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

It was a sensational day in the ever-escalating coronavirus story, with Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton on Friday testing positive for COVID-19 and admitted to hospital.

Meanwhile, sporting and other organisations prepared for massive changes, after the government’s announcement of the latest moves to try to contain the spread of the virus.

In a sweeping set of measures, based on medical advice and unveiled by Prime Minister Scott Morrison following a meeting of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG), organisations have been advised against mass gatherings of 500 people or more, a national cabinet of federal and state leaders is being formed, and Australians are being told not to travel abroad unless they really need to.

The revelation about Dutton – who recently visited the United States – threw the Prime Minister’s Office into a spin. Dutton had attended cabinet on Tuesday. Did this mean he could have infected the whole upper echelon of the government as a job lot?

Well, no, came the word from the PMO. The medical advice was that only people who’d had close contact with Dutton in the 24 hours before he showed symptoms needed to self-isolate.

The latest indication is the Prime Minister doesn’t plan to be tested, because he doesn’t need to be. But don’t take that for gospel. Everything can change in a few hours. For example, on Friday afternoon Morrison was proposing to go to the football on Saturday; on Friday night he wasn’t.

The coronavirus crisis is moving so fast that by Friday, the government’s $17.6 billion stimulus package, critically important though it is, seemed very much Thursday’s news.

Read more: Viral spiral: the federal government is playing a risky game with mixed messages on coronavirus

On Friday morning, praise for the government’s handling of the crisis suddenly seemed to be changing into criticism, with attention shifting sharply from economics to health and questions mounting. Why was it so tardy with its advertising campaign? Where was the “clear plan” it said it had to deal with the virus and was it adequate?

By mid-afternoon Friday – and a few hours after the Melbourne Grand Prix was cancelled – the dramatic new stage of the fight against COVID-19 started to unfold.

According to the Prime Minister’s Office, the “national cabinet” – a sort of health war cabinet – has no precedent in Australian history. To meet weekly from Sunday, it is a too-rare example of the federation working at its best, across state boundaries and party lines. In this highly complex situation, maximum co-ordination of effort and resources is vital.

The advice on mass gatherings – to apply from Monday – had seemed inevitable sooner or later. Critics were saying it should have been already in place. It is not a formal ban, but that’s unlikely to be necessary. What organisation would fly in the face of the recommendation?

Both Morrison and Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy were at pains to say this action was being taken early, to keep ahead of the rapidly evolving situation.

“This is a scalable response,” said Morrison. “What we’re doing here is taking an abundance-of-caution approach”.

Read more: Politics with Michelle Grattan: Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy on COVID-19

“What we’re seeking to do is lower the level of overall risk and at the same time ensure that we minimise any broader disruption that is not necessary at this stage.”

“There is every reason for calm,” he insisted, even as the general community becomes, understandably, increasingly alarmed.

Earlier Morrison told Alan Jones: “I think it’s important for our economy and just our general well-being … that people sort of get on about their lives, you know, ‘keep calm and carry on’ is the saying.”

The government cannot avoid the inherent conflict between the duelling imperatives of health considerations and economic ones.

The greater the restrictions, even voluntary ones, on activity, the worse for the economy.

Some people might have spent at least part of their $750 cash handout from the stimulus on attending sporting events and the like.

More generally, while ramping up the protection measures is designed to make people not just safer but also feel safer, it equally could make them more anxious.

That could not just be a disincentive for individuals to spend their handouts, but also discourage businesses from buying new equipment, or even hanging onto workers, despite the encouragement they are being given.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Will many people be too worried to spend the cash splashed their way?

The attempt to contain the spread of the virus for as long as possible is vital for the health system. An early big surge could overwhelm the intensive care facilities, which will cope much better if admissions are stretched over an extended period.

But for the economy, extending the duration in this manner worsens the impact.

This is an indication of the “wicked problem” the coronavirus is. Every policy response may produce some negative reactions, as well as the desired ones.

On some fronts the governments are trying to hold the line. They are not, for example, recommending schools or universities shut. A distinction is being made between “non-essential” gatherings and essential activities, like going to school or work.

In practice schools – which come under state responsibility – are shutting down on an individual basis for varying lengths of time when cases of the virus are discovered.

The Dutton diagnosis has raised the question the government hasn’t wanted to confront – how the parliament handles the outbreak when it spreads to one of its own.

Parliament resumes the week after next, with the priority to pass the legislation for the stimulus. It then adjourns until the May budget.

Asked on Friday about the implications of the “mass gatherings” edict for parliament, Morrison said parliament fell into the “essential” category but he flagged that visitors to the public galleries might be banned.

At that stage, Dutton’s illness had not become public.

It should be remembered that parliament doesn’t just belong to the government – making the question of its coming sittings still a live issue.

– ref. View from The Hill: Coronavirus hits at the heart of Morrison’s government, with Peter Dutton infected – https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-coronavirus-hits-at-the-heart-of-morrisons-government-with-peter-dutton-infected-133634

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Kenny, Professor, Australian National University

Holding daily press conferences to keep people alert but not alarmed is an inherently tricky business. But “fast, frank and frequent” have been the watchwords for Health Minister Greg Hunt and Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy in dealing with the coronavirus outbreak.

Since the earliest days of awareness of the virus, the pair’s updates, along with those of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, have generally struck that delicate balance between official insouciance and overreaction.

Inevitably, advice has evolved as new information has come to light about the virulence of COVID-19 and as governments abroad have embraced more extreme containment measures.

Read more: Grattan on Friday: Will many people be too worried to spend the cash splashed their way?

Early on, Australians were told there was little danger of human-to-human infection, and supposedly no risk at all of asymptomatic transfer.

As a novel pathogen, authoritative advice on COVID-19’s spread has been sparse. Meanwhile, on social media, unreliable information has flowed more freely. Public confusion has not been helped by an absence of clear advice on appropriate social behaviour, risk minimisation, what to do if feeling unwell, and infection modelling.

Neither has it been aided by politicians such as Barnaby Joyce who made a notable call for a “reality check” on breakfast television. He told the Seven network on March 9:

Look, it’s tragic, we’ve had over 3,000 deaths globally, but you’d need about 30 to 40 times that number to equate to the deaths from snake bites.

In the US, where the rate of testing is reported as significantly lower than in many other countries, President Donald Trump has variously suggested: that the normal influenza vaccine might help with COVID-19; that, as far as he knew, people did not die from the flu; and that as a result of its failure to contain the virus, all travel in people, trade and cargo from Europe would be banned.

Equity markets plunged more sharply on Thursday (US time) than on any single day since the Black Monday crash of 1987. The Australian Stock Exchange followed in this vein when it opened hours later.

While the word from Australian authorities has erred deliberately on the side of public reassurance, the dramatic Chinese decision to impose strict quarantining and order the construction of emergency hospitals spoke to something far more dangerous. Cue panic in the toilet-paper aisles of grocery stores.

As this pandemic has advanced, criticism has been growing that the government was no longer on the front foot as it had been with the first travel bans.

Meanwhile, much of the political/economic discussion has dwelt on the differences between the current situation as a “health crisis” and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Functionally, this is a distinction without a useful difference to most people inasmuch as the pandemic materially imperils economic growth and a putative budget surplus.

Read more: Morrison’s coronavirus package is a good start, but he’ll probably have to spend more

While obviously the root cause is different, many of the implications are notably familiar: collapsing confidence, evaporating consumer demand, broken supply chains, rising unemployment. It’s a secondary contagion of investment-chilling fear with severe economic and budgetary impacts.

Self-evidently, official messaging from Morrison has underscored a “don’t panic” mindset. Which is to say, the government has adopted a best-case stance on the viral spread in order to project confidence and thus protect the economic domain from the corrosive effects of runaway fear.

The clear aim has been to adjust policy only once unavoidable – such as the staged travel bans on entry from China, Iran, South Korea and Italy – while seeking to avoid a cliff-like drop-off in normal behaviour and commercial activity.

This has led to a dissonance between the life-as-normal health advice emanating from Canberra and the emergency footing onto which fiscal policy has now unashamedly been placed.

Even on economic policy, the government’s rhetoric has mostly conveyed a reluctance to be seen as overreacting.

This contrasts (perhaps deliberately) with the Rudd Labor government’s approach to the GFC in 2008. It conspicuously erred on the side of overreach to ensure it did not undershoot on stimulus.

Asked about the apparent gap between the emergency budgetary measures unveiled on Thursday and the public health advice advocating a business-as-usual approach to sporting events, travel, work and so on, Morrison said:

Well, it’s very simple. You follow the health advice. I’m going to the footy this weekend and I’m looking forward to it. And I’m sure many Australians would. And I encourage you to, unless you’re ill and unless there’s reason that with your own, if you’re in self-isolation for medical reasons or you’re actually ill, that I wouldn’t suggest you go.

By Friday afternoon, the distance between developments and the Morrison government’s static position on public gatherings was becoming unsustainable. That turned to untenable when Murphy advised that mass gatherings (more than 500 people) for sporting events should no longer be allowed. Morrison later announced that the government will be “advising against” such gatherings from Monday.

Labor, suppressing a perhaps understandable sense of schadenfreude after being punished for the “fiscal hangover” of its GFC response, has supported that position.

Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese told reporters on Thursday Labor would back the Coalition package, adding that he too intended to go the football on the weekend. But with community sentiment shifting underneath the government, there were signs of a breakdown in political bipartisanship emerging by Friday.

Former US president Barack Obama has also left little doubt as to his approach were he still in the White House, tweeting a graph showing the benefits of early decisive control.

Many sporting and other private organisations are coming to similar views.

This is making the absence of a centralised policy and a clear national message all the more glaring.

– ref. Viral spiral: the federal government is playing a risky game with mixed messages on coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/viral-spiral-the-federal-government-is-playing-a-risky-game-with-mixed-messages-on-coronavirus-133508

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Eileen Webb, Professor of Law and Ageing, School of Law, University of South Australia

Imagine you have just bought a home. You have moved in and, during a friendly chat with the neighbours, you find out the property had been the scene of a serious crime or used to manufacture methamphetamine.

How would you react? Is this something you would want to have known prior to the sale? If you had known, would this have affected you decision to buy the property? And was the real estate agent or vendor under any obligation to let you know?

Read more: What should buyers of a house be told about it?

In most cases, the answer is (somewhat surprisingly to buyers) “no”. However, amendments to Victoria’s Sale of Land Act 1962 have now broadened the matters that must be disclosed to buyers prior to a sale, including where a serious crime has occurred. Renters who find they have entered into a stigmatised property must resort to the consumer protection laws discussed below.

Why were the laws required?

The ancient doctrine of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware) still impacts on real estate transactions. It means the buyer bears the responsibility of making their own enquiries about the property.

Property inspections are usually confined to the physical condition of the property. While it would be possible, at least theoretically, to arrange for a person to investigate its “background”, this can be a difficult process, especially if such information is concealed or hard to come by.

As a result, each state and territory has introduced laws that provide for some level of disclosure to the buyer during the conveyancing process. The extent of disclosure required and the nature of matters that must be disclosed varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.

Furthermore, section 18 of the Australian Consumer Law considers conduct as misleading or deceptive where a matter is not disclosed but, in the circumstances, there is a reasonable expectation it would be.

The problem is that while disclosure may be required in matters involving, for example, a structural fault or a road-widening proposal, such information is confined to physical issues affecting the property.

However, what happens when the matter involves not a physical defect but a psychological or stigmatising one, such as a murder, for example? Such information may be of considerable importance to potential buyers who, for personal or religious reasons, would find living in a property where such an event occurred intolerable. On a more mercenary note, the impact on resale value of the property could be significant.

The nature of ‘stigmatised’ property

Concern about the effect of stigma on property is not a recent phenomenon. Courts in several jurisdictions, including Australia, have had to grapple with buyers who had discovered, after purchase, that the property had been the scene of a serious crime or criminal activity, a suicide had occurred, persons had been suffering from certain illnesses, or a sex offender lived nearby.

In one case a young man had murdered his parents and sister in their Sydney home. The property was later sold to a young couple. After discovering the tragic events that had occurred in the home, they sought to withdraw from the sale on religious grounds.

There was a significant amount of criticism of the real estate agent for not informing the buyers about what had occurred there. After considerable public pressure and an investigation by the NSW Office of Fair Trading, the contract was set aside.

On a more ethereal note, there have been a series of cases in the United States where buyers have sought, in some cases successfully, to have a sale rescinded because the house was (allegedly) haunted or the subject of paranormal activity.

Disclosure laws regarding stigma

The Victorian legislation clarifies obligations for estate agents and vendors regarding the disclosure of “material facts”.

In summary, an estate agent or vendor cannot knowingly conceal any material facts about a property when selling land. The legislation is supported by guidelines that clarify the nature of a material fact. This includes circumstances where, during the current or previous occupation, the property was the scene of a serious crime or an event that may create long-term potential risks to the health and safety of occupiers of the land.

Specific examples include extreme violence such as a homicide, the use of the property for the manufacture of substances such as methylamphetamine, or a defence or fire brigade training site involving the use of hazardous materials. Relevant factors can include the reaction of other potential buyers to the fact, including their willingness to buy in light of the revelation.

Significant penalties and even imprisonment await vendors and real estate agents who do not comply.

Will the laws work?

As with any new legislation, we will have to wait and see how this plays out. However, some preliminary comments can be made.

First, it will be interesting to see how the term “knowingly” is interpreted. Could an agent or vendor avoid the provisions if they merely suspect an issue but do not look further into it? The term “wilful blindness” comes to mind.

Second, a fact can be material in either a general or a specific sense. The general sense seems straightforward, as it refers to information most people would consider when deciding whether to buy a property.

Read more: Who bears the cost when your Uber or Airbnb turns bad?

However, how serious must a crime be to be material? What if the situation involves cultivation of marijuana rather than a more egregious substance?

More complex is where a material fact may be of importance to a specific buyer but not buyers generally. For example, in the case discussed above, the buyers’ religion made it impossible for them to live in a home where a violent murder had occurred. In this case, the onus seems to be on the prospective buyer to ask questions about matters of concern to them.

What now?

Although one suspects that buyers of an allegedly haunted house might not succeed under this legislation, the laws address a significant gap regarding disclosure of psychological considerations in the purchase of a property rather than the traditional physical ones.

– ref. When your house has a (disturbing) history, what should buyers be told about its ‘past’? – https://theconversation.com/when-your-house-has-a-disturbing-history-what-should-buyers-be-told-about-its-past-132766

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Centaine Snoswell, Research Fellow Health Economics, The University of Queensland

From tomorrow, some Australians will be able to consult their doctor or other health professional with a bulk-billed videocall rather than in person, in a move designed to limit the spread of the coronavirus among vulnerable people.

This measure will also help reduce the risk of transmission to health-care providers.

Yesterday’s announcement of these new telehealth measures comes as the World Health Organisation has upgraded the status of the coronavirus COVID-19 epidemic to a pandemic.

Read more: ‘The doctor will Skype you now’: telehealth may limit coronavirus spread, but there’s more we can do to protect health workers

Who’s eligible?

People in home isolation or quarantine as a result of the coronavirus, and those at high risk of complications if exposed to it, will be eligible for bulk-billed telehealth consultations with doctors, nurses and mental health professionals.

Eligible vulnerable groups include:

• people aged over 70
• Indigenous people aged over 50
• people with chronic health conditions or whose immune system is compromised
• parents with new babies
• pregnant women.

Existing Medicare-funded telehealth services in Australia normally refer to a consultation by videoconference, and don’t specify a particular software or platform.

However, yesterday’s announcement says these new telehealth services could be conducted by phone, or video, giving FaceTime or Skype as examples.

People in isolation or quarantine for COVID-19 will need to meet certain criteria and can videocall any eligible health provider.

However, those in vulnerable groups with a non-coronavirus matter can only videocall a health-care provider they have seen in person during the previous 12 months.

This may be a problem for people who do not have a regular health-care provider, or whose regular health-care provider is either ill-equipped or unwilling to provide consults via telehealth.

What are people eligible for and for how long?

Eligible people can not only access medical treatment by telehealth, they can also access mental health support.

The government acknowledges that home isolation, quarantine periods and/or the spread of COVID-19 can be stressful and could lead to mental health problems without support.

Other countries have also recognised mental health concerns. The World Health Organisation released advice this week on how to support the mental health of both patients and providers.

These newly announced telehealth measures are temporary, costing A$100 million over an initial period of six months. We don’t know whether the funding or time frame will be sufficient.

Telehealth in emergencies isn’t new

Telehealth has been used in Australia and overseas for decades. And in research to be published soon in the Journal of Telemedicine and Telecare we discuss how there’s good evidence it’s effective, especially in disaster situations.

For instance, telehealth was used after Hurricane Sandy in the USA in 2012, after an earthquake in Japan in 2011, and during the Boston blizzard in 2014.

In our forthcoming research paper we also discuss issues associated with implementing telehealth.

Telehealth can be very useful for a broad range of clinical services, but it can’t replace all in-person consultations. Some assessments, and all procedures, will still need to conducted in person.

Patients also need access to a device capable of videoconferencing (for example, a phone, computer, or tablet), as well as a reliable internet connection.

About 85% of the population has internet access at home. So there are people who may not be able to use telehealth services from home.

Read more: Virtual reality may be the next frontier in remote mental health care

Effective uptake of telehealth also relies on clinicians changing the way they interact and communicate with patients, a process that can be challenging for some.

So we need to provide adequate training and education to emerging and current health-care workers. We also need to ensure the general public is aware of telehealth and understand how to access it.

What might happen in the future?

The uptake of telehealth in Australia has been somewhat slow and fragmented so far.

However, the use of telehealth during the coronavirus pandemic might change this. People may become more aware of telehealth and accept it.

If it was used routinely in every health service, it would improve access to health care particularly in rural and remote areas, reducing the need for extensive travel.

Routine use would also mean our response to future pandemics and disasters would be much more timely and effective.

Researchers from our team at the University of Queensland’s Centre for Online Health, Centre for Health Services Research and the NHMRC Partnership Centre for Health System Sustainability contributed to research mentioned in this article.

– ref. Want to Skype your GP to avoid exposure to the coronavirus? Here’s what you need to know about the new telehealth option – https://theconversation.com/want-to-skype-your-gp-to-avoid-exposure-to-the-coronavirus-heres-what-you-need-to-know-about-the-new-telehealth-option-133433

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Komesaroff, Professor of Medicine, Monash University

The global coronavirus pandemic poses immediate, wide-ranging ethical challenges for governments, health authorities, health workers and the public.

At the heart of these challenges is how best to respond to COVID-19 urgently, yet safely and fairly.

How do we ensure rapid development and delivery of vaccines and other medicines, ethically and with proper oversight? How do we ration and distribute limited healthcare resources? How many of our personal freedoms are we willing to forgo to contain the pandemic?

How do we do this while protecting the vulnerable?

Read more: Why public health officials sound more worried about the coronavirus than the seasonal flu

This situation is unique

We ask these hard questions in a unique and rapidly changing environment, with the number of cases and deaths due to COVID-19 rising daily, and with increased global mobility leading to unstoppable transmission across borders.

The urgency of the situation is even forcing us to rethink how we answer these questions.

Traditionally, we make ethical decisions after open dialogue to achieve mutual understanding.

Such dialogue is placed under stress in times of crisis where, because decisions have to be made rapidly, authorities seek to suspend or dispense with time-honoured checks and balances.

However, it is precisely in these potentially dangerous situations that we most need nuanced ethical conversations.

Here are three key examples of the ethical challenges we face.

1. How do we develop new drugs quickly yet safely?

The first is how to balance the unknown risks associated with developing a vaccine or other drugs with the need for a response rapid enough to limit spread of the virus.

Part of that challenge is to ensure there is enough oversight of clinical trials when we are also accelerating the delivery of new therapies.

We will have to decide whether it is appropriate to accept higher levels of risk to research participants and patients when the stakes are higher.

Read more: Infecting healthy people in vaccine research can be ethical and necessary

As well as the risks there are also potential benefits.

It has taken many years to construct an elaborate framework to ensure clinical research is conducted ethically.

However, under the pressure of the current emergency we may be able to find ways to reduce bureaucracy and red tape, speed up decision-making and make the system more responsive.

These changes may serve us well in the future, when we return to “business as usual”.

Read more: Here’s why the WHO says a coronavirus vaccine is 18 months away

2. How prepared are we to give up some personal freedoms?

Balancing our personal freedoms – such as freedom of movement and the right to choose or decline medical treatment – with limiting the spread of disease is another major challenge.

