In Gwyneth Paltrow’s new Netflix series, The Goop Lab, Paltrow explores a variety of wellness management approaches, from “energy healing” to psychedelic psychotherapy.
Goop has long been criticised for making unsubstantiated health claims and advancing pseudoscience, but the brand is incredibly popular. It was valued at over US$250 million (A$370 million) in 2019.
The alternative health industry is worth A$4.1 billion in Australia alone – and projected to grow.
A key driver of the industry is increased health consciousness. With easier access to information, better health literacy, and open minds, consumers are increasingly seeking alternatives to managing their well-being.
Goop has capitalised on the rise in popularity of alternative health therapies – treatments not commonly practised under mainstream Western medicine.
Health systems in countries such as Australia are based on Western medicine, eschewing traditional and indigenous practices. These Western systems operate on measurable and objective indicators of health and well-being, ignoring the fact subjective assessments – such as job satisfaction and life contentment – are just as important in evaluating quality of life.
This gap between objective measures and subjective assessments creates a gap in the marketplace brands can capitalise on – not always for the benefit of the consumer.
The Goop Lab fails to engage with the cultural heritage of traditional health and well-being practices in any meaningful way, missing an important opportunity to forward the holistic health cause.
The uncritical manner in which these therapies are presented, failure to attribute their traditional origins, absence of fact-checking, and lack of balanced representation of the arguments for and against these therapies only serve to set back the wellness cause.
New to the West, not new to the world
Many of the historical and cultural origins of the therapies in The Goop Lab are not investigated, effectively whitewashing them.
The first episode, The Healing Trip, explores psychedelic psychotherapy, suggesting this is a new and novel approach to managing mental health.
In reality, psychedelics have been used in non-Western cultures for thousands of years, only recently enjoying a re-emergence in the Western world.
In the second episode, Cold Comfort, the “Wim Hof Method” (breathing techniques and cold therapy) is also marketed as a novel therapy.
For the ‘Hof method’ a group of Goop staff members did yoga on the banks of Lake Tahoe.Screenshot/Netflix
The meditation component of Hof’s method ignores its Hindu origins, documented in the Vedas from around 1500 BCE. The breathing component closely resembles prāṇāyāma, a yogic breathing practice. The “Hof dance” looks a lot like tai chi, an ancient Chinese movement practice.
Whitewashing these alternative therapies represents a form of colonisation and commodification of non-Western practices that have existed for centuries.
The experts showcased are usually white and from Western cultures, rather than people of the cultures and ethnicities practising these therapies as part of their centuries-old traditions.
Rather than accessing these therapies from authentic, original sources, often the consumer’s only option is to turn to Western purveyors. Like Paltrow, these purveyors are business people capitalising on consumers’ desire and pursuit of wellness.
Only the rich?
Paltrow describes Goop as a resource to help people “optimise the self”. But many of these therapies are economically inaccessible.
In The Health-Span Plan, Paltrow undergoes the five-day “Fast Mimicking Diet” by ProLon – a diet designed to reap the health benefits of fasting while extremely restricting calories. The food for the treatment period costs US$249 (A$368) (but shipping is free!). The average Australian household spends just over A$250 on groceries weekly.
Paltrow also undergoes a “vampire facial”, where platelet-rich plasma extracted from your own blood is applied to your skin. This facial is available at one Sydney skin clinic for between A$550 and A$1,499.
Paltrow’s vampire facial is touted as a ‘natural alternative’ to botox.Screenshot/Netflix
These therapies commodify wellness – and health – as a luxury product, implying only the wealthy deserve to live well, and longer.
This sits in stark odds with the goals of the World Health Organisation, which views health as a fundamental human right “without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic, or social condition”.
A right to live well
Companies like Goop have a responsibility to explain the science and the origins of the methods they explore.
Given their profit-driven motive, many absolve themselves of this responsibility with an easy disclaimer their content is intended to “entertain and inform – not provide medical advice”. This pushes the burden of critically researching these therapies onto the consumer.
Governments should seek to fund public health systems, such as Medicare, to integrate traditional health practices from other cultures through consultation and working in collaboration with those cultures.
Perhaps this will give everyone access to a wellness system to help us live well, longer. This way, citizens are less likely to be driven towards opportunists such as Goop seeking to capitalise on our fundamental human right to live well.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By C Raina MacIntyre, Professor of Global Biosecurity, NHMRC Principal Research Fellow, Head, Biosecurity Program, UNSW
Cases of the Wuhan coronavirus have increased dramatically over the past week, prompting concerns about how contagious the virus is and how it spreads.
According the World Health Organisation, 16-21% of people with the virus in China became severely ill and 2-3% of those infected have died.
A key factor that influences transmission is whether the virus can spread in the absence of symptoms – either during the incubation period (the days before people become visibly ill) or in people who never get sick.
On Sunday, Chinese officials said transmission had occurred during the incubation period.
So what does the evidence tell us so far?
Can you transmit it before you get symptoms?
Influenza is the classic example of a virus that can spread when people have no symptoms at all.
In contrast, people with SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) only spread the virus when they had symptoms.
No published scientific data are available to support China’s claim transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus occurred during the incubation period.
However, one study published in the Lancet medical journal showed children may be shedding (or transmitting) the virus while asymptomatic. The researchers found one child in an infected family had no symptoms but a chest CT scan revealed he had pneumonia and his test for the virus came back positive.
2-3% of those infected with the Wuhan coronavirus in China have died.Yuan Zheng/AAP
This is different to transmission in the incubation period, as the child never got ill, but it suggests it’s possible for children and young people to be infectious without having any symptoms.
This is a concern because if someone gets sick, you want to be able to identify them and track their contacts. If someone transmits the virus but never gets sick, they may not be on the radar at all.
It also makes airport screening less useful because people who are infectious but don’t have symptoms would not be detected.
How infectious is it?
The Wuhan coronavirus epidemic began when people exposed to an unknown source at a seafood market in Wuhan began falling ill in early December.
Researchers and public health officials determine how contagious a virus is by calculating a reproduction number, or R0. The R0 is the average number of other people that one infected person will infect, in a completely non-immune population.
Different experts have estimated the R0 of the Wuhan coronavirus is anywhere from 1.4 to over five, however the World Health Organisation believes the RO is between 1.4 and 2.5.
If the R0 was higher than 2-3, we should have seen more cases globally by mid January, given Wuhan is a travel and trade hub of 11 million people.
How is it transmitted?
Of the person-to-person modes of transmission, we fear respiratory transmission the most, because infections spread most rapidly this way.
Two kinds of respiratory transmission are through large droplets, which is thought to be short-range, and airborne transmission on much smaller particles over longer distances. Airborne transmission is the most difficult to control.
SARS was considered to be transmitted by contact and over short distances by droplets but can also be transmitted through smaller aerosols over long distances. In Hong Kong, infection was transmitted from one floor of a building to the next.
Initially, most cases of the Wuhan coronavirus were assumed to be from an animal source, localised to the seafood market in Wuhan.
We now know it can spread from person to person in some cases. The Chinese government announced it can be spread by touching and contact. We don’t know how much transmission is person to person, but we have some clues.
Coronaviruses are respiratory viruses, so they can be found in the nose, throat and lungs.
The amount of Wuhan coronavirus appears to be higher in the lungs than in the nose or throat. If the virus in the lungs is expelled, it could possibly be spread via fine, airborne particles, which are inhaled into the lungs of the recipient.
We still don’t know exactly how it’s transmitted but it could be through fine, airborne particles.David Chang/AAP
How did the virus spread so rapidly?
The continuing surge of cases in China since January 18 – despite the lockdowns, extended holidays, travel bans and banning of the wildlife trade – could be explained by several factors, or a combination of:
increased travel for New Year, resulting in the spread of cases around China and globally. Travel is a major factor in the spread of infections
asymptomatic transmissions through children and young people. Such transmissions would not be detected by contact tracing because health authorities can only identify contacts of people who are visibly ill
increased detection, testing and reporting of cases. There has been increased capacity for this by doctors and nurses coming in from all over China to help with the response in Wuhan
substantial person-to-person transmission
continued environmental or animal exposure to a source of infection.
However, with an incubation period as short as one to two days, if the Wuhan coronavirus was highly contagious, we would expect to already have seen widespread transmission or outbreaks in other countries.
Rather, the increase in transmission is likely due to a combination of the factors above, to different degrees. The situation is changing daily, and we need to analyse the transmission data as it becomes available.
Slang names or street names for drugs are common. From pingers (MDMA), to fishies (GHB) to going into the K-hole (ketamine), slang use marks someone as an insider with knowledge and experience of illicit drug use.
The use of language around drugs is important because people using drugs referred to by slang names could misunderstand what they’re getting.
At the same time, tuning in to drug slang offers researchers and health workers an avenue by which to track patterns of drug use.
Clinicians and people who study drug use have attempted to catalogue slang terms for drug use since the 1930s.
David Maurer, an American linguistics professor who studied the use of language in the American underworld, published the first glossary of drug slang terms in 1936. The aim was to guide law enforcement as well as to inform doctors, parents and teachers about drug use.
The definitions reflect the social and cultural values around drug-taking practices at the time. For example, Maurer’s glossary featured the term “to vipe”, meaning to smoke marijuana. The definition included how beginners were taught special smoking techniques by hostesses, likely sex workers.
Why is drug slang important?
The use of slang indicates a person uses drugs because they know the secret language of a subculture. With this in mind, researchers seek to identify drug subcultures through understanding language use.
In 1979, researchers created a drug slang association test to identify if the number of slang names people knew related to their use of a drug type. The authors found people in prison, who commonly used opiates, knew more slang words for heroin than college students did.
More recently, one study analysed Twitter posts to identify new slang. Another study used slang terms in Instagram hashtags to document drug use patterns.
For clinicians and researchers, slang offers insights into drug users’ beliefs and behaviours, which can in turn guide interventions. The slang words can be metaphors for the drug effects or appearance, giving health professionals an understanding of a person’s drug use experience.
Researchers also believe they get better results from surveys if they use the same language as people using drugs.
The use of slang can indicate to others a person uses drugs.From shutterstock.com
Pingers
As we find ourselves at the height of music festival season, let’s look at a timely example.
MDMA (3,4- methylenedioxymethamphetamine), or ecstasy, is one of the drugs people take most commonly at music festivals. The term “pinger” (or pinga) is thought to be an Australian creation used to refer to MDMA.
Most festival goers attend few events and are only occasional users of illegal drugs, so they may be unfamiliar with slang names and what drug they refer to. The drug they purchase could be completely different to what they expected.
The first reference to pingers is reported to be in the glossary of an Australian surfing book published in 2003. More recently the word pinger has appeared in several pop culture dictionaries with examples related to drug use. For example:
>“I had so many pingers last night I was tripping balls”.
An Australian video game called Big City Earnez has players collecting “pingaz” – things that look like tablets – in different Melbourne suburbs and hiding from the police.
None of these examples refer to MDMA specifically, but there’s an assumption people know what the word pinger means, including the drug’s use and effects.
