise change
The co-leaders also answered questions about the Greens’ lack of progress by promising to push Labour to move faster on a progressive agenda. Spinoff political editor Justin Giovannetti reports that “the two co-leaders sketched out a plan for the next two years, one where they are simultaneously in government and critical of it” – see: James Shaw wipes floor with rival as Marama Davidson lets rip at National Party. Davidson explains the strategy further saying: “We have the Greens in government, but also not in government.”
This approach is meant to allow the Greens to both work inside constructively while speaking up loudly from outside of Cabinet. However, this strategy has been used numerous times by the Greens to defend their arrangements. For example, Davidson even ran her 2018 campaign to be co-leader on the basis that she would be the outspoken leader that contrasted nicely with Shaw being the insider and constructive leader.
This approach clearly stopped once Davidson became a minister. However, Davidson argued in April that she is continuing this approach, and that “she feels ’empowered’ as a Minister while continuing to work with the same grassroots organisations” – see Jo Moir’sThe Greens’ new relationship with power. According to this article, the Greens maintain “the ability for MPs outside of the executive tent to fight for much more”.
Potential changes to the way the Greens operate were discussed behind closed doors at the weekend. The big leadership debate was really about whether the party should continue to have rules to ensure a dedicated male and female co-leader. Some argued that the dichotomy should be in terms of ethnicity instead of gender – see, for example, Dan Satherley’s Green co-leader Marama Davidson says party leadership should reflect ‘Te Tiriti representation’.
For more on the Greens’ ongoing representation debates, see Jo Moir’s April article, Hints of new leadership model for Greens. As to whether this is about improving representation or getting Chlöe Swarbrick as a co-leader alongside Marama Davidson, see Heather du Plessis-Allan’sIs personal ambition behind the Greens’ latest kooky idea?. However, we don’t know what was decided because the party co-convenors wouldn’t answer journalists’ questions on the outcome.
In our age of unnuanced media reporting, cynicism, and political correctness, words and meanings are subject – perhaps increasingly – to an effective process of cancellation. It’s not a new process, in the past certain words might be replaced by others – eg ‘race’ replaced by ‘ethnicity’, ‘illegitimate’ replaced by ‘ex-nuptial’, ‘benefit’ replaced by ‘handout’. Such replacements are not necessarily problematic. In the first two examples given above, words whose popular meanings have become pejorative have been replaced by words with essentially the same meanings, but without the pejorative connotations.
In the third example, a word (‘benefit’) that is a very good word – indeed a word that literally means ‘something good’ – has suffered a pejorative meaning and has been largely replaced by a word that reinforces that pejorative meaning. The proper meaning of ‘benefit’ – as a noun, though not as a verb – has largely been lost to the language; and it’s a critically important meaning to the understanding of the available capitalist options for the future of human civilisation. (I cannot conceive of any non-capitalist options that are not dystopian; apologies for the quadruple negative!)
Three words that I am particularly lamenting are ‘disinterested’, ‘progressive’, and ‘literally’. Today the word ‘disinterested’ has been almost entirely conflated with the word ‘uninterested’. Yet the craft of an academic – of a scholar – is to be always disinterested and never uninterested. The loss of this distinction is one of the warning signs that the age of reason – always tentative, but critically important to facilitating a civilised way of life – is nearing its end.
The word ‘progressive’ has two main meanings – both somewhat nebulous. For the earlier meaning, we get the full flavour in James Belich’s book on New Zealand history, Making Peoples. It was exemplified in the settler dream of creating a ‘Greater Britain’ in these islands; progress was understood as growth on steroids. The politicians in New Zealand most associated with this meaning of progressive were Julius Vogel, Joseph Ward, and Robert Muldoon (in Muldoon’s case it was about stemming what would otherwise have been substantial negative growth). These were our financially heroic political leaders, prepared to make full use of the government’s privileged balance sheet to build a materially advanced and equitable future.
The alternative – and prevailing – meaning of ‘progressive’ was coined through the American progressive movement of the early 1900s. Indeed these left-wing American intellectuals looked to New Zealand – and particularly the initial ‘radical’ Liberal leadership of John Balance (who lost his head, decades ago, in Whanganui) and William Pember Reeves – as setting the pace to a bright new socially enlightened twentieth century. (Refer Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State, 1987, by Peter J. Coleman.)
There are ironies. In Canada in the twentieth century, the equivalent of New Zealand’s National Party was the ‘Progressive Conservatives’, with the word ‘progressive’ fully containing that Vogellian meaning mentioned above. Yet today, the term ‘progressive’ relates to the new white collar socio-economic elite – simultaneously left-wing and (like all elites) conservative, inclined to shut down debates about practical solutions to the actual problems of our age, pursuing ideological agendas formed yesterday, and inclined to interpret the contemporary world as a contest between intelligentsia (defined as themselves) and an emerging conspiracy-theorising stupidia.
The word ‘literally’ is a wonderful word, the antonym of ‘figuratively’. To literally walk in someone else’s shoes means to actually wear the shoes of that other person. Recently I heard someone say, after a good result in the Olympic Games, that they were ‘literally over the moon’. Yeah right! Not even Jeff Bezos can do that. Not yet. ‘Literally’ is now becoming a synonym of ‘figuratively’; and, more generally, its just becoming another meaningless expression of hyperbole.
Sex, Gender and Certification
Language in this area is becoming a (figurative) minefield. And, in reflection of these sensitivities, this week the New Zealand Parliament is proceeding with a bill that will enable people to modify their birth certificates. This retrospective tinkering with historical documents – like other retrospective procedures in law – makes me very uneasy. Retrospectivity was one of the important themes of George Orwell’s classic dystopia, 1984. People would be cancelled, would become unpersons who legally never existed, even though they are or were alive, literally.
I will quote Yuval Noah Harari – from p.170 of his very (and deservedly) popular book Sapiens. Harari has impeccable credentials as a ‘progressive’ intellectual, in the full twentyfirst century meaning of that word.
Scholars usually distinguish between ‘sex’, which is a biological category, and ‘gender’, a cultural category. Sex is divided between males and females, and the qualities of this division are objective and have remained constant throughout history. Gender is divided between men and women (and some cultures recognise other categories). … To get to be a member of the male sex is the simplest thing in the world. You just need to be born with an X and a Y chromosome. To get to be a female is equally simple. A pair of X chromosomes will do it.
The word ‘sex’ has become a bit like the word ‘race’, and as a result many people have come to use the word ‘gender’, incorrectly, as a euphemism for ‘sex’. Some people accentuate the biological concept of ‘sex’, while substituting the word ‘gender’. Take ‘gender-reveal parties’ as an example. Further, some feminists refer to ‘gender’ as a biological attribute, while others use it as a cultural attribute.
Gender, as a term of identity, is much like that of religion. We know that most people born to Muslim parents will live their lives as Muslims; but it would be wrong to put the world ‘Muslim’ on a person’s birth certificate. A person born into a Muslim family may choose to not be a Muslim. It’s even trickier with Jews. To be an ‘Ashkenazy Jew’ is widely used as an ethnicity (eg in ancestry DNA tests), as well as a descriptor of a person’s faith, or an ancestor’s faith. This is because of the widespread social practice – covering three millenniums – of Jews to reproduce within their religious community. Over time, a religious group thereby becomes an ethnic group. Nevertheless, a person born into a Jewish family can disavow Judaism, but will still have the same ethnicity as their siblings who retain their birth faith.
A birth certificate is the official documentation of a birth, not a documentation of a person’s life, nor a documentation of a person’s subjective status on their eighteenth birthday. It’s meant to be a document of a person’s biology, not of their culture.
The issue does arise however, about the need to have a widely-used document that states who someone ‘is’, rather than what they ‘were’. Our common practice is to use passports and drivers’ licences for this purpose. But its an ad hoc solution.
Given that, in the 2020s, fewer people will travel internationally and more people are choosing not to drive (or choosing to delay gaining a driver’s licence), it is now time that New Zealanders ‘bite the bullet’ and develop an official domestic system of identity documentation; a present-focussed (rather than past-focused) system that easily allows a person to revise their identity when any aspect of their identity changes. Some categories of identity – eg gender, religion, ethnicity – could be optional inclusions. A person’s sex would not be required. The items of information needed would be a photo, a signature, a date of birth (to indicate age), a social security number, and a person’s immigration status. (With immigration status shown, a person’s place of birth would not be required.)
Do we need to indicate sex at all on a birth certificate? We don’t include ethnicity. I would argue ‘yes’, a person’s sex is an important part of their birth identity. (And, much academic research focusses on different life outcomes and options and discriminations based on their sex, even if much of its publication is couched in the subjective language of gender. Sex, like age, is a fundamental human attribute.) Harari (p.172) notes that “there is some universal biological [my emphasis] reason” why we have regarded, throughout history, the distinction between males and females as important. I presume it relates to their distinctly different biological roles in the literal reproduction of our species.
There is no equivalent imperative to define a person by their ethnicity, although some societies still do. (This is a touchy hypothetical point though, because there were once multiple species – not races – of humans. Even politically correct people today hang on to the idea that it is acceptable to be disparaging to extinct species of humans – eg Neanderthals – whereas they should not be disparaging to more recent victims of genocide, such as Tasmania’s first peoples. The boundary between extinct human species and extinct ethnicities is not clear though; it’s still accepted practice to call an allegedly ‘uncultured’ person a ‘philistine’. Also, especially in this modern era of DNA sequencing, we know that neither the genomes of native Tasmanians nor native Europeans [Neanderthals] are extinct.)
Marriages and Unions
An interesting episode in New Zealand’s political history is when, half a decade ago, New Zealand was one of the first jurisdictions to redefine the word ‘marriage’. The legislation came up, purely by chance, as a private member’s bill, and was promoted as an exercise in the right of two men (or two males) or two women (or two females) to love each other in the same public sense as a man and a woman (or a male and a female) could. Very few people disagreed with that right, which already existed. (It’s a bit like the ‘anti-hate speech’ bill which we are told to expect this or next year. We already have laws against hate-speech.)
There was a small issue, a problem with the earlier ‘Civil Union’ legislation, brought in about 15 years ago by the then Helen Clark led government. Imagine a Venn Diagram with ‘marriage’ on one side and ‘civil union’ on the other. While the two sides largely intersected, in some respects a civil union was wider in scope (same-sex relationships) and in other respects marriage was wider in scope (eg in the rights to adopt children). What we did, in effect, was to extend the scope of the Civil Union legislation, and then to redefine a ‘civil union’ as a ‘marriage’. The first part of this process was necessary, the second part was not. In doing so, we removed by diktat the meaning of a word – marriage, the union of an adult male and an adult female – that had existed since Adam and Eve, or Rangi and Papa.
The logically obvious approach to take was to make traditional marriage a cultural subset of an enhanced legal institution; a subset of a properly defined civil union. (An unpleasant linguistic analogy is that of ‘murder’ being a cultural subset of the legal term ‘homicide’.) In that way, marriage could still have been what it always was (a popular name for a union between a man and a woman), and there would have been no basis for any discrimination between same-sex and different-sex unions. In that case, marriage would have disappeared as a legal construct, while maintaining its popular role as a reproductive union.
My understanding is that the then Attorney-General, Christopher Finlayson, held essentially this same view. But hardly anybody – least of all people like myself, or Christopher Finlayson – wanted to be seen as gay-bashers or as neanderthals, as all opponents of gay-marriage were framed as being. At that time, there was no space for nuanced opposition to the legislation; in the public eye, re that issue, a person was either a progressive or a philistine.
At least the idea of a biological-based reproductive union still exists, albeit as a phrase – heterosexual marriage – rather than as a word. So all is not lost. Problematic though is the fact that – by affirming the legal meaning of the word ‘marriage’ – the concept of a de facto marriage, a favoured union for many people, has become an oxymoron.
Science, Knowledge, and other related Concepts
We have a number of important words – science, knowledge, truth, facts, claims, information – that have related meanings, but distinctively different (albeit nuanced) meanings.
A few weeks ago, a group of University of Auckland scientists wrote to the New Zealand Listener, arguing that traditional Māori knowledge (and modern knowledge developed through that Mātauranga Māori framework) was not science. While they were correct – science and knowledge are not the same thing – the uncritical reaction was immediate and unforgiving.
Knowledge derives from three things: observation (and measurement), reasoning, and literature (ie culture). Knowledge is evolving, and much of what was knowledge in the past would not be classed as knowledge today (eg Galen’s paradigm of medical knowledge). Much that is knowledge – such as complex knowledge that passes to us through literature – is unverifiable, but it tells us who we are, and how we see the world and how we think about it. (Early medical knowledge may not be classed as knowledge today, but the historiography of early medical knowledge certainly would be classed as knowledge today.)
Science is very much a method – associated with the Age of Reason – that can only create negative knowledge. Scientific research can only falsify propositions; it cannot declare them to be ‘true’; and, in practice, most falsification is based on probabilistic arguments devised by statisticians.
Empirical knowledge about the stars sufficient to enable trans-oceanic navigation is no more ‘science’ than is knowledge about which herbal remedies relieve certain conditions of pain or disease. Ptolemaic astronomy, traditional Polynesian astronomy, and Copernican astronomy all equally convey practical navigational knowledge. Polynesian astronomical knowledge is ‘true’, as observational knowledge; but it’s not science, it cannot be falsified. Ptolemaic astronomy, likewise, enabled navigation. But it offered an explanation for the movements of celestial objects that has been proven to be false. Likewise, Copernican astronomy is also false – the sun is not at the centre of the universe – but in an important scientific sense it is less false than Ptolemaic astronomy. Copernican astronomy made it possible to create further truths that are even less false (eg those associated with Gallileo, Kepler and Newton). These are evolving truths that are progressive – in the Vogellian sense – without which humans could never have visited the moon.
Truth is a philosophical rather than a scientific concept. If I say that I believe Vitamin C supplements are good for a person’s health in some circumstances, then I know that that is true, because I know what I believe. Further, that belief is verifiable (sort of) if I am observed to be taking Vitamin C supplements; although I could be taking the supplements as part of an experiment, and not necessarily because I believe they are good for me. Beliefs are truths, albeit subjective truths. I know what I believe, even if you don’t. If I believe in flying pigs, then it is true that I believe in flying pigs.
A scientific truth is a plausible ‘claim’, or ‘hypothesis’; an assertion of objective truth. By its very nuanced meaning, all scientific truths are provisional. A scientific truth, by definition, must be conceptually falsifiable.
Information is a mix of all the above-mentioned: science, knowledge, truth, facts, claims. Information makes no special claim to truth, and may be intentionally false, or an untested claim.
Trivial truths may be called facts. My date of birth is a fact. The size of a crowd for an event at Eden Park is a fact, but only has meaning if contextualised; it needs to be ‘time-stamped’, because the crowd size varies during an event. And even then, the truthful meaning of a time-stamped fact may vary; 50,000 people may have turned up by 7:30pm on the day of a given event, but most those people may have left soon after. The size of the crowd at 9:00pm is an alternative fact. For an event to be truthfully classed as more popular than another event, it depends on the duration of the crowd as well as its peak size.
One important kind of truth is abstract (or a priori) truth. Mathematics is a set of such abstract truths. 2+3=5 is a truth. So is +x+(-x)=0; the truth that underpins double-entry bookkeeping (where ‘x’ can be any number). So is i²=-1, where i is by definition the imaginary number which makes that truth true.
Historical Truth
A particularly important class of truth is ‘historical truth’. Historical truth is a set of facts underpinned by a set of counterfactuals that confer meaning or explanation onto that truth. Facts can be observed; that’s the easier part. Counterfactuals can only be argued; they can only be reasoned, because, by definition, they did not happen.
Much of what we think of as history is sequences of facts; many of these are provisional facts which may be disputed because of gaps or anomalies in the documentary record. Further, such facts are often interpreted. Was a recovered archaeological monument a temple, or a palace, or a parliament?
That James Cook and Jean-François-Marie de Surville unknowingly crossed paths off Cape Reinga in December 1769 is a fact. The date of that crossing is an unresolvable fact, because 17 Dec 1769 on Surville’s calendar would have been 16 Dec 1769 on Cook’s calendar. (I thank Mike Lee, former Auckland Councillor and author of Navigators and Naturalists for alerting me to this!) This is because Surville’s voyage was travelling towards the east, while Cook was travelling towards the west. (And for Surville, New Zealand’s north cape was one bit of land – now named in his honour – while Cook saw and named North Cape, another piece of land; close but not the same.)
The deeper historical truth is that these voyages changed New Zealand (named ‘New Zealand’ in the 1640s, after Abel Tasman’s voyage, so both navigators knew in advance that New Zealand was there, and that New Zealanders were fierce) forever. Possibly an even deeper historical truth is that, even if none of these three European voyagers had ventured to these islands, Europeans would still have come to – and colonised – New Zealand, and before the year 1800.
The last-mentioned ‘probable truth’ is a counterfactual. It is a fact that all the Europeans who visited New Zealand in the eighteenth century knew in advance that it was there. It is an argument, however, to claim that Europeans would have visited New Zealand before 1800 even if they had not known it was there. The argument is based on two main pieces of reasoning: first that Europeans at that time believed that there was land in our part of the world even before they knew it was there; and, second, Europeans had become a global voyaging people, much like the Polynesians before them. So, sooner or later – most likely sooner – they would have found us anyway, by chance.
This counterfactual actually devalues the significance of the ‘discoveries’ of Cook et. al., because others would have made them had they not made them. But the fact that Cook – and men of the French Enlightenment – made voyages to New Zealand when they did (in the era of the ‘Noble Savage’), may be important in that other people with less reputable motives could have made those first contacts instead.
The history of New Zealand can only be understood through well-argued counterfactuals; how did what actually happened differ from the other likely scenarios that might have happened. This applies, obviously, to all aspects of history, and not just the history of early encounters between Pakeha and Māori, between Europe and Aotearoa. To establish the best historical truths available, the most critical skill is to be able to present one or more well-argued counterfactuals. The art of argument is essential to the acquisition of historical knowledge.
Counterfactuals, as mentioned, represent alternative probabilities. There is another kind of counterfactual, an ideal counterfactual, which considers what might have been the best historical possibility. And knowledge of ideal counterfactuals can inform the future. In my example case above, relating to early post-contact New Zealand, we can imagine ‘win-win’ scenarios in which post-contact history might have worked out better for all parties. (We can also imagine other ‘win-lose’ scenarios, bearing in mind that today’s progressive narrative is that post-contact factual history represents one such ‘win-lose’ scenario.) Thinking about win-win historical scenarios can help us to think about win-win futures. But there is one proviso, and that is that well-intentioned behaviours do not necessarily bring about desirable outcomes; and selfishly-intentioned behaviours do not necessarily bring about undesirable outcomes. (Unintended and unforeseen consequences constitute one of history’s major themes.)
Covid19 Delta
A final example of historical truth worth mentioning here is that relating to the ongoing outbreak of Covid19 in New South Wales, Australia. I heard on the news last night some gentleman claiming that we are now in a near-existential battle between humanity and delta.
Certainly, the way the story is being reported is that all would be well for us on the viral front if only the delta mutation of the covid virus had not happened. Thus, the story we are getting comes with an ordained (rather than argued) counterfactual; that delta, and only delta, is the beastie. An alternative counterfactual is that what is happening in Australia is much the same as what would be happening there had delta not evolved. After-all, South America – consider Uruguay as a particularly pertinent case – experienced something much worse, and without a hint of delta.
If we go back to the story of the near-existential battle between humanity and delta, where delta is an allegory for a strengthened foe, an important factor is whether humanity (the good guys) are stronger or weaker than in previous episodes. If humanity this year is weaker – ie less immune to respiratory viruses – than last year then the present weakness of humanity may be the key determinant of events, meaning that the New South Wales event might have happened regardless of delta.
Yet the narrative we have may be useful, if not true. If the message is that humanity has to strengthen in order to match a stronger foe – eg strengthen through taking vaccines – then the ‘official’ narrative, though probably not true, nevertheless supports good behaviour.
Finally
By losing language, and conflating words with similar meanings into the same meaning, we lose our ability to conceptualise the alternative realities which represent the pathways to better futures. Too many words today become synonymous with hyperbole. Other words morph into their opposites.
Science is a particularly important word. Unlike ‘marriage’, if the word ‘science’ loses or changes its meaning, eg morphing with ‘knowledge’ and ‘facts’, there is no other word or phrase which we can use, in its stead, to mean what ‘science’ has meant. Indeed, all the slightly synonymous words used above – science, knowledge, truth, facts, claims, information – may all be coming to mean ‘beliefs’. In other words, all these nuanced words – with their underlying objectivity – may be lost in favour of post-modern subjectivity.