We have seen disturbing images from Wuhan in China of officials apparently detaining citizens walking along the street, or dragging them from their homes.

Australia has announced plans for legislation allowing people to be detained or isolated when they are said to pose a threat to public safety.

Read more: Explainer: what are the Australian government’s powers to quarantine people in a coronavirus outbreak?

At the same time, community organisations are mobilising to protect and support vulnerable members of society by providing food or other services. Health practitioners will continue to serve their patients with courage and dedication, even when this places them in danger.

How can we ensure such ethical values prevail over increasing authoritarian power?

How much of our personal freedom will we be prepared to give up in support of public health demands? Will we accept self-quarantine at home or isolation in a medical facility? Will we allow authorities to enter people’s homes and arrest infected people?

There is a great risk the emergency measures introduced will continue and be absorbed into everyday practice when the crisis ends. Will we be able to prevent this?

3. How do we allocate scarce resources?

Finally, there is the question of how best to allocate scarce resources, such as drugs, access to intensive care treatments, personal protective equipment, staff and research funding.

As the number of cases increases globally the number of critically ill patients will quickly exceed the available facilities, requiring us to make difficult choices.

Read more: Coronavirus: should frontline doctors and nurses get preferential treatment?

We will have to decide who is treated where, who has access to scarce drugs or technologies, how and for whose benefit health professionals and emergency services are deployed, and how food, protective clothing and other items are rationed.

Medical professionals have long been familiar with such discussions, which are now likely to become more routine.

Read more: How do we choose who gets the flu vaccine in a pandemic – paramedics, prisoners or the public?

What lies ahead?

We will need to make these decisions in a democratic way with public involvement, rather than leaving them to experts or government authorities.

We will need to struggle to preserve the ethical values of mutual respect and responsibility, fairness, and care for vulnerable members of society, which may be difficult in our present harsh and uncompromising times.

There are no easy solutions to satisfy everyone. However, at least we can start talking about these issues. For now, maybe that’s the best we can do.

– ref. The coronavirus pandemic is forcing us to ask some very hard questions. But are we ready for the answers? – https://theconversation.com/the-coronavirus-pandemic-is-forcing-us-to-ask-some-very-hard-questions-but-are-we-ready-for-the-answers-132581

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tanya Latty, Associate professor, University of Sydney

It’s nigh on impossible to calculate with accuracy how many ants are on Earth, but estimates put the number at about ten billion billion. And sometimes, it can feel like a good proportion of those ants are marching through our homes.

Ants usually come indoors in search of food or nesting habitat. Even small amounts of food, like pet food crumbs, can attract hordes of industrious ants.

Ants are one of Earth’s most successful animals, and comprise more than 13,000 species. They live almost everywhere except Antarctica, the high Arctic and a small number of islands.

Read more: Six amazing facts you need to know about ants

Despite ants’ ubiquity, people can still be surprised, or even horrified, to see a line of ants crawling along their kitchen bench. So should you get out the insecticide, or learn to live with them?

What are ants doing in my house?

Ants are part of nature’s cleaning crew: they efficiently find and remove food left around the house. The problem is, sometimes humans don’t want their help.

You’ve probably noticed ants more commonly come indoors in summer – that’s largely because most insects are more active in the warmer months.

Ants occasionally come inside in search of water, particularly during dry periods. In this case you may see them in bathrooms or other humid parts of the house.

Heavy rains can also cause ant nests to flood and force them to relocate to nearby buildings, such as your house.

Masters of cooperation

Ants are social animals and live in colonies with hundreds, or even millions, of others. They have tiny brains – in many cases smaller than a grain of sand. So how are they so clever at getting into our homes and finding our food? Because they are masters of cooperation.

Read more: Here’s what that house proud mouse was doing – plus five other animals who take cleaning seriously

Consider the way some ants march in a line towards that drop of honey on your kitchen bench. When worker ants of some species find a tasty piece of food, they respond by placing a tiny droplet of pheromone on the ground. They continue to leave a trail of pheromones all the way back to the nest.

Only one ant needs to find the food and lay a trail. Once that happens, hundreds of others can follow the trail to the food source.

How do I get rid of ants?

The first step to dealing with ants in your house is ensuring they don’t have access to food. Seal all food in airtight containers, clean behind the fridge and in the toaster, do not leave pet food out longer than necessary, ensure your bins are tightly sealed, and generally make sure there is no food around to entice ants (I know, easier said than done).

If you’ve seen ants marching in a line, try wiping down the surface with vinegar or bleach to disrupt the chemical trail.

Read more: Zombie ants: meet the parasitic fungi that take control of living insects

Prevent ants from entering your home in the first place by sealing up cracks and holes in walls. This will also prevent them from nesting inside wall cavities.

If all else fails, insecticidal baits can be used to control ant numbers. But before you take that route, ask yourself whether the ants are actually a problem (more on that later).

Insecticides may harm other insects

If your ant problem has got out of hand, contact a pest control professional rather than attempting to deploy a bug bomb or similar insect spray yourself.

DIY methods rarely work because ants mostly live in protected spaces (such as underground or in walls). You might kill a few worker ants, but probably won’t harm the colony.

If you (or a professional) do use insecticides, avoid using them outdoors and look for ones specifically designed for ants. Most insecticides are broad spectrum chemicals that can kill other types of insects. This includes insects beneficial in your home and garden, such as ladybirds, mantises and parasitoid wasps.

It may take a while for the ant colony to die, especially if it is large. Some species distribute themselves among several nests which makes them much harder to eradicate.

Ants fight back

In most ant species, the queen is the only individual who can produce new workers. So to destroy the colony, you need to kill the queen.

But some species, such as the rock ant (Temnothorax albipennis), have evolved an ingenious way to protect the queen and her larvae from poisoned food.

Read more: These ants have evolved a complex system of battlefield triage and rescue

Some worker ants stay in the colony and receive new food from forager ants – storing the food in their abdomen and regurgitating it when their nestmates are hungry. Since these “storage ants” collect and mix food from many workers, they help ensure that incoming poisons are diluted before they reach the queen. They also act as poison testers: if the food is toxic, they die before they can pass it on to the queen.

We need ants

Remember that ants can be beneficial predators – I’ve seen ants attack and kill cockroach nymphs. Ants also play an important role in spreading the seeds of native plants, and of removing waste from our environment.

Ants are a normal and important part of our urban ecosystems. So if we want to protect our precious biodiversity, this may mean tolerating our tiny neighbours – even when they seem intent on taking over our kitchen or ruining our picnic.

No one wants ants ruining their food. But if you have a small number of ants wandering around the house, is that really a big deal?

Read more: Curious Kids: do ants have blood?

– ref. Why tiny ants have invaded your house, and what to do about it – https://theconversation.com/why-tiny-ants-have-invaded-your-house-and-what-to-do-about-it-132092

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christian Downie, Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, Australian National University

The federal government this week signed a deal with the US to access their oil reserves should global supplies be disrupted and we eat into our meagre reserve.

Oil security is a hot topic in Australia – we consume more than a decade ago, produce less, and keep little in reserve. In fact, Australia is the only member of the International Energy Agency in breach of its treaty obligation to hold a 90-day “strategic petroleum reserve”. At the end of last year Australia’s oil reserves stood at 54 days of imports.

Read more: Australia’s fuel stockpile is perilously low, and it may be too late for a refill

But the deal will do little to bolster our energy security given the oil reserves will remain on the other side of the Pacific. Instead, in the near term, the best way to improve it is to reduce our dependence on oil and prepare for a renewable future.

The oil deal

The US-Australia oil deal will enable Australia access to the US’ Strategic Petroleum Reserve – the vast caverns used to store oil in Texas and Louisiana.

This is a prospect that has been weighing heavily on the mind of policymakers after the attacks on oil tankers near the Strait of Hormuz in 2019, the key shipping route off the coast of Iran with more than 20 million barrels of oil passing through each day.

Read more: Infographic: what is the conflict between the US and Iran about and how is Australia now involved?

Russia and Saudi Arabia’s increasingly heated oil price war also shows how geopolitical tensions can easily shake the global energy landscape, as both nations threaten to flood the market with extra oil barrels.

On paper, the US deal will allow Australia to meet its international obligations. But in practice, the impact will be marginal.

Under the leasing arrangements, oil may take up to a month to reach Australian shores in a crisis. And that’s assuming US President Donald Trump would stick to the deal – a courageous assumption given his track record of abandoning allies at a moment’s notice, as Kurdish forces in the Middle East know all too well.

In any case, electrifying our transport sector is likely the best way Australia can improve its oil security – think policies to increase the uptake of electric vehicles – not by relying on oil reserves on the other side of the Pacific.

A new energy world order

To a large extent, the oil deal is a side-show anyway. Australian energy diplomacy needs to quickly come to grips with the rapid deployment of renewables upending global energy markets. The impact on energy diplomacy will be profound.

As the International Renewable Energy Agency made clear in its ground breaking report last year, the expansion of renewables will transform patterns of cooperation and conflict between countries.

Read more: Chief Scientist: we need to transform our world into a sustainable ‘electric planet’

Alliances built on fossil fuels are likely to weaken as demand for fossil fuels decline. For example, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries is likely to become less important, as countries have a growing range of energy alternatives to oil.

New alliances and initiatives will emerge, such as the International Solar Alliance. This is an alliance initiated by India, of which Australia is a member, to improve cooperation among solar rich countries.

Renewables will also reconfigure the geographies of trade. Rather than Australia securing oil shipments from the US, regional agreements will be needed as countries look to trade electricity across borders. This means Australia will have to pay closer attention to the development of regional electricity grids in Asia.

As a result, the security choke points of the future are less likely to be oil shipping lanes off Iran, and instead the control of electricity grid infrastructure. Or, for example, the control of supply chains for rare minerals to produce renewable technologies – though there remains much uncertainty.

What should Australian energy diplomacy focus on?

First, countries like Australia that can take advantage of new renewable energy technologies can increase their global influence. Australia’s economically demonstrated solar and wind resources are estimated to be much greater than our resources of oil, gas, coal and uranium combined.

This means Australia is in a unique position to export renewable energy, such as electricity produced from solar in northern Australia to our neighbours in Asia.

Read more: It might sound ‘batshit insane’ but Australia could soon export sunshine to Asia via a 3,800km cable

Second, as one of the largest exporters of coal and natural gas in the world, Australia is likely to be exposed to large changes in demand as the world shifts to clean energy.

This could play out in different ways depending on how quickly the world moves to cut carbon emissions, but there’s little doubt our diplomatic efforts will have to shift away from simply securing export markets for fossil fuels.

Third, the changing patterns in the production and consumption of energy will also mean the global rules governing energy will be re-written.

The relevance and membership of key international organisations, many of which Australia belongs to, are likely to change. For example, the International Energy Agency – meant to be the go-to energy organisation – today doesn’t include China, India, Brazil and Russia as members. These countries are four of the top ten energy-consuming nations in the world.

Read more: How to transition from coal: 4 lessons for Australia from around the world

The government is right to be concerned about our energy security. But it needs to re-think Australia’s approach.

The future is renewables, not fossil fuels. The longer it takes to realise this reality, the less prepared we’ll be for the political and economic changes set to cascade around the world.

– ref. Taking US oil in a global crisis sounds good on paper, but it won’t do much for Australia’s energy security – https://theconversation.com/taking-us-oil-in-a-global-crisis-sounds-good-on-paper-but-it-wont-do-much-for-australias-energy-security-133344

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Wilson, Associate Professor in Education, University of Sydney

The World Health Organisation overnight declared that the coronavirus responsible for COVID-19 is now a pandemic, and called on countries to take “urgent and aggressive action”.

The virus has affected more than 113,702 people and resulted into 4,012 deaths globally. At the time of publication, there have been 126 people diagnosed with COVID-19 in Australia and three deaths linked to the virus. These numbers are likely to increase.

Australia has issued restrictions for travellers from China, South Korea, Iran and Italy. Four schools, two in New South Wales and two in Victoria, closed temporarily after students and a staff member tested positive for the virus.

In recent days, Victorian premier Dan Andrews has warned the public to prepare for statewide school closures. Federal education minister Dan Tehan said the trigger for more widespread school closures had not yet been reached, but it seems “clear now that the idea of containing the virus is getting harder and harder”.

There is currently no vaccine to protect people against COVID-19, so public health authorities will need to use non-pharmaceutical interventions in response to the outbreak. These can include isolating infected people, quarantining those exposed to the virus, and closing schools.

Current policy and guidelines

The federal government recently released the Australian Health Sector Emergency Response Plan for Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). It says:

State and territory governments are responsible for the operational aspects of public health responses […] They will […] implement social distancing measures as per national recommendations and local risk assessment […] and support outbreak investigation and management in residential aged care facilities, schools, prisons and other institutions.

This makes clear there is no specific national plan for schools to contain the virus. The statement seems to suggest the current plan is to “support outbreak investigation” as opposed to preventing the outbreak.

Supporting the outbreak investigation is a reactive measure, which leaves schools vulnerable to outbreaks without a strategy to prevent them.

Read more: It’s now a matter of when, not if, for Australia. This is how we’re preparing for a jump in coronavirus cases

There is general advice available for schools but this focuses on international students or those recently returned from a high-risk country, and those who have had contact with someone who is infected.

Without a concrete national plan, individual schools rely on state and territory advice, which varies significantly (see NSW and NT). This may mean there will be an untimely and inconsistent response to containing COVID-19 in schools across Australia.

What can schools do?

Measures schools can use to prevent infections fall into two groups: improving personal hygiene, and enforcing social distancing to reduce the possibility of contact between infected and non-infected people. Australian research simulating and modelling social distancing suggests this is likely to be effective against a novel virus, like the COVID-19 virus, if introduced quickly.

1. Promote good hygiene and minimise activities that involve personal contact.

Schools can provide age-appropriate and repeated instruction about personal hygiene and interpersonal physical contact. This includes: how to frequently wash hands, correct use of masks and gloves, strategies to avoid personal contact (such as no handshaking or sharing pens), and correct etiquette for sneezing and coughing (into elbow, turn away where possible).

Schools can place sanitisers in high-traffic locations such as at the entrance to classrooms and gyms, and next to elevators and main hallways. They can also increase cleaning of contact surfaces such as stair rails, desks, computer lab stations and keyboards.

2. Make changes to school timetables to minimise student exposure.

These include staggering recess and lunch breaks to avoid having the whole school on the playground at one time and ensuring fewer students interact at break times.

Strategies should also be put in place for students moving between classrooms to avoid hallway crush. A wise step would be to rotate teachers between classrooms, not students.

Suspending large school events and school excursions can also help.

3. Ensure students who have returned from ANY overseas country self-isolate for at least two weeks.

The global spread of the virus, which is now at the pandemic stage, is at the point that any air and cruise ship travel is a significant risk.

Read more: Worried about your child getting coronavirus? Here’s what you need to know

4. Provide online education for quarantined and self-isolated students.

This responsibility will fall on states and territories and many have already developed online systems. The difficulty will be in lifting them to scale. UNESCO has provided a list of online resources to help support students.

5. Ensure vulnerable students are supported

Extra support should be provided to vulnerable students and schools with high proportions of vulnerability. Australian Indigenous communities are at particular risk from COVID-19 infection, as are students in special schools for those with disabilities.

Both these groups of students, who are often disadvantaged socioeconomically, will also need specialist support if they are to receive alternative education online.

What about closing schools?

According to UNESCO 14 countries have closed schools nationwide including Japan and Italy. These are called proactive closures as they include schools where infections have not been identified.

A further 13 other countries, including Australia, have reported some closures of schools. Some of these are reactive, responding only when an infection is identified in a school. So far in Australia all school closures have been reactive.

There are variations in the length of time schools have closed and when decisions were made to close them. Japan issued a national directive for school closures when there were 186 confirmed infections in the country, compared to Italy when there were 2,500.

A review of several studies suggests widespread, proactive school closures have been effective at reducing the rate of new influenza cases, but research on the length of time they should be shut is inconclusive.

Evidence suggests that, during the 1918 influenza pandemic, widespread school closures (it is not clear what proportions were proactive or reactive) and other non-pharmaceutical interventions in particular communities were associated with lower death rates.

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

The rationale for closing schools during pandemics is that children are thought to be important vectors of transmission. They are more infectious and susceptible to most influenza strains, and high contact rates in schools favour transmission.

In the case of the 2009 swine flu H1N1 pandemic, 60% of cases infected were 18 years old or younger. But the COVID-19 seems to not affect children as much as the elderly. Children show milder symptoms and there are fewer infections among them. That said, they may still be significant vectors in transmission.

We need a national approach to virus containment and educational provision, with schools at the centre of our response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

– ref. Australian schools are closing because of coronavirus, but should they be? – https://theconversation.com/australian-schools-are-closing-because-of-coronavirus-but-should-they-be-133432

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

The technology-driven revolution in urban transport is largely centred on the inner city. It has completely missed the suburbs, which lack the public transport services and shared micromobility devices, such as e-scooters, that inner-city residents enjoy. But new technologies, skilled operators and willing governments may have produced a solution for the suburbs, known as on-demand transit.

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

According to our data collection, there have been 36 on-demand trials across Australia since October 2017, providing over 1 million rides to residents. Half of these trips have been in the past six months. Our research at the Griffith Cities Research Institute examines the social equity impacts of these services.

What is on-demand transit?

On-demand transit does not follow fixed routes or timetables. Riders book a trip for a cost similar to a bus fare.

Vehicles are often smaller buses, 13-seater vans, or sedans and fleets that can be adjusted based on demand for rides. Unburdened by fixed stops, which are convenient for only a few people, these services can weave their way through communities, optimising routes on the fly.

In certain areas of Australia, users simply download an app and request a ride just like a taxi or Uber, but cheaper. Others who would rather not use a smartphone app can book through a call centre or on a computer.

The impact of on-demand services may be much greater than simply adding a local bus route. While billions of dollars go into subsidising inner-city transport, households’ access to jobs and services gets much worse with increasing distance from the centre. Not only do households in the outer suburbs have longer commutes, they also have to drive to get to shops, recreation facilities or health services.

Read more: Living ‘liveable’: this is what residents have to say about life on the urban fringe

On-demand services allow people who cannot drive or do not have a car to be active members of society.

What is happening now?

Growth in on-demand services and their use has been rapid. Already, it seems some services are becoming too big to fail, as users’ daily reliance on them increases.

The number of operators has grown from seven at the end of 2017 to 22 by December 2019. Monthly ridership has increased nearly 1,000%.

The Northern Beaches service in Sydney, operated by Keolis Downer, has had nearly 27 months of continuous growth. Starting with a measly ridership of 38 passengers, it now carries over 19,000 passengers a month. The service in The Ponds, Sydney, grew from 1,000 to 8,000 riders in its first four months.

In South Australia, home to the most recent rollouts, the Mount Barker service attracted more than 4,000 riders in its first month.

However, not all on-demand services are created equal. Service provision, operations, locations and vehicles vary widely. Some have state-of-the-art technologies and new fleets of specially designed vehicles. Others operate simply under a procurement agreement with the local taxi provider and a call centre.

These trials haven’t been flawless. Eleven trials have closed. Nearly all have revised services, zones, hours or technology. Some services are world-class. Others need further revision.

This state of affairs reflects the speed of development in the field. Operators are learning how to better navigate the suburbs, while governing bodies are refining service requirements.

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

On-demand transit changes lives

The Queensland government and Logan City launched one of the first on-demand transit trials in Australia. Also known as demand-responsive transit, it covers three parts of Logan, south of Brisbane.

Our research surveyed users of this service. Their responses powerfully demonstrate the value of on-demand transport.

Over 50% of respondents either had no driver’s licence or lacked access to a car for regular use. Illustrating the decreased burden on family and increased autonomy the service provides, one respondent said:

I can’t drive, so I depend on my husband to drive me around. With [on demand] service, it gives me freedom.

Commenting on a recent trip, another respondent said they “would have no [other] way of getting there. On-demand transport has been my saving grace.”

Stories like these illustrate the value of on-demand services. For the people who use them, these services are invaluable, improving their quality of life and access to opportunities.

Negative survey responses pointed toward technological hiccups, such as app glitches. Yet, when talking about the service itself, responses have been glowing. Asked what they would change, one person said:

Nothing. It is the best thing since sliced bread.

What’s next?

Expect to see more of these rollouts in coming months. As technology and operations improve, these services are showing public transport in the outer suburbs can no longer be ignored.