Drug slang is part of the music festival vernacular.Yvette de Wit/Unsplash
And the term’s use has spread out of Australia. By 2012, Vice.com, a UK website that regularly reports on popular and emerging drug use, was using the term pinger to describe MDMA.
A problem with relying on slang to identify drugs is meanings change over time. It took a few years for pinger to be used in the UK as slang for MDMA. In 2009 police in England and Wales were issued with a list of 3,000 words to learn so they could “stay ahead of criminals”. Pinger was not on the list but ping-on was listed as meaning opium and pingus as the prescription drug Rohypnol (a sedative and muscle relaxant).
Slang terms are also culturally specific. Not all countries use the same slang even when English is the main language. In Ireland “yoke” is a word used to refer to MDMA pills or capsules while “molly” is a common word in the United States. “Shelving a pinger” is called “boofing a roll” in the US. Beyond the likelihood of embarrassment, misunderstanding slang terms can increase the risk of drug-related harms.
And even if you’re clear on the terminology, a label doesn’t mean a drug is necessarily what you think it is. A pinger may have MDMA in it, a combination of drugs or no drugs at all.
The risk of using slang is thinking you know what it means and not asking for clarification. If you’re buying pingers or another drug called by a slang name, it’s important to ask what it is.
The Wuhan coronavirus has had a significant human toll. More than 100 people have died and nearly 3,000 are known to be infected, including some in Australia. The number actually infected will be higher. People experiencing only mild symptoms often don’t report them.
The economic cost is as hard to tease out as the health cost, but there are clues.
They suggest the coronavirus will have little impact on the global economy, quite a bit in China, and some in Australia, which will most likely be short-lived.
Confirmed cases of Wuhan coronavirus
Data included until January 27th 2019.The Conversation
China is bearing the immediate brunt
The impact in China is already apparent, with 35 million people under effective lockdown, air travel curtailed, and some tourist destinations closed. In a sign the virus might spread, five million people reportedly left Wuhan before the lockdown.
The Shenzhen and Shanghai composite stock market indexes fell 3.52% and 2.75% before they closed for what turned out to be an extended Lunar New Year break.
While China’s steps to contain the coronavirus will hurt its economy in the short term, in longer term they might contain the damage.
Previous pandemics suggest scale
The world has changed significantly since the the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918, the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957-58 and even the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) pandemic of 2001-02.
On one hand the world has become better at containment and treatment; on the other, it has become more connected. But previous pandemics can tell us a lot.
1918 Spanish Flu: According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Spanish Flu hit 500 million people worldwide, killing as many as 50 million worldwide, including 675,000 in the United States.
The US Congressional Budget Office believes such an event in 2006 would have cut US gross domestic product 4.25% below where it would have been.
World Bank calculations suggest a severe pandemic, killing 71 million people, would cut world GDP by about 5%.
1957-58 Asian Flu Pandemic: The 1957-58 pandemic killed about 1.1 million people worldwide, including 116,000 in the United States. A follow-up 1968 pandemic had a similar effect.
The Congressional Budget Office believes a recurrence would cut United States GDP to about 1% below where it would have been. Similar countries would be affected in a similar way. The World Bank believes such a scenario would cut world GDP by between 1% and 2%.
2001-02 SARS pandemic: According to the US CDC, SARS infected around 8,100 people, with 774 dying, which was a 9.4% mortality rate. Its economic impact is open to debate. SARS mainly affected mainland China and Hong Kong, with one study estimating it cut their GDPs by 1.1% and 2.6%.
But because the event coincided with the recovery from a global recession, the effect is hard to estimate. Other estimates are less pessimistic.
The economic impact was limited, with little impact outside of China and Hong Kong, as Australia’s Treasury noted at the time.
This one should be smaller
Here’s what we know.
It’s not yet severe. Fewer than 100 people have died so far. The mortality rate is just under 3%. China has moved aggressively to contain the virus meaning it should have have less impact on gross domestic product than earlier pandemics.
There’s been minimal global impact. There have been few cases outside China. The countries with few if any reported cases are likely to suffer little impact, as correctly predicted by a Treasury discussion paper on the impact of SARS.
China and Hong Kong are the worst hit. The impact is likely be less than SARS because the coronavirus is less severe, because of China’s forthright containment efforts and because the outbreak has coincided with the Lunar New Year break. However, the aggressive steps taken to contain the virus might have a significant short term impact. Travel has declined significantly. Tourist attractions, such as Disneyland in China have closed. Wuhan is likely to see a significant economic decline.
The impact should be short-lived. With SARS, the economies of both China and the rest of the world rebounded shortly afterwards. To some extent, this coincided with the world emerging from an economic downturn. But other estimates suggest that even the impact of the severe 1918 pandemic was short-lived.
Different industries will be impacted differently. In impacted regions, tourism and consumer spending are likely to be the most significantly hit, as was the case in 1918. China has already suffered a significant reduction in travel expenditure. Other industries, including medical industries, will experience positive impacts. But given that the coronavirus is relatively contained, the impact is unlikely to spread those industries in other countries.
Taken together these points suggest the coronavirus is unlikely to significantly affect the world economy.
Based on what we know so far, the impact on China is likely to be short-lived.
The unexpected death of a person in New Zealand who recently travelled to China is being investigated for coronavirus, but a local district health board says virus is unlikely the cause.
A small number of cases linked to people who travelled from Wuhan have been confirmed in more than 10 countries, including Australia, Thailand, France, Japan and the United States where authorities said they had 110 people under investigation in 26 states.
In a statement, Bay of Plenty’s District Health Board said investigations were common in unexpected deaths, but it was unlikely this person had been infected with the novel coronavirus.
Dr Neil de Wet, medical officer of health at Toi Te Ora Public Health, said they were undertaking this measure to rule out the virus as a cause, because the person had recently travelled to China.
– Partner –
There are no cases of the novel coronavirus in New Zealand to date.
Health advice is also being provided to travellers arriving to New Zealand from China.
The DHB said travellers who became sick within a month of their arrival were encouraged to seek medical advice and contact Healthline (for free) on 0800 611 116 or a doctor.
It said people should also mention any recent travel to China and any known contact with someone with severe respiratory illness who has been in China.
On Friday I flew in a helicopter over the fire-ravaged Kosciuszko National Park. I was devastated by what I saw. Cherished wildlife species are at grave risk of extinction: those populations the bushfires haven’t already wiped out are threatened by thousands of feral horses trampling the land.
The New South Wales park occupies the highest mountain range in Australia and is home to plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Many of these species are threatened, and their survival depends on protecting habitat as best we can.
Devastation as far as the eye can see on the burnt western face of Kosciuszko National Park.Jamie Pittock
Not a green leaf in sight
Australia’s plants and ecosystems did not evolve to withstand trampling by hard-hooved animals, or their intensive grazing. Unfortunately, the New South Wales government has allowed the population of feral horses in the park to grow exponentially in recent years to around 20,000.
I flew over the northern part of the park with members of the Invasive Species Council, who were conducting an urgent inspection of the damage. Thousands of hectares were completely incinerated by bushfires: not a green leaf was visible over vast areas. A cataclysm has befallen the western face of the mountains and tablelands around Kiandra and Mount Selwyn.
Further north and east of Kiandra the fires were less intense and burnt patchily. On Nungar Plain the grassland and peat wetlands were only lightly burnt, and the first green shoots were already visible along the wetlands of the valley floor.
At first, I wondered if the fires may have spared two animals which live in tunnels in the vegetation on the sub-alpine high plains: the alpine she-oak skink and broad-toothed rat (which, despite the name is a cute, hamster-like creature).
The hamster-like broad toothed rat.Flickr
But not only was their understory habitat burnt, a dozen feral horses were trampling the peat wetlands and eating the first regrowth.
On the unburnt or partially burnt plains a few ridges over, 100 or more horses were mowing down the surviving vegetation.
Precarious wildlife refuges
Next we flew over a small stream that holds the last remaining population of a native fish species, the stocky galaxias. A small waterfall is all that divides the species from the stream below, and the jaws of the exotic trout which live there.
The aftermath of the fires means the last refuge of the stocky galaxias is likely to become even more degraded.
Over the years, feral horses have carved terraces of trails into the land causing erosion and muddying the stream bank. As more horses congregate on unburnt patches of vegetation after the fires, more eroded sediment will settle on the stream bed and fill the spaces between rocks where the fish shelter. Ash runoff entering the stream may clog the gills of the fish, potentially suffocating them.
Many key wetland habitats of the southern and northern corroboree frogs have also been burnt. These striking yellow and black frogs nest in wetland vegetation.
A corroboree frog.Flickr
We hovered over a key wetland for the northern corroboree frog that had not been burnt, deep in the alpine forest. A group of feral horses stood in it. They had created muddy wallows, trampled vegetation and worn tracks that will drain the wetland if their numbers are not immediately controlled.
Flying down the upper Murrumbidgee River’s Long Plain, I saw large numbers of feral horses gathered in yet more wetlands. Displaced by the fires to the south and west, they were already trampling the mossy and heathy wetlands that store and filter water in the headwaters.
The Murrumbidgee River is a key water source for south-east Australia. The horses stir up sediment and defecate in the water. They create channels which drain and dry the wetlands, exposing them to fire.
One-third of Kosciuszko National Park has been burnt out and at the time of writing the fires remain active. Feral horses are badly compounding the damage.
Feral horse numbers in the national park have reached at least 20,000.Perry Duffin/AAP
If we don’t immediately reduce feral horse numbers, the consequences for Kosciuszko National Park and its unique Australian flora and fauna will be horrendous.
Responsible managers limit the numbers of livestock on their lands and control feral animals. The NSW government must repeal its 2018 legislation protecting feral horses in Kosciuszko National Park, and undertake a responsible control program similar to those of the Australian Capital Territory and Victorian governments.
Without an emergency cull of feral horses in Kosciuszko National Park, burnt vegetation may not fully recover and threatened species will march further towards extinction.
Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) fossils were first discovered in western Europe in the mid nineteenth century. That was just the first in a long line of surprises thrown up by our closest evolutionary cousins.
We reveal another in our new study of the Neanderthals who lived in Chagyrskaya Cave in southern Siberia around 54,000 years ago. Their distinctive stone tools are dead ringers for those found thousands of kilometres away in eastern and central Europe.
Chagyrskaya Cave in southern Siberia’s Altai Mountains and excavation of the archaeological deposits.Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Author provided
The intercontinental journey made by these intrepid Neanderthals is equivalent to walking from Sydney to Perth, or from New York to Los Angeles, and is a rare example of long-distance migration by Palaeolithic people.
Knuckleheads no more
For a long time Neanderthals were seen as intellectual lightweights. However, several recent finds have forced a rethink of their cognitive and creative abilities.
Neanderthals are now believed to have created 176,000 year-old enigmatic structures made from broken stalactites in a cave in France, and cave art in Spain that dates back more than 65,000 years.