Our most important word may be the word ‘otherwise’. It is the word that indicates a counterfactual – a blend of imagination and argument that we need to make sense of our world, and to make progress in it.
————-
Keith Rankin, trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
News Britney Spears’ father has agreed to step down from her conservatorship might have you wondering how equivalent laws work in Australia.
Australia doesn’t have “conservatorships” but rather guardianship and financial management laws for each state and territory.
Traditionally, there have been three legal options for appointing other people to manage your money and your affairs.
One is through the Supreme Court, which is a very formal process out of reach for many. A second option is through state-based mental health laws for temporary financial management while an individual is detained in a mental health facility.
A third option is via state-based guardianship tribunals. Exactly how it works varies from state to state, so check the links below for details:
In most cases, financial management and guardianship laws relate to people who have been deemed incapable of managing their affairs, or who are considered in need of a financial manager or guardian, because of a disability.
That might include a person with a mental health condition, an intellectual disability, dementia or a disability affecting their ability to communicate their decisions.
Since the 1980s, state-based tribunals (made up of people with different expertise) have been able to make decisions to appoint someone to be a financial manager and someone to be a personal guardian.
In general, financial managers (sometimes called “administrators”) take care of the money side of things while a personal guardian makes decisions around their health and lifestyle.
Guardians can also play a major role in decisions about “restrictive practices” that normally involved limitations being placed on a person’s ability to move around (sometimes via physical or chemical restraints). Guardians might also be given power to make decisions regarding “special medical treatments” — for example, whether to put a person on long-acting contraception.
To have a financial manager or guardian appointed, a person has to make an application to the court or a guardianship tribunal. The applicant might be a government employee, a family member, a service provider or a medical professional who forms the view the individual in question doesn’t have the capacity to make their own decisions.
Australia has recently seen two trends in relation to financial managers and guardians.
Firstly, we are seeing more people living with dementia having financial managers appointed. This can be to prevent financial abuse or it can be a form of financial abuse in itself.
The second trend relates to the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). The creation of the NDIS has resulted in people who previously had their affairs managed informally by friends or family now needing to get financial managers and guardians appointed. For some, that has resulted in less control over their affairs.
When someone applies to a tribunal to have a financial manager appointed, the tribunal will considerfactors such as
how capable the person with disability is and what might in in their best interests
what family support they have around them
what might occur if a financial manager was not appointed.
Getting a decision reviewed
In most jurisdictions, guardianship and financial management orders are subject to routine reviews. Under the legislation, the welfare and interests of the person whose affairs are being managed are meant to be given paramount consideration. In practice, however, once a financial manager or personal guardian is appointed, it can be difficult to get them removed.
It can also be difficult to prove that circumstances have changed and that the financial manager or guardian is no longer needed. This is especially the case if the person is still contending with poverty and/or social isolation, or doesn’t have access to social networks or resources to support them to make decisions, or has not been provided with opportunities to develop their skills.
Many of the people contacting IDRS about financial management orders find the restrictions very distressing, frustrating and detrimental to their lives. They are often limited in the social activities they can enjoy. Moreover, most are frustrated and angry with their financial managers (especially where the financial manager is a government agency).
Substituted decision-making versus supported decision-making
Financial management and guardianship laws involve what experts in this field call “substituted decision-making”, because someone else is making decisions on behalf of an individual with disability.
United Nations bodies and Australian Disabled People’s Organisations have long argued for the abolition of substituted decision-making laws and the introduction of supported decision-making systems based on a person with disability’s “will and preferences”. The latter aims to provide access to support and resources for people to make their own decisions about their finances and other aspects of their lives.
The United Nations Committee overseeing the Disability Convention in 2019 expressed concern Australia has made little progress to abolish substituted decision-making regimes, and replace it with supported decision-making systems. The same UN committee also urged the Australian government to eliminate restrictive practices.
Only Victoria has changed its laws to formally incorporate the UN Convention into its Guardianship and Administration Act 2019 and even this law still employs mechanisms for substituted judgement in many cases.
Almost every day in recent months, Australian Medical Association (AMA) president Dr Omar Khorshid has appeared in the media, commenting on various issues related to the coronavirus pandemic.
Why is the AMA so regularly deferred to by politicians and media alike? And what is its role in the pandemic?
Historically, it has protected doctors’ professional and financial interests
The AMA (and its predecessor, the British Medical Association) built its reputation as a powerful, aggressive lobby group – essentially a medical union. It’s focused on protecting doctors’ professional interests and financial autonomy, and preserving the status quo in health care.
The self-published volume to commemorate the AMA’s 50th anniversary – ironically titled “More than Just a Union” – boasts of efforts to forestall government attempts to make health care universal and affordable.
Underpinning this opposition was a fear of controls and interference by both governments and health insurers, and efforts to expand the scope of practice for health-care providers other than doctors.
How the AMA has shaped past health policies
Those past fears are echoed today in the AMA’s continuing opposition to a range of proposals that are seen as impinging on doctors’ autonomy.
These include resistance to payment mechanisms that would move from fee-for-service (an itemised fee charged for every visit) to capitated fees for ongoing care of a chronic condition.
Concerns about the adequacy of doctors’ Medicare rebates are ongoing and, in some cases, justified. These concerns have led to the AMA issuing its own fee guidance to doctors.
The AMA has a particular aversion to “US-style managed care” which it describes as “a recipe for cost-cutting and less choice”. The AMA fears Medicare and private health insurers will try to push doctors, hospitals and patients into coercive contracts with capped funding payments, and require defined standards for performance, quality and outcomes.
Meanwhile, the AMA has consistently pushed back on increasing the roles for midwives and nurse practitioners in the health-care system, and is vehemently opposed to pharmacists having an increased prescribing role.
The AMA has opposed nurses doing work traditionally done by doctors. Shutterstock
Yet the AMA has also played a significant leadership role in highlighting important issues as varied as Indigenous health, tobacco and vaping regulation, boxing injuries, treatment of refugees, and climate change.
Inside the AMA machine
The AMA’s federal secretariat has excellent resources to assist with this work – experts in policy development, economic analysis and communications. This is highlighted in the report cards it regularly issues, which have the capacity and status to influence public opinions and government policy.
The AMA is diligent about making sure its voice is heard with budget commentary and submissions to a range of enquiries and reports. According to the AMA website, in 2020 it made 45 submissions – a mammoth task of preparation and approval.
This latter task is never easy for the AMA. It is an inherently conservative body, more comfortable with the conservative side of politics, although this has varied with the public face of the president.
Internal infighting was conspicuously highlighted when Dr Michael Gannon, in his successful 2016 run for AMA presidency, chided then-president Dr Brian Owler for opposing funding cuts in health in the 2014-15 Budget and the medical treatment of asylum seekers.
The criticism that is made of the current leadership [of the AMA] is that it’s strong on progressive policies but not listened to by the conservative government.
Ultimately, these in-house conflicts undermine the effectiveness of the organisation’s loud public voice. It can agree with or oppose government proposals, but is rarely able to generate enough internal consensus to offer alternatives.
All this serves to cast the AMA today as something of a chameleon organisation trying to be all things to all people. On the one hand, it’s always at war with government (regardless of political party) over members’ interests. On the other hand, it elevates issues of social responsibility and publicly positions itself as seeking to advance community health.
We see this dichotomy playing out in the pandemic. Along with supportive words to the public and comments on governments’ actions, the AMA is raising the usual concerns and is “working tirelessly” to shore up its influence in the corridors of power.
How the AMA is using its influence in the pandemic
It is likely the AMA’s influence on the federal government led to the initial decision to roll out the vaccination of the general public primarily through GPs.
The AMA highlighted that rolling out the campaign through general practice was the best way to encourage the community to get vaccinated and noted “significant reservations” about the role of pharmacists in the vaccine rollout.
This follows years of opposition to pharmacists playing a role in the flu vaccinations rollout, as you can see in this media release from 2014:
But many busy GP practices were unable to gear up for COVID-19 vaccinations and initially they were unable to manage the storage requirements for the Pfizer vaccine. These were later modified and since June practices can apply to also administer the Pfizer vaccine.
Responding to questions The Conversation’s political correspondent Michelle Grattan raised last week about how the AMA shaped the vaccine rollout, Dr Khorshid said the program was slowed by “supply constraints and hesitancy due to changing advice”:
In recent weeks, we have seen how both GPs and pharmacists are needed to ramp up
vaccine delivery, especially in coronavirus hotspots.
On other issues, the AMA has been very supportive of the expanded telehealth services that were put in place early in the pandemic to allow patients to have a consultation with their doctor by video or phone.
Initially these consultations were required to be bulk billed, but the AMA has now persuaded the government to remove this requirement. This means patients whose doctors do not bulk bill will now have out-of-pocket costs for telehealth consultations.
Meanwhile, AMA media releases also credit the organisation for proposing the government’s yet-to-be-implemented vaccine indemnity scheme.
Striving for relevance and public trust
The AMA is driven by the need to demonstrate relevance to today’s cohort of doctors and the public in the face of increasing competition for members and attention.
When the federal AMA was formed in 1962, 95% of doctors were members. As of 2018 it was less than 30%.
So it’s no surprise the RACGP is also an active player on behalf of its members – the advocacy pages of its website show it claims some of the same policy victories as the AMA. Its president is also a frequent media presence on the pandemic and other issues.
Many of Australia’s problems with vaccine rollout and compliance with lockdowns are due to confusing communication strategies from governments and the poor quality of public education campaigns. There is certainly room for effective communicators, speaking in language that everyone understands, to step into this space.
The public sees doctors as trusted voices and doctors working at the coalface are uniquely placed to comment on the health-care consequences of the pandemic.
The AMA (and other medical organisations) have spent decades building access to media and politicians. This means that often their voice is heard above those who have more expertise and their concerns are more obvious than those of affected communities. This is a privileged situation that should be used for public good, ahead of any organisational self-interest, during the pandemic and in the years ahead.
Editor’s note: The Conversation contacted the AMA for a response and in a statement, Dr Omar Khorshid said, “the issues the AMA advocates on are in the interests of doctors, the wider health professions, and patients”. He said these issues “go to the heart of our healthcare system and all health professionals, including nurses”.
Lesley Russell 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.
With the simple touch of a smartphone, online food delivery services conveniently offer takeaway food straight to your door.
Contact-free delivery has surged in popularity as lockdowns have limited physical access to restaurants and food outlets. Industry reports suggest Australians are spending three times more on online food delivery than before the COVID-19 pandemic.
While these delivery apps provide easy access to a variety of foods, they may be harmful for our health.
Online food delivery services increase access to fast food
During January and February 2020, we analysed data from Uber Eats, the market-leading online food delivery service in Australia and New Zealand.
We focused on online food ordering in 233 suburbs in Sydney and 186 suburbs in Auckland with above-average populations of young people (aged 15-34). This age group represents the biggest consumers of online takeaway foods.
We evaluated 1,074 popular food outlets available on Uber Eats across Sydney and Auckland by type and nutritional quality.
The use of food delivery apps has surged during the pandemic. Shutterstock
Results showed fast-food chains were the most popular food outlets. Fast-food chains accounted for 38% of the popular food outlets we looked at in Sydney and 54% in Auckland.
In Sydney, the most common fast-food chains were McDonald’s (54 stores, 8.4%), Subway (52 stores, 7.6%), Oporto (42 stores, 6.2%) and Domino’s (19 stores, 2.8%).
In Auckland, the most common fast-food chains were Subway (46 stores, 11.7%), McDonald’s (40 stores, 10.2%), Burger King (24 stores, 6.1%) and Hell Pizza (20 stores, 5.1%).
These fast-food chains were all classified in the lowest healthiness category.
When The Conversation contacted Uber Eats for comment, their spokesperson pointed to their grocery category, which “[makes] fresh fruit and vegetables more accessible for thousands of Australians”.
The spokesperson also said “quinoa, kale, bowls, brussel sprouts, edamame, acai, kombucha, hummus, poke and brown rice” all increased in popularity since June 2020. However according to our assessment, these items were not as popular or as well spruiked as the unhealthy menu items.
Independent outlets are rushing to join, but how healthy are their menus?
In Sydney, we found independent takeaway stores, like your local kebab shop or fish and chip shop, are the second most popular food outlet type (30% of all food outlets).
In a separate study, we analysed the menu items (13,841 in total) from 196 of Sydney’s most popular independent takeaway stores on Uber Eats. We used a classification system of 38 different food and beverage categories based on the Australian Dietary Guidelines.
We found more than 80% of all the menu items were discretionary or “junk” foods. A large number of menu items (42%) were categorised as “discretionary cereal-based mixed meals”, which includes foods such as pizzas, burgers, kebabs and pidés. Other types of junk foods could be battered fish or chicken schnitzel, and sugary drinks, among others.
Marketing tactics don’t help
Both these studies demonstrate the abundance of unhealthy menu items available on these platforms. This, combined with in-app marketing tactics, can hinder consumers from making healthier choices.
We found unhealthier menu items were more than twice as likely to be categorised as “most popular” than healthier options on Uber Eats. In addition, unhealthy menu items were nearly one-and-a-half times more likely to include a photo, and over six times more likely to be offered as a value bundle compared with healthier items.
More than 80% of the menu items we looked at from independent takeaway stores on Uber Eats were junk foods. Shutterstock
In another study, we observed how online food delivery services have leveraged the pandemic to promote junk food on social media.
Our recently published digital marketing analysis on the Instagram accounts of nine online food delivery services across three regions (Australia/New Zealand, North America and the United Kingdom) found nearly 70% of all food advertised was junk food.
In 2020, 32% of posts referenced the pandemic. Most commonly, the messaging in these posts encouraged consumers to stay home and get food delivered to support local businesses.
While of course during lockdowns it’s important to stay at home, and supporting local businesses is noble, worryingly, more than 97% of the food items featured in COVID-related Instagram posts from Australia and the UK were junk foods.
The World Health Organization has acknowledged the growing impact of online food environments on people’s diet choices. For the benefit of public health, it urges collective action by food industry, governments, policy makers and researchers.
In line with the WHO, we propose the following actions:
include healthy online food environments in the National Obesity Strategy. This is a ten-year strategy, currently under consultation, that will guide Australia’s actions on the overweight and obesity epidemic. The public, particularly young people, have asked for supportive food environments that will enable them to make healthy food choices. This framework will be an important way to put the public health impact of online food delivery services on the agenda
restrict junk food advertising on social media. Online food delivery services need to be considered with the broader food industry in government policies restricting junk food advertising to young people
generate clear public health messaging on health and environmental impacts.Research has suggested convenient takeaway produces excessive amounts of waste. Combining the messaging may enhance potential for behaviour change.
In a world disrupted by COVID-19, the way we purchase and consume food is changing. The time is ripe to shape the online food environment to promote easy access to healthy and nutritious convenience food.
This article draws on research by former University of Sydney Masters students Andriana Korai and Celina Wang.
Stephanie Partridge receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council, National Heart Foundation, NSW Health and the Medical Research Future Fund.
Alice A Gibson receives funding from National Health and Medical Research Council and Diabetes Australia.
I have/do receive fellowship and research grants from the NHRMC and MRFF
Dr Rajshri Roy receives funding from The University of Auckland Food and Health Programme.
Rebecca Raeside receives funding from The University of Sydney Postgraduate Research Scholarship in Digital Health, Youth and Nutrition
Sisi Jia receives funding from the Research Training Program Stipend Scholarship, provided by the Australian Government to support postgraduate research students.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Steven Freeland, Professorial Fellow, Bond University / Emeritus Professor of International Law, Western Sydney University, Western Sydney University
What do cyberspace and outer space have in common? As we make clear in a new report to the Department of Defence, both are new frontiers for national security that blur traditional ideas about borders, sovereignty and defence strategy.
These “areas” are important elements of Australia’s critical infrastructure and are vital to our ability to defend our nation and keep it secure. They also have a “dual use” character: both areas (and often even individual pieces of equipment) are used for both military and civilian purposes.
What is sovereignty and why is it important?
Sovereignty is a legal and political concept. It generally refers to the authority of a country (nation state) to exercise control over matters within its jurisdiction – including by passing laws and enforcing them.
Historically, this jurisdiction was based primarily on geography. However, cyberspace and outer space are not limited by borders in the same way as territorial spaces.
Sovereignty also includes the power to give up certain sovereign rights, such as when countries agree to limit their own actions so as to cooperate internationally on human rights and national security.
Cyberspace and outer space enhance our defence and national security capabilities, but our increasing dependence on continuous access to both also makes us vulnerable. These domains can be a source of unity and vision for humanity, but they can also be a source of tension and discord – and could easily be misused in the conduct of war.
Cyberspace
The world’s dependence on the internet has outpaced efforts at effective cyber security. For every “solution”, another threat arises. This can create serious vulnerabilities for defence and national security.
There is a general understanding that international law applies to cyber activities. However, the details of precisely how are not agreed. The debate generally concerns what military cyber activities are “acceptable” or “peaceful”, and which are prohibited or might be considered acts of war.
For example, during peacetime, international law is largely silent on espionage. Nation states can generally engage in cyber espionage without clearly violating their legal obligations to other countries.
However, it can be hard to tell the difference between a simple espionage cyber operation (which might be permitted) and one carried out to prepare for a more disruptive operation (which might count as an “attack”). Both involve unauthorised access to computer systems and networks within another nation state, but working out who is responsible for such intrusions and their intentions can be an imprecise art.
Different countries have suggested various approaches to the problem. France and Iran say any unauthorised penetration of their cyber systems “automatically” constitutes a violation of sovereignty, irrespective of the reason.
Others, such as the United Kingdom and New Zealand, say a cyber operation must be sufficiently disruptive or destructive to count as a violation of sovereignty principles. These might seem like legal niceties, but they matter – they can determine how the impacted country might retaliate.
Outer space
Outer space is no less challenging. The “militarisation” and possible “weaponisation” of space represent a significant defence and national security challenge for all countries.
Outer space, like the high seas, is often seen as a global commons: it belongs to everyone and is governed by international law. A key tenet of international space law is that space may not be appropriated, which would prevent plans such as colonising the Moon or Mars.
The 1967 Outer Space Treaty, ratified by almost every spacefaring country, provides that the Moon and other celestial bodies are to be used “exclusively for peaceful purposes”. It also forbids the placement of weapons of mass destruction in outer space and the militarisation of celestial bodies.
The treaty also imposes international responsibilities and liabilities on the countries themselves – even for transgressions carried out by a private entity. Everything revolves around the imperative to promote responsible behaviour in space and minimise the possibility of conflict.
Initially, there were different views as to whether the peaceful use of space meant that only “non-military” rather than “non-aggressive” activities were permissible. However, the reality is that outer space has been and continues to be used for terrestrial military activities.
The 1991 Gulf War is often referred to as the first “space war”. The use of satellite technology undeniably represents an integral part of modern military strategy and armed conflict for Australia and many other countries.
The situation is made more complex by the increasing interest in possible future mining in space and the potential rise of space tourism. There is also no clear international agreement about where to draw the line between sovereign airspace and outer space, or about what (and whose) criminal law applies in space.
Space sovereignty
At present, some 70-80 countries have some degree of sovereign space capability, including an ability to independently launch or operate their own satellites.
On the other hand, this means nearly two-thirds of the world’s countries do not have any national space capability. They are completely dependent on others for access to space infrastructure and to space itself. Their ability to enjoy the benefits of space technology for development and well-being relies on strategic and geopolitical networks and understandings.
Even Australia, which is a sophisticated space participant, currently has relatively limited sovereign capability for space launches, Earth observation, GPS and other critical space activities.
However, it is not economically feasible for Australia to be wholly independent in every aspect of space. For this reason, Australia’s twin policy of ensuring access to space through strategic alliances with selected spacefaring nations, while also developing further sovereign space capability in specific areas, is essential to Australia’s defence and national security interests.
Looking forward
Addressing the intersection between cyberspace and outer space is vital for Australia’s defence and national security policies. Both civilian and military actors participate in these domains, and the range of possible activities is rapidly developing.
We will need to understand the increasingly close intersection between cyberspace and outer space technologies to be in the best possible position to develop effective and integrated defence and national security strategies to meet the challenges of the 21st century.
Your heading here
This research was funded by a Strategic Policy Department of Defence Research Grant. Steven Freeland is a Director of the International Institute of Space Law
Danielle Ireland-Piper was part of a research team that received funding from the Australian Department of Defence. However, the views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or the Australian Department of Defence.