If the transition towards mobility as a service (MAAS) occurs as predicted, on-demand transit may play a key role. To develop these services, we need research into fare structures (such as subscriptions), vehicle types and branding, defining operating areas and promoting shared ridership.

The focus of our research will be to develop key metrics to allow for comparison between services, accounting for many of the variables. The private sector holds much of this knowledge, but it needs to become public to help governments plan more and better systems.

– ref. 1 million rides and counting: on-demand services bring public transport to the suburbs – https://theconversation.com/1-million-rides-and-counting-on-demand-services-bring-public-transport-to-the-suburbs-132355

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By John Quiggin, Professor, School of Economics, The University of Queensland

The spread of the coronavirus has brought us all face to face with the remorseless logic of exponential growth. A handful of cases has turned into dozens, then hundreds, then thousands.

If current attempts at containment fail, we can expect many millions of cases around the world.

Read more: One word repeated 9 times explains why the Reserve Bank cut: it’s ‘coronavirus’

The government’s economic policy response reflects this dawning reality. The exponential growth of the virus has been matched by growth in the magnitude and scope of the required response.

While the virus was developing in China, and even in the midst of the bushfire crisis, the government was insisting that its wafer-thin surplus would be delivered as promised.

Denial for a while…

Even after it became evident that the budget would be in deficit and the economy close to recession (at least in terms of the widely-used “two quarters of negative growth” criterion), the government’s primary concern was to avoid validating the Rudd government’s response to the global financial crisis.

Estimates of a package of A$2 to $5 billion were leaked, with a strong emphasis on a modest and targeted response, confined to specific sectors such as tourism. The universities, seen as tribal enemies by many in the government, got no sympathy.

Read more: Morrison’s coronavirus package is a good start, but he’ll probably have to spend more

Rather than being treated an export earner in trouble, universities were blamed for relying too much on the Chinese market. The idea of boosting Newstart and other welfare payments was dismissed out of hand.

As the package developed, the power of the “go hard, go early, go household” logic that drove the 2008 response of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Treasury Secretary Ken Henry became evident.

…then a focus on what might work

The figure being bandied about rose to $10 billion, and the government’s attempts at product differentiation became ever feebler.

This stimulus, it was claimed, would rely on existing programs (an attempt to keep faith with the spurious attacks on Rudd programs like the school-hall focused Building the Education Revolution).

It would be wound down as soon as the crisis was over (something Rudd’s treasurer Wayne Swan spent years trying and failing to do).

Now we have the announcement of a nearly $18 billion package which is virtually a repeat of Labor’s response to the global financial crisis.

The central elements are a cash handout aimed at sustaining consumer demand, and broad measures to stimulate investment.

Allowing for inflation and population growth, the almost $18 billion cost of this package is very similar to the $10 billion cost of the Rudd government’s first stimulus. It’s highly likely that, as in the GFC, more will be needed in future.

Those numbers doesn’t take account of the impact of the crisis on tax revenues and unemployment benefits.

It is highly likely that the economic aftershocks will be felt for years to come, and to me, it seems possible the impact on the budget may be well over $100 billion by the time Australia recovers.

There’ll be lessons when this is over

The remaining targeted measures to assist specific sectors like tourism have their parallel in the Rudd government’s rescue of the car finance industry through the Ozcar scheme, which gave rise to the (then) infamous “Utegate” scandal.

Looking ahead, the crisis response should kill off not only the idea that a surplus is the hallmark of responsible economic management, but also the absurdity of extending the standard four-year forward estimates period to ten-year projections, which formed the basis of tax cuts legislated years ahead of time.

Read more: When it comes to sick leave, we’re not much better prepared for coronavirus than the US

As the current crisis and the global financial crisis have shown, even an annual budget can be derailed by an unforeseen shock. Attempting to fix policies ten years in advance is a fools’ errand.

More broadly, this is yet another instance in which policies influenced by the market ideology that took hold in the 1970s has damaged us.

The economic impacts of coronavirus will be made worse by the casualisation of the workforce and the decades-long freeze on Newstart and other welfare payments.

A modern society can only function properly with a strong government and a commitment to looking after everybody. Perhaps the enforced isolation we are likely to face in the coming months will give us time to rethink.

– ref. The coronavirus stimulus program is Labor’s in disguise, as it should be – https://theconversation.com/the-coronavirus-stimulus-program-is-labors-in-disguise-as-it-should-be-133383

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

A payment of $750 will be made from the end of this month to about 6.5 million people as part of the government’s $17.6 billion stimulus package aimed at keeping Australia out of a recession caused by the impact of the coronavirus.

The one-off tax free payment will go to pensioners and others who receive income support, including those who get the family tax benefit – with pensioners numbering about half the beneficiaries.

The payment will cost $4.8 billion, and go out from March 31. Almost all payments are expected to be made by the middle of April, in an attempt to boost spending for the vital June quarter, which will be hit hard by the fallout from the virus.

Putting cash in the hands of lower income earners is considered the fastest way to stimulate the economy, because they are most likely to spend it – although the health scare makes it trickier to predict how much people could save.

The wide-ranging package is skewed to helping small and medium sized businesses, with the government’s priority being to keep people in jobs. Three out of four dollars will be spent on initiatives to assist business.

These include payments of up to $25,000 for small and medium-sized enterprises (costing $6.7 billion), wage subsidies to support apprentices ($1.3 billion), a widening of the instant asset write off ($700 million), and the acceleration of depreciation deductions ($3.2 billion).

Read more: Big stimulus package to splash cash, including $25,000 to small and medium-sized businesses

A $1 billion fund will be directed to help for severely-affected regions and communities. This will include measures such as the waiver of fees and charges for tourism businesses that operate in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and Commonwealth National Parks. There will also be assistance for businesses to identify alternative export markets and supply chains.

To help people who need to access government sickness payments or are thrown out of work and require unemployment benefits, waiting times will be waived.

Scott Morrison highlighted the availability of the existing Commonwealth sickness payment, saying a casual employee who for medical reasons had to self-isolate, or who contracted the virus, and was unable to work, could access it.

Notably, the package does not contain anything for the tertiary education sector, despite it being severely affected by the travel ban on non-Australians from China, which sees tens of thousands of students stranded offshore. The government believes the universities generally have strong enough balance sheets to meet the situation.

The package will amount to 1.2% of GDP. Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said Treasury estimated the measures will add 1.5% to growth in the June quarter. Some $11 billion will go out before the end of June. The duration of measures is limited.

Read more: The coronavirus stimulus program is Labor’s in disguise, as it should be

But Treasury has not yet been able to estimate the likely impact of the virus in the June quarter so, with the March quarter expected to be negative, it is unknown whether the economy will experience two quarters of negative growth, which would put it into recession.

The government now acknowledges the budget will be in deficit for this financial year. Finance Minister Mathias Cormann was blunt. “When you deliver a stimulus package of this size, I think people can add up the numbers. They can add up what it means in terms of the budget surplus. … This is not going to be a surplus year in 2019-20,” he told the ABC.

The package comes as the World Health Organisation declared the coronavirus a pandemic – something the Australian government had anticipated a fortnight ago – and the United States banned travellers arriving from Europe for the next 30 days.

Scott Morrison said the measures were “designed to support cash flow, boost investment and provide immediate demand stimulus to the Australian economy”.

The package has marked similarities to the Rudd government’s $10 billion first tranche stimulus in the global financial crisis, notably with its “cash splash” elements, although it is more targeted to business.

The prime minister will make an “address to the nation” at 7pm on Thursday.

The Australian Industry Group said the stimulus measures “will reduce the risk of a more severe downturn and the much worse budget outcome that it would bring”.

– ref. Cash handout of $750 for 6.5 million pensioners and others receiving government payments – https://theconversation.com/cash-handout-of-750-for-6-5-million-pensioners-and-others-receiving-government-payments-133512

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alison Carroll, Senior Research Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne

Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.

Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.

Rumi, Persia, 1207–1273

Shirin Neshat, Iranian-born though living in New York, has captured audiences around the world with her visually haunting black and white videos of loss and yearning. Three of her recent works, Illusions and Mirrors of 2013 (which stars Natalie Portman), Roja and Sarah, both of 2016, are on view at the National Gallery of Victoria until April.

NGV curator Simon Maidment, in an accompanying essay, reveals the influence of Western sources on Neshat, like the Surrealists and Nouvelle Vague (French New Wave) filmmakers, as well as parallels with Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

But the deeper, older rhythm here is the power of Iranian, or Persian, civilisation itself, the richness of its culture, and the depth of its aesthetics and beliefs.

Transcendence

A central role of the arts in Islam is to enable each person an easier route to transcendence, to achieve a greater closeness to God. It is a role in which each person cleanses themselves of their outer trivial concerns, releasing their minds and their spirits from worldly cares to gain equanimity and peace.

For traditional Persian arts, it means a focus on music and words, through poetry and calligraphy. Visual and theatrical art usually eschews prosaic content – though Persian miniature paintings have portrayed mythical heroes and illustrations of poetic stories to much admiration.

One of the clearest forms of Islamic art in which this is manifest is architecture, built most obviously in the form of mosques, and naturally, in gardens: spaces in which to find this closeness to God. Neshat talks about her childhood garden as paradise. Visitors can stand in the 17th century Mughal, Persian-influenced Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan, with its central vast courtyard empty of physical objects, open to the sky, surrounded by sheer red inlaid stone walls, and feel its encouragement to let their rational, earthly mind slip away.

We have our own such building in Melbourne, the Newport Mosque designed by Glen Murcutt, a square space empty of objects but with coloured inset ceiling glass catching the changing sun obliquely. Even an unbeliever like me can find serenity in this.

Elusive possibilities

Neshat’s film installations give us space to still our thinking and immerse ourselves in her visual and aural offering. Nothing is resolved for us. Few words are ever used. The content or story is always elusive.

Her figures yearn for things that are never clear, seen from her earliest works, with flocks of black-clad women rushing to and fro across desert landscapes, never finding what they are seeking.

Her recent videos have a theme of migration and belonging, but that seems superficial in comparison to this wider emotion. As her heroines submerge in water, so we submerge into her spare visuals, seeking our own truths.

This Persian understanding is central to one of Australia’s leading artists: Hossein Valamanesh, coming here after art school in Tehran in 1973. His work also leaves things unsaid with a similar restrained clarity to that of Neshat – he lets us find the truth of the work ourselves. His 1993 Sufi dancer, The lover circles his own heart, is a simple whirling piece of cloth.

Asia TOPA recently highlighted Sufi singer Abida Parveen in its program, the diva giving one concert in Melbourne to over 2000 delighted fans.

Abida-ji says she sings of love for the divine. Listening to her is to enter another physical realm, and indeed to be transported to some other level of bodily awareness. Each person in the Melbourne audience was moved – carried way as surely as a pop audience might be by a reigning star.

Persian influence in our midst

Abida-ji is Pakistani, from a culture infused with Persian influence, but less courtly, refined and restrained, and often, in contemporary art, more vital.

When Islamic thinking comes to the fore, it can be clad in more commonplace clothing. Karachi artists Durriya Kazi and David Alesworth’s Very Very Sweet Medina of 1999, now in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art, is full of blazing colour and human form, yearning again – literally here – for paradise, but visualised as a beautiful earthly house. Kazi was behind the 2006 Commonwealth Games Love is Life tram that pulsated around Melbourne.

There is not just Hossein Valamanesh, or that tram, somewhere bundled away in a Melbourne shed, but the work of immigrants like Nusra Qureshi, Rubaba Haider and Khadim Ali, all trained in the ancient Mughal art of miniature painting at the National Art School in Lahore, and all making marks for themselves here and internationally.

They are part of the subtle web of creative people from the old Persian network of influence, like Abida Parveen, Durriya Kazi and Shirin Neshat, who have brought the rich strains of that culture here and created a new, vibrant, evocative space for us all.

The old Persian empire had wide influence, but it also allowed other cultures their own way. A reminder is the display NGV recently mounted of its Rajasthani miniature paintings. They pay homage to Persian tropes, with their stories of heroes, their colourful flatness of form and love of detail, and they are universally loved for this.

However, though made in courts close to Muslim Mughal centres, these paintings were painted for Rajput princes, Hindus. They are mostly secular stories of princely life, painted to celebrate living men. Transcendence and that sense of elusive possibilities are in short supply.

Shirin Neshat’s Dreamers can be seen at NGV International until 19 April.

– ref. Ancient rhythms: Shirin Neshat and the dream space that contemporary Persian art can unlock – https://theconversation.com/ancient-rhythms-shirin-neshat-and-the-dream-space-that-contemporary-persian-art-can-unlock-133059

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sue Turnbull, Senior Professor of Communication and Media Studies, University of Wollongong

A heavily disguised Phryne (Essie Davis) is racing through the streets of Palestine, pursued by armed men. Excitement mounts. Having athletically eluded all attempts to capture her, Phryne sheds her indigo robes to emerge in a sparkling gold dress framed against the skyline like the superhero she has indubitably become.

Cheers erupt.

Attending a screening of Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears at Melbourne’s Sun Theatre surrounded by fans – some who have flown across the world to be here – is an experience to remember.

Miss Phryne Fisher, “that unpredictable whirlwind of a woman” as she is described in the film, has become a global fan phenomenon.

Making a hero

In 1989, Kerry Greenwood introduced readers to her fabulous flapper detective in Cocaine Blues, the first of 20 books about Phryne Fisher set in Melbourne in 1928.

For producers Fiona Eagger and Deb Cox, Phryne was the perfect lead for a television crime drama, bucking the gritty Nordic noir trend with a heroine who was fun, fashionable and a feminist.

Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries premiered on the ABC in 2012. It has now been sold into more than 179 countries. The series screened on Netflix and Acorn TV globally, Channel 5 in the UK, and on the French public broadcaster France 3.

Globally, the series has made over $A14 million. This makes Miss Fisher the most successful export for Australian TV dramas over the past five years.

In 2019, the spin-off Ms Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries aired on Seven. In another first for an Australian series, the Miss Fisher format has been sold to China where a Mandarin-language version, Miss S, is in production.

Now, Phryne is the big-screen action heroine for those who are ready for a feminist re-imagining of Errol Flynn at his swashbuckling, rooftop-leaping best, or the adventurous Indiana Jones on the track of an ancient relic – but with a much better wardrobe.

Watching the film with fans, it’s the ballroom scene that galvanises the attention. As the camera tracks around the space, I realise many of the on-screen guests are sitting around me. These are the fans who not only contributed to the successful crowd-funding campaign that raised A$733,210 from 7,763 fans and helped get the film made, but who also signed up to be extras.

Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears was always going to be a film for the fans.

Fandom writ large

Fan studies first gathered momentum in the early 1990s, when American scholars Camille Bacon-Smith and Henry Jenkins alerted the academic community to the significance of Star Trek fan communities, particularly their creativity, productivity and engagement.

As an academic with a long-standing interest in ethnographic audience research, I’m particularly interested in the stories the Miss Fisher fans tell me about their first encounter with the show, how they found like-minded others online, and how these encounters gradually gathered momentum.

Over the course of a week that includes a premiere in Sydney and two fan screenings, I encounter fans from the US, Canada, the UK, Finland and Germany.

Two young women from Europe have spent ten days travelling to every Miss Fisher location they could find, from a steam train in Castlemaine to an obscure alleyway in the Kensington wool sheds, recreating significant moments from the series. They are medical students who bonded over Miss Fisher and are now enjoying the holiday of a lifetime, which has taken them off the usual tourist route and into the secret heart of Melbourne.

Many of the American fans at the screenings are members of The Adventuresses’ Club of the Americas, a society that will be hosting its fourth Miss Fisher fan convention later this year. At these conventions, fans share their scholarship and knowledge not only of the show but also of the fashions, poisons and Phryne’s Hispano-Suiza automobile.

Many of the fans are willing to share intimate and confessional stories of how they came to Miss Fisher, and how she and her world view were of personal value in difficult or trying times.

One woman describes how, working in a male-dominated profession, Miss Fisher has inspired her to be a bit more powerful, more confident and a lot less scared of the world.

The rhetoric is all about empowerment, but also the need to be unapologetically oneself, demonstrating the inestimable value of a fictional character who has found her way onto a global stage and into the hearts and minds of her devoted fans.

– ref. Miss Fisher and her fans: how a heroine on Australia’s small screen became a global phenomenon – https://theconversation.com/miss-fisher-and-her-fans-how-a-heroine-on-australias-small-screen-became-a-global-phenomenon-131673

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sunanda Creagh, Head of Digital Storytelling

What do you need to know about COVID-19 and coronavirus? We asked our readers for their top questions and sought answers from two of Australia’s leading virus and vaccine experts.

Today’s podcast episode features Professor Michael Wallach and Dr Lisa Sedger – both from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney – answering questions from you, our readers. An edited transcript is below.

And if you have any questions yourself, please add them to the comments below.

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Transcript

Sunanda Creagh: Hi, I’m Sunanda Creagh. I’m the Digital Storytelling editor at The Conversation, and I’m here today with two of Australia’s leading researchers on viruses and vaccines.

Lisa Sedger: Hi, my name’s Lisa Sedger. I’m an academic virologist at the University of Technology Sydney. And I do research on novel anti-viral agents and teach virology.

Michael Wallach: I’m Professor Michael Wallach, the Associate Head of School for the School of Life Science (at the University of Technology Sydney) and my expertise in the area of development of vaccines.

Sunanda Creagh: And today, we’re asking these researchers to answer questions about coronavirus and COVID-19 from you guys, our readers and our audience. We’re going to kick it off with Dr. Sedger. Adam would like to know: how long can this virus survive in various temperatures on a surface, say, a door handle or a counter at a public place?

Lisa Sedger: Oh, well, that’s an interesting question, because we hear a variety of answers. Some people say that these types of envelope viruses can exist for two to three days, but it really depends on the amount of moisture and humidity and what happens on that surface afterwards, whether it’s wiped off or something. So potentially for longer than that, potentially up to a week. But with cleaning and disinfectants, etc, not very long.

Sunanda Creagh: And what’s an envelope virus?

Lisa Sedger: Well, viruses are basically nucleic acid. So DNA like is in all of the cells in our body or RNA. And then they have a protein coat and then outside of that they have an envelope that’s made of lipids. So it’s just an outer layer of the virus. And if it’s made of lipids, you can imagine any kind of detergent like when you’re doing your dishes, disrupts all the lipids in the fat. That’s how you get all the grease off your plates. Right? So any detergent like that will disrupt the envelope of the virus and make it non-infective. So cleaning surfaces is a good way to try and eliminate an infective virus particle from, for example, door handles, surfaces, et cetera.

Sunanda Creagh: And Professor Wallach, Paul would like to know: should people cancel travel plans given that this virus is already here? Does travelling make the spread worse? And that’s international travel or domestic travel.

Michael Wallach: So this question has come up to many different governments from around the world who’ve reacted very differently. Australia’s been very strategic in banning travel to certain places. And of course, those places you would not want to travel to at the time when there’s an outbreak like China, Italy, Iran, etc.. I was also asked the question on ABC Tasmania: should the Tasmanians restrict domestic travel to Tasmania? At the time, they had a single case. And I said to them, if you have one case, you most likely have more. You will not prevent the entry of the virus into Tasmania. But what restricting travel can do is restrict the number of people who are seeding that area with virus and make it more manageable. So it’s a question of timing. As I was saying to you earlier, the cost-benefit of closing off travel has to be weighed very carefully because the economic impacts are very great. So I think it’s a case by case basis. Ultimately, the planet is now seeded. And we’re moving into the stage of exponential growth and that it will affect travel very severely, where in all likelihood, travel will be very much curtailed now.

Sunanda Creagh: And this question’s from our reader, David. He wants to know: with the flu killing more people each year than coronavirus and mostly the same demographic, why is this outbreak receiving so much attention? Can’t we just catch the flu just as easily without cancelling events and travel plans?

Lisa Sedger: Yes, and I understand the question. Flu exists. We get it seasonally every year and then we get pandemic flu. And yes, people do die from influenza. I think it was 16,000 people in the US died last US winter. But the issue with this virus is that we don’t yet know how to treat it particularly well. We’re trialling anti-viral drugs in China at the very moment. There’s clinical trials on experimental drugs. There’s drugs that doctors are using. But until that data comes in and we actually know what regime of anti-viral drugs (are best) to use, then we don’t really yet know how to treat it with anti-viral drugs. The other thing is with flu, we have a vaccine. People can take the vaccine. Somebody gets sick in their family, the other family members can take the vaccine and prevent the spread of the virus. So the difference is with flu, we have ways to control it. We know about the disease. We know how it presents. This virus, we’re still understanding the clinical presentation and in different cohorts. So different age groups, different countries, different situations, we’re still understanding the symptoms. And we don’t yet fully know how to control it by antivirals. And we don’t have a vaccine yet.