They also used bird feathers and pierced shells bearing traces of red and yellow ochre, possibly as personal ornaments. It seems likely Neanderthals had cognitive capabilities and symbolic behaviours similar to those of modern humans (Homo sapiens).
Our knowledge of their geographical range and the nature of their encounters with other groups of humans has also expanded greatly in recent years.
We now know that Neanderthals ventured beyond Europe and western Asia, reaching at least as far east as the Altai Mountains. Here, they interbred with another group of archaic humans dubbed the Denisovans.
Traces of Neanderthal interactions with our own ancestors also persist in the DNA of all living people of Eurasian descent. However, we can still only speculate why the Neanderthals vanished around 40,000 years ago.
Banished to Siberia
Other questions also remain unresolved. When did Neanderthals first arrive in the Altai? Were there later migration events? Where did these trailblazers begin their trek? And what routes did they take across Asia?
Chagyrskaya Cave is nestled in the foothills of the Altai Mountains. The cave deposits were first excavated in 2007 and have yielded almost 90,000 stone tools and numerous bone tools.
The excavations have also found 74 Neanderthal fossils – the richest trove of any Altai site – and a range of animal and plant remains, including the abundant bones of bison hunted and butchered by the Neanderthals.
We used optical dating to determine when the cave sediments, artefacts and fossils were deposited, and conducted a detailed study of more than 3,000 stone tools recovered from the deepest archaeological levels. Microscopy analysis revealed that these have remained intact and undisturbed since accumulating during a period of cold and dry climate about 54,000 years ago.
Using a variety of statistical techniques, we show that these artefacts bear a striking similarity to so-called Micoquian artefacts from central and eastern Europe. This type of Middle Palaeolithic assemblage is readily identified by the distinctive appearance of the bifaces – tools made by removing flakes from both sides – which were used to cut meat.
Micoquian biface used as a meat knife by Neanderthals at Chagyrskaya Cave (left, showing both sides); and butchering of horse carcass using an experimentally manufactured biface (right).Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Author provided
Micoquian-like tools have only been found at one other site in the Altai. All other archaeological assemblages in the Altai and central Asia lack these distinctive artefacts.
Neanderthals carrying Micoquian tools may never have reached Denisova Cave, as there is no fossil or sedimentary DNA evidence of Neanderthals there after 100,000 years ago.
The presence of Micoquian artefacts at Chagyrskaya Cave suggests at least two separate dispersals of Neanderthals into southern Siberia. Sites such as Denisova Cave were occupied by Neanderthals who entered the region before 100,000 years ago, while the Chagyrskaya Neanderthals arrived later.
The Chagyrskaya artefacts most closely resemble those found at sites located 3,000–4,000 km to the west, between the Crimea and northern Caucasus in eastern Europe.
Comparison of genetic data supports these geographical links, with the Chagyrskaya Neanderthal sharing closer affinities with several European Neanderthals than with a Neanderthal from Denisova Cave.
When the Chagyrskaya toolmakers (or their ancestors) left their Neanderthal homeland in eastern Europe for central Asia around 60,000 years ago, they could have headed north and east around the land-locked Caspian Sea, which was much reduced in size under the prevailing cold and arid conditions.
Early and later Neanderthal dispersals to southern Siberia.Kseniya Kolobova / Maciej Krajcarz / Victor Chabai, Author provided
Their intercontinental odyssey over thousands of kilometres is a rarely observed case of long-distance dispersal in the Palaeolithic, and highlights the value of stone tools as culturally informative markers of ancient population movements.
Environmental reconstructions from the animal and plant remains at Chagyrskaya Cave suggest that the Neanderthal inhabitants survived in the cold, dry and treeless environment by hunting bison and horses on the steppe or tundra-steppe landscape.
Our discoveries reinforce the emerging view of Neanderthals as creative and intelligent people who were skilled survivors. If this was the case, it makes their extinction across Eurasia even more mysterious. Did modern humans deal the fatal blow? The enigma endures, for now.
New Zealand health authorities are following up reports of a person with coronavirus in the southern New Zealand tourism city of Queenstown.
The novel coronavirus, known as 2019-nCoV, has infected 2800 people and killed at least 80 in China. The outbreak is believed to have emerged late last year from illegally traded wildlife at an animal market in Wuhan, Hubei.
A small number of cases linked to people who travelled from Wuhan have been confirmed in more than 10 countries, including Australia, Thailand, France, Japan and the United States where authorities said they had 110 people under investigation in 26 states.
Director-General of Health Ashley Bloomfield told RNZ Morning Report that local health authorities were following up reports of a person with coronavirus in Queenstown.
The Ministry of Health had heard “through the grapevine” about the case but there was no confirmation.
– Partner –
Dr Bloomfield said a throat swab could be taken and sent to Melbourne for testing if deemed necessary by health professionals.
‘Well-developed protocol’ “We’ve got a really well-developed protocol and case definition for anyone who may be a possible or suspected case … so any clinician or public health unit staff member who is checking someone to see if they may be a case will be following that protocol.”
He said any results from samples sent to Australia could be expected within days.
“We’re using the lab there at the moment and working towards being able to do the test onshore here later this week.”
He said there was no confirmation either on whether the person was a tourist but they had been staying at a hotel.
The Rees Hotel in Queenstown posted to its Facebook page saying it had received rumours that there was an outbreak of coronavirus at the hotel.
“Please note that these rumours are unfounded and untrue as there has been no outbreak of the virus in New Zealand,” the Facebook message said.
This article is published under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.
The Australian government’s Digital Transformation Agency (DTA) has spent more than A$200 million over the past five years developing a National Digital ID platform. If successful, the project could streamline commerce, resolve bureaucratic quagmires, and improve national security.
The emerging results of the project may give the Australian public cause for concern.
Two mobile apps built on the DTA’s Trusted Digital Identification Framework (TDIF) have recently been released to consumers. The apps, myGovID and Digital ID, were developed by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and Australia Post, respectively.
Both apps were released without fanfare or glossy marketing campaigns to entice users. This is in keeping with more than five years of stealthy administrative decision-making and policy development in the National Digital ID project.
Now, it seems, we are set to hear more about it. An existing digital identity scheme for businesses called AUSkey will be retired and replaced with the new National Digital ID in March, and the DTA has recently put out a contract for a “Digital Identity Communication and Engagement Strategy”.
The DTA’s renewed investment in public communications is a welcome change of pace, but instead of top-down decision-making, why not try consultation and conversation?
We fear what we don’t understand
Ever since the Hawke government’s ill-fated Australia Card proposal in the 1980s, Australians have consistently viewed national identification schemes with contempt. Some have suggested that the DTA’s silence comes from fear of a backlash.
History provides insight into some, but not all, of the numerous potential reasons for the DTA’s strategic opacity.
For example, people do not respond positively to what they do not understand. Surveys suggest that fewer than one in four Australians have a strong understanding of digital identification.
The National Digital ID project was launched more than five years ago. Why hasn’t the public become familiar with these technologies?
The TDIF is what’s known as a federated digital identification system. This means it relies on multiple organisations called Identity Providers, who act as central repositories for identification.
In essence, you identify yourself to the Identity Provider, which then vouches for you to third parties in much the same way you might use a Google or Facebook account to log in to a news website.
The difference in this case is that Identity Providers will control, store and manage all user information – which is likely to include birth certificates, marriage certificates, tax returns, medical histories, and perhaps eventually biometrics and behavioural information too.
There are currently two government organisations offering Identity Service Providers: the Australian Tax Office (ATO) and Australia Post. By their nature, Identity Providers consolidate information in one place and risk becoming a single point of failure. This exposes users to harms associated with the possibility of stolen or compromised personal information.
Another weakness of the TDIF is that it doesn’t allow for releasing only partial information about a person. For example, people might be willing to share practically all their personal information with a large bank.
However, few will voluntarily disclose such a large amount of personal information indiscriminately – and the TDIF doesn’t give the option to control what is disclosed.
Securing sovereignty over identity
It might have been reasonable to keep the National Digital ID project quiet when it launched, but a lot has changed in the past five years.
For example, some localities in Canada and Switzerland, faced with similar challenges, chose an alternative to the federated model for their Digital ID systems. Instead, they used the principles of what is called Self Sovereign Identity (SSI).
Self-sovereign systems offer the same functions and capabilities as the DTA’s federated system. And they do so without funnelling users through government-controlled Identity Providers.
Instead, self-sovereign systems let users create, manage and use multiple discrete digital identities. Each identity can be tailored to its function, with different attributes attached according to necessity.
Authentication systems like this offer control over the disclosure of personal information. This is a feature that may considerably enhance the privacy, security and usability of digital identification.
Moving forward
Based on the idea of giving control to users, self-sovereign digital identification puts its users ahead of any institution, organisation or state. Incorporating elements from the self-sovereign approach might make the Australian system more appealing by addressing public concerns.
And self-sovereign identity is just one example of many technologies already available to the DTA. The possibilities are vast.
However, those possibilities can only be explored if the DTA starts engaging directly with the general public, industry and academia. Keeping Australia’s Digital National ID scheme cloaked will only increase negative sentiment towards digital identity schemes.
Even if self-sovereign identity proved appealing to the public, there would still be plenty of need for dialogue. For example, people would need to enrol into the identification program by physically visiting a white-listed facility (such as a post office). That alone poses several technological, economic, social and political challenges.
Regardless of the direction Australia takes for the Digital National ID, there will be problems that need to be solved – and these will require dialogue and transparency.
Government and other organisations may not support a self-sovereign identity initiative, as it would give them less information about and administrative control over their constituents or clients.
Nonetheless, the implementation of a national identity scheme by stealth will only give the Australian public good reason for outrage, and it might culminate in intensified and unwanted scrutiny.
To prevent this from occurring, the DTA’s project needs to be brought out of hiding. It is only with transparency and a dialogue open to all Australians that the public’s concerns can be addressed in full.
When the media report on the crisis of endangered languages, the view there’s an associated loss of culture, identity and even memory, is widely expressed.
While there are very good reasons to deplore the loss of small languages, assuming this loss condemns cultural identity may be unhelpful and reductive to those who have already shifted away from their heritage language.
To test the claim “losing language means losing culture”, I carried out linguistic research on Kriol, a postcolonial language now spoken by thousands of Indigenous Australians in the north of the country.
I found that regardless of the language they speak, people still find ways to express old ways of speaking in a new language, so language doesn’t fundamentally alter their cultural identity. In other words, their culture can shape their language, not just the other way around.
Yugul Mangi Ranger Maritza Roberts speaking in Kriol, showing the uses of the stringybark tree.
Reclaiming suppressed languages
UNESCO’s year-long campaign has highlighted the role of language in preserving cultural identities: its action plan says languages
foster and promote unique local cultures, customs and values.
Highlighting the role of language with respect to culture is important to help minorities access the support they need to maintain or reclaim heritage languages. Many people experience strong emotional attachment to their mother tongue. In Australia and other colonised countries, many Indigenous languages have been actively suppressed.
In such contexts, language maintenance and reclamation constitute responses to historical trauma, as well as acts of resistance.