This research was supported by the Australian Government through a grant by the Australian Department of Defence. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government, the Australian Department of Defence, or the universities or other institutions the authors are affiliated with.
This research was funded by a Strategic Policy Department of Defence Research Grant.
This research was funded by a Strategic Policy Department of Defence Research Grant.
This research was funded by a Strategic Policy Department of Defence Research Grant. Wendy Bonython was previously employed by the Department of Defence. She is a current member of the Defence Department of Veterans’ Affairs Human Research Ethics Committee.
When Treasurer Josh Frydenberg joined the podcast in December, the outlook was positive. While the forecast deficit was massive at nearly $200 billion, it had been revised down and the prospects for growth and employment revised up.
Frydenberg said then: “Australians go into Christmas with real cause for optimism and hope”.
But the economic climate now is bleaker. And very uncertain.
With the September quarter set to be negative, and the December quarter dependent on New South Wales’ ability to get on top of the virus, a second recession can’t be ruled out.
But joining The Conversation podcast this week, Frydenberg looks for some silver linings. He says a likely contraction of “about 1.5%” in the September quarter would be considerably less drastic than the 7% contraction the economy saw in the June quarter of last year.
“Consumer spending is about 30% higher today than it was in March and April last year.
“Consumer confidence, similarly, is around 30% higher than it was back then”.
And the latest jobs numbers had shown that more than 200,000 people had come off unemployment benefits since that JobKeeper ended.
“So I’m confident that the underlying fundamentals of the Australian economy [are] sound.”
With the New South Wales lockdown more than likely to continue into a third month and other lockdowns around the country, the government has remained steadfast in its decision to not reinstate JobKeeper, relying instead on COVID disaster payments to support workers.
A criticism levelled against the JobKeeper program was that money was wasted going to companies which ended up making profits, and then not returning the funds.
The treasurer calls JobKeeper “a remarkable success” which “restored confidence immediately after it was announced.
“If we had said at the time, you know, Grattan Enterprises would have to pay it all back if somehow they got through the crisis, the likelihood would have been that[…]some businesses wouldn’t have taken that money and therefore would have let their staff go.”
Once borders are open, and we are back to some sort of normality, Frydenberg looks to migration to assist in the economic recovery, and in countering “the impacts and consequences of an ageing population” outlined in this year’s Intergenerational Report.
Frydenberg supports a migration programme which strikes “the right balance”.
A program which “goes to our humanity with the resettlement of refugees[…]goes to the needs, the immediate needs of the economy with skilled workers, and[…] goes to the harmony of our society, with family reunions and the like.”
Michelle Grattan 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.
If you are one of the millions of Australians in lockdown, you are not alone in feeling a range of emotions difficult to put into words.
Lockdown days are blurry, with time lost within our own four walls. These walls are far more visible than we’ve noticed before. Our obsession with the never-ending news cycle leaves us both informed and overwhelmed.
Whether it’s a day filled with anger and sadness or oscillating between feeling grateful and feeling lost, this lockdown feels harder than ever before.
And the sadness you may be feeling, but can’t quite put your finger on,
could be something called “disenfranchised grief”.
Let’s admit how tough it’s been
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought changes to our lives we never imagined. It has transformed the world we live in, our sense of safety, our behaviours and how connected we feel to our loved ones.
It’s highlighted the importance of human connection. We’ve learned a lack of connection with others can bring social pain, just as real as physical pain.
The sadness you may be feeling can be down to a number of reasons. And feeling sad is not necessarily a sign of a mental health disorder. In fact feeling sad is one of the range of emotions that make us human, and has benefits.
But this doesn’t really explain the sadness many of us are feeling in lockdown right now — disenfranchised grief.
US researcher and professor Kenneth Doka introduced this notion about 30 years ago. He described disenfranchised grief as a loss not “openly acknowledged, socially validated, or publicly mourned”.
This fits with what we know about COVID-19, with stories of intangible losses including loss of safety, control, community, dignity and independence. Feelings of loss seem to envelope us wherever we turn.
Refugees and temporary migrants lost the safety of new-found homes, with the loss of jobs, accommodation and support services; citizens lost the predictability of being able to come home.
Students were robbed of in-person learning and parents were robbed of celebrating their children’s transition to the next phase in life. As well as birthdays and graduations, we lost funerals and weddings.
And when it came to grieving and loss, we lost access to the places and people that allow us to grieve collectively — our wider family and community, as well as places of worship.
Is it OK to grieve about this?
Societal and cultural norms, including gender norms, dictate how we grieve. These norms allow us to mourn the death of a loved one. Yet it feels more challenging to mourn the loss of our way of life.
Grieving can feel complicated in a pandemic when others may have it worse. People may question whether it’s legitimate for them to grieve the loss of their way of life. Researchers also talk about a hierarchy of loss, a sliding scale of who has a socially acceptable right to grieve, rather than a simple “yes” or “no”.
Disenfranchised grief may also cloud our ability to identify and validate our difficult emotions, such as feelings of shame. This may be especially so when others don’t see these losses.
This impacts our capacity to express emotions as well as seek appropriate support when needed.
Grief is real even when it feels impossible to explain what you’re feeling. So it’s important to acknowledge the loss.
Grieving is allowing yourself permission to say out aloud what you have lost. It can be validating to also label the emotions you’re feeling, even if they sound contradictory, such as feelings of both anger and guilt.
Although the risk of depression and anxiety symptoms for people with vulnerabilities has increased during the pandemic, it is not helpful to always pathologise valid human emotions that tell us we are not doing so well. These emotions act as a compass for us to slow down, reset expectations, and seek support when necessary.
Setting practical and achievable short-term goals can help direct our behaviour to be more purposeful. Sticking to a routine (as closely as possible to what you did before lockdown) can also support our sense of control.
Check in with yourself and each other. Use social media for support, which many young people in the LGBTQIA+ community have found beneficial during the pandemic. It’s vital for us to hear others’ experiences that can normalise our own.
Finally, nothing is more important than reminding ourselves we are living through a one-in-one hundred year event. We are all doing the best we can. And that’s not only OK, it’s enough.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or GriefLine on 1300 845 745.
Neeraja Sanmuhanathan is a Senior Sexual Assault Counsellor with NSW Health at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney. She received the Australian Research Training Program Scholarship to complete her PhD at the University of Sydney.
The sudden death this week of track cyclist Olivia Podmore has rocked New Zealand’s high-performance sporting and cycling communities and raised urgent questions about the culture of elite sport.
The tragedy has prompted past and current athletes, parents and the public to call for changes across a system that is seen by many to prioritise performance over the health and well-being of athletes.
Importantly, high-performance sport in New Zealand mirrors many international systems, and these issues are widespread across countries and sports.
Mental health in elite sport has been an issue for a long time. But the pressure on modern athletes is arguably more intense than ever, with increased salaries, media (and social media) visibility and heightened public scrutiny.
Tennis champion Naomi Osaka and multi-medal-winning gymnast Simone Biles have both been forced to make difficult decisions to prioritise their own well-being in sporting environments that value them as athletes rather than human beings.
Recent research by High Performance Sport New Zealand (HPSNZ) has shown that more that one in five athletes experience mental health challenges during their time as elite performers. Even more do during their transition out of elite sport.
There has been case after case of elite athletes walking away from their sport because of the pressure, most recently world champion rower Zoe McBride. She retired weeks before Tokyo because of the toll the sport was taking on her mental and physical health.
Pressure to perform: US gymnast Simone Biles withdrew from several events at the Tokyo Olympics. www.shutterstock.com
Women on an uneven playing field
The pressures on sportswomen are possibly more severe than on men. As well as expectations from sports organisations, coaches, the public and social media to bring home medals, they are also expected to conform to particular ideals of femininity, beauty and success.
Our survey of 219 elite and developing New Zealand sportswomen found 79% felt pressure by their sport to alter their physical appearance to conform to gender ideals. The impact on their overall health represents a double burden on many sportswomen.
Furthermore, for decades women’s sport has received less funding, resourcing and research, meaning organisations are not always well supported to manage those pressures. Despite initiatives to improve opportunities for women in sport, chronic inequities mean the infrastructure around female athletes remains inadequate.
The HPSNZ working group focused on building healthy environments for sportswomen (WHISPA) is committed to improving conditions for female athletes. But for greater impact the initiative requires sports organisations to prioritise health and make tangible changes.
In each of the reports about those organisations, athletes describe a culture of fear that prevents them speaking out about problems and vulnerabilities.
While these reports and subsequent media coverage typically focus on individual cases, it is time to connect the dots and acknowledge the wider crisis — the elite sport model is broken and it has been breaking athletes for many years.
The prioritisation of performance over well-being has come at great cost. The tragic loss of Olivia Podmore must be a watershed moment, a catalyst for significant cultural change.
The challenge is bigger than “treating” individual athletes as if they are isolated cases. A fundamental cultural shift is needed in the priorities and value systems of high-performance sport.
The lust for gold
A “win at all costs” mentality has become normalised to the extent coaches often fail to acknowledge they are part of the problem. Athletes learn from a young age that to be the real thing they must buy into a sport ethic that involves personal sacrifice for the game, suppression of vulnerability and acceptance of extreme discipline and surveillance.
This “whatever it takes” attitude compromises the health and well-being of athletes, but in many countries (including Aotearoa) funding is dependent on international podium results.
While “performance measurement” has been promoted as the best way to generate value from public funding, this flows through the system to the performance pressure felt by coaches and ultimately athletes.
It leaves little room for coaches or athletes to express doubts, worry or vulnerability. There is always someone waiting to take their spot on the team.
Sport New Zealand Chief Executive Raelene Castle has promised an investigation after Olivia Podmore’s death. GettyImages
Commitment to change
HPSNZ’s recently released and much anticipated 2024 Strategy includes a clearer focus on athlete well-being, including new well-being manager roles, mental health initiatives and objective measures to monitor well-being in national sports.
The strategy also introduces well-being criteria for investment decisions, with NZ$3.85 million earmarked for improved support structures around female athletes.
The priority shift is long overdue and sports organisations must be held accountable if they fail to care for the health of their athletes.
However, international efforts to implement safe systems for athlete mental health, welfare and protection have had mixed results, highlighting the challenges of creating genuine cultural change.
Following the death of Olivia Podmore, the chief executive of Sport New Zealand and acting chief executive of HPSNZ, Raelene Castle, promised a full investigation and the prioritisation of athlete well-being.
We can only hope those working with athletes – from development to elite levels – are also willing to take responsibility and commit to a process of rethinking deeply ingrained practices and value systems.
High performance and well-being are not mutually exclusive. Healthy, happy and flourishing athletes will stay in sport longer, come back from injury and illness faster and ultimately perform better. They will also be more likely to give back to the sport in retirement.
For all these reasons it is worth committing to new models of elite sport.
Holly Thorpe is affiliated with the High Performance Sport New Zealand working group, WHISPA: Health Women in Sport: A Performance Advantage
Michelle Grattan discusses the week in politics with University of Canberra Associate Professor Caroline Fisher.
This week the pair discuss provisional approval of the Moderna vaccine, as well as the wider question of vaccine hesitancy – especially in light of George Christensen’s controversial speech before Question Time on Tuesday.
They also discuss the government’s response to the grim report out of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has called for immediate action to combat global warming.
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.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bethaney Turner, Associate Professor, Centre for Creative and Cultural Research, Faculty of Arts and Design, University of Canberra
Shutterstock
With millions of Australians enduring lockdown yet again, you may be seeking solace in gardening. For migrants and refugees in Australia, gardening can be particularly meaningful when shared in community spaces.
But community gardens aren’t always sites of inclusion. In our recently published research, my colleagues and I highlight the ways migrants and refugees are excluded from community gardens — and how to change this.
When community gardens are socially inclusive, everyone benefits. Culturally diverse community gardens can not only deepen cross-cultural social connections, they can even help develop the skills to adapt to change and crisis, such as from climate change.
The benefits of community gardens
Waiting lists to join community gardens are extremely long in many parts of Australia, with some gardens requiring up to an eight-year wait. Advocacy groups consistently call for more sites and greater financial support to meet this demand.
There are good reasons for their growing popularity. Improved mental and physical health and wellbeing regularly tops the list of their positive impacts, as they promote more exercise, greater access to nutritious food, strengthen community connections, and more.
The food grown in community gardens can also help improve food security. During lockdown, these sites have been vital to meet the everyday needs of many suffering from financial hardship.
For refugees and migrants, communal gardening sites can be therapeutic, safe spaces.
When immersed in supportive communities that share a commitment to productive gardening, migrants and refugees can improve their self-efficacy. The ability to grow culturally familiar foods can also maintain their connections to homelands, easing the resettlement and migration process.
Communal gardens should be safe spaces. Shutterstock
This is why it’s so important to improve these opportunities and remove any barriers excluding these gardeners. Our research reviewed worldwide studies of community gardens, and found common barriers to refugee and migrant participation revolve around three key areas:
1. Physical and material features of gardens
This includes high membership fees, inability to easily travel to gardens and insecure land tenure.
Site design that limits gardeners’ autonomy and ability to grow familiar foods is also a problem. This can happen where there’s communal, rather than individual, plot cultivation, putting pressure on new gardeners to grow foods already well known to existing gardeners.
Another barrier is a lack of available space and small plot sizes, which can make it harder to grow culturally important crops, such as maize.
2. Garden management styles
Inclusive practices are often not embedded into information sharing and decision making, such as not translating information.
For example, community gardens often rely on formal management meetings, but these may not take into account different languages, cultural traditions and unequal power relations.
Relying on community gardens for food security can also be a big problem for refugees and migrants, especially for new arrivals. This can lead to gardens replacing more holistic social support programs.
The way we care for gardens and ideas about how a productive garden should look, are often shaped by whatever cultural norm is dominant. Uniform, neatly mulched raised beds, free of weeds and overhanging vegetation, are often favoured by risk averse councils.
Migrant and refugee gardening styles can be at odds with accepted expectations and values like these. Many are used to cultivating directly into the soil and prefer to grow a wide variety of plants together that may not look neat, but can increase biodiversity. They may also leave more space between crops to improve yield.
This means these familiar, productive and culturally appropriate ways of gardening for refugees and migrants can be devalued and excluded, along with their skills and knowledge.
Volunteer groups managing community gardens should be give more resources. Shutterstock
The good news is we can make community gardens more socially inclusive places. To do this, there needs to be more investment from governments and local councils in resources (including land and financial support) for the largely volunteer groups developing and managing these sites.
These resources need to assist migrants and refugees to:
develop social and ecological connections that engender a sense of belonging
contribute to the design and management of gardens in culturally and linguistically inclusive ways
make choices about how to tend their plots that enable some connection to their homeland
engage with other garden members from all backgrounds to share knowledge and lessons
not have to rely on the garden as a primary source of food or income generation.
Gardens are better when migrants and refugees are included
Community gardens are currently off limits to many under lockdown. When we return to COVID-normal, the lessons from socially inclusive gardens could help communities better prepare for future disruption, particularly from climate change.
Resettlement in a different country involves ongoing adjustments to new social, ecological and climate conditions. We can all learn from migrant and refugee skills, knowledge, and the ways they adapt, as adjustment to unfamiliar environments often comes with careful tinkering and trial and error.
When it comes to food gardens, past research has shown this experimentation can lead to boosting biodiversity and expanding diets, due to the variety of crops grown. One example is the introduction of maize to produce maize flour in many gardens throughout Australia. This is a diet staple for many African nations.
The desire to grow foods from the homeland can lead to gardening techniques that can sustain future changes in climate. Shutterstock
The desire to grow culturally relevant foods means tinkering with soil and growing conditions, as well as the plants themselves. This enables the plants to adapt to unfamiliar conditions, which will become increasingly variable under climate change. Learning how to grow tropical plants in frosty parts of Victoria or on marginal soils are a couple of good examples.
What’s more, gardeners from diverse backgrounds can increase a community’s repertoire of safe, low-tech cultivation and pest management techniques. This includes how to make the most of the waste from culturally familiar foods, such as Japanese gardeners’ use of tofu residue as a soil conditioner.
Not only will bringing together culturally diverse community members foster more meaningful connections, but also it will strengthen our shared ability to adapt to the uncertainty of a changing climate.
The author would like to acknowledge Jessica Abramovic and Cathy Hope who helped compile the research upon which this article is based.
Bethaney Turner has previously received funding from the Australian Capital Territory(ACT) Government for research into community gardens and local food strategies in the ACT and surrounding regions. Her family has a plot in a local community garden administered by Canberra Organic Growers Society.
Fifty percent of Fijians who died from covid-19 were at home at the time of their deaths.
The Fiji government said it had noted that many people dying of covid-19 had not given healthcare workers a chance to treat them.
The Health Ministry reported 398 new cases of covid-19 and five deaths for the 24 hours to 8am yesterday.
That compares with 568 cases and 13 deaths in the previous 24-hour period.
Health Secretary Dr James Fong said there were enough ventilators in health facilities across the country to accommodate the covid patients.
“We got ventilators but unfortunately many people are dying from coronavirus at home or due to late presentations,” he said.
“Severe coronavirus is a medical emergency and a delay in receiving appropriate medical treatment reduces your chance of recovering from the disease.
Plea to visit healthcare facilities “If you have severe symptoms of coronavirus, please visit the nearest healthcare facility to get medical treatment. Call 165 if you are unable to travel to a medical facility.”
There have been 345 deaths due to covid-19 in Fiji, with 343 of those victims dying during the outbreak that started in April this year.
There have been 38,742 cases during the outbreak that started in April 2021; and 38,812 cases recorded in Fiji since the first case was reported in March 2020, with 14,301 recoveries.
Of the latest cases, Dr Fong said 254 were from the Western Division and 144 from the Central Division.
Dr Fong said of the five deaths, three were reported from the Central Division and two in the Western Division.
“There have been eight more deaths of covid-19 positive patients. However, these deaths have been classified as non-covid deaths by their doctors,” he said.
“There have been 345 deaths due to covid-19 in Fiji, with 343 of those deaths during the outbreak that started in April this year.”
300 in hospital “There have been 38,742 cases during the outbreak that started in April 2021; and 38,812 cases recorded in Fiji since the first case was reported in March 2020, with 14,301 recoveries.”
Dr Fong said there are 300 patients admitted to the hospital — 62 at Lautoka Hospital, 67 at the FEMAT field hospital and 171 patients at the CWM, St Giles and Makoi hospitals.
He said 41 patients are considered to be in severe condition, and nine in critical condition.
He said as of August 9, a total of 513, 535 adults in Fiji had received their first dose of the vaccine and 180,722 had received their second doses.
“This means that 87.5 percent of the target population have received at least one dose and 30.8 percent are now fully vaccinated nation-wide,” Dr Fong said.
Drop in daily cases Meanwhile, the ministry noted a drop in cases reported daily recently.
Dr Fong said the seven-day average of new cases per day is 730 cases per day or 825 cases per million population per day.
This figure fluctuated at least over the past week, Dr Fong said with numbers recorded in four-digits at the height of soaring infections reported largely in the Central Division, and spiking numbers in the West.
Just a week ago, Dr Fong was reporting the following seven-day average of new cases:
Tuesday, August 3: 1220 new cases reported in 24 hours; Seven-day average of new cases per day – 1085 cases per day or 1226 cases per million population per day
Wednesday, August 4: 1187 new cases reported in 24 hours; Seven-day average of new cases per day – 1103 cases per day or 1247 cases per million population per day
Thursday, August 5: 968 new cases in 24-hour reporting period; Seven-day average of new cases per day – 1156 cases per day or 1193 cases per million population per day
Friday, August 6: 752 new cases in 24-hour period; Seven-day average of 997 cases per day or 1127 cases per million population per day
Saturday, August 7: 682 new cases in 24-hour period; Seven-day average of new cases per day – 934, or 1056 cases per million population per day
Sunday, August 8: 657 new cases in 24-hour period; Seven-day average of new cases per day is 938 cases per day or 1060 cases per million population per day
Monday, August 9: 603 new cases in 24-hour period; Seven-day average of new cases per day is 867 cases per day or 980 cases per million population per day.
Test numbers dropping Dr Fong said while they had noted a drop in recent cases reported per day, their daily testing numbers had also been dropping around the same time.
He attributed this to the change in testing policy in the Suva-Nausori containment area.