Michael Wallach: Can I just add to that a bit? I think one of the reasons we’re being so careful is when it broke and Wuhan, at the beginning the mortality rate was extremely high. And with related viruses like SARS, and MERS that went as high as 35%, whereas flu mortality rates is usually around 0.1%. So it was that very high mortality rate that gave a real shock. Had it continued, it would have been devastating. We’re very fortunate that now we see it dropping down to the 2 to 3% level and some say much lower.

Lisa Sedger: And we also know now that some people get COVID, have very minimal symptoms and almost don’t even know that they’ve been sick. So I think that fear and anxiety, in that sense, is lowering.

Sunanda Creagh: And Molly wants to know: how far off is a vaccine?

Michael Wallach: So, we are working on vaccines in Australia. The group in Melbourne was the first to be able to isolate and grow the virus. And I’ve been in touch with them, in fact, this morning. We’re working collaboratively nationally as well as internationally, collaborating with people at Stanford Medical School who through Stanford, in collaborations we have with them, we have worldwide about 15 vaccine projects going, plus all sorts of industry companies are aiming to make vaccines. In fact, one company in Israel early on announced that they believe that they can get to a vaccine within a few weeks. The problem with the vaccine is you may produce it even quickly, but it’s testing it and making sure that it’s actually going to help. There’s a fear, with COVID-19, that if it is not formulated correctly, to make a long story short, it can actually exacerbate the disease. So everyone has to take it slowly and carefully so that we don’t actually cause more problems than we currently have. But I’m optimistic and believe that we’ll get there. The WHO declared it would take 18 months. I would like to present a more optimistic view, not based on anything that substantial, but I think we can do better than that. And it is a great learning curve for the next time this happens.

Lisa Sedger: Can I make a comment on that, too? Recently, we’ve just seen Africa experience a very significant outbreak of Ebola virus, and there’s been an experimental vaccine that’s been administered that has largely controlled that outbreak. I think the people working in vaccines and the people who do the safety and efficacy studies, we’ve learnt a lot from how to administer vaccines, how to get the data we need to show safety more quickly than we might have in the past. So in the sense we’ve learnt, we’re learning lessons constantly from viral outbreaks. It might not be the same virus, might not be the same country, even the same continent. But we’re learning how to do these things more efficiently and more quickly. And always the issue is weighing up safety versus the ethics of the need to administer all get it, get the drug out there as quickly as possible.

Sunanda Creagh: This reader asks: isn’t lining up at fever clinics for tests just going to spread it even more?

Michael Wallach: So for sure, the way in which people are processed at clinics is crucial and the minimal distance you should keep from a person who’s infected is, according again to the WHO, is one metre. So the clinics have to ensure that spread is minimised, not only spread between people waiting in line, but to the health workers themselves. We’ve had real problems for health workers in China. Several died. And we face that problem here. One of the things we have to do is ensure that we protect our health workers because otherwise they’re not going to want to go in and actually see the patients. Unfortunately, masks alone do not work. We can’t rely on them. So it’s a problem. In Israel, for example, testing for COVID-19, takes place in one’s home. An ambulance pulls up and takes the swab and then takes it to the lab. That actually would be the ideal approach. True, the ambulance services in Israel now are swamped and having great difficulty in coping. But as much as we can keep people separated from each other when they’re infected, it’s crucial for the success of any campaign.

Sunanda Creagh: And these questions from Jake. He wants to know for people like myself living in Victoria. How likely is it that we can catch the virus and is hand-washing really the only thing we can be doing to protect ourselves?

Lisa Sedger: I think we now know that the virus is definitely in Australia. If you go to the New South Wales or Victorian Health government websites, you can see them update the statistics daily, even less than a day so that the truth is it’s here and it’s probably in more people than we realise because we haven’t tested as many people and we now realise some people are asymptomatic or don’t show classic flu like symptoms. So it’s here and you can’t say that you’re not going to get sick. Alright? That’s the first thing to say. The second thing is, though, we can minimise what we do. Okay. So we can wash our hands constantly. We can try not to touch our face, our eyes, our ears, our nose. We’ve learned, for example, even how do you dispose of a tissue when you sneeze or cough or, you know, sneeze into your elbow? So it’s just about common sense. This is what I think. It’s no different really than protecting yourself from any respiratory virus infection. So seasonal flu or even a pandemic flu.

Sunanda Creagh: And how do you dispose of a tissue safely?

Lisa Sedger: Well, I guess you fold it in and then you put – you don’t touch it, you don’t put it up your sleeve, OK? – you put it in the garbage bin and wash your hands afterwards.

Sunanda Creagh: Michael would like to know: what can we learn from other countries that are handling this well? He says basically South Korea, as far as I can tell.

Michael Wallach: So the country that handled this outbreak the best so far has been Taiwan. The Taiwanese have been amazing in the sense that after the pandemic commenced in China, many Taiwanese returned to Taiwan. And you would have expected they’d seed that island very strongly and it would be a major outbreak. They were ready before the pandemic commenced. And that was largely because they went through a SARS outbreak. Previously, they had in place all the testing, all the people. They have the best health system in the world. And they kept the numbers down to 45 cases during a period when in China it was going into the tens of thousands. And they should be commended on that. It’s quite amazing the way they did that. The issue now in Taiwan, which concerns them, is in the end, that’s a great start. But their population now is unexposed and susceptible. So how do you release them from this sort of quarantine situation? That is the next phase. And that’s what we’re looking to see how that works, because same in Wuhan. The minute you put everyone back out to work and in the street, will there be a second wave? Most virologists, I think, would expect there will be a major second wave, third wave and maybe continued into the future. So we have to continue with our preparedness and with the hope that the vaccine will come into effect sooner rather than later. And then bringing the quarantine approach, enabling that peak of viral infection to occur when the vaccine is available. That would be the goal.

Lisa Sedger: If I could just add one point there. When you look at the number of cases on a per day basis in Wuhan, it was escalating very quickly. And then they brought in their very strict quarantine and self-isolation. But the cases continued to increase until a point where it started to look like it was under control and going down. And that was after two weeks. So quarantine only works until after the quarantine period, because only after that will you see the effect. So I would argue there’s two factors for why isolation worked in Wuhan: One was you limited the spread through the self-isolation and imposed quarantine, but at the same time, the number of people who are infected and asymptomatic were building their own immunity. The number of people who were infected and sick but who survived, one would imagine, have a robust immune response to that virus. So at the same time as limiting spread, you have also slowly built or actually quite quickly built a community with much higher levels of what we call herd immunity. So this second outbreak may come, but it may be considerably less significant.

Michael Wallach: In fact, that the areas where there are the major outbreaks maybe have better herd immunity than places where you keep it down to nothing. So it works both ways.

Sunanda Creagh: And Jane would like to know: when do we stop testing for this disease and basically just assume that everybody with the sniffles has it?

Michael Wallach: So first of all, the major symptoms are not sniffles, they are fever and coughing and shortness of breath. It’s the sniffles, though, that causes it to be spreadable more easily. That’s a good question: what the health authorities will decide to do at various stages of this pandemic. We’re now at what I would consider the early seeding phase. The world is now seeded with virus and different countries were going through exponential phases like described in Wuhan at different times. And how do they handle that will be a crucial question. I’ve seen all the different approaches from US, Israel, Iran. I think that a mixture of very strategic quarantine with travel restrictions, with bringing in other types of… certainly health authorities will need to control the number of beds that are being occupied. For example, again, in Israel, they just went over their bed limits, so patients are starting to be treated at home. So at some point, I think depending on how the epidemic goes, if we can keep it under control, we can keep the testing going. We can keep control. If the exponential rise is too fast, we will lose control and the testing will become meaningless. So the hope is that things will be sorted and I think Australia has the opportunity to do really well and big decisions have to be made now.

Lisa Sedger: There’s already a paper just this week published in The Lancet that profiles survivors versus those who have succumbed from the infection. And we’re starting to learn what some of those factors are. So as as clinicians can better predict who are likely to be the more seriously ill people, they can better predict who should go to hospital for treatment, and as Michael has said, who are better actually just treated at home.

Sunanda Creagh: And Dr. Sedger, Kardia would like to know: how does this virus respond to cold or warm temperatures? Is it like the flu, which thrives in cold weather?

Lisa Sedger: I have heard so many different things about this. I will be completely honest and say I’m not certain that we really know. What we know is when this high humidity viruses can exist for longer because they don’t dry out. So that envelope we talked about is less likely to be dried out. And once that’s dried out, the virus is less infective. It’s not actually infective at all if it’s disrupted that envelope. But whether it likes cold temperatures, high temperatures, we think it’s not a warm temperature virus. We think it’s more a cold temperature virus. China’s just been going through their winter. Maybe one of the reasons it’s been big in Italy is they’ve just had winter. We also think the coexistence of seasonal flu in Italy at the same time is probably one of the factors that’s made it more severe. So, yeah, look, different circumstances in different countries, different climates. It’s not just about climate, though. It’s about susceptibility of various populations. Therefore, it’s a hard question to answer (at the moment).

Michael Wallach: Look, I would say in working in infectious diseases for many years, it’s a very difficult thing to predict. Remember with, it doesn’t matter which disease I was working on, everyone said it can’t transmit in dry climates. And it transmitted beautifully in the desert. And you think everything’s totally dry and it still transmits and vice versa.

Lisa Sedger: Well, you’ve got MERS is another coronavirus, which is your Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, and that’s in the desert climates. So that’s why I wanted to hedge my bets on my answer.

Sunanda Creagh: And Professor Wallach, this reader wants to know: once you’ve recovered from coronavirus, can you just go back to your normal, non-isolating life?

Michael Wallach: So the current understanding, according to colleagues also in the U.S., is if you go through one infection, you’re probably rendered immune against re-infection. There have been reports of cases of people getting re-infected. But the opinion that I heard so far is that it’s probably recurrence of the same infection that probably went down in terms of clinical symptoms. But the virus remained that just came back up. It happens with the flu all the time. The question is, what should be your behaviour after you go through a bout? I guess I would still be careful, which Lisa can maybe add to, it could be that the virus will continue to mutate. Although again, I fortunately heard this morning that they’re not that worried about this virus mutating at the rate that flu does. And we’re hopeful that we will develop herd immunity. People have gone through it then will be fairly safe unless, you have some immune disorder. And then it will become part of our environment just like flu is.

Sunanda Creagh: And here’s a question from me. It seems like there’s two camps. There’s the people who genuinely really concerned, quite worried about the situation. We see that in the panic buying. And then there’s the other camp of people who are saying it’s all been blown up. It’s all hype. We don’t really need to worry about it. It’s too early to panic. And I just wondered, how do you reconcile those two views out there in the community?

Michael Wallach: So early on in this outbreak, when I was interviewed also on the ABC and speaking to other groups, I took a very low panic view, maybe because I’ve been thinking about a pandemic for many years. And for me, it was always not a question of if, but when. I actually look at this, in a way, in a positive sense. We’re facing a pandemic that, yeah, as terrible as it is, is nothing in comparison to what could be if it’s a pandemic flu. For example, we experienced the Spanish flu in 1918, which killed somewhere between 20 to 50 million people. So the order of magnitude of mortality right now is extremely low compared to other potential pandemics. If you take China out of the equation, we’re at about 1500 people who died worldwide. That’s not to say we shouldn’t show great respect for the value of their lives. It’s mainly very elderly people with complicating illnesses and probably would have had the same effect if they were infected by flu. So my take on this whole thing is we all have to stay calm. We all have to accept the fact that this is part of nature. These viruses are out there all the time. We know them. I can detect now flu viruses in wildlife, birds that are coming into this country now, that can mutate and start affecting humans. So we have to be prepared. We have to face up to them, together in a collaborative way, in a scientific and professional way. And we could win. If we panic and react the way the market is, for example, of course, that’s that’s an improper way to react. Rather, this is part of being, of our biology. Viruses exist that can hurt us and they will always exist.

Lisa Sedger: Yeah. Look, I think there are a few factors that we can really learn from. So one is to work out where these viruses come from. And a lot of these RNA viruses exist in bats. They seem to be transmitted into wild animals through bat droppings. And I think one of the lessons we, the world all over, might need to learn is how we deal with the marketing and selling of wild animals that are then used for foods. That may then prevent these viruses from getting into the human population. So I think there are lessons to be learned, number one. But Michael, I would disagree with you in one sense “that it is maybe not as bad as pandemic flu”, on the other hand: we do have vaccines for flu, we do have anti-virals. And we have a whole world that has various levels of immunity to flu and different strains of flu. Whereas this virus is entering into a naive (non)-immune population. And that’s what’s so significant to start with. It may be that as our immunity at a population level increases, as a disease this will become far less significant. But the first outbreak of it in a naive, (non)-immune, (and a) “naive population” will always have the highest level of morbidity and mortality. And that’s where we have learned from other diseases like Ebola. As I mentioned, what we already know about flu, how we already control flu and the development of new and novel antiviral agents will be just as effective and important, I believe, as will the development of vaccines. So I think there’s a lot to learn to prevent this or limit, I should say, to limit these the severity of the outbreak and maybe even prevent it from happening again. As I say, if we stop trapping wild animals and eating them, we might prevent the outbreak of some of these type of RNA viruses.

Michael Wallach: So I certainly agree with that. And China is now putting into law a restriction on the sale of wildlife in their markets. What I’m trying to do, and I hope we both agree, is that in proportion to, for example, influenza, even seasonal flu that killed in one year I think up to 600,000 people worldwide, I’m just trying to put things into proportion. To prevent people from panicking. To understand that, yes, this is affecting the elderly. And anyone who is elderly, suffering from heart or respiratory conditions would certainly isolate themselves. So where my wife’s parents live, where they live in a retirement village, they made a decision to close off the entire village. Nobody’s allowed in, as a means of preventing – because they’re an elderly population – people bringing in COVID-19 and infecting that area. And I certainly agree with that sort of strategy.

Sunanda Creagh: And John would like to know: are the death rates likely to be lower in a country like Australia with lower rates of smoking than places such as China, Iran and Indonesia?

Lisa Sedger: Again, I think this is a little bit we have to watch and just wait and see. It’s very hard to predict these things. It was intriguing that some of the highest death rates in China appeared to be men as well as just the elderly. And that might be because there’s a high rate of long term smoking. So almost like an endemic lung pathology within that community that somehow exacerbated the disease. In Australia, we may find that there are different populations that are the most at risk. So we know, for example, the virus uses a receptor to get inside of cells that is a protein present on cardiac tissue. So people with known cardiac conditions may turn out to be at higher risk. And in a non-smoking type country, maybe people with existing heart conditions will turn out to be the most at risk. In America, we might find something quite different. What we might find is it’s more socio-economic. Maybe people without health insurance. Maybe people who are homeless and live on the streets will turn out to be the most affected because they have limited resources to be able to get treatment and they can’t afford treatment. So I think each country will be different. We mentioned earlier Italy has one of the highest fatality rates at the moment. That may be because they actually have a large number of people within their population that are over 65. So it might actually be not that surprising given that demographic. It might also be that they’ve had an outbreak of seasonal flu at the same time. We don’t know whether one type of virus limits the other. It’s quite possible you can get co-infections and that’s where people get the most sick. I think it’s going to pan out in different countries slightly differently. I think it’s a case of watch this space.

Michael Wallach: The other thing, just on the rate of transmission. What they go according to is the people who show up to the clinic. And the results from a study done in China indicate that they may have only picked up 5% of the people that have COVID-19. So it’s about 20-fold more than actually recorded because it’s mild and very little symptoms. The other thing that’s becoming a little disconcerting for scientists is there may be two strains of the virus. And the initial outbreak, as I said, the mortality rate was very high. It could be the virus, in order to transmit, went through a mutation that aided its transmission. And I would hope that would probably occur in pandemic flu. Maybe a little less pathogenic than the original strain was. I was surprised to see at the beginning such high mortality and then how it dropped down. That’s the results also put online by the CDC. And we’re looking and following that.

Lisa Sedger: Yes, viral evolution is a really key topic at the moment. We think RNA viruses and the rate that they mutate is much higher than DNA viruses. And it’s really a factor of how quickly the virus mutates and how quickly a person’s immune response is able to effectively control the virus replication. So the viruses that sometimes persist longer in a community are not necessarily the most virulent. So what we might also be seeing is a population, a group within the population who get a less severe disease, maybe even asymptomatic, but that may, long term, prove to be the bigger – how could I put this? – the bigger population of viruses that exist within that community.

Sunanda Creagh: And Michael would like to know: if I could shrink myself down to microscopic size and watch a virus invade a cell, what would I see?

Lisa Sedger: Well, a virus is not like a bacteria. A bacteria is a entity all of its own, and it can replicate and make another copy of itself and grow on a nutrient source. A virus, however, is sometimes called a non-living entity because outside of a human cell, it can’t replicate. It just exists as an entity. A virus is essentially just a piece of DNA, which is, you know, in the nucleus of every cell. It’s what our chromosomes are made of. So it’s either DNA or RNA surrounded by a protein coat and sometimes it’s also a lipid-based envelope outside of that, again. The virus will somehow encounter a cell. And for respiratory viruses, it’s largely by us inhaling water vapour droplets. They may contain hundreds of viruses. Those viruses then will attach or be exposed to our respiratory epithelium. If the virus can actually bind to the respiratory epithelium cell, then it might get inside. Once inside, it may or may not have the capacity to actually undergo replication, but it has to uncoat from that protein shell. Then the nucleic acid, the DNA or RNA has to make another copy of itself. Then all the genes that are in the virus have to get expressed as proteins. They then reassemble into a new viral particle and then the virus will get out of the cell. Sometimes it lyses (breaks) the cell, sometimes it will just buds out from the cell and leave the cell intact. And that’s what a virus is. That’s why we, some people call them living or non-living because they can only replicate in inside a cell, a host cell.

Michael Wallach: And it’s not like viruses have a will. So if they want to do this, it’s just part of evolution.

Lisa Sedger: Yes, I’m never a favour of the argument you sometimes see people say “it’s warfare, it’s the virus vs. immune system!” But there’s no will involved, it’s just capacity of life to replicate itself.

Sunanda Creagh: And Deidre writes in to say, I heard on the radio today that half the population is likely to get this. And with, say, a 1% death rate, the body count will add up. And I wondered what you thought of that.

Michael Wallach: So there was an announcement actually by Angela Merkel preparing Germany for 70% of the population being infected. Lisa may say the number is lower, I don’t know, until we build up herd immunity. The question of the mortality rate, as I alluded to before, I think based on what again, CDC and WHO are writing, is probably overestimated. Some estimate the mortality rate as being much lower. That’s not to say… every death is a family and has to be looked at and be concerned about. So again, I think and would like to hope that as we develop new vaccines, as we develop drugs, as we develop approaches to quarantine people, test them, keep them at home, isolate them, we’ll get the mortality rate under control. And I’m going to express an optimistic view. This world has amazing capabilities of doing amazing science. And if we apply it and work together, I think we can control this problem.

Lisa Sedger: Yes, absolutely. I would endorse that. And I’d say that the mortality rates at the moment simply reflect who is being tested. And it’s primarily people who are turning up with symptoms. But we’re now beginning to appreciate that there is a large number of people who could be quite asymptomatic, who are never tested. This virus will certainly have infected many more people than will be tested. And if we did have surveillance of every single person being tested, then there’s two questions here: Are you testing for the presence of the virus? If they’ve had virtually no symptoms and not a big illness, you might not find the virus. But if we test for the presence of an immune response to the virus, we would truly know how many people have been infected. And then we could get a true estimate or at least a much closer estimate of what the mortality rate really is. So at the moment, there’s hyperbole.

Sunanda Creagh: And Catherine asks, what is the likelihood of transmission through using a public swimming pool?

Lisa Sedger: I would think quite small because a) the virus would be quite diluted in a swimming pool. Secondly, swimming pools are all treated with chlorine, for example, and chlorine is a very effective anti-viral agent. You’d have to drink a lot of swimming pool water to get the virus.

Michael Wallach: I agree with that.