However, when praise of linguistic diversity does not go hand in hand with nuanced discussion about the complex relationship between language and culture, it can feed the already prevalent misconceptions that language “conditions” culture.
Post-colonial languages
In a country like Australia, where more than 80% of the Indigenous population has adopted new, post-colonial languages, this thinking is oversimplified.
Today, most Indigenous Australians speak Aboriginal English, a form of English with dialectal differences. A few thousand others speak creoles or mixed languages – languages that combine English-like forms with some features of older Australian languages.
This means for the vast majority of Indigenous Australians – and perhaps for descendants of migrants as well – singling out language as one of the main ways to maintain culture may be misplaced, and sometimes plainly hurtful.
Under Australian Native Title laws, for instance, Indigenous groups must demonstrate cultural continuity to be granted legal rights over their traditional land. While language isn’t mentioned in the Native Title Act 1993, the ways language can be used as evidence, and how it can influence court proceedings, is well-documented.
In this context, putting emphasis on traditional languages is a disadvantage for English-speaking Indigenous groups.
This shows that broader colonial ideology is still in play, where Indigenous populations are expected to conform to a static concept of Indigeneity, defined by the coloniser.
For instance, some Australian languages, including Kriol, have a word that means both “feel sorry” and “give”, which fits in well with the moral values of many Indigenous Australian societies. Other examples of possible correlation between language and culture are metaphors, or the expression of kinship relations.
While researchers often note such correlations between language and culture, little scientific research has explored what happens to such linguistic properties when people adopt a new language.
My recent linguistic study has shown how Kriol can preserve many of the meanings and convey the same emotions in the older Australian languages it replaces, such as the critically endangered Dalabon language.
Language is shaped by culture
The basic grammar of Kriol and the shape of its words resemble English, and differ sharply from Dalabon.
But many of the meanings of Kriol words match the meanings of Dalabon words, so culturally specific concepts are preserved, even though the words sound different.
For instance, in Dalabon the word marrbun means both “feel sorry” and “give”, as mentioned. In Kriol, we find the word sori, which sounds like “sorry” in English, but its meanings include “feel sorry” and “give”, just like marrbun. Similar adaptation mechanisms occur throughout the grammar.
What this shows is that language and meaning are highly plastic: they adapt to what speakers have to say. In this way, language is shaped by culture, and even when language is replaced, culture can continue.
This aligns well with the way Kriol speakers perceive their own language. Working with many Kriol speakers in communities near Katherine, Northern Territory, I have learned they regard Kriol as part of their identity. Some wish to maintain Dalabon or other Australian languages, just like they wish to maintain artistic traditions or story telling.
But this doesn’t mean the language they currently speak, although much closer to English, distances them from their own culture and identity.
New cannabis cultivation and possession laws come into effect in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) on Friday, January 31. But they’re not what most cannabis enthusiasts would be hoping for.
The ACT laws are a good first step, but they contradict federal laws that make cultivation and possession of cannabis a criminal offence. And it’s not clear whether these federal laws will continue to be enforced in the ACT.
The new laws also do little to regulate the supply of cannabis or its seeds. Instead, cannabis legislation and regulation should be approached in a similar way to alcohol and tobacco.
The new laws will allow territory residents aged 18 or older to grow cannabis plants at home. There will be a limit of two plants per person and four per household. And each person will be allowed to be in possession of no more than 50 grams of dried cannabis.
Cannabis plants can only be cultivated on private properties. And only by people who usually live there.
These laws won’t impact criminal offences for the large-scale cultivation of cannabis, or the supply of cannabis or cannabis seeds.
The commercial sale of cannabis via retail outlets or coffee shops will also remain prohibited.
However, the laws prompt the obvious question: if people are growing cannabis plants, where are they getting the seeds?
Although a person would not be prosecuted for possession or cultivation of a cannabis plant under the new ACT laws, the person providing the seeds or plants would be committing an offence.
What about the federal laws?
Considerable uncertainty still exists over potential conflicts between these fresh ACT laws and federal laws that criminalise the possession of cannabis.
Under the federal Criminal Code Act 1995, it’s an offence to possess a controlled drug. This can carry a penalty of two years imprisonment.
Attorney-General Christian Porter MP has publicly stated the federal offences will still have full effect in the ACT. As such, the Attorney-General’s office expects ACT police to enforce the federal criminal laws after January 31.
This will result in a bizarre situation where people growing plants at home in the ACT could be breaking federal laws despite being allowed to under local laws.
It’s hard to say how ACT Police will respond to people who use cannabis. The situation will require leadership within the ranks of law enforcement to decide the appropriate response.
The evidence supports decriminalisation
In most of Australia, the possession of cannabis is still a criminal offence. Given 34.8% of Australians aged over 14 have smoked cannabis at least once, many Australians have broken the law.
Diversion schemes typically require people caught with small amounts of cannabis to attend education or drug counselling. These schemes appear cost-effective when compared to imprisonment.
Research suggests prosecuting people for possession of small quantities of cannabis might actually be more harmful than the drug itself, leading to unemployment, relationships issues, and further problems with the law.
Criminalisation also creates a barrier to people seeking drug treatment and provides considerable profits for organised crime.
A step in the right direction
The ACT is leading Australia in progressive drug policy reform; the introduction of this law is another step in the right direction.
However, good laws should be unambiguous and clarify the inconsistencies with the federal law. They should also clarify the legal mechanisms for supply.
A variety of cannabis legalisation models exist overseas, ranging from commercial retail sale and cultivation, to small scale sanctioned cannabis social clubs, which operate in some parts of Spain and the Netherlands. These clubs are not-for-profit collectives where cannabis can be grown and used.
Canada and many states in the US have adopted a commercial retail model, where people can buy cannabis at a local store, similar to alcohol or tobacco. Australia should follow these countries in regulating cannabis in a similar way to how we regulate alcohol and tobacco.
Many Australians feel compelled to help our damaged wildlife after this season’s terrible bushfires. Suggested actions have included donating money, leaving water out for thirsty animals, and learning how to help the injured. But there is an equally, if not more, important way to assist: weeding.
An army of volunteers is needed to help land owners with judicious weed removal. This will help burnt habitats recover more quickly, providing expanded, healthy habitat for native fauna.
Other emergency responses, such as culling feral animals and dropping emergency food from aeroplanes, are obviously jobs for specialists. But volunteer weeding does not require any prior expertise – just a willingness to get your hands dirty and take your lead from those in the know.
Volunteer weeding will help burnt habitats recover more quickly.Silje Polland/Flickr
Why is weeding so critical?
The recent bushfires burned many areas in national parks and reserves which were infested with weeds. Some weeds are killed in a blaze, but fire also stimulates their seed banks to germinate.
Weed seedlings will spring up en masse and establish dense stands that out-compete native plants by blocking access to sunlight. Native seedlings will die without setting seed, wasting this chance for them to recover and to provide habitat for a diverse range of native species.
This mass weed germination is also an opportunity to improve the outlook for biodiversity. With a coordinated volunteer effort, these weeds can be taken out before they seed – leaving only a residual seed bank with no adult weeds to create more seed and creating space for native plants to flourish.
With follow-up weeding, we can leave our national parks and reserves – and even bushland on farms – in a better state than they were before the fires.
Bush regeneration groups are well placed to restore forests after fire, but need volunteers.Flickr
Their efforts eradicated weeds from areas where the problem previously seemed intractable and prevented further weed expansion. Key to success in this case was the provision of funding for coordination, an engaged community which produced passionate volunteers and enough resources to train them.
Fire typically kills these woody shrubs but also stimulates seed germination. Without intervention, broom will form dense stands which out-compete native plant species .
Scotch broom, a native shrub of Western Europe, has infested vast swathes of Australia.Gunter Maywald-CSIRO/Wikimedia
Parks Victoria took up this opportunity after the 2003 fires in the Alpine National Park. They rallied agencies, natural resource management groups and local landholders to sweep up broom . Herbicide trials at that time revealed that to get the best outcome for their money, it was critical to spray broom seedlings early, within the first year and a half.
Managing weeds after fire is currently a high priority at many sites. At the edges of the World Heritage Gondwana rainforests of southwest Queensland and northern and central NSW, there is a window to more effectively control lantana. In many forested areas in NSW, Victoria and South Australia, fire has created an opportunity to address important weed problems.
State government agencies have the mapping capacity to locate these places. Hopefully they can make these resources easy for the public to access soon, so community groups can self-organise and connect with park managers.
A koala badly injured during the Canberra bushfires before it was returned to the wild.ALAN PORRIT/AAP
All this needs money
Emergency funding is now essential to enable community-based weed control programs at the scale needed to have a substantial impact. Specifically, funding is needed for group coordinators, trainers and equipment.
While emergency work is needed to control regenerating weeds in the next 6-18 months, ongoing work is needed after that to consolidate success and prevent reinfestations from the small, but still present, seed bank.
You can volunteer to do your bit for fire recovery right now. In addition to state-agency volunteer websites, there are many existing park care, bush care and “friends of” groups coordinated by local governments. They’re waiting for you to join so they can start planning the restoration task in fire-affected areas.
If we do nothing now, the quality of our national parks will decline as weeds take over and native species are lost. But if you channel your fire-response energy and commitment to help manage weeds, our national parks could come out in front from this climate-change induced calamity.
By all means, rescue an injured koala. But by pulling out weeds, you could also help rescue a whole ecosystem.
Dr Tein McDonald, president of the Australian Association of Bush Regenerators, contributed to this article.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Ellerton, Lecturer in Critical Thinking; Curriculum Director, UQ Critical Thinking Project, The University of Queensland
Few people doubt the value of developing students’ thinking skills. A 2013 survey in the United States found 93% of employers believe a candidate’s
demonstrated capacity to think critically, communicate clearly, and solve complex problems is more important [the emphasis is in the original] than [their] undergraduate major.
A focus on critical thinking is also common in education. In the Australian Curriculum, critical and creative thinking are known as “general capabilities”; the US has a similar focus through their “common core”.
Critical thinking is being taught successfully in a number of programs in Australian schools and universities and around the world. And various studies show these programs improve students’ thinking ability and even their standardised test scores.
But what is critical thinking and how can we teach it?
What we mean by critical thinking
There are many definitions of critical thinking that are vague or ill-formed. To help address this, let’s start by saying what critical thinking is not.
First, critical thinking is not just being smart. Being able to recognise a problem and find the solution are characteristics we associate with intelligence. But they are by themselves not critical thinking.
Intelligence, at least as measured by IQ tests, is not set in stone. But it does not seem to be strongly affected by education (all other things being equal), requiring years of study to make any significant difference, if at all. The ability to think critically, however, can improve significantly with much shorter interventions, as I will show.
Second, critical thinking is not just difficult thinking. Some thinking we see as hard, such as performing a complex chemical analysis, could be done by computers. Critical thinking is more about the quality of thinking than the difficulty of a problem.
So, how do we understand what good quality thinking is?