Fiji’s Dr James Fong … “resources [being] targeted to early detection, monitoring and care of persons with covid-19, who are at higher risk of severe disease.” Image: RNZ/Fiji govt
Dr Fong said, as announced on July 21, only persons that have a higher risk of developing severe covid-19 were being tested in Suva-Nausori.”This was done so that resources could be targeted to early detection, monitoring and care of persons with covid-19, who are at higher risk of severe disease, to prevent more people succumbing to severe disease and death,” Dr Fong said in an epidemic outlook of the pandemic in the country.”We are likely seeing the effect of this testing policy change now in Suva-Nausori with the drop in daily reported cases.”This does not mean that the outbreak is on a downward trend in the Suva-Nausori community.”Dr Fong said daily case numbers in Suva-Nausori were not being used as an indicator at present to monitor the progress of the outbreak in Suva-Nausori.Closely monitoring “The ministry is closely monitoring other indicators such as test positivity, hospitalisations and deaths to track the progress of the outbreak in Suva-Nausori.”Test positivity in Suva-Nausori was between 40-50 percent before the change in testing policy and has remained at this high level, which is above the national average. This is one indicator of the continuing high level of community transmission in this area.”Dr Fong said testing levels in the Western Division remained high with 3.8-4 tests per 1000 population per day at a 7-day average.”We are seeing increasing cases reported in the Western Division with evidence of widespread community transmission in that division.”We are also recording increasing numbers of people with severe disease and deaths in the West.”The World Health Organisation (WHO) test threshold is five percent.Dr Fong urged the people to continue to adhere to covid-19 safety protocols and restrictions put in place.
International pressure is mounting on Indonesia to free West Papuan activist Victor Yeimo, the international spokesperson for the peaceful civilian West Papua National Committee (KNPB), as concern grows over his worsening state of health.
Following the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders Mary Lawlor’s declaration on twitter two days ago that Yeimo was at risk of being infected with covid-19, the Australia West Papua Association (AWPA) has written to Foreign Minister Marise Payne saying there was concern over his deteriorating health.
“He is losing weight and has been coughing blood for the past few days,” spokesman Joe Collins said in the letter today.
Amnesty International Indonesia has also raised concerns about Yeimo and about the arrest of 14 Cendrawasih University (Unicen) students who on Tuesday called for his release from Mako Brimob prison in the Papuan capital Jayapura.
Suara Papua reports that the KNPB on Monday urged the Papua regional police and the Papua chief public prosecutor to immediately release Yeimo because there was no legal basis for his detention and his health had been deteriorating since his arrest on May 9.
“For the sake of humanity and the authority of the Indonesian state, immediately release Victor Yeimo and all Papuan independence activists who have been arrested without [legal] grounds, evidence or witnesses,” said KNPB chairperson Agus Kossay in a media statement.
“The Papuan people are not the perpetrators of racism.”
‘Disturbing reports’ Lawlor’s twitter post the following day said: “I am hearing disturbing reports that human rights defender from #WestPapua, Victor Yeimo, is suffering from deteriorating health in prison. I’m concerned because his pre-existing health conditions put him at grave risk of #COVID-19.”
I am hearing disturbing reports that Human Rights Defender from #WestPapua, Victor Yeimo, is suffering from deteriorating health in prison. I’m concerned because his pre-existing health conditions put him at grave risk of #COVID19. pic.twitter.com/q6Exq4LibE
— Mary Lawlor UN Special Rapporteur HRDs (@MaryLawlorhrds) August 10, 2021
Yeimo faces a number of charges, including treason, because of his peaceful role in the anti-racism protests on 19 August 2019.
He is accused of violating Articles 106 and 110 of the Criminal Code on treason and conspiracy to commit treason.
Many analysts on West Papuan affairs consider these charges to be trumped up.
Amnesty International Indonesia deputy director Wirya Adiwena said that the students protesting for Yeimo should be protected — not arrested and treated like criminals.
“Like Victor, these Uncen students are only using their right to exercise freedom of expression, assembly and association, to peacefully speak their minds,” said Adiwena.
Against human rights The jailing of peaceful activists because they had taken part in a demonstration was against their rights under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which states, Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek receive and impart information and ideas though any media and regardless of frontiers (Article 19).
Article 20(1) states that everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
Lawyer and human rights activist Veronica Koman also called for the release of Yeimo.
“Victor Yeimo will not be safe if he remains behind [the bars] of a colonial prison. Colonialism will continue to demand political sacrifices,” wrote Koman on her Facebook.
Collins of AWPA said his movement was greatly concerned that by denying Yeimo proper adequate medical care, the Indonesian authorities were putting his him at “grave risk of death or other irreversible damage to his health”.
The AWPA called on Minister Payne “to use your good offices with the Indonesian government to call for the immediate and unconditional release of Victor Yeimo and all political prisoners”.
The world is on the brink of a climate catastrophe, with just a narrow window for action to reverse global processes predicted to cause devastating effects in the Pacific and world-wide, says the leader of the 18-nation Pacific Islands Forum.
Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna said a major UN scientific report released on Monday backed what the Blue Pacific continent already knew — that the planet was in the throes of a human-induced climate crisis.
Puna said a major concern was sea level change; the report said a rise of 2 metres by the end of this century, and a disastrous rise of 5 metres rise by 2150 could not be ruled out.
The report also found that extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.
To put this into perspective, these outcomes were predicted to result in the loss of millions of lives, homes and livelihoods across the Pacific and the world.
The IPCC said extreme heatwaves, droughts, flooding and other environmental instability were also likely to increase in frequency and severity.
Governments cannot ignore voices Puna said governments, big business and the major emitters of the world could no longer ignore the voices of those already enduring the unfolding existential crisis.
“They can no longer choose rhetoric over action. There are simply no more excuses to be had. Our actions today will have consequences now and into the future for all of us to bear.”
The call urged the UN to do more to persuade industrial powers to cut their carbon emissions to reduce contributing to climate change.
However, Puna said the factors affecting climate change could be turned around if people acted now.
“The 6th IPCC Assessment Report shows us that the science is clear. We know the scale of the climate crisis we are facing. We also have the solutions to avoid the worst of climate change impacts.
“What we need now is political leadership and momentum to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
After 39 years with the Fiji Police Force, Rusiate Tudravu has tendered his resignation having reached the office of the Deputy Commissioner of Police upon his retirement.
The outgoing Deputy Commissioner Tudravu, who acted as the Commissioner of Police over a 12-month period, tendered his resignation to the Commissioner of Police Brigadier-General Sitiveni Qiliho.
He acted as commissioner while Brigadier-General Qiliho was away on overseas studies in the United Kingdom.
Following the completion of the handing over of duties to the Brigadier-General Qiliho, Tudravu decided to tender his resignation.
Brigadier-General Qiliho thanked the outgoing deputy commissioner for his services and wished him well for his future.
Until COVID, Australians had a pretty safe assumption that global supply chains could supply more or less whatever they wanted.
And then it became hard to get sanitiser and masks and other kinds of personal protective equipment.
Most of those supply chains were quickly reestablished, but the sudden appearance of vulnerabilities prompted Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to commission the Productivity Commission to prepare a report identifying significant vulnerabilities and ways of dealing with them which I co-authored.
We approached the task with a broad scan of the data. The advantage of a data scan is that it can identify products vulnerable to disruption that experts might have missed.
Our approach was to first identify the products that are vulnerable to supply
chain disruptions and then to identify which of them were used in essential industries. Experts can then determine if it’s possible to replace the product in a crisis.
Australia imported 5862 different products from 223 countries in 2016-17. The biggest suppliers were China and the United States. Combined, they accounted for just over one third of the value of goods imported.
We found that 1327 of the 5862 products (one in five) came from concentrated import markets.
The most concentrated were chemicals, iron and steel, and equipment.
Imports of other products including seafood and some types of clothing were also highly concentrated.
Market concentration creates vulnerability
We considered how markets were likely to respond to a disruption of supply or a spike in demand. As was experienced during the spike in demand for protective equipment, shortages trigger a period of uncertainty during which existing contracts and personal relationships help determine who gets goods first.
But fairly soon after, who gets what gets determined by the prices buyers are willing to pay.
So a product is vulnerable if much of the world supply is concentrated in one country; if that country experiences a natural disaster or other shock, the remaining world supply is very limited, and prices will be astronomical.
A filtering process was used to identify vulnerable imports
China is the main supplier of about two thirds of the list of vulnerable imported products, although the main source of supply varies by product.
Many of the imports classified as vulnerable were clearly not critical to the wellbeing of Australians; among them Christmas decorations, swimwear, luxury watches and American peaches.
The essential supplies that were vulnerable included personal protective equipment and certain chemicals.
Onshoring can’t always help
Some commentators and some policymakers have recommended onshoring critical supplies.
A problem with this is that onshore manufacturing could not have prepared us for a ten-fold spike in demand for personal protective equipment unless we produced multiples of what we needed.
Onshore manufacturing of the Pfizer vaccine would still require importing 280 components from 19 countries, some of which are the true source of scarcity according to Pfizer.
The principle outlined in our report is that most of the time governments should be responsible for managing their supply chains (for example in hospitals), and private firms should be responsible for managing theirs.
The government should intervene in private markets only when the private firm is more tolerant of risk than the nation. The correct response depends on the nature of the risk.
Among the responses possible are measures to encourage firms to build domestic stockpiles, to diversify, to write contracts with contingencies for emergencies, and (in only rare cases) to manufacture domestically.
Income from most exports is safe
Excluding iron ore, only 1.5% of Australia’s exports are at risk of disruption, having no alternative markets.
Iron ore accounts for about 40% of Australia’s goods and services exports to China, and can be thought of a “mutual vulnerability” — China has few other sources of supply for the quantify it needs, and Australia has few other buyers for that quantity.
Australian coal exports have regained losses. Oleksiy Mark/Shutterstock
Recent natural stress-tests have been positive.
Products such as coal found alternative markets after China blocked Australian shipments in 2020. By March 2021 the value of coal exports had returned to the level before the disruption.
Wine, also disrupted, is growing an alternative customer base.
On the other hand timber exports, identified as vulnerable, have not returned to previous levels.
While demand for iron ore from China will probably fall, it might be a disservice to the shareholders of BHP or Fortescue to encourage them to diversify into other markets now.
Shareholders concerned about risk can diversify into other shares.
Catherine de Fontenay is a Commissioner of the Productivity Commission.
An irregular cluster of fossil spores. (Scale 10 micrometres.)Paul Strother, Author provided
When plants first ventured onto the land, evolving from freshwater-dwelling algae, more than 500 million years ago, they transformed the planet. By drawing carbon dioxide from the air, they cooled Earth, and by eroding rock surfaces they helped build the soil that now covers so much land.
These changes to the planet’s atmosphere and land surface paved the way for the evolution of the biosphere we know. Land plants make up around 80% of Earth’s biomass.
The pioneering plants were small and moss-like, and they had to overcome two big challenges to survive on land: avoiding drying out, and surviving the Sun’s harsh ultraviolet light.
In rock samples from Canning Basin in the north of Western Australia, we have discovered 480 million-year-old fossilised spores from early land plants alongside spores from ancestral water-dwelling algae. These are the oldest land plant spores found, and they give us new clues about when and where plants made the jump to land and also how they managed to survive. The research is published in Science.
When plants colonised land
Estimates of the initial timing of the colonisation of land by plants are based on large fossilised plant remains, calculations of how long it has taken different species to evolve (called “molecular clock” data), and the record of plant spores.
Molecular clock data suggests land colonisation occurred around 515 million years ago (in the Cambrian period), while the earliest plant stem fossils occur around 430 million years ago (in the mid-Silurian period). These early small plants did not have root systems or hard woody tissue, which may explain why their fossil remains are rare.
Alternatively, we can look at the spores of plants. Spores are simple reproductive units that carry genetic material (much simpler than seeds, which did not evolve until much later). For successful reproduction, the spore walls of land plants had to be strong enough to resist drying out and damage from ultraviolet radiation.
These resilient spore walls are also what allows the spores to be preserved for hundreds of millions of years in ancient sediments, and to be extracted from those sediments using strong acids as used in this study. We then studied the shapes of the spores under the microscope.
The shape of spores
The spores of the earliest land plants occur as more or less regular geometrically arranged groups of two or four cells. Such spores and have been found in sediments as old as 465 million years (in the Ordovician period), which places them at least 35 million years before any known larger plant fossils.
However, older spores (from around 505 million years ago) have also been found in the United States. Paul Strother (of Boston College, my co-author on the new Canning Basin research) and his colleagues have shown these older spores are likely to derive from freshwater algae called charophytes.
These older spores occur as irregularly shaped “packets” of cells. These same “packets” of spores also occur in the fossils we found in the Canning Basin, dated to around 25 million years later.
Newly discovered fossil spores (middle) bridge the gap between older (bottom) and newer forms (top). Paul Strother, Author provided
Charophyte algae live semi-aquatically. To survive in this situation they developed genes to resist desiccation and the damaging affects of UV.
The earliest land plants either captured parts of that ancestral algal genome, perhaps through “horizontal gene transfer” in which bacteria move genes from one organism to another, or developed similar genes on their own.
Given the time frame of millions of years, it suggests the origin of the land plants did not occur as a singular event. We found both land plant spores, with either two or four cells, and irregularly packaged algal spores in the Canning Basin assemblage, which shows land plants and their algal ancestors existed together in the same area at the same time.
It also shrinks the time gap between estimates of land colonisation from molecular clock data (515 million years ago) and fossil evidence. At around 480 million years old, the Canning Basin record is the oldest yet found anywhere in the world.
Those two records were only found after examination of extracts from about 100 core samples in efforts to determine the age of the rock sequences, which shows the spores are rare. The sediments deposited in the Canning Basin in this period are mainly from marine environments, as we can see from shelly fossils and microfossils such as conodonts.
The early land plants, like their charophyte algae ancestors, grew in freshwater settings at the fringes of the sea. Spores and sediments were washed into these areas. So the fossil records that have come down to us depend on the geography of the ancient world.
In 2020 Geoscience Australia in collaboration with the Geological Survey of Western Australia drilled a well in the southern part of the Canning Basin to understand the geology of the subsurface rocks. After acid extraction of rock samples from a geological formation called the Nambeet Formation, which dates to the Early Ordovician period (485 million to 470 million years ago), we identified land plant spores with the typical regular arrangements of two or four cells.
As part of that work, we examined preparations of plant spores, already mounted on glass slides, from the original section of the Nambeet Formation drilled in 1958. And here we found the first record of land plant spores associated with spores from their algal ancestors. Our discovery would not have been possible without the access to these earlier materials provide by the WA government.
Further studies are needed to determine where additional algal and land plant spores occur in Australian sediments from the late Cambrian and Ordovician periods. New data may also shed light on where the land plants got their start: was it on this continent, as others have suggested?
The present work has emphasised the importance of access to previous data and materials, and we acknowledge the critical science infrastructure role of curating geological samples and data by the WA government.
Clinton Foster 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.
Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt said last week plans to introduce legislation to establish an Indigenous Voice would be delayed beyond the next federal election.
Wyatt said he was unsure he would have time to introduce legislation, as he has yet to consider the final report of the Voice co-design process led by professors Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.
The shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, was quick to criticise the government’s failure to introduce legislation, saying it
clearly walked away from any semblance of a Voice to the parliament. This is despite the fact that you know, at the beginning of the term, it was the big thing, the big ticket item.
While government failure to introduce legislation may be a favourable political target, it is an unhelpful and confusing criticism to make considering Labor’s own commitment to the Uluru Statement from the Heart.
This would also mean pausing on Voice legislation — and its announcement to pursue a Makarrata Commission (for agreement-making and truth-telling) — until a referendum on constitutional protection for the Voice can be held
Supporting the Uluru Statement in full means accepting a sequence of reforms, the first of which is a change to the constitution to ensure the authority and protection of the reforms going forward.
This sequence is deliberate and key to its success. We have had representative bodies and truth-telling processes before — all introduced by legislation — which have then been taken away or ignored by government. This cannot continue to happen if we want lasting change.
The simple truth is that a legislation-first approach to establishing a Voice (or the Makarrata Commission) without constitutional protection is bad policy.
It is not true to the Uluru Statement’s deliberate sequencing, it is contrary to expert advice that legislation first would be ineffective and kill constitutional reform, and it is not supported by the Australian people.
The Uluru Statement, informed by the rightful place of Indigenous people, is fundamentally about changing the way things are done for the better by establishing a permanent institutional mechanism to negotiate and inform the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and governments.
The only way to change the constitution is by referendum. By legislating the Voice without constitutional protection, nothing substantive will change. It would remain susceptible to the whim of government and be kicked down the road for generations to come.
So, the failure to pursue this legislate-first path should be welcomed. This is especially so considering consecutive polling and the government’s own co-design process indicate overwhelming public support for a constitutionally enshrined Voice to parliament.
Despite varying statements, the government has remained committed to a two-stage process recommended by the committee. That approach included the Voice co-design process and a second stage addressing what legal form the Voice would take.
This commitment included A$7.3 million for the co-design process and $160 million for a future referendum.
The fact that Wyatt and senior members of the co-design process have been considering a legislated model should be concerning to all Australians. It is contrary to government policy and the Uluru Statement, and is also indicative of government decision-making that continues to be out of touch with public sentiment and rightfully expected standards of transparency, trust and accountability.
This concern is highlighted by the fact that providing advice on the legal form of the Voice (for example, constitutionally protected or legislated) was not part of the terms of reference for the co-design process established under the Joint Select Committee.
That a legislate-first approach has remained a commitment of the minister shows just how important the structural reforms in the Uluru Statement are.
With the government now stepping back from introducing legislation before the federal election, this gives parliament the opportunity to focus on delivering a referendum so the Australian people can have their say.
Structural reform remains the burning issue
Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comments last week during his announcement of the Closing the Gap implementation plan indicated a considered approach to the staged recommendations of the Joint Select Committee, now that the first step is complete.
The first step was to define the detail of an Indigenous Voice […] Once a model for the Indigenous Voice has been developed, all governments will need to explore how they can work with the Voice to ensure that these views are considered.
Yet, there is cause for concern when considering Morrison’s purported commitment to learning from the past and doing things differently with First Nations peoples.
Reiterating these steps again last week while detailing the $1 billion in funding to accompany the Closing the Gap plan, he noted “we are making good on our commitment to do things differently”.
It’s not that the funding isn’t welcome. It is beyond time, for example, that members of the Stolen Generations in the Northern Territory, the Australian Capital Territory and Jervis Bay (Commonwealth jurisdictions) are recognised and compensated for the harm they suffered. Other jurisdictions should follow.
The problem is that despite the rhetoric, much remains the same. The poorly conducted Voice co-design process is one example of this.
Perhaps more importantly, the government’s own vaunted new agreement on Closing the Gap shows, yet again, that it is not taking into account the views of the recently formed Coalition of Peaks on key policy decisions.
We only need look to the example of the heavily criticised cashless debit card to see this.
As was highlighted by Northern Territory Senator Malarndirri McCarthy during Senate Estimates last November, the government pushed ahead with its expanded rollout of the card, despite the vehement opposition of the Coalition of Peaks and extensive expert advice.
How can trust, accountability and change in decision-making be established if this is how the government continues to operate under its new approach to Indigenous affairs?
These questions aren’t just political. They matter for all Australians when it comes to the behaviour and practice of our government and parliament. They also highlight, once again, why the reforms called for by the Uluru Statement are more important than ever if we are to achieve real change.
Eddie Synot is a Centre Associate with the Indigenous Law Centre, UNSW that works in partnership with the Uluru Dialogue.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. Click here to subscribe to Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup and New Zealand Politics Daily.
With the summer music festival season approaching (COVID willing), hopes are high that the current temporary recreational drug checking law will become permanent. If and when that happens, New Zealand will take another small step down the long drug reform road from criminalisation to harm prevention.
Submissions to parliament’s health select committee on the Drug and Substance Checking Bill have now closed, with a report due in October. If the stop-gap law rushed in for the 2020-21 summer is made permanent it will allow buyers of otherwise illegal drugs to have them independently checked without either the user or testing agency risking prosecution.
It’s an important service, given the dangers inherent in the illicit drug market and the chances of substances being cut or compromised with other toxic stimulants, as happened with some MDMA circulating last year.
Making testing legal, even if what is being tested isn’t, is a tacit acknowledgement that New Zealand’s “war on drugs” – which began 122 years ago with the Opium Prohibition Act – needs rethinking.
Despite generations of effort, the supply, demand and diversity of illegal drugs have grown, not diminished. Profit, pleasure and addiction have proved exceptionally powerful forces both internationally and domestically.