Sunanda Creagh: Candy would like to know: there are conflicting symptoms lists circulating on Facebook. One says it starts with a dry cough and if your nose is running, it is not COVID-19, which I suspect is incorrect. Can we please have an accurate list?

Michael Wallach: So, again, the major symptoms are, in fact, the cough and shortness of breath and fever. But, it’s not to say it’s not possible that you’ll have also upper respiratory effects. The virus goes into the lung and attaches to the alveolar cells or to the cells that make up our air sacs and that help our breathing. And it has to get there to really cause this disease. So if there’s upper respiratory involvement, which includes sneezing and runny nose, et cetera, it’s probably not the main effect of the virus. Again, I would say if you see that somebody is sneezing and wheezing and and that’s it, it’s probably an allergy, but it does frighten people. I was on the train this morning, and I know if I, God forbid, sneezed the whole train would empty out pretty quickly.

Lisa Sedger: You know, we’re just coming into winter. And actually, it’s a really good question because at the moment, what’s building is a sense of fear. But we must keep in perspective that there will also still be the normal seasonal cases of flu. So just because somebody sneezes or has a sore throat does not mean that they’ve got COVID-19. And we need to make sure, I think it’s really important that we don’t stigmatise people who have symptoms because it may not even be COVID. And we’re all at risk from any respiratory tract infections and already have been for years. That’s not a new thing. We just need to keep things in perspective.

Sunanda Creagh: A question from Karen: can you catch it twice?

Lisa Sedger: Normally, I would have said no, because we imagine that there’s a good immune response that will then provide you protection from re-infection. That’s what our immune system does. But this is a new virus. We don’t yet fully understand how our immune system clears it. We don’t know whether virus can remain for a longer period of time. I would would say, though, that there are only a few cases of people who have been treated, appear to have recovered, they’ve gone home, they’ve then had another relapse. There’s only a very few number of cases that have been like that. So for all intents and purposes, I don’t think that’s something we should fear and it’s not something we’ve seen with the previous SARS outbreak in 2003.

Sunanda Creagh: And Tim would like to know: how will quarantine work in a family?

Lisa Sedger: Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it? We think of quarantine as being away from work or away from public places. But really, if you have been infected, then the people in your family are as at risk as your work colleagues would be at work. Again, I think it’s about just common sense. Don’t share food utensils, wash your hands, don’t keep touching your face and your mouth and your nose. Get rid of tissues in a nice sort of clean manner. It’s about minimising transmission.

Michael Wallach: Let me just add to that, that all the data indicates that children likely will only get very mild symptoms, if at all. So if you’re a family member and you’re worried about your children, this is one time that you can be happy about this. All the results so far indicate that children aged zero to nine, there’s not been a single death.

Lisa Sedger: Whereas what we do know is the elderly appear to be more susceptible to a more severe disease. So that’s where if I’m sick, it’s better not to go and visit my grandparents or something like that. That’s where quarantine within the family works in a practical sense.

Sunanda Creagh: And just to finish up, is there anything else that you’d like to add?

Lisa Sedger: Yeah, I think I’d just want to finish with a really positive note. I mean, we live in an amazing era of medical research and science. Within within a very, very short period of time, parts of the virus had been sequenced. We now track the virus in its entire sequence. We know, we have clinical trials for the drugs. We have people working on vaccines. We have epidemiologists better understanding the disease susceptibility within a population. I mean, we learn a lot from other existing outbreaks of infectious diseases. And I remain positive that, you know, the medical and scientific community working together will be able to solve this. I’m quite confident that there’s a really strong response. That’s not to diminish that people have died and it’s been tragic. But we live in an era where we’re exposed to infectious agents and we are getting better and better at controlling most of those infections.

Michael Wallach: So I’ll just add and put in a plug for a program I’m very much involved with called Spark working with people at Stanford. We established a program for exactly this time, when there’s sudden outbreaks. And the program now involves 23 countries and around 70 institutions, all working together for outbreaks of Zika, Ebola and now coronavirus. It gives me great hope that, apart from what you said, we’re now working together collaboratively like never before. We’re putting our egos outside and we’re saying we have social responsibility to do better. Certainly, in the case of a pandemic. And we’re doing it. And we’re very proud to be able to say we have 15 projects going on now collaboratively that we just formed over the past two weeks, together with our colleagues all over the world. I also believe in a very bright future.

Production credits

Recording by postgraduate.futures at the University of Technology Sydney.

Audio editing by Sunanda Creagh.

Theme beats by Unkle Ho from Elefant Traks.

Read more: Coronavirus is stressful. Here are some ways to cope with the anxiety

– ref. Coronavirus and COVID-19: your questions answered by virus experts – https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-and-covid-19-your-questions-answered-by-virus-experts-133617

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Pearson, Professor of Journalism and Social Media, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University, Griffith University

Thousands of employees internationally are already working from home in COVID-19 self-isolation because of their recent travel, related symptoms or immune system vulnerability.

But to do so while habitually checking the news on devices – and allowing 24/7 news channels to play non-stop in the background – might erode your productivity and increase stress and anxiety.

A foundational element of media literacy in the digital era is striking an appropriate balance between news consumption and other activities. Even before the current crises, Australian research demonstrated news avoidance had risen among news consumers from 57% in 2017 to 62% in 2019, driven by a sense of news fatigue.

Self-help expert Rolf Dobelli implores us to stop reading the news. While he advocates going cold turkey and abandoning all packaged news consumption, Dobelli makes exceptions for long-form journalism and documentaries.

So too does philosopher Alain de Botton in The News – A User’s Manual, while proposing more positive news and journalism’s examination of life’s deeper issues, emotions and aesthetics.

In journalism education there has been a move towards “peace journalism”, “mindful journalism”, “constructive journalism” and “solutions journalism”, where the news should not merely report what is wrong but suggest ways to fix it.

Read more: How peace journalism can help the media cover elections in Africa

Of course, it would be a mistake to abstain from all news during the COVID-19 pandemic and its unpredictable economic and social consequences.

Often it is best to navigate a middle path, so here are five suggestions on how you can stay in the loop at home while you get your work done – and help maintain your mental health.

1. Switch off

Avoid the 24/7 news channels and feeds unless it is your business to do so, or unless the information is likely to impact you directly.

Try to develop a routine of checking in on the main headlines once, twice or three times a day so you stay informed about the most important events without being sucked into the vortex of click bait and news of incremental changes in the number of coronavirus cases or the ups and downs of the stock markets.

2. Dive deep

Look for long-form journalism and in-depth commentary on the topics that most interest you. Articles by experts (Editor’s note: like those in The Conversation!) include the most important facts you need to know, and are likely to have a constructive angle presenting incisive analysis and a pathway to a solution or best practice.

On radio and television, look for big picture current affairs programs like the ABC’s AM and 7.30 – or on a lighter and more positive note Ten’s The Project – so you don’t have to be assaulted by a disturbing litany of petrol station hold-ups, motorway chases and celebrity gossip in the packaged morning and evening news.

3. Connect

Use social media wisely – for communicating with family and friends when you might be physically isolated and by following authoritative sources if something in the news is affecting your life directly, such as emergency services during cyclones, fires and floods.

But avoid the suggested and sponsored news feeds with dubious and unfiltered information (often shared as spam by social media illiterates).

Keep your social media commentary civil, empathetic and supportive – mindful of everyone’s mental health during a crisis.

4. Interrogate

Ask the key question: “What is the best source of the information I absolutely need to know?”

Go to primary sources where possible. Subscribe to official and authoritative information feeds – for example, daily summaries from the World Health Organisation) and the Commonwealth Department of Health on COVID-19 and your preferred bank’s summary reports on the sharemarket and economic indicators.

5. Be mindful

Bear in mind the well being of any children in your household with the timing and selection of your hard/live news consumption. International research has shown more constructive news stories have fewer negative mental health impacts on children, particularly when combined with the opportunity to discuss the contents with their peers.

Finally, you might also use these crises to build your own media literacy – by pausing to reflect carefully upon what news you really need in your family’s life. This might vary markedly according to your work, interests and passions.

For many of us it will mean a much more critical diet of what we call “traditional hard news” – allowing us the time to read and view material that better contributes to the quality of our own lives and to our varied roles as informed citizens.

– ref. Coronavirus: 5 ways to manage your news consumption in times of crisis – https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-5-ways-to-manage-your-news-consumption-in-times-of-crisis-133614

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Karleen Gribble, Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Western Sydney University

If you have a baby, you may be worried about them catching the coronavirus, particularly after media reports of an Australian infant diagnosed with it.

The good news is, the evidence so far is babies almost never get seriously ill from the coronavirus. And even if infected, they may have no symptoms.

However, the coronavirus could affect infants in other ways. For instance, there may be difficulties accessing health care, consumer goods and child care.

Thinking about these possibilities now, and preparing for them, can help you manage what may come.

Health care access may be tricky, but there are ways

If the coronavirus becomes widespread, the health system will struggle to cope for a while.

Up to 20% of people who get COVID-19 need treatment in hospital for up to two weeks or more.

Hospitals and general practices may be overwhelmed by others sick with the coronavirus, which may make it difficult to access health care if your baby gets sick for any reason.

Read more: Want to Skype your GP to avoid exposure to the coronavirus? Here’s what you need to know about the new telehealth option

Recognising this, the Australian government recently announced special provisions for parents of newborns to be bulk-billed when consulting a doctor or nurse via phone or videocall rather than in person.

There are also things you can do to help keep your baby healthy so they don’t need medical treatment. By protecting them, you also protect the people around them who may be more vulnerable to serious illness from the coronavirus.

Think about hygiene

The first thing you can do is to practice good hygiene yourself. This includes frequently washing your hands, avoiding close contact with other people as much as you can, coughing or sneezing into your bent elbow or a tissue, and avoiding touching your eyes, nose and mouth.

Because babies put their hands in their mouths no matter what, frequently washing their face and hands and cleaning surfaces and objects they might touch will help protect them from any infection.

How about daycare?

It will come as no surprise to most parents that babies who attend daycare are sick more often.

That’s because babies and small children have an immature immune system, are in very close contact with one another, and may end up sharing saliva with one another by mouthing and touching one another and the same toys.

So, if you can, keep your baby away from daycare. However, if you need to use it, when you pick up your baby from daycare, wash their hands and face, change their clothes, then wash your own hands, before scooping them into that big, warm hug.

Make sure vaccinations are up to date

Routine vaccination is the safest, most effective way to protect babies and children from illness.

So, keep your child’s vaccinations up-to-date to minimise the chance they’ll need medical attention while the health system is dealing with the coronavirus.

Read more: No, combination vaccines don’t overwhelm kids’ immune systems

If you’re breastfeeding

Breast milk contains many ingredients to help prevent and fight infection. It is recommended babies be fed only breast milk until they are six months old and continue breastfeeding with other foods into their second year of life.

If your baby is under six months and breastfeeding, offering them only breast milk protects them from a range of infections and reduces their need for medical treatment or hospitalisation.

If your baby is breastfeeding and using formula, consider replacing formula feeds with breastfeeds.

If you have stopped breastfeeding altogether, it is possible to start breastfeeding again if you want to (contact the national Breastfeeding Helpline for assistance).

If you have an older baby or toddler who is still breastfeeding, keeping breastfeeding will help protect them from other illnesses until after the coronavirus pandemic has passed.

If you’re using formula

It is easy to accidentally introduce germs into bottles while you’re preparing infant formula. So, because medical care may be hard to access, it is worth taking extra care to prevent this.

Be extra careful about preparing bottles. This means always washing your hands thoroughly with soap, washing bottles thoroughly, sterilising them after every use, and making up formula with hot water.

Remember to cool down the bottle in the fridge, give it a gentle shake, and check it’s not too hot before giving it to your baby.

Shop for supplies, such as nappies

Supply chains may be disrupted if lots of people get ill. And you may not be able to shop if you need to self-isolate at home.

It is recommended you have two to three weeks worth of supplies at home to prepare for this possibility. Consider stocking up on nappies for this length of time, or keeping washable (cloth) nappies on hand.

If you are formula feeding, buy enough infant formula for three weeks but check the expiry dates.

What if mum contracts the coronavirus?

Mothers are more at risk of becoming sick from the coronavirus than their babies.

And if you’re breastfeeding and you’re infected, it is recommended you continue breastfeeding. That’s because the virus has not been found in breastmilk.

Wearing a mask when you are with your baby (including during feeding), washing hands before and after contact with your baby, and cleaning and disinfecting surfaces and any feeding equipment will help prevent your baby catching the virus from you.

If you are are hospitalised or separated from your baby, you can express breastmilk for them.

Think about keeping grandparents safe

If you or your partner get ill, someone else may need to help care for the baby or other children.

Babies like to share their saliva with their caregivers and they may be infected with the coronavirus but have no symptoms. So they may easily spread the infection to the people looking after them.

Read more: Worried about your child getting coronavirus? Here’s what you need to know

Many parents call on grandparents to help with child care. Unfortunately people over 60 are the most likely to get seriously ill or die from the coronavirus.

So, if your standby carers are over 60, now is the time to think about making alternate childcare arrangements.

Talk with grandparents about how they can reduce their risk of infection if they need to look after the baby.

– ref. Coronavirus with a baby: what you need to know to prepare and respond – https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-with-a-baby-what-you-need-to-know-to-prepare-and-respond-133078

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justine M. Philip, Doctor of Philosophy, Ecosystem Management, Museums Victoria

After the summer’s devastating bushfires, the New South Wales government announced a plan to airdrop one million poisoned baits in the state’s most vulnerable regions over the next year. The plan is aimed at protecting surviving native animals from foxes, feral cats and wild dogs.

This isn’t the first time aerial baiting has been used in NSW recently. As the fire season got underway in September last year, the government’s biannual aerial baiting program scattered baits over nearly 8 million hectares in the Western Division alone – dispensing 43,442 aerial baits and 115,162 ground-laid baits over the drought-stricken region.

In a study published this week, I explore Australia’s history as pioneers of this technology. The review raises serious concerns about the ethics and poor results of baiting programs, and the high uptake of baits by non-target species such as marsupials.

D-day for dingoes

Aerial baiting has been Australia’s foremost weapon against pest species for the past 74 years. The initial target was the dingo, to protect unguarded livestock from being killed.

Read more: How Australia made poisoning animals normal

It started on Remembrance Day in 1946. Around 367,000 dry meat baits were airdropped across Queensland, each containing enough strychnine to kill an adult dingo. The campaign was considered a victory, despite only recovering one dingo carcass during the initial operation. Livestock predation apparently decreased; tracks in the sand vanished.

The following year, 1.5 million baits were distributed. Then in 1948 the quantity increased to 2.5 million baits across remote regions of Queensland and the Northern Territory.

Thousands of baits to kill one dingo

The strychnine tablets took up to 12 tortuous hours for the poison to deliver its lethal kill. The baits used in research trials were still toxic after 14 weeks.

There was huge public criticism of the project at the time – much of it from graziers. They claimed ants and valuable pest-eating birds – magpies, small hawks, butcher birds, crows, ibis and curlew – were eating the baits.

In response, the Queensland government set up the first monitored trials. The 1954 report from the Chief Vermin Control Officer recorded:

In the dry season campaigns, the baits are dropped on water-holes, soaks, junctions of dried water courses, gorges in hills and all places where dogs must travel or gather in their search for water and game and in their movements with pups from the breeding areas.

The data recorded an average 14,941 baits dispensed for every dingo carcass recovered. Anecdotal evidence suggests the program was considered a success.

Then in 1968 – 21 years after aerial campaigns began – a four-year CSIRO study tested the effectiveness of aerial baiting. It found the 1954 report was far from conclusive – the dingoes may just have moved elsewhere. And it concluded: “clearly aerial baiting was not effective”.

But there was an important caveat:

It is important to emphasise that, though this aerial baiting campaign was a failure, such a conclusion does not necessarily apply to any other campaign.

On the strength of that, aerial baiting programs continued.

Not much has changed

Despite millions of baits applied annually to the environment since the 1940s, Australia’s biodiversity has plummeted.

What’s more, developments in the technology haven’t come far. Raw meat baits eventually replaced dry baits in some areas. Strychnine was superseded by 1080, a less harmful poison to non-target native species, and less persistent in the environment.

Trials in the 1980s brought the bait-to-kill rate down to 750 to 1 (baits per dingo carcass recovered). This was considered a cost-effective and successful outcome.

Soon after, aerial baiting found a new market, becoming the frontline defence against Australia’s plummeting biodiversity from invasive predators.

Baits are not benign to marsupials

In 2008, the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority imposed a limit of ten baits per kilometre to reduce risk to non-target species.

Pest control agencies need four times that amount of poison to achieve a successful kill rate. Yet planes have been dispensing baits at this lower and ineffective rate since 2008.

Why? It seems a balance between wildlife safety and effective canine or predator eradication isn’t possible with this technology.

Read more: Dingoes found in New South Wales, but we’re killing them as ‘wild dogs’

In fact, it has been impossible to accurately trace the fate of baits thrown from aeroplanes into remote terrain. Even ground baiting trials have proved difficult to monitor. A 2018 trial found non-target species consumed more than 71% of ground-laid meat baits, including ravens, crows, goannas, monitor lizards, marsupials and ants.

Four young dingoes died during this trial, representing only a 1.25% uptake by target. Despite monitoring with cameras and sand traps, 599 baits out of 961 in the trial disappeared without a trace.

These baits are not benign. Repeat doses can kill marsupials; non-lethal doses can kill pouch young. Secondary poisoning can also be lethal. Applying this outdated technology to vulnerable bushfire regions is from a historical viewpoint, potentially hazardous.

Surely there’s another way

There are new technologies available to help protect and repair Australia’s fragile and broken ecosystems. Remote surveillance, drones, AI, heat sensing equipment, and more could locate populations and dispatch dangerous animals.

Read more: Guardian dogs, fencing, and ‘fladry’ protect livestock from carnivores

If aerial baiting continues, aerial surveillance could at least follow the fate of the one million baits and tell us what and who is eating them – who lives and who dies in the stripped-bare landscape.

One thing is for certain: halting the program would prevent hundreds of thousands of these poisoned meat baits ending up in the stomachs of our treasured native animals.

– ref. Air-dropping poisoned meat to kill bush predators hasn’t worked in the past, and it’s unlikely to help now – https://theconversation.com/air-dropping-poisoned-meat-to-kill-bush-predators-hasnt-worked-in-the-past-and-its-unlikely-to-help-now-132195

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Melanie Walters, PhD candidate in music, University of Adelaide

Review: 150 Psalms, The Tallis Scholars, Netherlands Chamber Choir, The Song Company, The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir for the Adelaide Festival

One of the great aspects of international arts festivals is the opportunity to experience large-scale artistic projects that would otherwise be unfeasible in a smaller city like Adelaide.

A series of choral concerts may not seem like the same scale as an opulent opera or an interactive virtual reality experience. But 150 Psalms was a monumental event. It brought together four internationally acclaimed choirs to cover 500 years of musical terrain.

Created by Tido Visser of the Netherlands Chamber Choir, 150 Psalms was first staged for the 2017 Utrecht Early Music Festival. Along with the Netherlands Chamber Choir, the Adelaide event brought together Sydney-based The Song Company, the Norwegian Soloists’ Choir and British vocal ensemble The Tallis Scholars.

Each ensemble brought their own distinctive character and aesthetic. In 12 concerts at various venues – a Uniting church, Catholic and Anglican cathedrals, an Orthodox synagogue – all 150 psalms were performed.

Visser conceived the project as a reflection of the world today, connecting the themes of the psalms with contemporary events.

Concepts of joy, fear, loss and insecurity running through the texts seem as relevant today as they were when the psalms were written.

Accompanying the performances was a photographic exhibition drawn from The Australian’s archives. These photos highlight the relationship between contemporary events and the psalms: powerful images contrasting war, protests and vigils against artistic and sporting achievement, children playing and religious celebration.

How lovely is your dwelling place

The Netherlands Chamber Choir had the most traditional sound, with warm, blended timbres.

The Tallis Scholars and their historically informed performance had exceptional precision and clarity with nuanced phrasing.

The Song Company were animated and communicative.

The polished Norwegian Soloists’ Choir navigated their exceptionally diverse programs with ease.

Renaissance music made up a large percentage of the concert programs. There were well-known names such as Josquin and Palestrina alongside lesser-known composers including France’s Philibert Jambe de Fer.

Short, simple settings, such as Lodovico da Viadana’s Exultate iusti with its homophonic textures and call-and-response passages, beautifully contrasted with the intricate polyphony of works like Ferdinando di Lasso’s Sperate in Domino.