Critical thinkers have the ability to evaluate their own thinking using standards of good reasoning. These include what we collectively call the values of inquiry such as precision, clarity, depth and breadth of treatment, coherence, significance and relevance.
I might claim the temperature of the planet is increasing, or that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon is greater than it was last year. While these statements are accurate, they lack precision: we would also like to know by how much they are increasing to make the statement more meaningful.
Or I might wonder if the biodiversity of Tasmania’s old growth forests would be affected by logging. Someone might reply if we did not log these forests, jobs and livelihoods would be at risk. A good critical thinker will point out while this is a significant issue, it is not relevant to the question.
A good argument has to be sensitive to the values of inquiry, like relevance.from shutterstock.com
Critical thinkers also examine the structure of arguments to evaluate the strength of claims. This is not just about deciding whether a claim is true or not, but also whether a conclusion can be logically supported by the available data through an understanding of how arguments work.
Critical thinkers make the quality of their thinking an object of study. They are sensitive to the values of inquiry and the quality of inferences drawn from given information.
They are also meta-cognitive – meaning they’re aware of their thought processes (or some of them) such as understanding how and why they arrive at particular conclusions – and have the tools and ability to evaluate and improve their own thinking.
How we can teach it
Many approaches to developing critical thinking are based on Philosophy for Children, a program that involves teaching the methodology of argument and focuses on thinking skills. Other approaches provide this focus outside of a philosophical context.
Teachers at one Brisbane school, who have extensive training in critical thinking pedagogies, developed a task that asked students to determine Australia’s greatest sports person.
Students needed to construct their own criteria for greatness. To do so, they had to analyse the Australian sporting context, create possible evaluative standards, explain and justify why some standards would be more acceptable than others and apply these to their candidates.
They then needed to argue their case with their peers to develop criteria that were robust, defensible, widely applicable and produced a choice that captured significant and relevant aspects of Australian sport.
Learning experiences and assessment items that facilitate critical thinking skills include those in which students can:
challenge assumptions
frame problems collectively
question creatively
construct, analyse and evaluate arguments
discerningly apply values of inquiry
engage in a wide variety of cognitive skills, including analysing, explaining, justifying and evaluating (which creates possibilities for argument construction and evaluation and for applying the values of inquiry)
One strategy that also has a large impact on students’ ability to analyse and evaluate arguments is argument mapping, in which a student’s reasoning can be visually displayed by capturing the inferential pathway from premises to conclusion. Argument maps are an important tool in making our reasoning available for analysis and evaluation.
This map shows part of an argument in favour of giving artificial flowers over real ones.
How we know it works
Studies involving a Philosophy for Children approach show children experience cognitive gains, as measured by improved academic outcomes, for several years after having weekly classes for a year compared to their peers.
Research also shows deliberate attention to the practice of reasoning in the context of our everyday lives can be significantly improved through targeted teaching.
the critical thinking gains measured […] are close to that which could be expected to result from three years of undergraduate education.
Students who are explicitly taught to think well also do better on subject-based exams and standardised tests than those who do not.
Our yet-to-be-published study, using verified data, showed students in years three to nine who engaged in a series of 12 one-hour teacher-facilitated online lessons in critical thinking, showed a significant increase in relative gains in NAPLAN test results – as measured against a control group and after controlling for other variables.
In terms of developing 21st century skills, which includes setting up students for lifelong learning, teaching critical thinking should be core business.
The University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project has a number of tools to help teach critical thinking skills. One is a web-based mapping system, now in use in a number of schools and universities, to help increase the critical thinking abilities of students.
A key question facing us all after Australia’s unprecedented bushfires is how will we do reconstruction differently? We need to ensure our rebuilding and recovery efforts make us safer, protect our environment and improve our ability to cope with future disasters. Australia could learn from the innovative approach India adopted in 2001 after the nation’s second-most-devastating earthquake.
The quake in Gujarat state killed 20,000 people, injured 300,000 and destroyed or damaged a million homes. My research has identified two elements that were particularly important for the recovery of the devastated communities.
First, India set up a recovery taskforce operating not just at a national level but at state, local and community levels. Second, community-based recovery coordination hubs were an informal but highly effective innovation.
Rebuilding for resilience
Scholars and international agencies such as the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) have promoted post-disaster reconstruction as a window of opportunity to build resilience. By that, they mean we not only rebuild physical structures – homes, schools, roads – to be safer than before, but we also revive local businesses, heal communities and restore ecosystems to be better prepared for the next bushfires or other disasters.
This is easier said than done. Reconstruction is a highly complex and lengthy process. Two key challenges, among others, are a lack of long-term commitment past initial reconstruction and a failure to collaborate effectively between sectors.
Reconstruction programs require a balancing of competing demands. The desire for speedy rebuilding must be weighed against considerations of long-term challenges such as climate change adaptation and environmental sustainability.
There will always be diverse views on such issues. For example, planners may suggest people should not be allowed to rebuild in areas at high risk of bushfires. Residents may wish to rebuild due to their connection to the land or community.
Such differences in opinion are not necessarily a hindrance. As discussed below, managing such differences well can lead to innovative solutions.
The 2001 Gujarat earthquake was declared a national calamity. My research examined post-disaster reconstruction processes that influenced community recovery – physical, social and economic. The findings from Gujarat 13 years after the quake were then compared with recovery processes seven years after the devastating 2008 Kosi River floods in the Indian state of Bihar.
Of my key findings, two are most relevant to Australia right now.
India’s government set up a special recovery taskforce within a week of the earthquake. The taskforce was established at federal, state, local and community level, either by nominating an existing institution (such as the magistrate’s court) or by establishing a new authority.
The Australian government has set up a National Bushfire Recovery Agency, committing A$2 billion to help people who lost their homes and businesses rebuild their communities. While Australia effectively has a special taskforce at federal and state level (such as the Bushfire Recovery Victoria agency), we need it at local and community levels too. Moreover, no such agency exists at state level in New South Wales.
Without such a decentralised setup, it will be hard to maintain focus and set the clear priorities that local communities need for seamless recovery.
Second, India’s recovery coordination hub at community level was an innovative solution to meet the need of listening to diverse views, channelling information and coordinating various agencies.
A district-wide consortium of civil society organisations in Gujarat established Setu Kendra – literally meaning bridging centres or hubs.
These hubs were set up informally in 2001. Each hub comprised a local community member, social worker, building professional, financial expert and lawyer. They met regularly after the earthquake to pass on information and discuss solution.
Bushfire Recovery Victoria has committed A$15 million for setting up community recovery hubs, but it remains to be seen how these are modelled and managed.
The community hubs in India have had many benefits. The main one was that the community trusted the information the people in the hub provided, which countered misinformation. A side effect of community engagement in this hub was their emotional recovery.
These hubs also managed to influence major changes in recovery policy. Reconstruction shifted from being government-driven to community-driven and owner-driven.
This was mainly possible due to the Setu Kendras acting as a two-way conduit for information and opinions. Community members were able to raise their concerns with government in a way that got heard, and visa versa.
Due to the success of coordination hubs in Gujarat after 2001, the state government of Bihar adopted the model in 2008. It set up one hub per 4,000 houses. In Gujarat, these hubs continued for more than 13 years.
More than 2.3 million people were affected by the 2008 floods in Bihar, where the state government adopted the community hub model for disaster recovery.EPA/AAP
The UN agency for human settlements, UN-Habitat, notes these community hubs as an innovation worth replicating.
We in Australia are at a point when we need to create such hubs to bring together researchers, scientists, practitioners, government and community members. They need to have an open conversation about their challenges, values and priorities, to be able to negotiate and plan our way forward.
Australia needs a marriage between government leadership and innovation by grassroots community organisations to produce a well-planned recovery program that helps us achieve a resilient future.
2020 is shaping up as a dismal year for the economy, with no progress on many of the key measures that matter for Australians.
Unemployment will stay above 5% and probably rise rather than fall.
Economic growth will continue to have a “1” in front of it, instead of the “2” or “3” that used to be common, and living standards will grow more slowly.
Wage growth, forecast in the budget to climb to 3%, will instead remain stuck near 2.2%, where it has been for half a decade.
Those are the central forecasts of a panel of 24 leading economists from 15 universities in six states assembled by The Conversation to review the year ahead, a year they expect to be marked by one only more interest rate cut, more modest growth in house prices, and a return to slower growth in the share market.
The panel comprises macroeconomists, economic modellers, former Treasury, IMF, OECD, Reserve Bank and financial market economists, and a former member of the Reserve Bank board. Combined, their forecasts are more likely to be correct than those of any individual member. One-third are women.
They expect the long-promised budget surplus to all but disappear as a result of responses to the bushfires and weaker-than-predicted economic growth.
Economic growth
The Treasury believes the Australian economy is capable of growing at a sustained annual pace of 2.7%, but it hasn’t grown that fast since mid-2018. Growth slipped below 2% in March 2019 and hasn’t recovered. It now has been below 2% for three consecutive quarters, the longest period since the global financial crisis.
The panel’s central forecast is for economic growth to stay at or below 2% for at least another year, producing the longest period of low economic growth since the early 1990s recession. The average forecast for the year to December is 1.9%.
Panellist Saul Eslake says it will be the result of persistently slow growth in household disposable incomes, reflecting “very slow growth in real wages, the increasing proportion of gross income absorbed by tax, and weakness in property income (interest and rent) as well as (at the margin) the impact of the drought on farm incomes”.
It will be domestic rather than overseas conditions that hold back Australian growth. US economic growth is expected to remain little changed at 2.1% notwithstanding trade friction with China, and China’s officially reported growth is expected to ease back only slightly from 6% to 5.8%.
Living standards
One of the best measures of overall living standards (the one the Reserve Bank watches) is real net national disposable income per capita, which takes better account of buying power than gross domestic product does. In the year to September it climbed an unusual 3.3%, pushed up by a resurgence in iron ore export prices.
The iron ore price has since slid from US$120 a tonne to around US$90 a tonne, and the panel’s average forecast is for it to fall further.
As a result it expects growth in living standards to slow to 2.4% in 2020, a result that will still be better than between 2012 and 2016 when a dive in export prices sent it backwards.
Growth in nominal GDP, the raw total unadjusted for inflation, is also expected to slow, slipping from 5.4% to 4.4% as export prices weaken, producing a decline in revenue growth the government has already factored in to the budget.
The unemployment rate is expected to end the year near the top of the 5%-to-5.5% band it has been stuck in for the past two years, rather than falling to the 5% forecast in the budget or towards the 4.5% the Reserve Bank believes is possible.
Only one of the panel, Warren Hogan, expects the unemployment rate to end the year below 5%.
Wages and prices
The panel’s central forecast is for inflation to remain below the bottom of the Reserve Bank’s 2-3% target band, where it has been for most of the past five years.
One panellist, Margaret McKenzie, breaks ranks. She expects the drought and bushfires and floods to sharply push up the cost of food and essential items including energy, quickly pushing inflation into the range the authorities have long wanted, but not for the reasons they wanted.