And while border seizures were way down due to COVID-19 restrictions, the black market in New Zealand for illegal drugs (not counting cannabis) is still worth an estimated NZ$77 million per quarter.
Success and failure
New Zealand first tried a different approach in 1987. The then Labour government introduced a national needle exchange program — a world first that allowed intravenous drug users to receive clean needles. The program significantly reduced the risk of catching HIV or hepatitis C, saving lives and tens of millions in health spending.
The next innovation was a world-leading attempt to legalise and regulate the rapidly evolving synthetic drug market. It ultimately fell over due to practical problems implementing the Psychoactive Substances Act, public backlash and resistance to animal testing.
This pattern of innovation and failure has continued. While the use of medical cannabis became legal in 2019, the referendum on legalising recreational cannabis failed at last year’s general election.
A 2019 amendment to the Misuse of Drugs Act did pass, however, giving police clearer discretion not to prosecute for possession of small amounts of illegal drugs. Despite room for improvement, the new system has seen fewer prosecutions for personal use and has helped shift the focus towards health and away from the criminal courts.
Drug checking prevents tragedies
Given Labour’s parliamentary majority and that the drug checking bill is a government initiative, it’s likely to pass. If for some reason it didn’t, individuals or organisations handling drugs to check them would risk being charged with possession or supply.
Anyone allowing drug testing to operate on their premises would also be at risk because their co-operation could be seen as evidence of knowledge that illegal drugs were being consumed.
Most critically, if drug users can’t get reliable information about what they’re taking, their uninformed choices carry unpredictable and potentially extreme risks. Naïve customers and untrustworthy dealers can be a fatal combination.
Between 2017 and 2019, more than 70 deaths were attributed to synthetic cannabis in New Zealand.
When the volunteer drug checking and harm reduction organisation Know Your Stuff NZ checked 2,744 samples of other drugs at 27 events between April 2020 and March 2021, “only 68% of all the samples checked were the substance that people expected”. They called it “the summer of terrible drugs”.
Even cannabis sourced illegally for medicinal reasons is often not what people expect, or even effective. Not surprisingly, then, research has shown the vast majority of people would opt to have their illegal drugs tested if they could do so without risk of arrest and could trust the information.
It’s been argued that drug checking only encourages the use of illegal and harmful substances. But the evidence
suggests otherwise.
Rather, informed decisions produce changes in behaviour. When drug customers realise they have been misled or have misunderstood the nature of a given substance, they typically take less, or none.
The so-called war on drugs may be turning into a war on misinformation. If the Drug and Substance Checking Act finally comes into force by December, as has been promised, it will reflect a legislative trend toward harm reduction.
It will not stop the illegal use of drugs. But it will be one step further towards making New Zealand citizens safer from the scourge of unregulated and dangerous black markets for drugs.
Alexander Gillespie 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.
Several jurisdictions overseas have introduced vaccine requirements for entry into public and private spaces such as schools, restaurants, public venues, and for domestic travel. Attention is turning to whether these policies would work in Australia and at what point they might be introduced.
An important consideration is whether the mandates are seeking to protect people against COVID transmission in key sectors or spaces, or whether governments are using them as a lever to push up vaccine rates in the population at large. While both can be legitimate, they are different policy goals and governments need to be transparent about which one they are pursuing.
Israel, the first jurisdiction to introduce a vaccine passport, has utilised this measure intermittently, depending on the transmission risk and coverage rates. This suggests the government has used it as a strategy to increase vaccine coverage overall.
EU countries are also utilising vaccine passports, but they have had design and implementation issues.
Despite ongoing protests to the measures in France, and to a lesser extent Italy, surveys show the majority of people in both countries approve of the measures. They have also led to a rapid increase in bookings for vaccinations.
New York City has also mandated vaccination for certain public spaces — the first government in the US to do so. There is a legal basis to do so: the Supreme Court ruled in 1905 that states could require residents to be vaccinated against small pox or be fined.
Can it be done here legally?
There is scope for Australian governments to impose a similar “vaccine passport”.
It’s important to bear in mind this kind of mandate is very different from forced vaccination (where an individual is forcibly inoculated). Rather, mandates create a set of negative consequences in cases of noncompliance.
The most obvious example in Australia is the “No Jab No Play” policies that restrict access to childcare in most states for children who are not fully immunised.
In the same vein, COVID-19 vaccination could be made mandatory for specific purposes, such as access to certain public or private spaces, travel, or certain types of employment, such as the pending vaccine requirement for aged care workers.
A proof of vaccination sign is posted at a bar in San Francisco. Haven Daley/AP
From a legal perspective, the key limitation for government mandates pertains to discrimination. The mandate must not discriminate, and therefore exemptions must be available for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.
There is no protection under Australian law, however, for “discrimination” against people who are opposed to vaccination because of their personal beliefs.
Countries like France and Italy have dealt with vaccine refusal by enabling people to show proof of a recent negative COVID test as an “opt-out” measure to the vaccine mandate. This is good behavioural science, since it makes the option available — albeit more burdensome — than the default of vaccination.
Private sector vaccine mandates are also feasible in Australia for COVID-19 and other diseases. These mandates can apply to workers, clients, or both, provided they align with existing employment and consumer laws.
However, this could become more widespread in Australia after the Fair Work Commission ruled in several cases this year that it was reasonable for employers in the aged care and child care sectors to insist on flu vaccinations for staff.
Mandates may be easier to establish and implement in the private sector because companies are generally subject to less scrutiny and accountability than governments. They can also rely on arguments about their duty of care to workers and clients.
International research also shows the private sector is highly trusted, and this can provide a useful anchor if companies ask their workers or clients to vaccinate. (There is a difference, of course, between providing vaccinations at a workplace or requesting it of employees, and demanding it!)
Moreover, private companies lack some of the constraints that governments face. Government vaccine mandates must be linked to other conditions for which governments are responsible and accountable, such as the available supply of vaccines. A broad-based government mandate in the absence of adequate supply could be subject to court challenge and risk being political suicide.
By contrast, private entities do not share the same level of responsibility for providing vaccines when enacting such mandates on clients. In the case of vaccine mandates for employees, however, the duty to provide vaccines is much higher.
Despite the fact that private sector mandates may be easier to introduce, the complexity of exemptions and enforcement leads us to prefer government mandates.
Would Australians support vaccine mandates?
Our research shows Australians are broadly supportive of vaccine mandates, and our recent unpublished work indicates they prefer vaccine passports to other kinds of mandates (such as punishments or financial incentives).
However, the high levels of support for government mandates we saw in our survey last year may not be the same now, given public perceptions of the government’s vaccine rollout failure. Australians may be less trusting of government, and therefore, less supportive of government-mandated vaccinations.
This demonstrates that the obstacles to the introduction of vaccine passports are not only legal, but highly political.
To appear legitimate, a mandate needs to serve clearly articulated public health goals and be proportionate. (In particular, it has to be effective, reasonable and without a less invasive alternative available.)
Mandates can be good public policy when they are appropriately designed and defensible from ethical and epidemiological perspectives. These attributes are largely within government control.
However, when governments do not take sufficient action to address hesitancy in the community, this can create the conditions that make mandates appear attractive or necessary. Our research shows this was the case in Italy with childhood vaccines.
The danger here is that all roads automatically lead to mandates, without governments first exhausting other important strategies to encourage vaccinations.
Excellent public communications targeted to specific groups, and making access to vaccines as easy as possible, are two no-brainers.
Katie Attwell receives funding from the Australian Research Council and the WA Department of Health. She is currently funded by ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award DE1901000158. She is a member of a government advisory committee, the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation (ATAGI) COVID-19 Working Group. She is a specialist advisor to the Therapeutic Goods Administration. All views presented in this article are her own and not representative of any other organisation.
Marco Rizzi receives funding from the WA Department of Health.
The committee’s deputy chair, the Labor Party’s Andrew Leigh, asked Lowe a series of pointed but important questions. Lowe tried to duck them, with limited success.
The most interesting exchange concerned the possibility of a wholesale review of the central bank by outside parties.
Leigh referred to a series of articles about the bank by journalist Shane Wright that note the bank and its policy objectives haven’t been reviewed in 40 years.
Many were calling for a fundamental review of monetary policy, Leigh said. Such reviews had been done by the US Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, the Bank of Japan, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and Germany’s Reichsbank. He asked Lowe:
Would you support a review of monetary policy, a review into the RBA?
Predictably, but disappointingly, Lowe replied:
When people say that there should be a review of the Reserve Bank, I’m not sure what they’re calling for — a review of the legislation, the mandate, the way the government appoints people to the board, the type of people they put on the board, or how we’ve done our job; we haven’t done our job effectively. All those things get conflated.
The obvious response to this is: so what?
Reviewing the job the RBA has done — or failed to do — seems entirely appropriate from time to time. Who the government appoints to the board and why could also do with a little scrutiny.
What Lowe called “conflated” reasons I think are all good reasons.
Reasons to review the central bank
Lowe went on to ask (rhetorically):
I just wonder, when people want a review, what they actually want to review — other than that they’re not happy with the decisions we’re making.
Following this, Leigh was perhaps a little too polite, pivoting to questions about what is minuted in RBA board meetings.
Being less encumbered by such considerations, I would have replied to Lowe’s question as follows.
I can’t speak for others, but I want a review to look into why you have made the decisions you have made and how you might have made better ones.
I want a review into how the central bank has missed its self-imposed inflation target since 2015, for the entire time you have been governor. I want a review into what institutional failures have led to this.
I want a review into whether the inflation-targeting regime is still preferable to a nominal GDP target.
I want a review into the degree to which dissenting views are aired in board meetings. I want your international peers — like former governors of the US Federal Reserve — to tell how the RBA can serve the Australian people better.“
On one level, I understand Lowe’s opposition to a review. Nobody enjoys a performance review all that much. Even less so when it’s likely to highlight some “areas for improvement”.
But Lowe is wearing two hats.
His first hat is as governor of the RBA, responsible for its successes and failures while he’s in the chair.
He’s responsible for taking too long to cut interest rates from the 1.5% level they were stuck at for meeting after meeting. He’s responsible for saying bizarre things from time to time, from innocuous “off-piste” comments about light rail to flat-out incorrect statements about migration having suppressed wages. This is something that someone with a PhD from MIT ought to know better about, particularly given the research contradicting the claim presented at the RBA’s own conference in 2019.
His second hat is even bigger, as the steward of one of Australia’s most important economic institutions. In the same way the Chief Justice of Australia not only writes opinions but is a steward of the court, the RBA governor has a broader responsibility to the nation.
You would need go a long way to find someone more opposed than me to agendas like that of the so-called “Democratize the Fed” movement. But that doesn’t mean I think the RBA could not be more democratically accountable.
The RBA rightly has a strong degree of independence. It needs that to make credible policy. But that doesn’t mean it’s infallible.
The central bank should want to get better. It should want to offer itself up for peer review.
That would, ironically, do the most to reduce the amount of criticism it receives.
Richard Holden is President-elect of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
As the pandemic has progressed, researchers have begun to understand how COVID-19 impacts our bodies.
Early in the pandemic, risk factors such as heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes were quickly associated with an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID.
We now know that, among the myriad ways it can damage our health, the virus can affect the heart and directly cause a range of heart complications.
Also, mRNA COVID vaccines like those from Pfizer and Moderna have been linked with heart inflammation. But this is very rare, and you’re much more likely to get heart inflammation from COVID infection than the vaccines.
Here’s what we know so far.
How does COVID affect the heart?
The SARS-CoV-2 virus can directly invade the body causing inflammation. This can impact the heart, causing myocarditis and pericarditis — inflammation of the heart muscle or outer lining of the heart.
Inflammation from COVID can also cause blood clotting, which can block a heart or brain artery causing a heart attack or stroke.
COVID can also cause abnormal heart rhythms, blood clots in the legs and lungs, and heart failure. Our understanding of how COVID causes heart inflammation and injury to the heart muscle is becoming clearer, though there’s more to learn.
Persistent symptoms from the virus, called “long COVID”, have been reported in about 10-30% of people who’ve contracted COVID.
One study on long COVID, published in July, found common cardiovascular symptoms include heart palpitations, fast heart rate, slow heart rate, chest pain, visible bulging veins, and fainting.
Of roughly 3,700 study participants, over 90% reported their recovery lasted more than eight months.
The Delta variant, first identified in India in October 2020, is highly transmissible. It’s the variant responsible for lockdowns in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland.
A Scottish study found the risk of hospital admission from COVID was around double in those with Delta variant compared to the Alpha variant (which originated in the UK). It also found Delta was spreading most commonly in younger people.
The good news is two doses of either the Pfizer or AstraZeneca vaccines remains effective in preventing Delta complications.
There’s also a link between mRNA COVID vaccines and a rare side effect of heart inflammation (myocarditis and pericarditis). This seems to be most common in males under 30 and after the second vaccine dose.
But this is very rare. Of the 5.6 million Pfizer vaccine doses administered to Australians so far, there have only been 111 cases of suspected (not confirmed) heart inflammation reported up to August 1. There have been no reported deaths associated with this vaccine side effect in Australia.
Recovery from this heart inflammation is generally good. The benefits of vaccination against COVID far outweigh the potential risks of these generally mild conditions.
Nevertheless, if you experience any change in symptoms after having a COVID vaccine, including chest pain, an irregular heartbeat, fainting or shortness of breath, you should seek prompt medical attention.
The vast majority of people with heart conditions are safe to get vaccinated. But if you have had myocarditis or pericarditis in the past six months then speak with your doctor or cardiologist.
Don’t delay getting your heart checked
Many people have been reluctant to seek medical attention amid the pandemic. This includes for both urgent and routine care of heart disease. Longer delays between the onset of the symptoms and hospital treatment are being reported in countries including England, Italy and China. This makes long-term heart damage more likely.
One study found global hospital admissions for heart attacks have decreased between 40% and 50%. An Australian study found a 21% reduction in cardiac surgery at Sydney’s Royal Prince Alfred Hospital between March and June 2020.
It’s important you don’t neglect your heart health even amid the pandemic. If you ever think you’re having a heart attack, call triple zero (000) immediately.
The author would like to thank the National Heart Foundation’s Amanda Buttery and Brooke Atkins for their help with this article.
Garry Jennings receives funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council. He is Chief Medical Advisor for the Heart Foundation and Interim CEO. He has part time positions with the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute and Sydney Health Partners, and is Honorary Professor of Medicine at the University of Sydney and Monash University.
On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its long-awaited report on the physical impacts of climate change. It painted a terrifying picture of a warming planet increasingly subject to extreme weather events.
If there’s a silver lining to the 3,900 pages of gloom, it’s that there’s still time to avert the worst damage if global emissions are rapidly cut. So what happens if the Australian government continues to lag?
Well, while foreign countries can’t sue Australia under the Paris Agreement, they can apply political and economic pressure, such as through publicly calling our leadership out and applying carbon border adjustments.
But we’re also seeing another important and growing trend: domestic climate litigation.
In fact, Australia is second only to the US in terms of the volume of climate change cases brought before the courts.
In the last few years in particular, we’ve seen Australian cases succeed in influencing action. With this new IPCC report, climate science is more certain than ever, making it more likely this trend will continue.
Avoiding catastrophic impacts
The IPCC report concluded that escape from climate change is no longer possible. And, the report indicates, Australia will be badly hit.
It’s believed our best achievable scenario is to reach net-zero emissions by midcentury, on a global scale. This will hopefully equate with an around 1.5℃ temperature rise above preindustrial levels, which is what the IPCC says is our maximum to avoid catastrophic impacts.
Although some countries have made pledges under the Paris Agreement in line with this goal, Australia, we know, is shirking. If all countries adopted targets as weak as ours, global warming would be in the order of 4.3-4.5℃.
While climate change is caused by the actions of many, some are in better positions than others to mitigate it. So it’s no surprise businesses, financial institutions, and governments have been the prime targets of a new wave of litigation.
Courtrooms are changing
Fifteen years ago, the Australian federal court considered the climate change impacts of one particular coal project to be “speculative” and “minute”, citing a “paucity” of detail about the possibility of coal contributing to climate change.
But the situation is changing, and courts are changing with it. One of the reasons for the about-face is the progression of climate science and the availability of new information from advanced modelling. The work of the IPCC is instrumental to this.
A couple of recent examples of cases show how climate science is becoming more influential in Australian court decisions.
In a case heard this week between the Bushfire Survivors group and the NSW Environmental Protection Authority, a NSW court allowed evidence to be presented from former Australian Chief Scientist Penny Sackett on climate change impacts.
It is the first time this kind of evidence has been allowed in a case about the alleged failure of an authority (the EPA) to perform a statutory duty (the regulation of greenhouse gases). On Tuesday, the Bushfire Survivors asked the court to allow her to comment on the IPCC’s sixth report.
And in a landmark case in May against the federal environment minister, the federal court found Australia’s young people are at high risk of suffering personal injury from climate change in their lifetime, including death and hospitalisation.
The judge was considering a coal mine approval. He said even though one coal mine won’t single-handedly cook the planet, it could serve as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, given climate science tells us irreversible “tipping points” may be reached one day, and it could be soon.
The judge cited the IPCC’s findings, recognising the IPCC as the authority on climate change, and called on one of its authors as an expert witness.
It’s not just that the volume of cases is increasing, cases are also becoming more creative, exploring new avenues to hold polluters and decision makers to account. These cases are more likely to succeed where a link between actions and impacts can be supported with evidence.
In a case against Shell in May this year, a Dutch court ordered Shell to reduce its emissions by 45% by 2030, relative to 2019 emissions. To reach this figure, the court extensively cited the past work of the IPCC. It concluded Shell’s corporate policy was “hazardous and disastrous” and “in no way consistent” with the global climate target to prevent a dangerous climate change for the protection of people, the human environment and nature.
There are many ways climate science will be instrumental to the success of future cases. The evidence released so far by the IPCC shows us different warming scenarios under climate change, each depending on the actions we take now and in the near future.
Chapter 3 of Monday’s IPCC report is dedicated to spelling out the now “unequivocal” influence of humans. This type of evidence could support cases seeking to force government action, as well as cases against businesses for failing to disclose and mitigate climate risk, and for greenwashing.
Next year, the IPCC will release its findings on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability. This could support cases relating to fire, flood, and sea-level rise, including human rights cases, property, planning, and insurance cases.
Climate change will unfortunately be costly, and litigation can help determine who should take action, and who should pay.
The more Australia’s governments and businesses lag on climate change, the more litigation we are likely to see. And, the greater the extent leadership decisions are at odds with the science, the stronger plaintiffs’ cases will be.
Laura Schuijers receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Year 12 students in Sydney who live or go to school in an area affected by stage 4 lockdowns will be able to apply for special consideration if their oral or performance exam, or major project, was impacted by COVID.
Under the New South Wales COVID-19 special consideration program, students’ work must have suffered as a direct result of the pandemic restrictions, although “detailed evidence for students who have been impacted by Level 4 restrictions will not be required”.
Victoria provided students with similar special consideration in 2020 to avoid adverse impacts of COVID reflecting in ATAR rankings as “part of a wide-ranging process to ensure fair and accurate results in this unprecedented year of school”.
Special consideration will [also apply to Victorian senior students](https://www.vcaa.vic.edu.au/news-and-events/latest-news/Novel%20coronavirus%20update/Pages/SchoolsandEducators.aspx#:~:text=Consideration%20of%20Educational%20Disadvantage%20(CED,and%20fair%20for%20all%20students.) this year.
We interviewed ten year 12 teachers in Victoria to find out their experiences with assessment policies during lockdown in 2020. Our early findings show the teachers struggled to provide valid assessment outcomes while abiding by their duty of care, following school procedures, and protecting student privacy in the digital context.
How Victoria did it
In August 2020, Victoria introduced a new consideration of educational disadvantage process to take into account the impacts of lockdown on student learning that year. For scored assessments, the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority advised teachers “consider whether a student’s performance on one or more school-based assessment tasks has been affected”. The impact had “to be above that which may have been addressed through school-based strategies”.
Teachers had to essentially determine what a student’s expected score or grade would be if they had not been impacted by the pandemic or bushfires.
The teachers’ judgement was to be informed by a range of available evidence. This included a student statement about how they were affected over the course of the year. Students were not required to provide any evidence of hardship though the school had the right to ask for clarification.
Ethical issues with remote learning
Our study focused on ten teachers of VCE (Victorian Certificate of Education), which is the end of school certificate, equivalent of the HSC (High School Certificate) in NSW. The teachers came from different Victorian secondary schools — both government and independent. They taught subjects including English, maths, history, chemistry, arts and languages.