In the selected baroque works, alongside the predictable inclusion of works by Bach and Purcell was composer and Benedictine nun Chiara Margarita Cozzolani. Her Dixit Dominus was one of the more interesting early works, with its contrasting textures and shifts between major and minor modes.

Among the many highlights across the performances was French-Lebanese composer Zad Moultaka’s setting of Psalm 60 in Sakata.

Violent imagery permeates the text of Psalm 60, with references to earthquakes and the futility of man’s salvation. Moultaka conveys this harshness through effects such as chest beating, ululation and other extended vocal techniques, while slowly shifting drones maintain a sense of unease throughout the setting.

Most of the psalms were either a capella or with organ accompaniment. James MacMillan’s A New Song brought the organ to the fore, with impressively clear articulation in the repeated scalic passages by organist Anthony Hunt.

There was an impressive number of world premieres across the programs. New works by Australian and New Zealand-based composers replaced some of the settings in the original Utrecht staging.

Commissions included some of today’s most distinctive composers, among them Cathy Milliken, Elena Kats-Chernin and Claire Maclean. Kate Moore’s setting of Psalm 3 evoked a sense of desperation, with vocal portamenti conjuring distant emergency sirens.

I walk in the midst of trouble

Dutch theologian Gerard Swüste divided the psalms into 12 themes, such as abandonment, trust and suffering, with speakers contextualising each performance.

These themes weren’t always successful. The inclusion of Carlo Gesualdo – the late Renaissance composer who brutally murdered his wife and her lover – in a program called “safety” seemed ill-conceived.

But, for the final concert, Celebration of Life, the unresolved dissonance at the end of Francis Poulenc’s Exultate Deo seemed fitting after Kerry O’Brien spoke to tumultuous current events. The lack of harmonic resolution at the end of an otherwise jubilant musical setting felt like an unanswered question, leaving us to consider how to move forward in the chaos of today.

The musical answer given to this question was Thomas Tallis’s Spem in Alium. All four ensembles came together to perform the glorious 40-voiced work.

Although the text of this work is drawn from the Book of Judith, rather than psalms, it summed up the celebratory nature of many of the psalms. The beauty of the music, along with the text’s exhortation to hope, was one of the most moving moments in the entire program.

– ref. Review: 150 Psalms is a monumental choral event – https://theconversation.com/review-150-psalms-is-a-monumental-choral-event-133349

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle O’Shea, Senior Lecturer Sport Management, Western Sydney University

Packed stadiums are the bread and butter of sports. Crowds create stadium atmosphere and generate revenue. For a global industry built on live entertainment and big crowds, the continued spread of COVID-19 could be disastrous for international sports events.

Australia’s sports leagues and teams are not immune, though in recent days, it would be hard to tell.

Despite the cancellations of major international sporting events like the Indian Wells tennis tournament and the Chinese Grand Prix, and European football matches being played in closed stadiums, a record crowd of 86,174 fans descended on the MCG to watch the T20 Women’s World Cup final last weekend.

Days later, the decision to hold the match looked ill-advised when the government put the cricket match on its list of exposure sites for coronavirus cases.

Read more: It’s now a matter of when, not if, for Australia. This is how we’re preparing for a jump in coronavirus cases

This weekend’s Australian Grand Prix was finally cancelled this morning, but only after organisers held an emergency meeting to discuss various options with fans lined up at the gates.

The event was thrown into doubt after the McLaren team pulled out when a team member tested positive for coronavirus and several members of other teams were quarantined with flu symptoms.

Now, with the rest of the NBA and NHL seasons in the US being suspended and the MLB season being delayed, Australian sports leagues are finally starting to take action.

The NRL announced today its first round of matches would go ahead as normal this weekend after Prime Minister Scott Morrison banned public gatherings of more than 500 people, but future matches would be played behind closed doors. The AFLW and NBL made similar announcements, while a decision is expected to be forthcoming from the AFL within days.

This is a positive sign, but there are worrying questions why it took Australian sports officials so long to act, particularly when stadiums and arenas were emptying out so quickly in other countries.

Some leagues too slow to act

For health officials, the timing is important. Just days ago, Victorian Health Minister Jenny Mikakos said that since there had not yet been any reported cases of “community transmission” of the virus in Victoria, the Australian Grand Prix, in particular, could go ahead.

However, this changed today when Premier Daniel Andrews said no spectators would be allowed at the Grand Prix “on public health grounds”.

Officials elsewhere in the world haven’t waited this long to make tough calls on cancelling events. The Indian Wells event in California was cancelled after a single case of coronavirus was confirmed locally. (The ATP Tour was then suspended for six weeks.) And the upcoming Bahrain Grand Prix decided days ago it will be held on a closed track with no spectators.

There have been mixed messages on whether it’s safe to attend NRL matches, as well. Prime Minister Scott Morrison tried to appeal for calm by saying he would be going to the footy this weekend, but an infectious disease specialist said this morning he was incredulous the season hadn’t already been cancelled.

The NRL finally decided today to play upcoming games in empty stadiums. It also announced stringent rules for its players, including bans on community outreach and minimising contact with fans.

But these moves were remarkably slow to materialise and the season began as usual this week with arch-rivals Parramatta and Canterbury playing in front of a sizeable crowd. In recent days, CEO Todd Greenberg has also been urging fans to continue “to go to public events” and “do your normal activities”.

We will put plans in place, we are not jumping to any conclusions just yet, but of course we are mindful of the problems that might exist.

More than mindfulness is required. This wait-and-see approach looks weak now that the world is in the midst of a pandemic. Contingency plans should have been developed long before the start of the season, with clear communication to clubs, players and fans alike.

Commercial impact to leagues

From a commercial standpoint, AFL CEO Gillon McLachlan has also sought to minimise concerns about the virus, saying the league has “limited exposure” given its domestic focus.

At the moment, the coronavirus has implications for those with supply chain or international links and that’s not where we’re at.

There has been some discussion about modifying the season if the outbreak continues to spread, including cancelling games, playing in empty stadiums or condensing the schedule.

The AFL has modelled the potential cost to the league of such steps, but has remained tight-lipped about these projections.

Read more: Explainer: what are the Australian government’s powers to quarantine people in a coronavirus outbreak?

While the NRL and AFL earn a substantial amount of their income from television broadcast deals, revenue generated through gate receipts is also important to clubs, as is secondary food and beverage, merchandise and other game-day spending.

While short-term cancellations or closed stadiums can likely be managed by most teams, the longer-term impacts could be much harder to address if the virus continues to worsen. Locking out fans could require membership reimbursements, but what about corporate box revenue and catering contracts?

The players, too, stand to lose a significant portion of their salaries. While those on guaranteed contracts will not be affected by cancelled games, all first- and second-year players signed to base salary contracts with match payments could stand to lose quite a bit.

Risks to athletes’ health

While the risk to fans is of obvious concern, the health of athletes should also be taken into consideration.

Many of us think of athletes as some of the healthiest people we know. And yet, research suggests elite athletes can be more susceptible to viruses due to the immense physical and mental stress they are under, which may affect their immune systems.

There are also added risks associated with air travel, physical contact during competition and living in close quarters with other athletes. A study of the Finnish team at the 2018 Winter Olympics showed just how fast such illnesses like the common cold can spread during competitions.

Read more: The coronavirus pandemic is forcing us to ask some very hard questions. But are we ready for the answers?

This explains why the NBA advised players to avoid high fives and minimise contact with autograph seekers, and then immediately suspended its season when one player tested positive.

The AFL, by comparison, has seemed divided on how to deal with a player possibly contracting coronavirus. It has provided some advice to clubs on prevention strategies, but is leaving it to them to develop their own protocols.

Keep calm and carry on

As the Australian leagues grapple with how to respond to the virus, the organisers of the biggest sporting event of the year, the Tokyo Olympics, are still weighing their options.

Though the International Olympic Committee and the Tokyo 2020 Olympic chief have affirmed their commitment to hold the games as planned, the situation remains fluid.

For now, Australian athletes continue to train and prepare for the Olympics as normal, though they are being advised not to travel overseas.

When it comes to domestic sports leagues and sporting events, however, more caution is certainly needed. While the decision to cancel matches does not solely lie with sports authorities, they should be taking more guidance from what is being done by leagues overseas.

It’s surely no longer business as usual and Australian sport officials can no longer just watch this space before deciding how to act.

This story has been updated since publication with the official cancellation of the Australian Grand Prix and the NRL’s decision to play matches in empty stadiums.

– ref. Stadiums are emptying out globally. So why have Australian sports been so slow to act? – https://theconversation.com/stadiums-are-emptying-out-globally-so-why-have-australian-sports-been-so-slow-to-act-133354

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Louise Stone, General practitioner; Clinical Associate Professor, ANU Medical School, Australian National University

One of our patients was recently talking about her anxiety around the coronavirus epidemic. This woman’s stress was understandable. She had survived a serious infection with swine flu, but only with a prolonged stay in intensive care.

I guess we all walk on the edge of a cliff […] anything can happen to anyone at any time. We are never really safe. But people like me? Now we know the edge of the cliff is right there, and we can’t help looking down.

Read more: 7 science-based strategies to cope with coronavirus anxiety

While some people may be more susceptible to becoming seriously ill with the coronavirus than others, none of us are immune to the pervading sense of anxiety that has taken hold around the world.

For Australians in particular, this crisis has come immediately after a horror summer of bushfires, which took their own toll on our collective mental health.

But there are some things we can keep in mind, and some practical steps we can take, to keep coronavirus-related anxiety under control.

A tangible threat versus an invisible enemy

It hasn’t been an easy start to the decade. In the face of the summer’s bushfires, many of us contended with threats to our health, our homes and even our lives.

Even those not directly affected were faced with constant images of charred bushland, injured wildlife, and homes burnt to the ground.

The bushfires put a strain on our collective mental health, and it’s very likely some people are still struggling.

Natural disasters, though, are visible and tangible. There are things we can do to avoid the threat, manage the danger or mitigate the risk. We can see the smoke, check the app, buy an air purifier, prepare our homes. And despite the vivid images of floods, fires and cyclones, we know the storm will pass.

Epidemics are different. A novel epidemic is unknown, evolving and a global risk.

We are faced with a variety of information (and misinformation) online. Guidelines contradict each other, different states have different approaches, and experts disagree.

Meanwhile, infection rates climb as economies fall. We know we may contract the virus, and as yet we know there’s no vaccine to prevent it.

Read more: You’re not the only one feeling helpless. Eco-anxiety can reach far beyond bushfire communities

While the bushfires united us, coronavirus seems to divide us

There’s an ugly side to ways we can deal with the stress of an unknown enemy like the coronavirus.

Some people blame potential carriers for their own illnesses, scapegoating people they see as high-risk. This is not helpful.

We also seek to manage our anxiety by trying to prepare ourselves and our families for the possibility of isolation or quarantine.

While this is reasonable to a degree, practices like stockpiling toilet paper and other goods can feed, rather than relieve, anxiety. Empty supermarket shelves can create panic, and further disadvantage people who might be living from week to week.

Epidemics isolate us from each other physically too, and this will only happen more and more.

So how can we put things into perspective?

We can take heart in knowing many people will develop only mild disease from the coronavirus.

There are of course vulnerable members of our community: those with compromised immune systems due to illness or age. We need to protect these people as a community by creating safe spaces for them to live, work and access health care, rather than fostering panic.

Read more: ‘The doctor will Skype you now’: telehealth may limit coronavirus spread, but there’s more we can do to protect health workers

Our greatest asset lies in our own bodies. We may not understand how to best protect ourselves, but our bodies are experienced managers of novel immune challenges, and they will manage the risk as effectively as they can.

Ultimately, our best chance at surviving this virus relies on nurturing our bodies: avoiding exposure through hand-washing and isolation where appropriate, eating well, exercising, managing chronic illnesses, and getting enough sleep.

The anxiety a pandemic generates is inevitable. At the end of the day, we all need to learn to live with a degree of risk we can’t avoid.

Practical strategies to keep anxiety at bay

The World Health Organisation has developed some practical tips for dealing the stress of this outbreak. Here are a few of them:

• accept that it’s normal to feel sad, stressed, confused, scared or angry during an outbreak

• find ways to talk about how you feel with others, especially if you are in quarantine

• remember to keep an eye out for your children during this time, and for loved ones who already have mental illness. They may need help dealing with this added anxiety

• if you feel overwhelmed, seek support from a health professional

• don’t use smoking, alcohol or other drugs to deal with your emotions. Keep your body as healthy as possible by eating well, exercising and getting enough sleep

• limit worry by limiting media exposure to a few trusted sources

• draw on skills you have used in the past that have helped you to get through difficult times.

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

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

Dr Wendy Burton, a GP in Brisbane, contributed to this article.

– ref. Coronavirus is stressful. Here are some ways to cope with the anxiety – https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-is-stressful-here-are-some-ways-to-cope-with-the-anxiety-133146

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Findlay, Sessional Lecturer in History, University of Sydney

Tourism was an early money-spinner in Tasmania, with Port Arthur featuring on travel circuits by the late 1800s.

In the years following the penal station’s closure in 1877, an influx of local and interstate tourists encouraged guides (including some ex-convicts) to set up shop at the settlement, walking visitors through the ruins and recounting horrors of the bad old days – for a fee.

One guide was known for presenting his own body as a ghoulish attraction, dramatically removing his shirt to display lash marks, or “stripes”, on his back to astonished onlookers.

Cinema played an important role in this early popularity of Port Arthur: the rise of the motion picture occurred in tandem with the site’s evolution from ruined penal settlement to premier tourist attraction.

Viewed today, these films raise important questions about the layers of historical meaning film can bring to a site like Port Arthur. They also highlight how long we have been fascinated by dark tourism.

Forgetting and remembering past horrors

In particular, travelogues – short documentary films promoting the virtues of travel, usually screened before feature films or as part of newsreels – embraced Tasmania’s taboo convict history.

These films played in cinemas to large audiences around the country. They highlighted Port Arthur’s convict heritage as a key part of the site’s allure.

This was in contrast to early attempts by the Tasmanian government to downplay or gloss over the state’s history in tourist campaigns. These focused on natural attractions instead.

Many who were crafting the state’s tourism image considered cashing in on convict horror to be harmful to its reputation. Guidebooks were at pains to reinvent Port Arthur as a pleasant seaside retreat, avoiding Tasmania’s convict history and preferring to highlight its “respectable” pioneers.

But travellers kept coming for the convicts.

Alongside Port Arthur, other local convict tourist attractions, including the Port Arthur Museum in Hobart and The Old Curiosity Shop at Brown’s River, also proved popular.

By 1918, there were two guest houses and a hotel at the former penal colony, catering to visitors wanting to stay overnight on the peninsula. The original jetty was extended to accommodate the increased water traffic.

As a site of punishment, Port Arthur remained the ultimate convict experience, and one of Australia’s earliest examples of dark tourism.

Scholars coined the term dark tourism to encompass the complex relationships between travel destinations and an interest in human trauma.

Alongside battlefields, Holocaust memorials and natural disaster remnants, prisons feature prominently as places of dark tourism globally. As historical sites of suffering, they elicit sympathy for their former inmates.

Read more: From trauma to tourism and back again: Port Arthur’s history of ‘dark tourism’

Port Arthur evoked this sympathy alongside the thrill of experiencing the horrors of convict punishment.

Meanwhile, the ruins and their surrounds offered the traditional pleasure of visiting a beautiful and wild landscape: representations in alignment with Tasmania’s evolving tourist image.

The coming together of these seemingly paradoxical experiences produced a unique site of convict memory.

Beautiful landscapes and ‘ancient’ histories

Filmmakers were initially drawn to this unbeatable scenery.

Port Arthur’s buckling walls, roofless prison towers and rows of elm trees, oaks and briar roses were splashed across cinema screens around the country to the delight of moviegoers.

But the beautiful landscapes contained unsettling truths.

Tasmania promoted itself as having a history of industrious state-building. In keeping with this theme, travelogues recast convicts as skilled craftsmen.

In films like See Tasmania First (1935) and Hobart Town (1952), convict-constructed buildings and bridges and the ruins at Port Arthur are presented as pre-industrial marvels and seeds of the state’s enduring progress.

These films describe the “honest” colonial structures “whose simple dignity and beauty redeems the characters that built them”.

Travelogues, including the Frank Hurley-directed Isle of Many Waters (1939), Tasmania: Gem of the South Seas (1951) and the Cinesound-produced Tasmania: A Southern English Garden (1946), feature Port Arthur as a star attraction in a gallery of scenic delights.

Accompanied by swelling orchestral soundtracks and jaunty narration, the audience is carried along from one attraction to the next, including apple orchards, mountain climbs and copper mines.

When it comes to Port Arthur, panoramic shots usually introduce the ruins, followed by close-ups detailing the site’s Gothic architecture. Sometimes, travellers or tour guides are featured, wandering through the grounds to provide scale.

But, overwhelmingly, it is Port Arthur’s scenery in the spotlight.

It was imagery evoking the medieval castles of Great Britain. This recognisably nostalgic aesthetic must have satisfied a yearning in many Australians for a romanticised historical connection to England that transcended tales of convict transportation.

Tasmania’s famed natural beauty was also enlisted to deal with the legacy of Port Arthur’s convict history. Since its closure, the prison had been overrun by nature, ravaged by bushfires and invaded by vegetation.

The remaining timeworn aesthetic allowed filmmakers to locate Port Arthur in a past disconnected from the modern day, with narration claiming the ruins were “ancient” and “relics of a bygone era”.

Characterising Port Arthur in this way gave audiences permission to reflect on the majesty of the ruins – and the convict histories they evidenced – from the safety of a distant present.

Ghosts of Port Arthur

Travelogues like Ken G. Hall’s Ghosts of Port Arthur (1932) walked a finer line between sensationalising the convict experience and presenting Port Arthur as a benign scenic location. Screening widely, it was one of the most popular and longest-running Tasmanian travelogues of the 1930s.

Advertised as a “travel-fantasy”, Hall’s film is a meditation on the grim history of the penal settlement. Its narrative intercuts melodramatic vignettes of convict punishment taken from an earlier popular silent cinema adaptation of Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life (1927) with contemporary scenes of sightseers at Port Arthur.

The brazenly recycled footage suggests Hall recognised the centrality of Clarke’s convict mythology and its recent revival on screen to the cultural currency of the site.

At the time of its production, For the Term of His Natural Life was the most expensive Australian feature film ever made and the key visual text informing a popular understanding of the convict experience during the 1930s.

Many of the film’s scenes had been produced on location at the ruins. This includes the famous “glass shot”, where the roofs of the penitentiary and other buildings were “restored” by placing a pane of glass between the scenery and the camera, with the roofs and other features painted onto the glass.

By using sequences from For the Term of His Natural Life in his travelogue, Hall was likely acknowledging the lure of Port Arthur was not only of a former convict prison, but also the chance to visit the location of a blockbuster film.

On the ground at Port Arthur, For the Term of His Natural Life’s impact is further reflected in tourist accounts written during the 1930s. Visitors reported being haunted by convict ghosts re-enacting scenes from the film before their very eyes as they strolled through the ruins.

Ghosts of Port Arthur both recognised and reinforced the important role cinema played in shaping visitors’ expectations at the ruins and the historical memories they evoked.

Visitors searching for the convict experience confronted both real and imagined landscapes, constructed from memories of a penal settlement already experienced through film.

Framing the convicts

Though many Australians avoided, and even fostered, an ignorance of the nation’s convict story until the 1960s, the Port Arthur travelogues acknowledged the ruins as lying at the heart of Tasmania’s historical imagination.

As the closing narration in the Cinesound-produced travelogue Historic Port Arthur asserted, by 1946 tourists at the ruins required little prompting to:

make contact for a little while with one of the most poignant chapters of Australian history … To breathe life into the old shades that time could only partly hide. Beneath the crust of the years there are some things we cannot forget.

Travelogue films framed Port Arthur as a place to remember Australia’s convict past, both on and off screen, helping to reconfigure the ruins as a site of convict memory.

In doing so, cinema imbued a nation’s monument to its convict origins with new ghosts.

– ref. Friday essay: projecting light onto a dark history – how mid-century cinema resurrected Port Arthur’s convict past – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-projecting-light-onto-a-dark-history-how-mid-century-cinema-resurrected-port-arthurs-convict-past-127623

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Britta Denise Hardesty, Principal Research Scientist, Oceans and Atmosphere Flagship, CSIRO

You’ve probably heard that our oceans have become a plastic soup. But in fact, of all the plastic that enters Earth’s oceans each year, just 1% has been observed floating on the surface. So where is the rest of it?