“I don’t think people have thought about it, because there hasn’t been inflation for so long,” she says. “The problem is that the fires are likely to contract an already weak economy, impelling the Reserve Bank to cut interest rates further, even though its inflation targeting regime would tell it not to.”
Wage growth is forecast to be well below the highest inflation forecast and only a little above the central forecast, resulting in continued low real wage growth and seeing the budget miss its wage growth target for the eighth year in a row.
Business
Household spending barely grew in the year to September, inching ahead by a shockingly low 1.2%, the least since the financial crisis, and not enough to account for population growth.
The panel’s central forecast is for a recovery in spending growth to a still-low 2.4%, with spending held back by low consumer confidence and what former Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development director Adrian Blundell-Wignall calls a “sense that we are living on borrowed time”.
“China is slowing, bank-financed housing has been pushing the envelope and is very expensive, and the governments have never had a plan for the next phase of sustainable growth,” he says. “This perception of no confidence in the government has not been helped by the bushfire events.”
There are few signs of a recovery in business investment, notwithstanding record-low interest rates.
The panel’s average forecast is for investment by mining and non-mining companies to grow by only 1.7% and 1.9% in 2020, which will represent a turnaround for mining, in which investment fell 11.2% in the year to September.
Markets
Financial markets should provide less support to households in the year ahead, with the ASX 200 share price index expected to climb only 6.4% after soaring 20% in the year just ended.
None of the panellists expect last year’s growth to continue.
The Australian dollar is expected to end the year at 68 US cents, close to where it is at present. The iron ore price is expected to fall to US$75, a smaller slide than was assumed in the budget.
Home prices
Housing investment (homebuilding) is expected to stabilise in 2020, falling only slightly from here on, after sliding 9.6% in the year to September 2019.
Sydney and Melbourne home prices are expected to continue to recover, growing by 5% in 2020.
Panellist Nigel Stapledon says the higher home prices will in time boost perceptions of wealth, opening up the possibility that consumer spending will “surprise on the upside”.
Interest rates and budget
The panel’s central forecast is for only one more cut in the Reserve Bank’s cash rate this year, in the first half, followed by no further cuts in the second half. This would allow the bank to avoid so-called unconventional monetary policy or “quantitative easing” in which it forces down longer-term rates by buying government and private bonds, an option Governor Philip Lowe said it would only resort to after it had cut its cash rate to 0.25%.
The single cut would take the cash rate to an all-time low of 0.5%. In anticipation the ANZ cut its online saver account rate from 0.1% to 0.05% on Thursday.
The cut could come as soon as next week when the board holds its first meeting for the year on February 4. Governor Lowe has scheduled an address to the National Press Club for the following day.
Most of the panel think quantitative easing will not be needed and many question its effectiveness, saying the government could achieve much more by fully abandoning its commitment to surplus in order to stimulate the economy.
The panel expects the government’s 10-year bond rate to remain historically low at 1.3%. That makes it about as cheap as it has ever been for the government to borrow for worthwhile purposes.
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has abandoned his absolute commitment to return the budget to surplus this financial year, saying his first priority is “meeting the human cost of the bushfires”.
The 2019-20 surplus was forecast at A$7.1 billion in the May budget and then downgraded to $5 billion in the December update.
The panel’s average forecast is for a bushfire-ravaged $2.2 billion.
Most of the panel believe that with good management the government can avoid a recession for another two years, propelling the Australia economy into what will be its 30th straight year of expansion.
On average they assign a 27% probability to a recession within the next two years, down from their average forecast of 29% in June.
Several point out that, whereas the main risks to continued growth come from overseas, China appears to be managing its slowing economy better than expected, although the emergency triggered by the new and deadly Wuhan coronavirus might change that.
Among those who do fear a home-bred recession is Julie Toth who has lifted her estimate of the likelihood of a recession from 25% to 50%, saying growth is already so weak that it won’t take much to send it backwards.
“The bushfire disaster presents the real and immediate possibility of two quarters of negative growth for the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of of 2020,” she says.
“Even if disaster relief and fiscal stimulus are delivered swiftly, resource constraints (a lack of skilled tradespeople, water, equipment and appropriate building materials) mean reconstruction will be very slow.”
The panel began compiling its responses when the bushfires weren’t as bad as they subsequently became and before the emergence of the Wuhan coronavirus.
It delivered its final forecasts on January 20 when the worst of the bushfires appeared to have passed but before the coronavirus had spread to Australia.
The effects of both won’t be known for some time.
2020 is turning out to be a year of uncertainty, as well as low expectations.
What happens when people visit beauty and hair salons? Are trips to the salon simply about shaping how one looks on the outside, or can these spaces involve something deeper?
Research shows that beyond “beauty”, salons can be spaces for clients to have intimate conversations with salon workers.
This means beyond technical hair and beauty skills, working in the industry involves listening to and managing the emotions of clients.
In my research and interviews with salon workers between 2017 and 2019, most described themselves as makeshift counsellors. One sign in a Melbourne shopfront even read
Therapy is expensive, get a haircut instead, we’re great listeners.
Beyond the technical
Research conducted in the United States shows salon workers can act as “lay health educators”. Workers have close physical contact with clients and potentially access to different and diverse communities, depending on the salon.
Some US salon workers have even been engaged to assist public health campaigns, educating the general public about health issues such as melanoma, diabetes, and unintended pregnancy.
Salon workers can develop a “commercial friendship” with clients as they maintain close physical proximity with the client over a long period. But they are neutral figures in relation to emotional disclosures.
This relationship means clients may disclose more details about the troubles in their lives than they would to friends or family. UK research also shows salons are spaces where workers often provide clients with emotional support.
It’s appropriate then that initiatives have emerged across the globe to train hairdressers and other salon workers to respond to client disclosures.
In Victoria the Eastern Domestic Violence Service has been running a program called Hair-3R’s (recognise, respond and refer), to train salon workers to safely manage client disclosures of family violence.
In some US states, “cosmetologists” (hairstylists, manicurists and other salon workers) are legally required to do formal training in domestic violence and sexual assault awareness every two years to renew their salon licenses.
Though they are likely to hear distressing client disclosures, salon workers are not often trained how to cope or respond.Unsplash, CC BY
What workers signed up for?
Expecting salon workers to respond to issues such as family violence is asking a lot. Low wages and sometimes dangerous working conditions persist in the beauty industry.
When I interviewed salon workers trained in the Hair-3R’s program, I found they were relieved to be able to have frank discussions about the nature of their work, and grateful to receive support and guidance in negotiating these issues.
Research has shown salon workers are likely to have clients disclose intimate partner violence to them at some point. But workers I spoke with also mentioned a huge array of different issues clients bring up.
Marriage breakdown, mental health, suicidal ideation, gender transition and job loss were among the client issues reported by workers.
While the majority of conversations a worker has in a day or even over the course of a week may not be so “heavy”, they will likely encounter diverse and sometimes distressing stories, given the huge segment of the community they come into contact with over months and years. Many workers suggested the Hair-3Rs training was the first time they’d spoken about the emotional aspects of their work or had it recognised as something they negotiate daily.
Beyond the surface
Feminists writing about beauty have long focused on the gender expectations maintained in these spaces. From this perspective, salons have been seen as reinforcing stereotypes of how women should look and how they should maintain their bodies.
A reframing of this perspective notes the beauty industry is highly feminised, dominated by workers who are working class and often migrant women. Salon workers are represented as low-skilled “bimbos” in popular culture and the media. It is therefore no surprise the emotional nature of this line of work has remained largely hidden and both economically and culturally undervalued.
In Legally Blonde (2001) the salon relationship extends beyond grooming.IMDB
As the beauty industry continues to boom – a day spa, nail salon or laser hair removal clinic on almost every Australian street corner and dotted throughout our shopping centres – we might speculate people are accessing these services for reasons beyond maintaining appearances.
While some may lay the blame on an increasingly image-soaked world due to the popularity of social media such as Instagram, we might also look to what kind of emotional refuge the salon is providing for a world in crisis.
Further research is needed to identify what can be done to support workers in this industry, who may accidentally find themselves acting as untrained social workers or therapists with little community support or recognition.
How did human intelligence evolve? Anthropologists have studied this question for decades by looking at tools found in archaeological digs, evidence of the use of fire and so on, and changes in brain size measured from fossil skulls.
However, working with colleagues at the Evolutionary Studies Institute of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, we have found a new way to estimate the intelligence of our ancestors.
By studying fossil skulls, we determined how much blood – and how much energy – the brains of ancient hominins required to keep running. This energy use gives us a measure of how much thinking they did.
We found the rate of blood flow to the brain may be a better indication of cognitive ability than brain size alone.
The brain as a supercomputer
Researchers have often assumed increases in intelligence in human ancestors (hominins) occurred as brains grew larger.
This is not an unreasonable assumption; for living primates, the number of nerve cells in the brain is almost proportional to the brain’s volume. Other studies of mammals in general indicate the brain’s metabolic rate – how much energy it needs to run – is nearly proportional to its size.
Information processing in the brain involves nerve cells (neurons) and the connections between them (synapses). The synapses are the sites of information processing, much like the transistor switches of a computer.
The human brain contains more than 80 billion neurons and up to 1,000 trillion synapses. Although it occupies only 2% of the body, the brain uses about 20% of the energy of a resting person.
Some 70% of that energy is used by the synapses to produce neurochemicals that transfer information between neurons.
To understand how much energy the brains of our ancestors used, we focused on the rate of blood flow to the brain. Because blood supplies essential oxygen to the brain, it’s closely related to synaptic energy use.
The human brain requires about 10 mL of blood every second. This changes remarkably little, whether a person is awake, asleep, exercising or solving tricky maths problems.
In this regard, we can view the brain as a rather energy-expensive supercomputer. The greater a computer’s capacity, the more power it needs to stay running – and the bigger its electrical supply cables need to be. It is the same with the brain: the higher the cognitive function, the higher the metabolic rate, the greater the blood flow and the larger the arteries that supply the blood.
Measuring artery size from skulls
The blood flow to the cognitive part of the brain, the cerebrum, comes through two internal carotid arteries. The size of these arteries is related to the rate of blood flow through them.
Just as a plumber would install larger water pipes to accommodate a higher flow rate to a larger building, the circulatory system adjusts the sizes of blood vessels to match the rate of blood flow in them. The rate of flow is in turn related to how much oxygen an organ requires.
We initially established the relationship between blood flow rate and artery size from 50 studies involving ultrasound or magnetic resonance imaging of mammals. The size of the internal carotid arteries can be found by measuring the size of the holes that allow them through the base of the skull.
The arteries that carry blood to the brain pass through small holes in the base of the skull. Bigger holes mean bigger arteries and more blood to power the brain.Roger Seymour, Author provided
Next, we measured these holes in the skulls of 96 modern great apes, including chimpanzees, orangutans, gorillas. We compared the skulls to 11 from Australopithecus hominins that lived approximately 3 million years ago.
Chimpanzee and orangutan brains are approximately 350 mL in volume, while gorilla and Australopithecus are a little larger at 500 mL. Conventional wisdom suggests Australopithecus should be at least as intelligent as the others.