We asked about their experiences with assessment, including their contribution to the ongoing conversation on fair assessment in year 12 and their school’s relationship with the Victorian education department.
The new consideration of educational disadvantage process caused some complex ethical struggles. Teachers found it difficult to provide valid scores for assessments at school while also abiding by their duty of care to minimise the risk of mental and physical harm of students in a digital space.
One of the teachers, for instance, reluctantly ignored his student’s vaping during an online school assessment task:
I’m almost sure that I could see steam or something from like vaping […] I couldn’t prove it in a court of law, but I’m pretty sure it was nicotine or something similar, and that would never happen in a classroom […] so here is a question of duty of care […] if I had that kid in the class, then 100% I have a legal obligation to intervene and I’m responsible here, but in this case, he’s at home, I can’t prove it, other students see it and are affected by it, and I’m expected to assess this work […] how outrageous and impossible is that?
Reflecting on the new consideration of educational disadvantage process, another teacher said:
How are we supposed to evaluate the potential grade? And who am I to decide that x struggled more than y?
She admitted that in assessing students, she was relying on her “professional intuition” and ignoring the student statement document, which she said was a “sham”.
Some school procedures hindered valid assessment
Teachers also found it difficult to adhere to their school’s remote assessment policies, where they believed they prevented them from providing a fair assessment.
One teacher said:
The state government announced that it was up to the school leaders to decide whether they wanted to offer onsite essential assessments to VCE kids […] and our principal said NO and kept the school closed the whole time, which really pissed off a lot of teachers who wanted to run assessment in person to provide meaningful feedback […]
Another teacher highlighted issues of student cheating:
Our principal insisted on an online assessment [despite the fact that] students took screenshots of tests and iMessaged them around the cohort […] it was a disaster, we found out that more than 70% of our students had these images!
Protecting students’ privacy at the expense of learning
Some teachers described situations where their ethical obligation to protect student privacy conflicted with their ethical responsibility to provide accurate assessments.
One teacher, for example, said she was unable to provide “meaningful feedback” and follow ethical provisions of assessment when teaching students in an “off-camera” space intended to protect their privacy.
She was not sure whether her assessment feedback in class was helpful, considering she could not see the students’ responses.
The unfolding pandemic and environmental disasters such as the bushfires mean school closures will likely reoccur to varying degrees in the future.
Digital platforms for remote assessment and learning become central in these times. These platforms are creating complex ethical challenges of assessment that require, now more than ever, closer attention from educators, educational leaders and policymakers.
Christine Grové is a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society and College of Educational and Developmental Psychologists and an international affiliate of the American Psychological Association (APA) and a member of APA D15 (Educational Psychology) and APA D16 (School Psychology). Christine is Associate Editor of the Educational and Developmental Psychologist and a member of The United Nations Association of Australia Academic Network.
Carlo Perrotta and Ilana Finefter-Rosenbluh do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
A slide by Gordon H. Woodhouse to accompany a 1901 lecture by his father Clarence entitled ‘exploration and development of Australia’.State Library of Victoria
Roman Quaedvlieg standing tall in his smart black suit — medals glistening, insignia flashing — looked every bit the man-in-uniform from central casting when he posed between then Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton on 1 July 2015 to launch a new paramilitary unit to protect Australia’s borders.
Australian Border Force was modelled on a similar agency created in Britain two years earlier but with a distinctive accent. Its Operation Sovereign Borders had changed the culture of military, policing and customs agencies in Australia as they were pushed out of their silos with a new shared priority: stop refugees arriving by boat.
Just 14 months earlier Scott Morrison, then the Immigration Minister, had announced the formation of the new armed and uniformed force, describing it as the “reform dividend from stopping the boats”.
The 70 year-old department had gained a new role: “Border Protection”. The old tags — “Multiculturalism”, “Citizenship” and “Ethnic Affairs” — were artefacts of other ages when population growth coupled with social cohesion had been the goal. The armed Border Force that had emerged out of the chrysalis of the old customs service, complete with new uniforms, ranks and insignia, on that mid-winter day was another sign of Canberra’s increasing preoccupation with security and militarisation.
He liked to reassure people that Australia would still be taking more than its share of refugees, but the proportion of overseas-born residents fell over the early years of his prime ministership. After decades of multiculturalism the Australian ear was once again being attuned to new arrivals as threat.
By 2015, Australia’s proportion of overseas-born residents was nudging the all-time high of 30% reached in the 1890s, but multiculturalism was still a grubby word.
Without irony, Commissioner Quaedvlieg cut to the chase, reducing the new nearly 6,000-strong agency’s role to its essence: “to protect our utopia”. Decades before, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin had elegantly demolished the idea of utopias, suggesting they were “a fiction deliberately constructed as satires intended to shame those who control existing regimes”.
A month after the launch of Border Force, its first big public exercise, Operation Fortitude, was announced. Officers were to walk the streets of Melbourne and seek proof of the right of residence of “any individual we cross paths with”. The warning was clear: If you commit border fraud you should know it’s only a matter of time before you are caught.
The residents of the Melbourne branch of “our utopia” fought back with a dose of theatricality, to prove Berlin’s point, and the joint operation with the Victorian Police was abandoned in a flurry of protests and press releases. Prime Minister Abbott declared, “Nothing happened here except the issue of a poorly worded press release”.
Within a couple of years, the uniformed commissioner from central casting had gone. The intent, however, remained clear. Immigration might be at an all-time high, but exclusion was still the key, and national security was at the centre of Australian public life.
Ills of the past and present
Deciding who could come and the circumstances under which they could enter the country has, as we have been again reminded during COVID times, been central to the management of the Australian utopia since 1901.
[…] idea of the perfect society is a very old dream, whether because of the ills of the present which lead men to conceive what their world would be like without them … or perhaps they are social fantasies – simple exercises in the poetical imagination.
Australia at the time of Federation was awash with bad poetry by mediocre poets. So if conceiving the nation as a utopia was an exercise of the poetical imagination, it was inevitably flawed.
Tom Roberts’ depiction of the opening of the first Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia May 9, 1901, By H.R.H. The Duke of Cornwall and York at Melbourne’s Exhibition Buildings. State Library of Victoria/Tom Roberts
The first step towards the creation of Australia’s white utopia was brutal and relentless. It depended on the humiliation and elimination, by design and neglect, of the million First Nations people who in 1788 still called the continent home as they had done for countless generations, managed with an elaborate, ancient patchwork of languages, social relations, trade and lore.
Although the Australian Constitution explicitly excluded them from the census, by the time the 3.7 million new arrivals became Australians in 1901, the First Nations population had been reduced, systematically and deliberately, to about 90,000 people.
The men who debated the legislation that would shape the new nation preferred to avert their eyes. They were not, however, ignorant of what had gone before.
Even in a world shaped by race there was argument, opposition and some shame. Months after Australia became legally, unequivocally white, the parliament debated whether to recognise the survivors who preceded them.
The senate leader and future High Court justice Richard O’Connor argued that just as the right to vote was being extended to women — because in some states, they already had the franchise — the same principle should apply to Aboriginal people who had the right to vote in four of the former colonies. “It would be a monstrous thing, an unheard-of piece of savagery”, he declared, “to treat the Aboriginals whose land we were occupying to deprive them absolutely of any right to vote in their own country”.
We are told we have taken their country from them. But it seems a poor sort of justice to recompense those people for the loss of the country by giving them votes.
This argument prevailed. White women and Maori were the only exceptions: “no aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific” could enrol to vote. Within its first two years, the parliament had failed two moral tests.
At the heart of the Australia embraced by those who met in Melbourne in the Federation Parliament was the idea of a model society populated by men like them. Utopian dreams had played out in many ways in shaping the new nation. A decade earlier, nearly 300 colonialists sailed to Paraguay in a flawed attempt to create a more perfect, and even whiter, society called New Australia.
Looking for an even whiter utopia, several hundred people set off for Paraguay to establish the New Australia colony between 1892–1905. Flickr/State Library of NSW
Prime Minister Edmund Barton, in the middle of the first year of the century, firmly grounded the new nation in the “instinct of self-preservation quickened by experience”. Optimism tempered by fear.
What became known as the White Australia policy was necessary, he said, because “we know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year’s surplus population”.
Future prime minister Billy Hughes spelt out the two steps of this dance when he candidly observed that having “killed everybody else to get it”, the inauguration of Canberra — which they considered calling Utopia — as the national capital “was unfolding without the slightest trace of the race we have banished from the face of the earth […] we should not be too proud lest we should too in time disappear. We must take steps to safeguard the foothold we now have”.
Fresh eyes
In 1923 Myra Willard — a recent graduate of the University of Sydney — paid Melbourne University Press to publish its first monograph, her book History of the White Australia Policy to 1920. She wrote with a contemporaneous eye.
The debates in the colonies before Federation were still close enough for the lines between them and the 1901 legislation to be thickly etched with detail. She grimly recounted the way each colony penalised and excluded “coolies” and “celestials”.
“The desire to guard themselves effectively against the dangers of Asiatic immigration was one of the most powerful influences which drew the Colonies together,” she wrote. She quoted with approval the now infamous speech by Attorney-General Alfred Deakin in which he described the principle of white Australia as the “universal motive power” that had dissolved colonial opposition to Federation. At heart, he declared, was “the desire that we should be one people and remain one people without the admixture of other races”.
The Australian utopia depended on a “united race”. This would be ensured by “prohibiting the intermarriage and association that could degrade”. As Deakin declaimed in September that year, “inspired by the same ideas and an aspiration towards the same ideals of a people possessing a cast of character, tone of thought … unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia”.
The legislation was finally, if somewhat reluctantly, signed by Governor General Lord Hopetoun just before Christmas 1901. London was discomfited by the determination of the new nation to exclude and proposed amendments to save face with her imperial allies in Europe and Japan. Willard wrote in 1923, “Australia’s policy does not as yet seem to be generally understood or sanctioned by world opinion”. It was, she maintained, despite the negative connotations, really a positive policy that ensured Australia would be a productive global contributor of resources and supplies.
By the time the legislation passed, those with Chinese heritage were fewer than they had been in the 19th century. It did not take long before Indian residents who had lived in Fremantle for years, as British subjects, were denied the right to return to Australia after visiting their homeland. Those of German heritage, who made up about 5% of the population at the turn of the century, soon became pariahs — wartime internment was followed by the deportation of 6,000 Australians of German heritage.
Gough Whitlam revoked the policy as one of his first acts as prime minister.
“Right up to our election in 1972”, he recalled, “there had to be, from any country outside Europe, an application for entry referred to Canberra and a confidential report on their appearance […] The photograph wasn’t enough, because by a strong light or powdering you could reduce the colour of your exposed parts. It was said that the test was in extreme cases, ‘Drop your daks’ because you can’t change the colour of your bum’.”
For Michael Wesley, now deputy vice chancellor international at the University of Melbourne, and thousands of others, this meant that his Australian-born mother could return home with her Indian husband and brown babies without fear of deportation.
The echoes still resonate. Fast forward to this year, when the average time in immigration detention rose to 627 days and the then Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, described deporting New Zealand-born long-term Australian residents who had been jailed as “taking the trash out”.
The suite of bills passed in that first parliament — at least as much as the Constitution — determined the social nature of Australia for much of the 20th century. As Deakin said a couple of years after the White Australia policy was adopted, “it goes down to the roots of our national existence, the roots from which the British social system has sprung”.
By the time he was prime minister, the bureaucratic method of exclusion was even clearer: “the object of the [language] test is not to allow persons to enter the Commonwealth, but to keep them out”. John Howard could not have asked for a better crib sheet than the speeches of the Federation Parliament when preparing his 2001 election campaign.
‘It’s about this nation saying to the world, we are a generous open-hearted people … but we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.’
That Australia has emerged as a cohesive multicultural society, with people drawn from hundreds of different countries — and increasingly from those that were once explicitly excluded — is a remarkable achievement. That the First Nations people have survived is in many ways even more remarkable.
But the foundation story of our notional utopia is still undigested and recurs unwittingly in policy language and political rhetoric, in legal and administrative practice and personal abuse.
The brutal speed and wilful political rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart would have shamed even the members of the Federation Parliament; the failure to turn enquiry into action on the oldest issue in the land — treaty, truth-telling and settlement with the descendants of those who have always been here — is unconscionable.
Methods of border control are now more likely to be couched in the convoluted small print attached to visas, employment conditions and bureaucratic processes, but at some level the old order prevails — there has been no national apology to those who were humiliated by the White Australia policy, no formal truth-telling to address these sins of the past at a national level. It has taken 23 years for the compensation recommended by Stolen Children inquiry to be parsimoniously granted.
Hands are thrown up in mock astonishment when another example of institutional or official racism, discrimination or maltreatment makes the headlines. Over a decade, the cost of detaining (and breaking) those refugees who felt compelled to leave their homeland reached double-digit billions. International criticism is once again worn with bravado as a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame. It was surprisingly easy to jettison 50 years of careful relationship-building with China.
Ever since those first debates in the Federation Parliament there has been a moral deficit in Australian politics, a reluctance to go back to first principles, to meaningfully make amends. Until this is addressed there will always be an action deficit. The big public health campaigns have not extended to addressing the lingering racism that has equally pernicious consequences.
No national political leaders rose to the defence of Adam Goodes when the 2014 Australian of the Year was called “an ape” and booed off the footy field. None came to the defence of Yassmin Abdel-Magied when she sought to contribute to public life. The response to the never-ending list of Aboriginal deaths in custody is couched in mealy-mouthed administrivia.
When Prime Minister Julia Gillard was battered by misogynist hectoring, the message to other women was clear: don’t get ideas above your station. Almost every week a woman dies at the hands of her intimate partner, but overwhelmed police seem powerless to help.
Our treatment of refugees attracts a global condemnation that is dismissed as readily today as it was in 1901. Behrouz Boochani will probably never set foot in the country he described so searingly in his much awarded No Friend but the Mountains, and despite public support, the Murugappans — the Biloela family — spent nearly three years in costly detention on Christmas Island.
Yet when the government banned Australian citizens and permanent residents who happened to be in India as COVID raged from returning home under threat of fines and jail terms, the outcry was impossible to ignore.
The brutality of the old ways still lives in the memory. A colleague recalled her traumatic fear, during the family’s first trip to India with their Pakistani-born father, that the White Australia policy would be reintroduced and they would be denied re-entry. It had happened to those returning to Fremantle Harbour a century earlier — and, astonishingly, again in 2021.
Utopia out of step
Public sentiment is at odds with that of those who are most committed to the old status quo. Survey after survey shows a populace willing to embrace change that means people are treated better. But there are few leaders willing to make the case, fearful of an imagined backlash, rather than embracing the need for big tough conversation. Transformation is left to the slow accretion of a new normal.
Tens of thousands turned up at the football waving “I stand with Adam” banners years before the AFL officially apologised to Goodes.
Those affronted by official treatment of refugees engage in endless protest campaigns, travel to detention centres, provide support and lobby. The Black Lives Matter movement has galvanised some of the biggest demonstrations seen in the country, despite COVID, and the calls for action on the unfinished business of the 33-old Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the other inquiries are becoming impossible to ignore.
There is much to be learnt from First Nations people. Their survival and generosity is an inspiration that needs to be taken seriously and acted upon. Without righting this foundational wrong, this country will be forever stuck on a political treadmill, running but going nowhere.
Art speaks volumes
It is striking that one of the most important Aboriginal artists to have captivated the world came from a place called Utopia. Hers was the land of the Alyawarr people for millennia before its brief life as a cattle station. It is a place as impoverished as any of the remote settlements in northern Australia, returned to their traditional owners with only grudging support from the state. But the semi-arid country is the source of dreaming and a culture that speaks to the world when brought to life on canvas. Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s paintings are displayed in galleries, palaces and private collections around the world.
One of Australia’s most famous contemporary paintings, Earth’s Creation 1, by Emily Kame Kngwarreye. AAP Image/Emily Kame Kngwarreye
They are more than great works of art. It is what Australian art always aspired to be. In the words of the influential Aboriginal scholar and advocate Marcia Langton, Emily’s paintings
[…] fulfil the primary historical function of Australian art by showing the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, a new way to belong in this place rather than another […]
Creating a utopia, or at least an aspiration to do better, requires more imagination and courage than our current system of professional politics permits.
It needs more art and better faith. Politics, like everything else, is now in thrall to corporate modes of organisation and communication.
The emphasis is on the mission (to get elected) and KPIs (to deliver on promises). The headline of every corporate plan is the “vision”. It is always the hardest thing to define. But without a vision, any plan is meaningless. Our utopia needs a new vision, one not tinged by shame. The old ones have failed the test of time.
This is an edited extract of Facing foundational wrongs — careful what you wish for, republished with permission from GriffithReview73: Hey Utopia!, edited by Ashley Hay.
Julianne Schultz is Professor of Media and Culture at Griffith University, publisher and founding editor of Griffith Review and chair of The Conversation Media Group. Her book The Idea of Australia: a search for the soul of the nation will be published by Allen and Unwin.
As the nation proceeds – but still at an agonisingly slow pace – towards the targets of having 70% and 80% of those 16 and over fully vaccinated, the next big debate is about making the jab compulsory in workplaces.
This would give the community greater protection and accelerate the lifting of restrictions and opening the economy.
Dig deeper, however, and it’s a fraught issue, full of political, legal, practical and ethical complexities.
From the start, Scott Morrison has insisted his government would not make taking the vaccine mandatory.
It’s not just a matter of the anti-vaxxers, who are only a small, albeit noisy, minority.
It’s that many in the Coalition’s ranks and, even more important, among its base would be totally against compulsion. A fair number of these have already been angered by the extent of restrictions, believing civil rights have been excessively compromised.
So when individual businesses, notably the food processor SPC, started down the road of requiring workers to be vaccinated, Morrison last week had the solicitor-general brief national cabinet on the confusing legalities. He also said neither the federal government nor any state or territory intended to legislate to give employers the legal safety they would like.
“We are not going to seek to impose a mandatory vaccination program by the government by stealth,” he said this week.
A very hot potato has been left firmly in the hands of individual businesses.
They are in an awkward position. The advantage of having their workplaces vaccinated is obvious. But the legal position is unclear. In the absence of a public health order, they would be relying on directions to employees being judged lawful and reasonable. Inevitably there would be court challenges.
In advice published on Thursday, the Fair Work Ombudsman said: “In some cases, employers may be able to require their employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19. Employers should exercise caution if they’re considering making COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory in their workplace and get their own legal advice.”
ACTU secretary Sally McManus doubts the legality, short of public health orders, of employers forcing vaccinations and says support and encouragement for employees is the better way to go.
Even apart from any court challenge, some businesses would face division among their workers, and potential dismissals and voluntary departures. When Western Australia made vaccination compulsory for quarantine workers – surely a very reasonable requirement – it lost some of them.
Simon Longstaff, head of The Ethics Centre, points to the distinction between vaccination being compulsory or a condition for doing something.
Vaccination could be a condition for a person working in a company, just like donning safety equipment is for certain jobs, Longstaff says. “If they are not prepared to accept the condition, then they may choose not to work for an employer imposing such a condition.”
But “conditions” form a continuum. For example, having to be vaccinated to work in a hospital is very different to the jab being required to keep a job that involves minimal risk.
This takes us to the various ways of skinning the cat – and to vaccine “passports”. The government already has the beginnings of a vaccine passport scheme, although it won’t use that name – because its “base” doesn’t like the idea. It calls it a certificate.
The vaccine passport is the iron-fist-in-velvet-glove approach to imposing vaccinations.
Once we reach the 70% or 80%, and people are registered as being vaccinated, evidence of having had the jab will be the gateway to freedoms. Looked at the other way, lack of the passport would restrict what people could do.
A vaccine passport could be as necessary for international travel as a national passport. At a more mundane level, it could be required to eat at a restaurant just as, currently, people are told to sign in. Similarly, it could be needed to attend music or sporting events. Or to enter Parliament House.
Forcing people, directing or indirectly, to have a COVID vaccination involves sometimes competing rights – your right to choose whether to accept a vaccine, my right to be safe in the workplace and the community’s right to protection from a very serious and potentially fatal disease.
It is not as simple as “no jab no pay” for the vaccination of children, which only denies government benefits. In the COVID case we’re talking, in the extreme, about people’s access to jobs and livelihoods.
So where are we left?