This “missing” plastic has been a longstanding scientific question. To date, the search has focused on oceanic gyres such as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the water column (the part of the ocean between the surface and the sea bed), the bottom of the ocean, and the stomachs of marine wildlife.

But our new research suggests ocean plastic is being transported back onshore and pushed permanently onto land away from the water’s edge, where it often becomes trapped in vegetation.

Of course, plastic has been reported on beaches around the world for decades. But there has been little focus on why and how coastal environments are a sink for marine debris. Our findings have big implications for how we tackle ocean plastic.

The hunt for marine pollution

Our separate, yet-to-be-published research has found around 90% of marine debris that enters the ocean remains in the “littoral zone” (the area of ocean within 8km of the coast). This new study set out to discover what happens to it.

We collected data on the amount and location of plastic pollution every 100 kilometres around the entire coast of Australia between 2011 and 2016. Debris was recorded at 188 locations along the Australian coastline. Of this, 56% was plastic, followed by glass (17%) and foam (10%).

The debris was a mix of litter from people and deposition from the ocean. The highest concentrations of plastic pollution were found along coastal backshores – areas towards the inland edge of the beach, where the vegetation begins. The further back from the water’s edge we went, the more debris we found.

The amount of marine debris, and where it ends up, is influenced by onshore wave activity and, to a lesser extent, wind activity. Densely populated areas and those where the coast was easily accessible were hotspots for trapped plastics.

Read more: Stop shaming and start empowering: advertisers must rethink their plastic waste message

Think about what you see on your beach. Smaller debris is often found near the water’s edge, while larger items such as drink bottles, plastic bags and crisp packets are often found further back from the water, often trapped in vegetation.

We also found more debris near urban areas where rivers and creeks enter the ocean. It could be that our trash is being trapped by waterways before it gets to the sea. We’re finding similar patterns in other countries we’re surveying around the Asia Pacific and beyond.

This pollution kills and maims wildlife when they mistake it for food or get tangled in it. It can damage fragile marine ecosystems by smothering sensitive reefs and transporting invasive species and is potentially a threat to human health if toxins in plastics make their way through the food chain to humans.

It can also become an eyesore, damaging the economy of an area through reduced tourism revenue.

Talking rubbish

Our findings highlight the importance of studying the entire width of coastal areas to better understand how much, and where, debris gets trapped, to inform targeted approaches to managing all this waste.

Plastic pollution can be reduced through local changes such as water refill stations, rubbish bins, incentives and awareness campaigns. It can also be reduced through targeted waste management policies to reduce, reuse and recycle plastics. We found container deposit schemes to be a particularly effective incentive in reducing marine pollution.

Read more: We organised a conference for 570 people without using plastic. Here’s how it went

This discussion is particularly timely. The National Plastics Summit in Canberra last week brought together governments, industry and non-government organisations to identify new solutions to the plastic waste challenge, and discuss how to meet targets under the National Waste Policy Action Plan. Understanding that so much of our debris remains local, and trapped on land, provides real opportunities for successful management of our waste close to the source. This is particularly critical given the waste export ban starting July 1 at the latest.

Plastic in our oceans is increasing. It’s clear from our research that waste management strategies on land must accommodate much larger volumes of pollution than previously estimated. But the best way to keep plastic from our ocean and land is to stop putting it in.

Arianna Olivelli contributed to this article, and the research upon which it was based.

Read more: Here is a global solution to the plastic waste crisis – and A$443 million to get it started

– ref. For decades, scientists puzzled over the plastic ‘missing’ from our oceans – but now it’s been found – https://theconversation.com/for-decades-scientists-puzzled-over-the-plastic-missing-from-our-oceans-but-now-its-been-found-133434

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Baker, Professor of Housing Research, School of Architecture and Built Environment, University of Adelaide

Social housing is part of the lives of a surprising number of Australians. On any one night in Australia, just over 4% of households rent social housing. Yet it has housed many more people than this for brief, and sometimes repeated, periods. We estimate up to 10% of Australians have called social housing home at some time in the past 20 years.

Throughout the postwar era, Australians have used social housing in various ways. Social housing can be:

• a place to raise a working family

• a “springboard” to owning a home

• a brief “safety net” to escape domestic violence

• a stable home following homelessness.

Read more: As simple as finding a job? Getting people out of social housing is much more complex than that

Today the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) releases a major commissioned study tracking the pathways of people into and out of social housing from 2000 to 2015. Our analysis, using national data, provides many interesting insights into how Australians use social housing.

Try to picture a “typical” social housing tenant. You might imagine a single mother, or an elderly lady who has lived and raised family there. Or do you see a single man who has fallen out of the workforce? Regardless of whom we picture, most of us will probably see social housing as an end-point in their housing journey – a stable home.

The truth is Australians use social housing in several very different ways. A home for life is just one of those ways.

Who uses social housing?

When we look over time (in this case 15 years) at everyone who has lived in social housing, we find only about a third of people lived continuously in the tenure. Almost another third entered social housing in that time and remained there. But a surprisingly large proportion entered and left the sector either once or multiple times.

So social housing represents different things – a long-term home, a springboard, a safety net – to different people.

Read more: Is social housing essential infrastructure? How we think about it does matter

The likely role of social housing depends a lot on what else is going on in people’s lives. When we compared characteristics of all people who were “social renters” at some time in the 15 years, we found:

• the group who lived continuously in social housing were generally older (average age 60) and more likely to be female than people on other housing pathways, with age pension and disability benefits the most common types of government assistance received

• those who left social housing (and never returned) were the second-oldest group (average age 50), also predominantly female, with unemployment and disability support the most commonly received government assistance

• the group who entered (and then remained in) social housing was distinct in its high proportion of refugees and other people born overseas, with unemployment and disability support again the most common government assistance

• more than a quarter of all pathways could be described as more transitory, involving multiple entrances or exits. This group as a whole was younger, more likely to be Australian-born and more likely to be Indigenous than the other groups. It was also distinct in the dominance of unemployment benefits among the forms of government assistance received.

Social housing has broad benefits

The people who enter social housing, and their patterns of behaviour, are nowhere near as predictable as many of us thought. There are many pathways. Only about one-third are long-term tenancies.

Despite the shrinkage of this sector, and a relative lack of investment in it, social housing does much more than simply house the elderly, sick and most disadvantaged people in our society.

Read more: Australia’s social housing policy needs stronger leadership and an investment overhaul

More than one in four people who enter social housing use it as a launchpad to more stable employment and market housing. Clearly, then, the sector plays a valuable role in stabilising lives and raising prosperity. These important functions should be safeguarded in the future as pressures on the sector continue to grow.

Overall, one of the things this new work gives us is a long view – hopefully a different view – of the social housing sector and its role over time in Australian lives. It reminds us the impact of social housing is felt well beyond the 4% of the population who may live in it at any one time.

Our social housing infrastructure has certainly been part of the housing experience of many Australians or their parents. We therefore underestimate the effectiveness of social housing as a springboard into home ownership, or a temporary safety net, when we only think of the 4% it currently houses.

– ref. The many faces of social housing – home to 1 in 10 Australians – https://theconversation.com/the-many-faces-of-social-housing-home-to-1-in-10-australians-133436

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

What makes the prime minister confident most households will spend A$750 delivered in cash, when they mostly wouldn’t spend the A$1,080 delivered in the form of bonus tax refunds after last year’s budget?

Experience.

Here’s how he put it on Thursday, announcing the economic response to the coronavirus:

Australians will be getting a cheque for $750. Now it’s not for us to tell those Australians how to spend their money, but what we do know from experience is that they will spend that money, and that money will encourage economic activity.

That experience was Labor’s.

On October 11, 2008, Labor announced cash payments totalling between $1,000 and $1,400 per eligible household to stave off a retail recession.

It offered still more in February 2009.

Read more: The coronavirus stimulus program is Labor’s in disguise, as it should be

The first cheques went out in December. Spending surged 4% that month after scarcely growing all year. A year on, spending was 5.4% higher than before the cheques went out.

In Japan, the United States, Canada and Germany where stimulus packages were not targeted at consumers, retail spending slipped by 2-3%. In Australia, it surged 5%.

So big was the effect that the payments were staggered by region to ensure cash delivery trucks could top up the automatic teller machines first.

The statisticians collecting retail sales data at the Bureau of Statistics abandoned their usual practice and stopped drawing a trend line.

The jump was impossible to reconcile with the pre-existing trend.

The Treasury had searched the economic literature and determined that cash payments were more likely to be spent than tax cuts, and could be delivered much more quickly.

Six million Australians receive government benefits of some sort, whether they think of themselves as on welfare or not. As recipients of family allowance, childcare support, the pension or even the seniors health card, they are on Centrelink’s books. (Centrelink recently changed its name to Services Australia.)

The payment machine that delivered robodebt can just as easily deliver “robocheques”.

Read more: Cash handout of $750 for 6.5 million pensioners and others receiving government payments

Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy, who advised Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to give households cash this time instead of tax refunds, saw the effect at first hand. He was working in Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s office as the good news came through.

If there is an important criticism of the Morrison government’s (first) coronavirus stimulus package, it would be that it doesn’t concentrate on households enough.

Household spending accounts for 55% of Australia’s gross domestic product, yet payments directed to households make up only 27% of the $17.6 billion the government is spending.

The package has two primary aims. One is to ensure that spending and production don’t shrink in the June quarter after shrinking in the March quarter, triggering what, for better or worse, people call a technical recession.

The Treasury expects it to boost economic activity by 1.5% in the June quarter.

If it does, it should be enough to compensate for the downturn we would have without it, always remembering that we don’t yet know how bad things will get in the three months to June – how many schools and public gathering places will be closed, and how many workers will have to stay home to care for children who can’t go to school or family members who are ill.

Read more: When it comes to sick leave, we’re not much better prepared for coronavirus than the US

The second aim is to stop the unemployment rate climbing. When it climbs more than a few points it tends to keep going. In the early 1990s recession it climbed from 6% to 10% in a matter of months.

People who entered the labour force and couldn’t get work were scarred for years.

Labor’s most enduring achievement during the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009 was to stop unemployment climbing above 6%.

That’s what the government’s $11.8 billion of payments to businesses are aimed at, whether delivered in the form of a boosted instant asset writeoff (available only until June 30), accelerated depreciation, payments to cover salaries, or wage assistance for apprentices and trainees.

Morrison wants businesses in the best possible position to hold onto their workers. He wants them to display “patriotism”.

– ref. Morrison’s coronavirus package is a good start, but he’ll probably have to spend more – https://theconversation.com/morrisons-coronavirus-package-is-a-good-start-but-hell-probably-have-to-spend-more-133511

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

Let’s hope it won’t come to this, but handling the coronavirus might eventually make dealing with the global financial crisis look rather a doddle.

The GFC was devastating – for businesses, individuals and many economies. But it was a financial crisis that drove an economic crisis. When a health crisis is the driver of an economic crisis, the uncertainties are multiplied, and people’s reactions are more difficult to predict.

Will the government’s mega $17.6 billion stimulus package be sufficiently big and well targeted to head off an Australian recession? That was the obvious question when on Thursday Scott Morrison had to eat many of his previous words about Labor’s alleged waywardness in times past and announce his own cash splash for individuals and businesses.

Read more: Big stimulus package to splash cash, including $25,000 to small and medium-sized businesses

It’s easy to ask but no one can be confident about the answer.

The spending has been carefully pitched to try to stop the economy tanking via a negative June quarter (the general assumption is the March one is down the gurgler). Some $11 billion will go out the door by June 30, and it is estimated the measures will add 1.5% to growth in the June quarter. The rub is, no one knows how much the virus will take off growth in that quarter.

One pressing uncertainty is whether there’ll be a shutdown of major events. So far, the medical advice has been that mass gatherings should not be abandoned.

Scott Morrison told reporters he was looking forward to attending the football this weekend. But many organisations are cancelling smaller events, ranging from the school fete to the business conference. Government House in Canberra has pulled its weekend open day.

There’s an increasing prospect large gatherings will have to be stopped, something primarily in state governments’ hands.

Former Labor leader Bill Shorten on Thursday suggested this should come sooner rather than later. “This is going to be a major policy question, not in weeks and months, but in days. Do we keep having big events? Will we teach school from home?” he said on Sky.

“But we’ve got to have more social distancing. And that is the only way to stop this pandemic being worse than it might otherwise be,” he said.

A pattern is emerging overseas. In the United States the National Basketball Association (NBA) has suspended its season after a player tested positive, and many sporting and other activities around the world are being called off.

On Friday morning the Grand Prix, due to be held in Melbourne, was cancelled.

The cancelling of events, whether after official decrees or by the actions of individual organisations, will hit the economy hard, but the impact must be near impossible to predict.

In any crisis, confidence is key. In this crisis, people obviously are worried not just about jobs and income but also about the sickness.

Different segments of the population will vary in their principal concerns. Young people will be more preoccupied with the employment and financial implications, older people with health matters, but there will be much overlap, with many of the young and middle aged fretting about older relatives.

Glitches will be found and priorities disputed but in general the government’s package appears sound. Nearly $12 billion goes to business, largely to small and medium sized enterprises, in an attempt to keep people in jobs. Meanwhile Morrison is putting moral pressure on big businesses to look after their own. Some are responding.

The $4.8 billion for 6.5 million welfare recipients and other lower income people to receive a one-off $750 payment is unashamedly designed to boost household consumption ASAP. The government can’t wait to get the money out – it will be dispatched from the end of this month.

Here, however, more uncertainties emerge. All the economic data and past experiences say giving these people money will see it spent rather than saved. But will things be the same in these extraordinary circumstances?

About half the beneficiaries of this cash are pensioners – people in the coronavirus’ most vulnerable age group. How many of them will be fearful enough about their health prospects to think they should put away some or all of their windfall from the government?

In political terms, there are lessons in the unfolding crisis.

Politicians should remember that old adage of what goes around, comes around. The Coalition in recent years has made a mantra of how the Rudd government spent too much on combatting the impact of the GFC.

There’s an argument that Labor overspent in its second stimulus package, costing $42 billion, and we know it had flaws. But it was better to err on the side of overkill, and now it’s Kevin Rudd and former treasurer Wayne Swan running round finger pointing.

Read more: The coronavirus stimulus program is Labor’s in disguise, as it should be

The Morrison government is aware of the danger of doing too little, hence as it crafted the measures it “grew” the package (which compares with Rudd’s $10.4 billion first tranche). And it stresses the plan is “scalable” – an ugly way of promising to do more if necessary. The next opportunity will be in the May budget.

It’s the same with the government’s crowing about the (prospective) surplus while this was still in the budget’s womb. It will be born a deficit.

Politicians never seem to learn it’s best not to get too full of yourself.

On Thursday night Morrison took the rare course of an address to the nation. He wanted to reassure the public. But are people comforted these days by anything a political leader says? In our age of distrust of the political class, probably not much. Perhaps better to put the Chief Medical Officer on.

Commentators have been saying this crisis will make or break Morrison. We can’t be sure about this either.

If the economy goes into a serious recession, that would transform the political landscape, but in what way is another unknown. A recession helped see off the Fraser government. But as treasurer Paul Keating announced “the recession we had to have” at the start of the 1990s and then as prime minister he won an election in 1993.

So a recession wouldn’t necessarily be fatal for the Morrison government. Nor would avoiding one necessarily deliver the Prime Minister the votes of a thankful electorate.

The public were not grateful to Labor for warding off recession. Gratitude isn’t something today’s fractious voters are inclined to hand out. They thought it was Labor’s job to get them through the GFC. If the Coalition prevents a recession Morrison will receive some bouquets, but whether their pleasant scent lingered would depend on a whole lot else.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Will many people be too worried to spend the cash splashed their way? – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-will-many-people-be-too-worried-to-spend-the-cash-splashed-their-way-133544

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

The Morrison government’s stimulus measures, to be announced Thursday, will include a $25,000 cash flow boost for small and medium-sized businesses, a subsidy to help preserve apprentices’ jobs, and a big expansion of the incentive to invest in equipment.

These three items alone will total A$8.7 billion, in a package which is set to be much larger than earlier estimates.

This indicates the government has responded to warnings about the dangers of not going hard enough, as uncertainty mounts about the ultimate economic fallour from the coronavirus.

Speculation on Wednesday was that the package would exceed $15 billion.

Scott Morrison paved the way for some cash handouts to pensioners and others on welfare to try to shore up growth quickly. He reminded a news conference the Coalition had supported the first round of the Rudd government’s stimulus (which centred on cash payments for households). “We need to address the demand side and supply side,” he said.

Speaking on Sky on Wednesday night, he pointed to something for pensioners, saying they in particular but also many in similar circumstances would spend any extra money.

The government will provide up to $25,000 tax free to businesses, with a minimum payment of $2000, to help them with wages, extra staff, investment and to buttress against the looming downturn. Businesses eligible will be those with a turnover under $50 million that employ staff.

Businesses that withhold tax on their employees’ wages will receive a payment equal to 50% of the amount withheld, up to a maximum $25,000. Enterprises that pay wages will get a $2000 minimum even if they are not required to withhold tax. The payment will be structured in a manner that speeds money out early on.

The cost of the measure is estimated at $6.7 billion over the forward estimates, with about 690,000 enterprises employing about 7.8 million people benefitting.

The apprentice measure is aimed at protecting some 120,000 apprentice jobs. The government will offer small businesses up to $7000 wage assistance each quarter for each apprentice, to retain existing apprentices and trainees, and to re-employ those who lose their jobs from a small business due to a downturn driven by the coronavirus.

The employer will get a wage subsidy of 50% from January 1 to September 30. Where a business has to let an apprentice go, a new employer can get the subsidy.

Businesses eligible will be those with fewer than 20 fulltime workers. But businesses of any size, and group training organisations, that re-engage an eligible apprentice will be able to get the subsidy.

The apprentices must have been in training with a small business on March 1. The program will cost $1.3 billion across the current and next financial years.

In an attempt to stimulate some investment quickly, the government will expand the instant asset write off, raising the threshold from $30,000 to $150,000, as well as widening access for firms, from the present annual turnover of up to $50 million to $500 million.

The government is hoping to “supercharge” investment in items like cars and utes, new tools and kitchen equipment.

The expansion is costed at $700 million over the forward estimates.

Morrison said: “We’ve balanced the budget and managed our economy so we can now use this to protect the health, wellbeing and livelihoods of Australians.

“Our targeted stimulus package will focus on keeping Australians in jobs and keeping businesses in business so we can bounce back strongly”.

Former senior bureaucrat Martin Parkinson, who headed treasury and later the prime minister’s department, told the Australian Financial Review the stimulus should be at least 0.5% of GDP, or about $10 billion.

As the tally of Australian coronavirus cases stood at 122 on Wednesday (including three deaths), an increasing number of events are being cancelled and shutdowns occurring.

The government on Wednesday added Italy to the countries from which non-Australian arrivals are banned. The others are China, Iran and South Korea. The ban on Italy is likely to have only marginal impact because that country is already in lockdown.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg met the CEOs of the big four and other banks on Wednesday. The banking sector flagged it would assist businesses financially affected by the virus.

CEO of the Australian Banking Association Anna Bligh said businesses would be assessed on a case by case basis but the sort of help could include deferral of loan repayments, waiving fees, interest free periods or no rate increases, and debt consolidation.

– ref. Big stimulus package to splash cash, including $25,000 to small and medium-sized businesses – https://theconversation.com/big-stimulus-package-to-splash-cash-including-25-000-to-small-and-medium-sized-businesses-133452

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Matt Mason, Lecturer and Program Co-ordinator: Nursing, University of the Sunshine Coast

The Australian government today announced new telehealth consultations will be covered under the Medicare Benefits Schedule.

This will mean people who are isolated due to the coronavirus can access medical services from home by audio or video, an important step to protect other patients and health-care workers from being infected.

Health-care workers are perhaps our most valuable asset in an outbreak situation, but can be at high risk when coming into contact with patients who have COVID-19.

So how do health-care workers protect themselves – and patients – from transmission? And what more could we do?

Read more: Morrison government funds ‘pop up’ testing clinics and tele-consultations in $2.4 billion COVID-19 health package

The challenges

Regardless of COVID-19, doctors and other health-care staff often feel some level of expectation to turn up to work even when ill. They’re often worried about placing strain on co-workers and affecting patient care.