However, our study showed an Australopithecus brain had only two thirds the blood flow of a chimp or orangutan, and half the flow of a gorilla.
Anthropologists have often placed Australopithecus between apes and humans in terms of intelligence, but we think this is likely wrong.
The unique trajectory of human brain evolution
Over time, the brains of our ancestors required more and more energy.Roger Seymour, Author provided
In humans and many other living primates, the rate of internal carotid artery blood flow appears to be directly proportional to brain size. This means if the size of the brain doubles, the rate of blood flow also doubles.
This is unexpected because the metabolic rate of most organs increases more slowly with organ size. In mammals, doubling the size of an organ will normally increase its metabolic rate only by a factor of about 1.7.
This suggests the metabolic intensity of primate brains – the amount of energy each gram of brain matter consumes each second – increased faster than expected as brain size increased. For hominins, the growth was even quicker than in other primates.
Between the 4.4 million year old Ardipithecus and Homo sapiens, brains became almost five times larger, but blood flow rate grew more than nine times larger. This indicates each gram of brain matter was using almost twice as much energy, evidently due to greater synaptic activity and information processing.
The rate of blood flow to the brain appears to have increased over time in all primate lineages. But in the hominin lineage, it increased much more quickly than in other primates. This acceleration went side by side with the development of tools, the use of fire and undoubtedly communication within small groups.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rowan Nicholson, Associate Lecturer and Co-director of the Sydney Centre for International Law, University of Sydney
Should we remember January 26 1788 as “Invasion Day”?
The colonisation of Australia was an invasion from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective.
But critics of the name “Invasion Day” object that it emphasises just one side of the story – that from a European perspective the British merely “settled” land they did not think belonged to anyone, and there was no invasion in the strict legal sense. That is, similar to the way Germany invaded Belgium in 1914.
This objection is misplaced. The name “Invasion Day” does not just reflect an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective. It also reflects the meaning of “invasion” within a European system of law – international law as it operated in the 18th and 19th centuries.
International law played a central role in colonialism that is sometimes overlooked today.
Debates about our history often focus instead on the domestic law that applied inside Britain and its empire. This law denied the pre-colonial peoples of Australia had either property rights in land (the issue that the High Court of Australia reassessed in 1992 in the Mabo case) or sovereignty (meaning the authority to govern territory).
But international law is a separate legal system. It is concerned with whether one nation has sovereignty in relation to other nations. And that is what matters here because it underpins the meaning of “invasion”.
International law in the colonial period, unlike today, had nothing to say about human rights, self-determination or genocide. It was shaped by and for Europeans, who used it to legitimise colonialism.
In the 1880s, for example, Henry Morton Stanley journeyed up the Congo River in Africa and made more than 200 treaties with chiefs in which they ceded their sovereignty to the king of the Belgians in exchange for trinkets or pieces of cloth.
Some international lawyers at the time even divided the world into a hierarchy based on supposed levels of “civilisation”, with Europeans at the top and peoples of Africa and Australia at the bottom.
But even within this system – European, colonialist and sometimes racist – there was pressure to accord a legal status to the supposedly least “civilised” peoples.
Take the African chiefs who signed Stanley’s treaties. The king of the Belgians wanted to be able to exhibit the treaties to rival colonial powers to show he had acquired sovereignty from the chiefs.
To advance his self-interest in this way, however, the king had to accept implicitly that the chiefs had originally had sovereignty themselves. This approach to acquiring colonial territory was common.
Invasion Day protesters during the Australia Day celebrations in Brisbane last year.Glenn Hunt/AAP
The test for sovereignty
International lawyers of the time disagreed about how to explain evidence that the supposedly least “civilised” peoples had sovereignty. Some denied they really had it. As usual with legal issues that were never litigated, we cannot be completely certain.
The key factor was either whether they were politically organised or whether they had an understanding of sovereignty that was compatible with the European understanding.
The pre-colonial peoples of Australia passed the test for having sovereignty. In fact, they passed it comfortably.
An early 20th-century anthropologist, Gerald Wheeler, observed:
The evidence we have been able to collect from the Australian tribes shows us many of the ideas of International Law clearly developed – territorial sovereignty, the sacredness of messengers and envoys, a normal and recognized intercourse over wide areas […]
So, was Australia invaded in a legal sense?
This allows us to answer the question of whether Australia was invaded in a strict legal sense.
irruption by an army or a large multitude of people into another land in order to seize it
the action of invading a country by force of arms.
As these definitions suggest, the central meaning of the word “invasion” in international law was the entry by force by one sovereign into the territory of another sovereign.
This happened on January 26 1788, when agents of the British government, including military officers and marines, entered the sovereign territory of the Gadigal people at Sydney Cove.
It happened again and again over the following century, whenever British governmental forces entered the territory of another Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people to seize that territory.
Indigenous protesters have long sought to change the date of Australia Day.James Ross/AAP
Why ‘Invasion Day’ is a fitting term
International law is, of course, only one point of view.
For advocates of the name “Invasion Day”, it is more important that Australia was invaded from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspective. We do not need European law to validate that perspective, especially not law from the 18th and 19th centuries that is tainted by colonialism and racism.
But if Australia was invaded even from the perspective of this system of law, there is little room left for critics to argue.
The name “Invasion Day” cannot be dismissed as one-sided or legally inaccurate. It might even be seen as a neutral description, in that it accords both with the views of colonised peoples and with a system of law accepted by the colonisers at the time.
Almost one in four cancers detected in men were overdiagnosed in 2012, according to our new research, published today in the Medical Journal of Australia.
In the same year, we found that approximately one in five cancers in women were overdiagnosed.
Overdiagnosis is when a person is diagnosed with a “harmless” cancer that either never grows or grows very slowly. These cancers are sometimes called low or ultra-low-risk cancers and wouldn’t have spread or caused any problems even if left untreated.
This level of overdiagnosis means Australian men are 17% more likely to be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime than they were 30 years ago, while women are 10% more likely.
Cancer overdiagnosis can result in people having unnecessary treatments, such as surgery, radiotherapy and hormone therapy. Being diagnosed with cancer and having cancer treatments can cause physical, psychological and financial harms.
How many cancers were overdiagnosed?
In 2012, 77,000 cancers were diagnosed among Australian men. We estimated that 24% of these (or 18,000 in total) were overdiagnosed, including:
8,600 prostate cancers
8,300 melanomas
860 kidney cancers
500 thyroid cancers.
Some 55,000 cancers were diagnosed in women; 18% of them (11,000) were overdiagnosed. This includes:
4,000 breast cancers
5,600 melanomas
850 thyroid cancers
660 kidney cancers.
These calculations are based on changes since 1982 in the lifetime risk of cancers, after adjusting for other causes of death and changing risk factors.
Because they are more common, prostate and breast cancer and melanoma accounted for the greatest number of overdiagnosed cancers, even though larger percentages of thyroid cancers were overdiagnosed.
In women, for example, 73% of thyroid cancers were overdiagnosed, while 22% of breast cancers were overdiagnosed.
The harms to patients come from the unnecessary surgery, and other treatments, as well as the anxiety and expenses.
Three in four patients with thyroid “cancers” that are overdiagnosed, for example, will almost all have their thyroid completely removed, risk complications, and have to take replacement thyroid medication for the rest of their life.
In addition, there are substantial costs to the health system, and delays in necessary surgery.
Some “good news” is that overdiagnosis appears to be largely confined to the five main cancers mentioned above.
What causes cancer overdiagnosis?
The cause of overdiagnosis differs for each cancer.
For prostate cancer, the cause is the quest for early detection of prostate cancer using the prostate specific antigen (PSA) blood test. A downside of PSA testing is the risk of detecting large numbers of low-risk prostate cancers which may be overtreated.
For breast cancer, the cause is also early detection, through mammography screening which can detect low-risk cancers.
Likewise, detection of low-risk melanoma accounted for most of the melanoma overdiagnosis we observed. Early detection activities again are the likely cause, with many times more skin biopsies being done today than 30 years ago.
Overdiagnosis of kidney and thyroid cancer is due largely to “incidentalomas” – abnormalities found incidentally on imaging done for other reasons – or through over-investigation of mild thyroid problems.
What can we do about it?
Some level of overdiagnosis is unavoidable in a modern health-care system committed to screening to reduce the disease and death burden from cancer.
We want to maximise the timely detection of high-risk cancers that allows the best chance of cure through early surgery and other treatments.
But this is still possible while taking measures to prevent overdiagnosis and overtreatment of low-risk cancers that are better left undetected.
Take South Korea, for example. Following the introduction of a screening program for thyroid cancer, the country saw a 15-fold increase in small, low-risk thyroid cancers. Then it cut back on early detection. This led to a major drop in thyroid cancer rates without any change in death rates.
Rates of PSA testing in Australia are among the highest in the world. Countries where there is less PSA testing, such as the United Kingdom, detect less low-risk prostate cancer, and therefore have less overtreatment.
Trials to wind back treatment of low-risk prostate cancer have resulted in clinical practice guidelines which recommend men with low-risk prostate cancer be offered active surveillance as an alternative to immediate surgery or radiation therapy.
Trials to evaluate less treatment for low-risk breast cancer are now under way and should help wind back breast cancer overtreatment one day.
New screening tests that identify clinically important cancers, while leaving slow- and never-growing cancers undetected, are the holy grail. But they could be some time coming.
In the meantime, health services need to be vigilant in monitoring new areas of overdiagnosis, particularly when investing in new technologies with potential to further increase overdiagnosis.
It started as a New Year’s resolution driven by guilt and a touch of sibling rivalry – but by the end of the year, it taught me valuable lessons as a teacher, including about the benefits of failure.
At Christmas dinner 2018, my sister declared she would buy nothing for a year. After living in Bangladesh for two years, she had seen how the world’s fashion industry was wreaking havoc on the country’s people and environment.
I decided to follow her lead. As an Australian living in Finland, I still can’t imagine going a year without a flight home to see family. So buying nothing (apart from groceries) would do something to offset all those carbon-costly air miles.
I’m also a high school humanities teacher, and realised what I was learning while trying to buy nothing could prove useful in a classroom.
Modelling behaviour
The effectiveness of “modelling” – demonstrating a behaviour, which is then observed and imitated by someone else – as a teaching strategy has long been known in education literature. There is recent evidence to suggest modelling is an effective strategy in education for sustainable development too.
Given this research, I thought modelling sustainable and ethical decision-making while teaching could prompt some interesting discussions, without needing to preach to my students.
This is known as education for sustainable development 1 (ESD1), where the goal is to raise awareness and change students’ behaviours. ESD1 has also been called instrumental ESD. It’s widely used in teacher training courses and school curricula around the world. It involves encouraging students to learn how their behaviours impact the environment, and what behaviours they could substitute or modify to reduce their ecological footprint.
However, some researchers argue this type of education for sustainable development is not enough, and advocate also including emancipatory education for sustainable development, or ESD2. Its goal is to build students’ capacity in more innovative, critical thinking about sustainable development.