When people are dealing with the vulnerable – most obviously in aged care – the rights of those being cared for clearly come ahead of the workers’ right to choose. National cabinet was correct in supporting the mandating of vaccinations of the aged care workforce.
Workers in quarantine, disability, and health care are, or should be, treated similarly by whoever employs them.
There are many other “frontline” workers, including those in supermarkets and hospitality. While this gets us back to the compulsion issue, it could be tackled, especially in occupations where there is high turnover, by giving preference in hiring to the vaccinated. This would be harsh, but less harsh than firing workers.
When everyone eligible has been offered the vaccine, we will have a better idea of the size of the minority of unvaccinated people we’re dealing with.
It’s important during the rollout to minimise this pool – to make sure as many as possible of the apathetic have been motivated and the hesitant persuaded.
The latest government “vaccine sentiment” survey, released on Thursday, had 79% of Australians intending to get vaccinated, or already done. According to rollout chief Lieutenant General J.J. Frewen, of the rest 14% were making up that their minds and only 7% were saying they won’t get vaccinated.
Incentives may be helpful, although they shouldn’t be as expensive or extensive as Anthony Albanese’s $300 for everyone vaccinated. Much better advertising is also needed, including niche campaigns where vaccination is below average.
The Australian community has proved remarkably compliant during COVID. Some hesitancy about AstraZeneca notwithstanding, we are lagging in our vaccination rate not primarily because of the public’s resistance or reluctance but because of the faults in the rollout. With improvements in that, and a combination of the positive and negative incentives of the vaccine passport, we can probably reach a vaccination level high enough to keep the community safe without having to go further down the road of compulsion.
Michelle Grattan 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.
The latest report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is confronting. It finds global mean sea levels rose by about 20 centimetres between 1901 and 2018. In fact, sea levels have risen faster over the last hundred years than any time in the last 3,000 years.
This acceleration is expected to continue. A further 15-25cm of sea level rise is expected by 2050, with little sensitivity to greenhouse gas emissions between now and then. Beyond 2050, however, the amount of sea level rise will largely depend on our future emissions.
In a low-emissions scenario, we can expect sea levels to rise to about 38cm above the 1995–2014 average by the year 2100. In a high-emissions scenario this is expected to more than double to 77cm.
In either case, who will feel the effects of sea level rise? And how much does your location’s height above sea level really matter? It’s a question a lot of you have been googling since the report’s release. But the answer isn’t straightforward.
Since satellites began measuring sea surface height almost three decades ago we have learned sea level rise is not uniform across the globe.
The map on the left in this video shows daily sea level variations since 1993, while the curve on the right shows the month-by-month global mean sea level.
In fact, sea levels can vary quite substantially on a year-to-year and decade-to-decade basis. However, we know much of this regional variability is driven by surface wind changes — and will typically decrease over long periods.
So while the IPCC report’s projections are for global mean sea level for the year 2100, most coastal locations will experience a sea level rise within 20% of the projections (which are subject to change beyond 2050 depending on global emissions).
Flood zones and drainage
Elevation above the high tide is an important factor in determining how at risk a particular location is of experiencing flooding due to sea level rise.
In low elevation coastal zones, physical distance to the coast and certain topographic features in the area such as sand dunes, wetlands and human built structures like levies and flood walls can act as a buffer to sea level rise.
That said, current and projected sea level rise may still pose a significant risk to regions with these buffers, as there are many ways by which sea level rise can lead to flooding.
For instance, as sea levels rise water from the sea can inundate storm water drainage systems and end up flooding inland regions with elevations below (or which will eventually be below) sea level. This is because drainage largely depends on gravity, and some storm water systems don’t have flood gates to stop water entering from the ocean.
Here we see Bobbin Head in NSW flood during a king tide. This problem will become more pronounced as sea levels rise and will require clever engineering solutions, such as drainage pumps to push water back out to sea.
There are also cases where man-made features intended to help protect people from sea level impacts can be breached, resulting in flooding. One prominent example was the New Orleans flooding that occurred during Hurricane Katrina, when the man-made flood levee system suffered many failures
The tidal range around Australia varies from less than 1m in some parts such as southwest Australia, to more than 8m in other parts such as the northwest.
The tidal range in an area determines how quickly flooding impacts will increase as sea levels rise. If two regions have the same elevation, as the high tide rises past the regions’ elevation, the region with a smaller tidal range will likely struggle with more flooding and for longer than the region with a larger tidal range.
Beach erosion increases risk
Yet all of the above hasn’t considered the fact our beaches are naturally mobile systems which respond to change. This is why the relationship between an assets elevation above the high tide mark and risk of flooding is less straightforward at low elevation coastal zones — where 11% of Australia’s population lives.
When sea levels rise, the shape of the coastline changes with it and can move inland to a great extent. If sea levels rise by 1m, the coast can erode inland by 1km or more. This can potentiallycreate risk for properties even if they are currently above the height of the projected sea level rise.
Australia has many retreating coastlines, often forming striking erosional landforms such as The Great Ocean Road region.
However, the response of the coastline can also be moderated by natural and human factors. In some regions, coastal elevation is actually increasing due to sediment being deposited, or tectonic uplift raising the coast as fast (or even faster) than rising sea levels.
In Australia, this is especially pronounced in estuaries with a riverine supply of sediments and where vegetation such as mangroves, saltmarshes and dune vegetation help collect sediment in their root systems.
We know sea level rise is with us for the long haul. And it’s now inevitable we will have to adapt to changes along our coasts. We’re already using a number of approaches to counteract projected sea level rise in Australia, including:
sand renourishment of beaches
the formation of more seagrass, saltmarsh and mangrove habitats
construction of seawalls and other hard coastal protection measures.
But it’s important to note we still have a choice for how much and how quickly sea levels will rise beyond 2050. So perhaps, instead of googling your current elevation, a more pragmatic approach would be to think of what you can do to help protect your own coasts and reduce your carbon footprint.
Shayne McGregor receives funding from the Australian Research Council.
Nerilie Abram receives funding from the Australian Research Council. She is a member of the international Climate Crisis Advisory Group.
ruth.reef@monash.edu receives funding from the Australian Research Council to study how vegetated shorelines respond to rising sea levels in Australia.
We’ve been urged to get COVID tested even if we have mild symptoms. Or perhaps we don’t have symptoms but are a close or casual contact of a known case. This includes children.
So what can you do to make COVID testing as simple and stress-free as possible for your child?
With a bit of preparation, role play and modelling the type of behaviour you’d like to see, the process can be plain sailing.
Ideally, you want to start the conversation about COVID testing before your child actually needs a swab. Reflect together on the pandemic so far and envision what might happen in the future.
Knowledge of what is going to happen is important for children to feel in control and empowered in situations like COVID testing.
Encourage them to watch videos showing kids having a COVID test, like this one.
Encourage questions and be open to answering them honestly. Acknowledge it feels uncomfortable to have something pushed up your nose. But the discomfort will be only temporary.
This Canadian video shows the swab going right up a child’s nose. The video says this feels a bit like what happens when you get water up your nose, or the tingly feeling you get in your nose after a fizzy drink.
The swab goes up your nose, but only for about five seconds. Count them.
Children report feeling deceived if they are told a procedure won’t hurt when it does. This can lead them to distrust future medical procedures.
Depending on the age of the child, you could also help prepare with some role play, known as therapeutic play. This type of preparation helps children feel more comfortable and less anxious before medical procedures.
For COVID testing, this can include asking your child to try wearing a mask. Then your child can use a couple of cotton buds taped together to make a long swab, to “test” their teddy or doll.
To help your child feel in control of what is happening to them, think about how they can participate in the process. Give them choices where possible.
Which testing centre would they like to go to? What toy would they like to take with them to hold during the test? There may be a long wait for the test. What fun things could they take with them or do to help pass the time? What snack would they like to take?
During the test
Children are good at picking up on cues from their parents, so stay calm and confident when taking your child for testing. If you are also being tested, they may like to see you go first.
Ask the tester to talk through what they are doing. Avoid distractions and bribes. Offering a bribe can give the child the impression there is something to be worried about, and distractions can leave the child suspicious of why they were distracted.
As with vaccinations, some children may like to watch so they know what is happening, rather than shutting their eyes. Give your child the option.
Be fully present with your child during the procedure and put your phone away.
Humour can help keep things light hearted and it reduces stress levels. What do COVID-19 jokes have in common? They’re catchy!
You need to go home until you receive a result so brainstorm with your child about some fun things to do while you wait.
Explain their result will come back either positive or negative. Positive means you have COVID-19, negative means you don’t.
Consider how best to help your child deal with a positive result. Some children may have some anxiety around this, even if they have very mild symptoms.
Overall, this respectful approach to child-centred health care focuses on developing a cooperative relationship with the child, rather than using authority or incentives.
We have used this approach successfully in our child research projects involving invasive assessments. It helps the child feel in control, helps reduce anxiety around medical procedures and helps them feel empowered by their experiences.
Look at COVID testing as an opportunity for your child to learn more about how health care works. An empowering COVID testing experience can help set up your child for future interactions with the health system.
Mandy Richardson is the owner and operator of Raise Toddlers, a parenting consultancy that provides resources and advice about early childhood development to support parents and educators.
Therese O’Sullivan 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.
“Your teacher was wrong!” It’s a phrase many a high school or university student has heard. As practising and former science teachers, we have been challenged with this accusation before.
Whereas those with advanced science understanding (including the students’ lecturers and high school teachers) may well say their previous teachers were “wrong”, “incomplete” might be more appropriate. These teachers were probably right in selecting age-appropriate scientific models and teaching these in age-appropriate ways.
If we were to put Einstein in front of a year 7 class, he might well present content to those students way beyond their level of understanding. This highlights a common misunderstanding of what is (and isn’t) taught in schools, and why.
Teaching at the level of the students
Our cognitive development, defined by different stages according to age, means learning is gradual. Teaching involves choosing the right pedagogies to impart knowledge and skills to students in a manner that matches their cognitive development.
In this article, we will use understanding of forces in science to demonstrate this gradual progression and evolution of education.
In Australian schools, forces are taught from kindergarten (foundation) to year 12. Throughout their education, and especially in primary education despite the various challenges, it is more important that students learn science inquiry skills than simply science facts. This is done within the contexts of all science topics, including forces.
Before a child can learn about the science of the world around them they must first acquire language skills through interactions with adults such as book reading (particularly picture books).
Newtonian Physics for Babies by Chris Ferrie.
In preschool and kindergarten, play-based learning using early years learning principles is particularly important. Dropping objects such as rocks and feathers to see which falls faster, or what sinks, might lead to comments like “heavy things fall faster” or “heavy things sink”. Of course, this is “wrong” since air resistance is not being considered, or density relative to water, but it is is “right” for five-year-old children.
At this age, they are learning to make observations to make sense of the world around them through curious play. Children may lack a full understanding of complicated topics until they are capable of proportional reasoning.
Who sank the boat? The red wombat. Year 1. Photo: Simon Crook, Author provided
In junior high school, students learn about Newton’s Laws of Motion through various experiments. These typically use traditional equipment such as trolleys, pulleys and weights, as well as online interactives.
What are Newton’s Laws of Motion? Using an animation to explain from PhET by Physics High.
In senior years, students examine uniform acceleration and its causes. As well as performing first-hand investigations, such as launching balls in the air and using video analysis, students need higher mathematical skills to deal with the algebra involved. Strictly speaking, they should take into account friction, but ignoring it is normal at this level.
Exploring projectile motion with a phone and a hose. Photo: Tom Gordon, Author provided
Online simulations are particularly good for this topic. Our research has shown simulations can have a statistically significant and positive effect on student learning, particularly with the student-centred opportunities they present. (They are also very useful while learning from home in lockdown.)
Students then extend their learning to Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation. Students now need to apply higher mathematical skills, with further algebra and potentially calculus. Although this model is incomplete, and cannot explain the orbit of Mercury (among other things), this knowledge was enough to get us to the Moon and back.
Getting beyond Newtonian physics and its limitations, undergraduate students learn Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity where gravity is not thought of as a force between two objects, but as the warping of spacetime by masses. To tackle this content, students need the mathematical prowess to solve Einstein’s nonlinear field equations.
So have we finally reached the correct view? No, general relativity does not provide a complete explanation. Theoretical physicists are working on a quantum theory of gravity. Despite a century of searching, we still have no way to reconcile gravity and quantum mechanics. Even this is an unfinished model.
Quantum gravity and the hardest problem in physics | PBS Space Time.
Teachers aren’t “wrong’”, they are being appropriately incomplete, just as Einstein was incomplete. So how can we avoid such accusations?
Perhaps the answer lies in the language we use in the classroom. Rather than say “This is how it is … ” we should instead say “One way of looking at it is … ”, or “One way to model this is …”, not as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of complexity. This allows the teacher to discuss the model or idea, while hinting at a deeper reality.
Is Einstein actually wrong? Of course not, but it is important to realise that our models of forces and gravity are incomplete, as with most of science, hence the academic pursuit of higher knowledge.
More importantly, our teachers understand the process of introducing students to increasingly sophisticated models so they better understand the universe we live in. This matches their cognitive development through childhood.
Learning is a journey, not simply the end point. As the aphorism attributed to Einstein states, “Everything should be as simple as it can be, but not simpler.”
This article was co-authored by Paul Looyen, Head of Science at Macarthur Anglican School and Content Creator at PhysicsHigh.
Paul Looyen, Head of Science at Macarthur Anglican School and Content Creator at PhysicsHigh, is a co-author of this article.
Simon Crook is the Director of CrookED Science, a STEM education consultancy. He has taught physics in high schools since 1994 and science in primary schools.
Tom Gordon 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.
Dr Paul Buchanan, Dr David Robie and Selwyn Manning discuss Covid-19 and Melanesian instability.
A View from Afar
PODCAST: Covid-19 & Melanesian Instability with Buchanan + Manning + Dr David Robie
/
RSS Feed
Share
Link
Embed
A VIEW FROM AFAR: In this episode, Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning are joined by Dr David Robie to discuss how Covid-19 has become a trigger of instability in the wider Pacific Region.
Dr David Robie is editor of AsiaPacificReport.nz and a renowned expert on Melanesian and Pacific affairs.
In this, the first of a two-part SPECIAL, we analyse how Covid-19 has been a trigger of instability across the Pacific region.
And specifically, for this episode, we deep dive into instability in Melanesia focusing on:
Security issues in Papua New Guinea
Indonesia’s interests in dividing regional groups such as the Melanesian Spearhead Group
a security crisis that has developed in Fiji, after the recent detention of nine politicians and activists who dared to criticise former military coup leader, Frank Bainimarama’s government.
Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage. Click here to subscribe to Bryce Edwards’ Political Roundup and New Zealand Politics Daily.
Last year, according to a United Nations report published in March, Libyan government forces hunted down rebel forces using “lethal autonomous weapons systems” that were “programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition”. The deadly drones were Turkish-made quadcopters about the size of a dinner plate, capable of delivering a warhead weighing a kilogram or so.
Artificial intelligence researchers like me have been warning of the advent of such lethal autonomous weapons systems, which can make life-or-death decisions without human intervention, for years. A recent episode of 4 Corners reviewed this and many other risks posed by developments in AI.
Around 50 countries are meeting at the UN offices in Geneva this week in the latest attempt to hammer out a treaty to prevent the proliferation of these killer devices. History shows such treaties are needed, and that they can work.
The lesson of nuclear weapons
Scientists are pretty good at warning of the dangers facing the planet. Unfortunately, society is less good at paying attention.
In August 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing up to 200,000 civilians. Japan surrendered days later. The second world war was over, and the Cold War began.
The world still lives today under the threat of nuclear destruction. On a dozen or so occasions since then, we have come within minutes of all-out nuclear war.
Well before the first test of a nuclear bomb, many scientists working on the Manhattan Project were concerned about such a future. A secret petition was sent to President Harry S. Truman in July 1945. It accurately predicted the future:
The development of atomic power will provide the nations with new means of destruction. The atomic bombs at our disposal represent only the first step in this direction, and there is almost no limit to the destructive power which will become available in the course of their future development. Thus a nation which sets the precedent of using these newly liberated forces of nature for purposes of destruction may have to bear the responsibility of opening the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale.
If after this war a situation is allowed to develop in the world which permits rival powers to be in uncontrolled possession of these new means of destruction, the cities of the United States as well as the cities of other nations will be in continuous danger of sudden annihilation. All the resources of the United States, moral and material, may have to be mobilized to prevent the advent of such a world situation …
Billions of dollars have since been spent on nuclear arsenals that maintain the threat of mutually assured destruction, the “continuous danger of sudden annihilation” that the physicists warned about in July 1945.
A warning to the world
Six years ago, thousands of my colleagues issued a similar warning about a new threat. Only this time, the petition wasn’t secret. The world wasn’t at war. And the technologies weren’t being developed in secret. Nevertheless, they pose a similar threat to global stability.
The threat comes this time from artificial intelligence, and in particular the development of lethal autonomous weapons: weapons that can identify, track and destroy targets without human intervention. The media often like to call them “killer robots”.
Our open letter to the UN carried a stark warning.
The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable. The endpoint of such a technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow.
Strategically, autonomous weapons are a military dream. They let a military scale its operations unhindered by manpower constraints. One programmer can command hundreds of autonomous weapons. An army can take on the riskiest of missions without endangering its own soldiers.
Nightmare swarms
There are many reasons, however, why the military’s dream of lethal autonomous weapons will turn into a nightmare. First and foremost, there is a strong moral argument against killer robots. We give up an essential part of our humanity if we hand to a machine the decision of whether a person should live or die.
Beyond the moral arguments, there are many technical and legal reasons to be concerned about killer robots. One of the strongest is that they will revolutionise warfare. Autonomous weapons will be weapons of immense destruction.
Previously, if you wanted to do harm, you had to have an army of soldiers to wage war. You had to persuade this army to follow your orders. You had to train them, feed them and pay them. Now just one programmer could control hundreds of weapons.
In some ways lethal autonomous weapons are even more troubling than nuclear weapons. To build a nuclear bomb requires considerable technical sophistication. You need the resources of a nation state, skilled physicists and engineers, and access to scarce raw materials such as uranium and plutonium. As a result, nuclear weapons have not proliferated greatly.
Autonomous weapons require none of this, and if produced they will likely become cheap and plentiful. They will be perfect weapons of terror.
Can you imagine how terrifying it will be to be chased by a swarm of autonomous drones? Can you imagine such drones in the hands of terrorists and rogue states with no qualms about turning them on civilians? They will be an ideal weapon with which to suppress a civilian population. Unlike humans, they will not hesitate to commit atrocities, even genocide.
Time for a treaty
We stand at a crossroads on this issue. It needs to be seen as morally unacceptable for machines to decide who lives and who dies. And for the diplomats at the UN to negotiate a treaty limiting their use, just as we have treaties to limit chemical, biological and other weapons. In this way, we may be able to save ourselves and our children from this terrible future.
Toby Walsh is a Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and author of the recent book, “2062: The World that AI Made” that explores the impact AI will have on society, including the impact on war.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Madeline Gleeson, Senior Research Fellow, Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, UNSW
This week marks nine years since Australia re-introduced a policy of offshore processing for asylum seekers arriving by boat. Nine long years of a cruel, costly and ineffective policy sustained by successive governments of both major parties, despite consistently failing to meet any of its stated aims.
Beyond simply not doing what it sets out to do, offshore processing carries enormous costs. There are human costs, for the men, women and children subject to immense suffering, and even to some of the people tasked with implementing it.
It also carries diplomatic costs, as Australia’s international reputation is tarnished. Its relationship with Pacific neighbours in Nauru and Papua New Guinea grows increasingly strained with each passing year. Then there’s the ballooning economic costs for taxpayers, as billions are sunk in vain into a disastrous policy failure.
That no Australian government in almost a decade has successfully brought this policy to a formal close is astonishing, and it demands interrogation.
The government’s own data on the impact of offshore processing on boat arrivals is the starkest revelation of this policy’s failure. During its first year, more people sought asylum in Australia by boat than at any other time since boat arrivals were first recorded in the 1970s. Deaths at sea also continued at broadly comparable rates to previous years.
People continued to seek safety in Australia via maritime routes until they physically could not do so anymore. The 2013 launch of Operation Sovereign Borders, and the Abbott government’s commitment to intercepting and returning people trying to reach Australia by boat — no matter the legal and humanitarian consequences — effectively rendered it futile to try and reach Australia by sea.
Despite early suggestions offshore processing was a vital complement to this turning back of boats, there is no evidence that this is so.