The practice of quarantining health-care workers who may have been exposed to the virus puts additional pressure on health services and is expected to increase as the outbreak continues.

Over the weekend, we saw tension between medical practitioners and state health departments when a Melbourne GP saw patients while unwell and subsequently tested positive to coronavirus.

The Victorian health minister called for the health professional regulatory agency AHPRA to investigate the doctor, despite the fact he followed state guidelines current at the time.

Where multiple jurisdictions and authorities are providing differing information, this complicates the decision health-care workers face when they’re unwell or may have been exposed to the coronavirus.

As much as possible, health-care workers should follow guidelines issued by their place of work or health department.

Health-care workers take precautions all year round

Australia has a robust, evidence-based infection prevention and control system supported through accreditation bodies like the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare.

Standard precautions used in most health-care encounters include hand hygiene, the use of appropriate personal protective equipment, the safe use and disposal of sharps, and routine cleaning. These are to be followed even if there’s no evidence of an infection.

Read more: How do we detect if coronavirus is spreading in the community?

Extra measures

We use what we call transmission-based precautions in conjunction with standard precautions when we know of or suspect an increased risk of transmission for a particular disease.

Because we know coronavirus spreads through large droplets, health workers are using two classes of transmission-based precautions: droplet and contact precautions.

Contact precautions involve putting on gloves and a gown upon entry to the patient care area, to ensure clothing and skin do not make contact with surfaces that have potentially been contaminated with the infectious droplets. Droplet precautions involve wearing a surgical mask so infectious droplets don’t get in the mouth and nose.

Normally coronavirus is spread only via droplets but some medical procedures such as inserting a breathing tube can aerosolise the virus, meaning it can stay in the air longer.

Health-care workers may take additional airborne precautions when they’re undertaking aerosol generating procedures such as intubating a critically unwell patient. These precautions include wearing a properly fitting P2/N95 respirator and caring for the patient in a special isolation room.

Read more: ‘Fever clinics’ are opening in Australia for people who think they’re infected with the coronavirus. Why?

Studies overseas have shown these procedures, when followed, do protect health-care workers from contracting infectious diseases.

But there’s often a gap between the recommended practices and their application in health-care settings. Studies have indicated reasons for this include staff attitudes, insufficient knowledge of procedures, inadequate supplies, time pressures and staffing levels.

Education and training around these procedures must be routine so that in the face of an outbreak like coronavirus, health-care workers are supported and prepared to implement these critical protocols.

Telehealth consultations are a good step

As well as enabling people who are sick or isolated to see a doctor from home, telehealth will allow doctors who may be isolated due to infection, or quarantined because they’ve had contact with an infection, to continue to practise.

The measure could also ease the strain on resources. Numerous health-care practices have reported scarcity of personal protective equipment (like masks) and hand hygiene consumables (such as soap and paper towels), potentially placing health-care workers and patients at risk.

While telehealth is useful to a degree, when someone needs a test or treatment, this will likely need to happen face-to-face.

It’s critical health-care workers can access the appropriate supplies so they can follow the proper infection prevention and control protocols.

We also need consistent messaging for the public and health-care workers on when to contact a health-care professional, how that should be done and what to do to minimise coronavirus risk.

Read more: Worried about your child getting coronavirus? Here’s what you need to know

In the 2003 SARS outbreak, one fifth of reported infections were in health-care workers. We don’t want to see that again.

Existing health systems are already stretched beyond their limits. We don’t have the capacity to respond to a surge in required services – let alone to absorb health-care workers who are unwell.

– ref. ‘The doctor will Skype you now’: telehealth may limit coronavirus spread, but there’s more we can do to protect health workers – https://theconversation.com/the-doctor-will-skype-you-now-telehealth-may-limit-coronavirus-spread-but-theres-more-we-can-do-to-protect-health-workers-133062

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexey D Muraviev, Associate Professor of National Security and Strategic Studies, Curtin University

It should be taken as a given that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a master of ambiguity and strategic surprise.

After the Russian government resigned and Putin proposed amendments to the constitution in January, the Russian leader spent a great deal of time rebuffing claims he would try to run for president again when his fourth term in office was up in March 2024.

But this week, he did not back away from a proposal by Valentina Tereshkova – a trusted supporter and one of the most respected women in Russian politics – to change the constitution to reset Putin’s presidential terms to zero. This would legally allow him to run for the presidency again (and potentially a second consecutive term), thereby extending his reign past 2024 for another 12 years.

Read more: Russian government resignation: what’s just happened and what’s in store for Putin beyond 2024?

The 67-year-old Putin has been in charge of the country for the past 20 years, both as president (2000-08, 2012-present) and as de facto leader while serving as prime minister from 2008-12.

He has stayed in power longer than any other elected Russian head of state and still maintains strong approval ratings. However, the Russian public’s trust of Putin hit a six-year low last month, dropping sharply to just 35% in January.

Putin likely did not make this latest move in response to declining public trust. Rather, the proposed change to the constitution, which must still be approved by Russia’s Constitutional Court and a nationwide referendum, can be explained by three other major factors.

Saving the ruble

The move to signal possibly staying in power may be driven by the immediate need to offer some support to the volatile Russian markets, which plummeted following the collapse of talks between Russia and OPEC over oil production cuts.

The logic is simple: by indicating he may be staying on, Putin is trying to reassure investors that Russia is unlikely to slide back into internal political turmoil after almost two decades of relative calm under his continuous rule.

The Russian stock exchange improved immediately after the proposed constitutional change was announced and the ruble recovered some lost ground to major foreign currencies. However, this may prove to be just temporary relief.

No political heir in sight

This week’s announcement may also be an indication of a more serious challenge for Putin – identifying his political successor.

Even as public trust in Putin has declined in recent years, it’s even lower for his political allies, such as former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (5% in January 2020), current Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin (3%), head of the Russian Federal Assembly Valentina Matvienko (2%) and Moscow mayor Sergey Sobyanin (2%).

The only person the Russians seem to trust (besides Putin) is Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu, who garnered 19% in the January poll.

Shoygu is perhaps Putin’s most loyal ally in his inner circle and could be a potential heir, but it seems he has no ambition for the top job.

Russia’s lost opposition

Another effect of Putin’s 20 years in power is that the Russian electorate does not see any viable alternative to the current president.

For most Russians, Putin is associated with the country’s rise as a great power, the revival of its military might and the stabilisation of the economy compared with the volatility of the 1990s. He’s also overseen a considerable decline in the risk of terrorist threats in the country.

There is a whole new generation of Russian voters who grew up in a country run only by Putin. Not all support Putin, but many young people are his biggest fans.

Read more: Speaking with: journalist Masha Gessen on Putin’s Russia

Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, once faced fierce political opposition in the Duma, the Russian parliament. But under Putin, the parliamentary opposition currently represented by the Communist Party, A Just Russia (a leftist party) and the liberal democrats has lost much of its support to the pro-Putin centrist and nationalist coalition of the United Russia party and the People’s Front movement.

Russia’s real liberal opposition is a lost cause. The most charismatic and trusted opposition figure in Russia, Alexey Navalny, has launched many anti-corruption investigations into figures in Putin’s party, yet his popular support base remains pitifully low. The same political trust poll by the independent Levada Centre shows Navalny at no more than 3% from 2017-20.

The real problem of Russia’s liberal opposition is its continuous failure to engage the vast majority of the conservative Russian electorate. This, combined with its simultaneous courting of both big business and the small, underdeveloped middle class, as well as select intelligentsia, does more damage to its public reputation than the Kremlin’s oppressive measures.

As such, the Russian electorate is stuck with practically no alternative. On one hand, they want change and recognise Putin is no longer the most effective problem solver. On the other hand, they don’t see anyone else who is as experienced, trustworthy and capable of running the country as Putin.

Read more: Russia’s World Cup widely hailed as success, but will the good vibes last for Putin?

Being both a populist and pragmatist, Putin has positioned himself well. Putin the populist gives Russians hope by addressing their anxiety over who could lead the country after him. Putin the pragmatist understands that his reputation in the eyes of ordinary Russians, while remaining strong, is nonetheless fading away.

Perhaps most critically, Putin remains a master of evasiveness, and his announcement this week left enough room for him to make a final decision on standing for another term closer to the 2024 election.

Putin’s love of power is balanced by his ambition to be remembered as yet another saviour of Russia. He will go for another term only if he feels confident he can deliver another success story. Failure is not an option for a strong, ambitious personality like Vladimir Putin.

– ref. Putin for life? Many Russians may desire leadership change, but don’t see a viable alternative – https://theconversation.com/putin-for-life-many-russians-may-desire-leadership-change-but-dont-see-a-viable-alternative-133431

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mandie Shean, Lecturer, School of Education, Edith Cowan University

As the number of new cases of coronavirus infection continue to rise the impact is now being felt in schools in Australia. At least four closed due to students and a staff member testing positive for the virus. Most international travel by Queensland students is also banned.

It’s therefore important for parents to be there for their children to ease any concerns they may have about the virus and how it could affect them.

One thing to note is the number of reported infection cases in children remains low: of more than 44,000 confirmed cases from China, only 416 (less than 1%) were aged nine years or younger. No deaths were reported in this age group.

Read more: Worried about your child getting coronavirus? Here’s what you need to know

Children are either being infected less or exhibit milder symptoms, but they may still play an important role in transmitting the virus.

So here’s some advice for parents to help them and their children stay informed.

1. Control during uncertainty

The new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 causes the disease COVID-19, which can be like a common cold but it can also have more serious complications. Signs of infection may include: fever, cough and shortness of breath. More severe cases can involve pneumonia, kidney failure and even death.

The spread of SARS-CoV-2 has not yet been declared a pandemic but the Australian government has said it’s operating on the basis that it has.

One reason people experience anxiety during a pandemic is uncertainty about its impact. Research during the 2009 swine flu (H1N1) pandemic found those people who struggled with uncertainty were more likely to see the pandemic as threatening, and this can lead to increased levels of anxiety.

One way to provide our children with certainty in uncertain times is with facts, for example, telling them the evidence so far shows children are less likely to experience severe symptoms than older adults.

You can also help them gain a sense of control by giving them strategies to help prevent them catching the virus.

2. Practise good hygiene

The World Health Organisation (WHO) says we should channel our concern into good hygiene.

Encourage your children to wash their hands with soap and water frequently (particularly after going to the toilet, coming from a public place, and before and after eating).

Children should also use a tissue to sneeze into and put the tissue in the bin afterwards.

3. Be careful with the news media

A quick scan of the news brings up headlines such as “Australia’s coronavirus death rate could proportionally be worse than China’s, expert warns”. This report even includes a graph showing “How likely are you to die from Coronavirus?”

Exposing children to such reports can increase their fear and anxiety.

There is a clear and strong relationship between what children see as threatening information in the media and their level of fear.

So be careful with what news media your children are exposed to. Try to watch, listen or read it with them so you are there for any questions they may have.

4. Stay with the facts

When answering such questions, use information from the World Health Organisation and other trustworthy sources to inform yourself.

Filter some of the incorrect information around preventing COVID-19 (eating garlic, having hot baths) and inform your family with the correct information. Don’t be someone who passes on incorrect information to your children or others.

5. Talk about your feelings

It’s OK to feel worried. Talking about your feelings of stress can help you work through them.

If you try to push down feelings of stress this can have an impact on your health.

As parents you only have to listen and hear your child’s concerns. You can’t promise things will be safe or certain. But you can assure them that as a family you will work together to manage whatever comes up in the future and that you are there to listen to them.

6. Don’t pass on your fear

Research from the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic showed children’s fear of the disease was significantly related to their parents’ fear of the disease.

This effect of parents passing on fear even exists when there is nothing to fear. Research showed if parents get negative information about something that is harmless, they are more likely to pass on those negative beliefs to their children and increase their level of fear.

So even if you feel stressed about COVID-19, you need to make sure you don’t pass on this fear to your children. Show them you are calm. Don’t be a carrier for fear.

7. Keep on living life

It is easy to get swept away with panic about the future and what may happen. But being future-focused only contributes to anxiety.

Help your child to focus on the now and what they are doing today. These things are in their control – work hard at school, train for basketball. Continue their routine and enjoy the moments.

Read more: Coronavirus fears can trigger anti-Chinese prejudice. Here’s how schools can help

8. Work together

This is not a time to be selfish, but to work together and support one another.

Be kind to others (don’t steal their toilet paper) and encourage your children to be kind to others as well.

Being less self-focused helps to alleviate stress and give life more meaning and purpose.

– ref. 8 tips on what to tell your kids about coronavirus – https://theconversation.com/8-tips-on-what-to-tell-your-kids-about-coronavirus-133346

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katharine Kemp, Senior Lecturer, Faculty of Law, UNSW, and Academic Lead, UNSW Grand Challenge on Trust, UNSW

On Monday, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) brought proceedings against Facebook in the Federal Court, asking the court to impose financial penalties for serious interference with the privacy of more than 300,000 Australians.

To our knowledge, this is the first time the privacy regulator has sought civil penalty orders under the Privacy Act.

Facebook responded by saying it had made “major changes” to its platforms “in consultation with international regulators”.

This response is none too comforting, given Facebook’s current data practices (which include collecting data of consumers who have never used Facebook). The company also has a history of misrepresentations regarding data privacy.

Read more: Here’s how tech giants profit from invading our privacy, and how we can start taking it back

What is Facebook being sued for?

In 2014, Facebook users were offered an app called “This is Your Digital Life”, which paid users to take a personality quiz. The app harvested the data not only of the person taking the quiz but also of their Facebook friends, who had no knowledge of the app or the data collection.

The app developer then sold that information to a political lobbying company, Cambridge Analytica, which used the personal data for political profiling. This profiling was apparently used to aid in the election of US President Donald Trump in 2016, among other things.

Worldwide, approximately 87 million Facebook users were affected. In Australia, only 53 users downloaded the app, but still, around 311,000 people were affected.

The OAIC alleges that Facebook contravened the Privacy Act by allowing users’ personal data to be used for purposes that were not properly disclosed, and by failing to take proper steps to protect users’ personal data.

Better late than never

The OAIC’s action follows similar action against Facebook by regulators around the world. In 2018, the UK privacy regulator fined Facebook the maximum GBP500,000 over the Cambridge Analytica breach. Last year, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) settled with Facebook on a record-breaking US$5 billion payment in respect of related conduct.

While the OAIC’s action should be encouraged, we should not overestimate the impact on Facebook.

Read more: The ACCC is suing Google over tracking users. Here’s why it matters

If the Federal Court finds the alleged contraventions occurred, Facebook could face fines of up to A$1.7 million for each contravention. (There is likely to be debate over what constitutes a single contravention, and therefore how many contraventions there were.) That may sound hefty, but we should put it in context.

When the US$5 billion settlement with the FTC was announced last year, Facebook’s share price went up. The settlement represented only about 7% of Facebook’s 2019 revenue of more than US$70 billion.

Facebook is still collecting data about non-Facebook users

Facebook responded to this week’s announcement of the OAIC action by saying it has upgraded privacy protections:

We’ve made major changes to our platforms, in consultation with international regulators, to restrict the information available to app developers, implement new governance protocols and build industry-leading controls to help people protect and manage their data.

But has the leopard changed its spots? While Facebook has made some adjustments to the settings available to Facebook users, it continues, for example, to track the activities of consumers on third-party websites, when a Facebook user is not logged in and even when the consumer has never been a Facebook user.

Facebook says it collects information about anyone who visits a website or app that uses “Facebook Products”, which includes anywhere you see Facebook “Like” buttons or an option to “sign in with Facebook”.

You don’t need to click on the “Like” button or sign in with Facebook for this to happen. According to Facebook, it collects this information “without any further action from you”.

Facebook does this by placing a cookie on your computer or device when you visit the third-party website. It then collects data about what you do online, including your use of other websites and apps, and information about your device, which can be highly individual.

As the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission pointed out last year, it’s unlikely non-Facebook users could even find out about this practice.

What could they do with our data?

According to its Cookie Policy, Facebook can broadly use this data to offer you products and to “understand the information we receive about you, including information about your use of other websites and apps, whether or not you are registered or logged in”.

In 2018, Facebook told the US House of Representatives that it does “not use web browsing data to show ads to non-users or otherwise store profiles about non-users”. However, its Cookie Policy does not reflect these claims, and it has not said it will stop collecting this data.

More than that, Facebook has in the past claimed it will limit data use, before going back on it later. When Facebook acquired WhatsApp in 2014, it told regulators it would be unable to automatically match Facebook and WhatsApp user accounts after the merger. The European Commission has since fined Facebook for making incorrect or misleading representations in this respect.

Similarly, the action brought by the US FTC referred to repeated misrepresentations by Facebook about the extent to which users could control the privacy of their data.

Facebook may have made some changes, but it is still an advertising business with a history of privacy infringements that makes tens of billions of dollars each quarter from collecting and monetising oceans of personal data.

Other companies are similarly focused on extracting personal data at the expense of privacy. Consumers should hope this is only the first of many more actions by the privacy regulator.

– ref. Australia’s privacy watchdog is taking Facebook to court. It’s a good start – https://theconversation.com/australias-privacy-watchdog-is-taking-facebook-to-court-its-a-good-start-133345

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Belinda Hewitt, Professor of Sociology, University of Melbourne

Women are now the main earners in about one in four Australian households. This increase in female “breadwinner” households challenges traditional expectations of men and women and their roles in family life.

Our research shows those expectations remain strong, with both men’s and women’s satisfaction with their relationship dropping when the woman becomes the primary breadwinner, earning 60% or more of household income.

Examining relationship satisfaction

We examined what happened when couples experienced change in their household breadwinning arrangements using data from the Households Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey. Our study used detailed information collected from about 12,000 Australians over a maximum of 17 years.

Read more: There’s a reason you’re feeling no better off than 10 years ago. Here’s what HILDA says about well-being

Our analysis took into account the level of economic prosperity of the household as well as health, number of children, marital status, the division of household labour and gender role attitudes. We did this to ensure any changes we found in relationship satisfaction by breadwinner status were irrespective of other characteristics.

For example, it would be unsurprising for both partners to feel dissatisfaction if the reason for a woman being the main income provider was her partner’s unemployment. Even when both partners were employed, our findings show both men and women were less satisfied when she earned more.

Conditions make a difference

It is true, though, that a woman earning more because her partner is unable to work due to unemployment or illness has different implications for relationship satisfaction than her having a better-paying job.

Women on average were least satisfied with the relationship when she became the primary breadwinner due to her partner being unable to work due to illness or disability.

The reverse is not the case; the woman being unable to work does not, on average, affect the man’s relationship satisfaction.

Both men and women were generally more satisfied with their relationship when the woman became the homemaker. This is similar to international research that finds women who are homemakers are slightly happier than full-time working women.

This change in satisfaction may be explained by most women becoming homemakers after having a child. Many new mothers want to stay home with their infant. It also helps working families manage the time pressures of having young children. It is usually short-term. About three-quarters of women return to work by their child’s first birthday.

Read more: Gender equality at home takes a hit when children arrive

Employed women were most satisfied with the relationship when they became “equal” earners – contributing between 40% and 60% of household income. Men were most satisfied as the main or equal earner.

Gender Equality – still a long way to go?

Our research suggests gendered expectations about who earns income persist despite the changing reality of the labour market.

Women are increasingly obtaining university qualifications and entering occupations that are in demand and on the rise. Meanwhile some traditionally well-paid male-dominated industries are subject to uncertain boom-and-bust cycles (such as mining) or long-term decline (such as manufacturing).

Yet men’s identity – the way they see themselves and are perceived by others – is more tied to employment and being the breadwinner than women’s. Women often expect their male partner to contribute at least equally to the household finances, or to be the primary earner.

Another factor that might partly explain the greater dissatisfaction when she is the main earner is how couples share household labour.

Research shows Australian women do, on average, about 70% of unpaid domestic labour in couple households. Previous Australian research, also using HILDA, shows women who earn 75% or more of household income spend 40 minutes longer doing domestic labour than women who were more equal earners.

Read more: Census 2016: Women are still disadvantaged by the amount of unpaid housework they do

If a woman continues to do more housework as the main or sole earner, this may well decrease her relationship satisfaction.

That both women and men are generally less satisfied in relationships when she earns more shows the issue is complicated. Personal expectations and values sit in tension with both changing economic reality and social ambitions for gender equality.

– ref. Most couples are less satisfied when the woman earns more – https://theconversation.com/most-couples-are-less-satisfied-when-the-woman-earns-more-131659