In fact, while offshore processing has formally remained on foot, and popular rhetoric gives the impression that it is still a key part of the matrix of border security measures necessary to keep the boats “stopped”, Australia ceased transferring new arrivals offshore in 2014.
Instead, Australian officials have gone to extraordinary lengths to intercept at sea and return hundreds of asylum seekers in recent years.
What this means is that transfers offshore occurred for less than two years. The following seven years have been spent in a prolonged and costly policy bind, as successive Labor and Coalition governments have tried to find solutions outside Australia for people who should have been settled here long ago.
According to latest figures, there are barely more than 100 asylum seekers left in each of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. The men and women in Nauru are living in the community. The men in Papua New Guinea are in the capital, Port Moresby, having been transferred there following the closure of the Manus Island detention centre in 2017.
So why does this policy drag on?
The reason given publicly for continuation of this policy — that offshore processing is necessary to prevent a resurgence of boat arrivals — has no demonstrated evidentiary basis.
When Australia previously sent asylum seekers offshore, under the Howard government, the majority of people processed offshore and found to be refugees were settled in Australia.
This fact did not prompt an increase in boat arrivals. More recently, there was no spike in boat arrivals when Australia announced that people offshore would be eligible for resettlement in the United States, or when almost everyone was moved back to Australia.
We have just over a thousand asylum seekers here in Australia, and a small number offshore, who have been put through significant trauma in a failed attempt to send a harsh deterrence message to others who might consider trying to reach Australia by boat.
They have been waiting years for a solution, when a simple one is available right now.
All should be permitted to settle permanently in Australia or another appropriate country, provided that alternative is voluntary. Serious consideration should be given to what reparation and rehabilitation Australia may owe the victims of offshore processing.
This deeply flawed policy must not be permitted to reach its ten-year mark.
Madeline is the author of ‘Offshore: Behind the wire on Manus and Nauru’ (NewSouth, 2016). She does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has not disclosed any relevant affiliations beyond her academic appointment.
Natasha Yacoub is an international refugee law scholar and practitioner, having worked on refugee protection for two decades with the United Nations in conflict and peacetime settings. She is presently a researcher and doctoral candidate at UNSW. The views expressed herein are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.
On Monday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first instalment of their sixth assessment report. As expected, the report makes for bleak reading.
It found all regions of the world are already experiencing the impacts of climate change, and its warming projections range from scary to unimaginable.
But the report also makes for dry reading. Even the Summary for Policymakers, at 42 pages, is not a document you can quickly skim.
Local governments, national and international policymakers, insurance companies, community groups, new home buyers, you and me: everyone needs to know some aspects of the IPCC’s findings to understand what the future might look like and what we can do about it.
With climate action more crucial than ever, the IPCC needs to communicate clearly and strongly to as many people as possible. So how is it going so far?
The most assertive report in 30 years
The gruelling IPCC process and an extensive author list of 234 scientists make IPCC reports the world’s most authoritative source of climate change information. Every sentence is powerful because each one has been read and approved by scientists and government officials from 195 countries.
So when the report states “it is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land”, there is absolutely no denying it. In fact, the IPCC has become progressively more assertive in the 30 years it has been assessing and summarising climate science.
In 1990, it noted global warming “could be largely due to natural variability”. Five years later, there was “a discernible human influence on global climate”. By 2001, “most of the observed warming […] is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”.
This week’s reference to “unequivocal” human influence pulls no punches.
Why has this language changed? Partly because the science has progressed: we know more about the complexities of the Earth’s climate than ever before.
But it’s also because the report’s authors understand the urgency of communicating the message effectively. As this week’s report makes clear, limiting warming to the most ambitious 1.5℃ goal of the Paris Agreement may be (at least temporarily) out of reach within decades, and the goal of keeping warming below 2℃ is also at risk.
As the IPCC’s scientific assessment reports are only published every seven years or so, this may be the authors’ last chance to warn people.
Climate change communication isn’t easy
Communicating any science is hard, but climate science has particular challenges. These include the complexities of the science and language of climate change, people’s misunderstanding of risk management, and the barrage of deliberate misinformation.
The IPCC has standardised the language they use to communicate confidence: “likely”, for example, always means at least a 2-in-3 chance. Unfortunately, research has shown this language conveys levels of imprecision that are too high and leads to readers’ judgements being different from the IPCC’s.
The gruelling report approval process also means IPCC statements can be conservative to the point of confusion. In fact, a 2016 study showed IPCC reports are getting harder to read. In particular, despite the IPCC’s efforts, the Summaries for Policymakers have had low readability over the years, with dense paragraphs and too much jargon for the average punter.
Condensing the IPCC report to its highlights, such as in this graphic, is an effective way to engage time-poor readers. Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub/IPCC
There has also been a rise in communication barriers since the final part of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report was released in 2014, including more fake news, and climate news fatigue.
While there has been an increase in communication imperatives, including the urgency for action and the increase in science information, these are all taking place during a headline-stealing global pandemic.
Also, people are exhausted. Eighteen months of living with a pandemic has probably shrivelled everybody’s ability to take on more big problems.
On the other hand, hunger for COVID-19 information has raised familiarity with exponential curves, model projections, risk-benefit calculations, and urgent action based on scientific evidence to combat a global threat.
Remaining hopeful
To address the challenges of communicating the science, climate communicators should aim for consistent messages, draw on credible information, focus on what is known rather than the uncertainties, offer tangible action, use clear language that avoids despair, connect locally, and tell a story.
To a large extent, Australian contributors to the IPCC release this week have done just that, chiselling relevant facts from the IPCC’s brick of a report into blogs and bites.
To its credit, the IPCC has also provided a plethora of communication resources in different formats. This includes videos, fact sheets, posters and, for the first time, an interactive atlas enabling you to explore past and possible future climate changes in any region.
However, there’s (so far) less focus on information for different audiences, such as students, young people, managers and planners rather than just politicians and scientists.
And the atlas, while a great tool, still requires users to have some climate science literacy. For example, average users looking for future climate information may not understand that CMIP6 and CMIP5 are the next, and previous, generations of climate models used by the IPCC.
This is a positive approach because feeling that humanity cannot, or will not, respond adequately can lead to a lack of engagement and action, and eco-anxiety.
As Al Gore pointed out 15 years ago in An Inconvenient Truth:
there are a lot of people who go straight from denial to despair without pausing on the intermediate step of actually doing something about the problem.
Early next year, the IPCC will release two volumes about ways to adapt to, and reduce, climate change. After the confronting results of this first volume, the next two must provide messages of hope if we’re to keep fighting for our planet.
Simon was an invited reviewer of the IPCC 6AR
James participated in an Accessibility Review of the IPCC Working Group I’s Interactive Atlas tool.
James is a member of the Australian Meteorological Oceanographic Society.
James has previously received funding from the Department of Environment and Science (Queensland), the Australian Conservation Foundation, and the Australian Research Council.
Linden Ashcroft receives funding from the Australian Research Council and is a member of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has released a “roadmap” for a phased process of border reopenings that could begin during the first quarter of next year — as long as New Zealand completes its vaccination rollout by the end of this year.
New Zealand’s elimination strategy remains at the centre of the plan, but will shift from the “collective armour” of border restrictions to the “individual armour” of vaccination.
The government is ramping up vaccination and officials are developing a system of travel for fully vaccinated people, based on a risk classification of countries similar to the UK’s red, amber and green lists. A limited self-isolation pilot will start in October to set up and trial new testing and vaccine checking systems at the border.
The announcement follows advice from a strategic COVID-19 advisory group chaired by epidemiologist Sir David Skegg, which recommended New Zealand shouldn’t relax border restrictions until the vaccine rollout is complete.
This is good advice. It will put New Zealand in the best possible position to control the virus before letting it in. There is also a strong equity argument — relaxing border measures before all New Zealanders have had a chance to be fully vaccinated would be unfair on people at the back of the queue, including children.
Modelling work by Te Pūnaha Matatini and similar research overseas have shown vaccination alone will not achieve population immunity. In other words, we will need to continue additional public health measures to prevent a COVID-19 epidemic in New Zealand.
But the higher the vaccine coverage, the more protection we’ll collectively have and the less we’ll have to rely on lockdowns and other distancing measures.
It is tempting to view decisions about border reopening as trade-offs between economic and health benefits. But as we have learned, allowing widespread transmission of the virus isn’t a trade-off but a lose-lose situation.
The Delta variant is wreaking havoc and threatening reopening plans in countries around the world. Any economic gains from international travel would be quickly wiped out if we had an uncontained outbreak of the Delta variant in New Zealand.
More outbreaks are inevitable
The Skegg report is clear that, once international travel resumes, outbreaks will be inevitable and we’ll need to be ready to stamp them out. The challenges of doing this will be formidable and should not be underestimated.
As a hypothetical example, suppose we allowed quarantine-free travel from countries with fewer than ten new daily cases per million people. In the global context, this is quite a low limit and way below the current levels in most countries in Europe and North America.
We also have to think about the number of people travelling. At the moment around 2500 people arrive in New Zealand per week, but the introduction of quarantine-free travel could see this number increase dramatically. Let’s suppose this went up to 50,000 arrivals per week, which is around half the pre-pandemic travel rate.
In this scenario, we could get about seven infected people arriving in New Zealand every week. The Skegg report recommends vaccination and pre-departure and arrival testing as requirements for travel. As a rough estimate, let’s suppose these measures reduce the risk of an outbreak in a population with high vaccine coverage to about 5% per infected arrival. This means we could expect a new outbreak to occur around once every three weeks.
If our vaccine coverage is high enough, we may be able to contain most of these outbreaks with targeted measures like testing and contact tracing. Even then, it’s likely some of these outbreaks will need broader restrictions or even localised lockdowns to bring them under control. This will be especially likely during the winter months when the virus spreads more easily, or if the outbreak gets into a population group with low vaccination rates.
Caution while uncertainty remains high
Te Pūnaha Matatini’s model estimates that, even with 90% coverage of people over 15, an uncontrolled outbreak of the Delta variant could still potentially cause thousands of deaths and threaten to overwhelm our healthcare system. This means we need to prevent uncontrolled spread of the virus and sticking with a “stamp it out” strategy gives us the best shot at doing that.
Whether this will ultimately succeed is uncertain. But as the Skegg report notes, it is easy to switch away from an elimination approach if it becomes apparent that the costs are too high. But once you’ve abandoned elimination, it is virtually impossible to get it back.
Given this uncertainty, it makes absolute sense to take a cautious and gradual approach to relaxing travel restrictions rather than throwing the borders open quickly. We will need to see how our systems cope with a small influx of travellers from low-risk countries before considering a wider reopening.
This also shows why it’s unrealistic to expect a detailed timeline for resuming international travel at this stage. There are too many uncertainties around the level of vaccine coverage, how our systems will cope with managing COVID-19 outbreaks in the community, and whether we’ll be facing another new variant. Most importantly, it’s hard to predict which countries will have the virus under control months in the future.
In the meantime, it’s becoming clear the choice is not simply whether to get vaccinated or not. The choice is between getting vaccinated or getting COVID-19. We now have a wealth of evidence that getting vaccinated is by far the safer of these options. It also contributes to a collective immunity that will give us the best chance of resuming international travel safely.
Michael Plank is affiliated with the University of Canterbury and receives funding from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and Te Pūnaha Matatini, New Zealand’s Centre of Research Excellence in complex systems. He is a co-author of the Te Pūnaha Matatini research referenced in this article.
LIVE PODCAST: In this episode of A View from Afar Paul Buchanan and Selwyn Manning are joined by Dr David Robie to discuss how Covid-19 has become a trigger of instability in the wider Pacific Region.
Dr David Robie is editor of AsiaPacificReport.nz and a renowned expert on Melanesian and Pacific affairs.
In this, the first of a two-part SPECIAL, we will analyse how Covid-19 has been a trigger of instability across the Pacific region.
And specifically, for this episode, we deep dive into instability in Melanesia focusing on:
Security issues in Papua New Guinea
Indonesia’s interests in dividing regional groups such as the Melanesian Spearhead Group
AND a security crisis that has developed in Fiji … after the recent detention of nine politicians and activists … who have dared to criticise former military coup leader, Frank Bainimarama’s government.
Join us at midday New Zealand time (8pm US EDST) and join the conversation via Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.
WE INVITE YOU TO PARTICIPATE WHILE WE ARE LIVE WITH COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS IN THE RECORDING OF THIS PODCAST:
You can comment on this debate by clicking on one of these social media channels and interacting in the social media’s comment area. Here are the links:
Threat.Technology placed A View from Afar at 9th in its 20 Best Defence Security Podcasts of 2021 category. You can follow A View from Afar via our affiliate syndicators.
How does music get onto a cassette tape? — Paul, age 9, Adelaide
Hi Paul!
That’s a great question. To answer it very briefly, music is recorded onto a cassette tape using electricity and a magnetic field. Now let me explain what I mean by that.
Sound gets turned into electricity
Imagine you’re singing into a microphone while playing a guitar. When you sing, you use your vocal cords in your throat, your mouth and your breath to make the air around you vibrate — and these vibrations are what create sound.
Similarly, when you pluck or strum the strings of a guitar, this causes the wooden body of the instrument to vibrate, which also vibrates the air inside the guitar, creating sound.
Both the microphone and the guitar “pickup” (a special kind of microphone for “picking up” sound from an instrument) have tiny magnets that vibrate with the movements of air, and produce an electrical current.
The current flows through the microphone and guitar cables to the tape recorder, through which a plastic tape is slowly moving. The electrical signal creates a magnetic field in the recording head and this is what allows sound to be recorded.
But what happens within the tape recorder itself during this process?
How magnetic tape works
A cassette tape is a plastic shell that surrounds two rotating spools.
A collection of cassette tapes/ Mike Flamenco/unsplash
Another long, thin piece of plastic is wound around the spools. This is the “magnetic tape” on which the sound is recorded.
This tape is covered with a magnetic material that contains iron, and which reacts when it comes close to a magnetic field. The material could be iron oxide, chromium dioxide, or sometimes barium ferrite.
A diagram of a magnetic tape recorder showing the mechanical parts. University of California Santa Cruz Electronic Music Studio
In the diagram above, we can see the basic parts of a tape recorder. Here’s what happens when an empty cassette tape is used to record sound.
The magnetic tape starts on the supply reel and a motor on the takeup reel winds the tape past the heads (4, 6, 7). Each head contains metal coils. When electricity is sent to the coils in the record head (6), it generates a tiny magnetic field.
When the tape enters the magnetic field generated by the record head, the magnetic particles on it align in proportion to the strength of the field. The loudness and pitch of the sound (how high or low it is) make the magnetic particles align in different patterns as the tape passes through.
Later, if we want to play our recording back, we wind the tape past the play head (7), where the pattern of the magnetic particles recorded on the tape produces an electrical signal that is converted back to sound.
These particles will stay in the same arrangement unless they are exposed to a new magnetic field — so a tape can be played back many times, until it wears out!
The remaining head is the erase head (4). This lets us erase sound from a tape by using a constant electrical charge to “reset” the magnetic material on the tape as it passes through, erasing any previous recordings.
The capstan, rollers and arms all help to keep the tape stretched out as it passes through the heads, so that it moves at the same speed and gets a good-quality recording.
An image of the first model of compact cassette tape sold by Philips in the 1960s. Philips USA
Although recording to tape had been possible since the 1930s, the technology was large, awkward and expensive. The Philips Compact Cassette was cheap, portable (small enough to carry around) and could be used at home or in the office, with basic recording equipment.
But when Masaru Ibuka, the co-founder of the Japanese company Sony, wanted a way to listen to his favourite music on long flights, he sparked an invention that would change the way we listened to music forever: the Sony Walkman.
The Original Sony Walkman TPS L. Binarysequence/wikimedia
The Walkman was released in 1979 and brought music into every part of our lives. Not just our homes, or cars — but anywhere at any time! It is more or less a portable cassette player that connects with headphones.
Since then we have seen huge improvements in portable music technology, with MP3 players coming out in 1997 and eventually the Apple iPod’s release in 2001.
Today, we don’t even need a special device just to record or play music. We can do everything on our phones! But cassette tapes were the first invention that let people easily record and play on the go.
Given all parliamentary parties have said they oppose conversion practices being performed on LGBTQ+ people, you could be forgiven for wondering why the first reading of the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill last week didn’t pass unanimously.
In the end, the bill passed comfortably, 87-33, but the National Party has sown doubt by voting against it due to the alleged risk of criminalising parents “for trying to advise their 12-year-old child not to take puberty blockers”.
ACT voted for the bill to proceed to select committee but voiced similar concerns, and also argued it would unduly restrict the ability of religious people to express and engage with their beliefs.
While there are some other aspects of the bill that might assuage these concerns, whether or not these are realistic fears ultimately comes down to the bill’s definition of “conversion practice”. The core of the definition is contained in section 5(1), which says:
In this Act, conversion practice means any practice that —
(a) is directed towards an individual because of the individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression; and
(b) is performed with the intention of changing or suppressing the individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.
Right off the bat, you can see that to count as a conversion practice there must be a practice. This word by itself strongly suggests a course of conduct or action is required.
Moreover, it must be “directed towards an individual” — again suggesting a passive failure to do something (such as not seeking affirming health care for a trans child) would not be caught by the law because it is not directed at a person.
The practice must also be intended to change or suppress the individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.
It is difficult to see how merely advising their child against a particular healthcare option could be seen as suppressing their gender identity or expression.
Section 5 explicitly draws on Australian legislation that also supports the idea that this sort of parental reluctance would not be caught by the bill. One of these Australian laws, a 2020 amendment to Queensland’s Public Health Act, gives examples of what conversion practices include:
inducing nausea, vomiting or paralysis while showing the person same-sex images
using shame or coercion to give the person an aversion to same-sex attractions or to encourage gender-conforming behaviour
using other techniques on the person encouraging the person to believe being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or intersex is a defect or disorder.
These are clearly ongoing courses of action directed at making a person associate pain and shame with their sexual or gender identity.
It is not unreasonable to see the examples in the Queensland act – which directly influenced the drafting of New Zealand’s bill – as further evidence that family discussions about appropriate health care (even if it involves parents not immediately seeking out the health care their child wants) simply aren’t matters the bill is concerned with.
It is, however, appropriate that the bill covers parents who do take an active course of action to suppress or change their child’s identity.
The sad fact is that, in almost all cases, if a child is subjected to conversion practices it is because their parents have sent them there. A general exclusion for parents would defeat the purpose of the bill.
That said, section 5(2) does explicitly exclude some types of conduct from the definition of conversion practice. These include helping a person express their gender identity or transition to a different gender, facilitating a person’s coping skills or identity exploration, and providing acceptance, support or understanding of an individual.
Expressing religious beliefs is allowed
There are also medical and religious exclusions. The former is written slightly oddly, but functionally means that regulated medical professions – including doctors, nurses, psychologists and psychotherapists – can provide advice and support for LGBTQ+ people within the normal ethical practice of their profession without risking being caught by the bill.
The professions covered by this carve-out do not include counsellors, although the Association of Counsellors unequivocally considers conversion practices to be unethical.
The religious exclusion is not a general exemption for all conduct based on religious beliefs. That would defeat the purpose of the bill, because many conversion practices are indeed religious.
What it does do is state that merely expressing religious principles or beliefs to an individual without any intention to change or suppress their identity will not be caught by the bill. General religious discussion or preaching, even if it could be seen as homophobic, is not a conversion practice.
What this means is that if a priest, for example, said to an LGBTQ+ person, “It’s a sin to be gay, you’re a sinner”, this would not be caught by the bill. If, however, they added, “I can help change you, or make you put that part of yourself in a little box you never think about”, and offered “therapy” from a religious standpoint, it would be.
What is targeted is the practice, not the beliefs that motivate it. Given this explicit exclusion, ACT’s concerns about the effect on general freedom of religion seem overblown.
Definitions no reason to oppose the bill
The fears raised about the effect on families struggling to deal with a child’s gender identity are not borne out by the actual text of the bill.
On their own, awkward or emotional discussions, or a failure to actively seek out affirming health care, cannot reach the required threshold of active, deliberate conduct.
If even more clarity is required, perhaps the wording of the definition could be changed to “actively suppressing”, making it (even more) crystal clear that passive failure to act cannot be caught. That is a very minor tweak, however, and could easily be made at the select committee.
It is certainly no reason to vote against ending a practice that every party in parliament agrees is cruel and unnecessary.
Eddie Clark 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.