As I began my year of buying nothing, I was about to start teaching Year 7 students a unit called “Progress: At What Cost?”. It examines the parallels between the first industrial revolution – a time of extraordinary change, but also labour exploitation, colonisation and huge increases in pollution – and the challenges from progress today, including from climate change, structural inequalities and the technological revolution.
Year 7 International School of Helsinki students pitching ideas at their innovation fair.Author provided
A combination of humanities, English, science and design, the unit culminates with an innovation fair. The students choose one of the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals to solve, and at the fair, students, teachers and parents walk around with $1000 in pretend “seed money” to “invest” with the students whose solutions they like best.
Students trying to win ‘investment’ for their ideas at the innovation fair.Author provided
I’ve come to see these two strands of education for sustainable development as complementary. The first, more concrete ESD1 – learning about the global supply chain, our ecological footprints and low-carbon alternatives – allows students to see the impact of their actions today. ESD2 encourages students to imagine the challenges they might face in future, as well as new solutions.
If I think about what improved in my classroom because of my new year’s resolution, the biggest gains in my students’ and my own thinking came from discussing my failures.
In a 24 hour tech-free challenge, the author discovered she was more hooked on her phone than her students.EPA/Etienne Laurent
I didn’t make it the whole year without buying anything. I bought four things: food containers so I could avoid plastic wrap, new running shoes when my old ones began falling apart, a secondhand bike after mine was stolen and a secondhand phone when mine died in a storm.
I went about a week without a phone. It turned out I was as addicted to it as the teenagers in my class. This sparked a conversation about smart phones, screen-time and social media addiction as added costs of progress, and a class challenge to go tech-free for 24 hours. Two students out of the 36 in my class made it. I didn’t.
I decided to buy a secondhand “new” phone. I talked to my students about my checklist of sustainable consumption questions, which helped me buy almost nothing all year:
Could I go without it? (No, as it turned out with my phone: I am an addict.)
Could I repair what I had? (I tried drying my old phone out in a bag of rice for two days, but it didn’t work.)
Could I buy a secondhand one? (Yes! I got one from Swappie.)
What I saved and learned
As my year of buying almost nothing in 2019 came to a close, I had no motivation to hit the post-holiday sales. I’d also saved at least few thousand dollars, which instead went towards paying off my mortgage and more meals out with friends.
At the beginning of this new school year, I don’t pretend to have all the answers about living sustainably. But as a consumer and as a teacher, there’s a lot I can do. I can support my students’ activism, including if they choose to join a Fridays for future school strike for the climate. I can support – and challenge – their critical reasoning capacity in our classrooms the rest of the week. Each of us can make a difference – and we can all start by practising what we preach.
Every author is asked by new writers for advice. There is, however, no all-encompassing, single answer that also happens to be correct. Quite a lot of commonly offered suggestions (“write every day”) don’t work for everyone and must be approached with caution.
A few years ago, I set out to create a list that will benefit all new writers. I put ten commandments through the wringer of my peers, who suggested modifications and noted that this list applies not just to new writers but to writers at every stage of their career. Indeed, I’ve needed reminding of more than one myself.
Here, then, are the 10½ commandments of writing – with an extra one for free.
1. Read widely
To succeed as a writer, you must occasionally read. Yet there are wannabe-novelists who haven’t picked up a book in years. There are also, more tragically, writers too busy to engage with the end-product of our craft. If the only thing you’re reading is yourself you are bound to miss out on valuable lessons.
The same applies to reading only within a favourite genre. A varied diet will strengthen your literary muscles.
2. Write
No need to thrash out 1,000 words a day or pen a perfect poem before breakfast, but you do have to write. The fundamental qualification for being a writer is putting words on the page.
If you aren’t doing that now, it’s possible you never will.
3. Follow your heart
When you really want to write literary fiction, but the market wants paranormal romance, write literary fiction. Chasing paranormal romance will be futile. Writing well is hard enough without cynicism getting in the way.
Passion doesn’t always pay, but it increases the odds of your work finding a home.
The best books come from the heart.Brooke Cagle/Unsplash
4. Be strategic
But the choice is never between just literary fiction and paranormal romance. You might have poetry and narrative non-fiction passion projects as well, and it’s possible narrative non-fiction will appeal to the widest audience. If a wider audience is what you want, narrative non-fiction is the one to choose.
If, however, you don’t give two hoots about your audience, write what you like.
There are lots of different kinds of writers and lots of different paths to becoming the writer you want to be.
5. Be brave
Writing is hard, intellectually and physically. It also takes emotional work, dealing with exposure, rejection, fear and impostor syndrome. It’s better you know this upfront, in order to fortify yourself.
These crises, however, are surmountable. We know this because there are writers out there, leading somewhat normal lives, even healthy and happy ones. You can too, if you don’t give up.
The ones who persist are the ones who prevail.
6. Be visible
Many writers would prefer they remain hidden in a dark cave for all eternity. But stories demand to be communicated, which means leaving that cave. Whether it’s you or your written word, or both, broaching the bubble of self-isolation is important.
This doesn’t mean assaulting every social platform and attending every festival and convention. Find the kind of engagement that suits you and embrace it, and don’t overdo it. Remember: you still have to write.
You have to come out from there at some point.Matthew Henry/Unsplash
7. Be professional
Don’t lie. Don’t belittle your peers and don’t steal from them. Keep your promises. Communicate. Try to behave like someone people will want to work with – because we all have to do that, at some point.
8. Listen
Heed what people you’re working with are saying, because you never know what gems of knowledge you might glean – about craft, about the market, about something you’re working on – among the knowledge you (think you) already possess.
9. Don’t settle
Every story requires different skills. You’ll never, therefore, stop learning how to write. The day you think you’ve worked it out is the day the ground beneath you begins to erode, dropping you headlong into a metaphorical sinkhole – and nobody wants that. Least of all your readers.
Readers can tell when you’re getting lazy, just like they can tell when you’re faking. You’re one of them. Deep down, you’ll be the first to know.
10. Work hard
Put in the hours and you’re likely to get some return on your investment. How many hours, though?
There’s a wonderful saying: “Even a thief takes ten years to learn her trade.” Writing is no different to any other career. Hope for overnight success; plan for being like everyone else.
The bonus commandments
When I put this list to my friends, several raised the importance of finding your people. Although I agree this is an important principle, I would argue it is implicit in commandments 6-8: these have no meaning without engaging. I decided to encapsulate this as 10.5. Embrace community
Find those who will walk alongside you.Kenny Luo/Unsplash
After I’d been teaching and giving talks on this topic for several years, someone suggested another commandment that lies beneath the rest. It is so fundamental none will work unless you have this in spades. It is 0. Really want it, which sounds so obvious that it barely needs stating – except it does.
One day, I may no longer want to write. If that happens, I will take every mention of writing from this list and substitute the name of a new vocation – because this list applies to everything.
An American environmental journalist accused of violating the terms of his visa has been freed after three days in jail and is likely to be deported soon, a top Indonesian government minister said, reports The New York Times.
The journalist, Philip Jacobson, 30, who works for the nonprofit news site Mongabay and is known for exposing environmental damage and corporate misconduct, was arrested on the island of Borneo after attending a public meeting between officials and indigenous leaders.
Immigration officials said he had been conducting journalistic activities while on a business visa, which was not permitted, and that he faced up to five years in prison, writes Times reporter Richard C. Paddock from Jakarta.
Award-winning Mongabay editor Philip Jacobson … his arrest comes shortly after Human Rights Watch issued a report documenting rising violence against activists and environmentalists in Indonesia. Image: Mongabay
The Minister for Political, Legal, and Security Affairs, Mohammad Mahfud MD, met on Friday with the United States ambassador to Indonesia, Joseph R. Donovan. He told reporters afterward that the case would be handled as an administrative matter punishable by deportation, not as a crime.
The minister set no timetable for deporting Jacobson and indicated that the authorities were still investigating whether he had broken any laws. Since his release on Friday, Jacobson has been free to move around the city of Palangkaraya, where he was arrested, but not to travel outside the city.
– Partner –
“We will try to just deport him soon if he didn’t commit any other crime,” Mahfud said.
A State Department spokesman said the United States Embassy in Jakarta had been in frequent communication with Jacobson since he was first contacted by Indonesian immigration authorities and that it was following his case closely.
Moved from jail A story posted on Mongabay’s website said that Jacobson had been moved from the jail, where he had shared a cell with five other prisoners, to “city detention”.
“We are grateful that authorities have made this accommodation and remain hopeful that Phil’s case can be treated as an administrative matter rather than a criminal one,” said Mongabay’s founder and chief executive, Rhett A. Butler.
Indonesia requires visiting foreign journalists to obtain a journalist visa, a cumbersome and lengthy process that allows the authorities to question an applicant’s reporting plan, deny a visa without explanation or take no action at all.
On Tuesday, the immigration authorities arrested him and put him in jail, signaling that he could face criminal charges.
Jacobson’s reports for Mongabay include an article about a paper company that he said had illicitly set up a shell company to secretly clear forest in Borneo, and another that analysed the environmental record of Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo.
Arvin Gumilang, a spokesman for Indonesia’s immigration department, said Jacobson had visited Indonesia several times on a business visa, and that he had been arrested after being reported to the authorities by an interviewee.
Disturbing case He was not arrested because of any articles published by Mongabay, Gumilang added.
Rights activists said Jacobson’s case was disturbing and highlighted the need for Indonesia to loosen restrictions on journalists.
“This arbitrary arrest is an unacceptable attack on freedom of the press in the country,” said Amnesty International Indonesia’s executive director, Usman Hamid.
“Respect for the right to freedom of expression is a pillar of any rights-respecting society, whether it is holding institutions to account or highlighting environmental concerns.”
Dera Menra Sijabat contributed reporting to this Times story.
Prime Minister Tuilaepa Dr Sa’ilele Malielegaoi has attacked the Samoa Observer, accusing the nation’s only daily newspaper of being “nosy,” spreading “lies” and employing “kids” whose writing, he says, are misleading the public.
Tuilaepa issued his attack in response to the Samoa Observer’s coverage of the Legislative Assembly’s decision to ban the media from pre-Parliament briefings last week.
Speaking during his weekly media programme with Radio 2AP, Tuilaepa defended the decision, saying the media had no business being present during pre-Parliament briefings.
The Samoa Observer editorial on “accountability”, 22 January 2020
“The truth is that the media should have never been allowed to poke their noses into this thing,” said Tuilaepa.
“The meeting is for Members of Parliament so they could be briefed [about the bills to be discussed in Parliament].
– Partner –
Tuilaepa said the Samoa Observer liked to meddle in things it had no business being involved in. He said that the newspaper wanted to be first [to report on laws] and yet the legislation had not reached the leaders of the country.
“This is kids stuff,” the Prime Minister said, adding that in Samoan culture, it was only appropriate “that this stuff should be known to the leaders first”.
“And here we have these kids poking their noses into legislation that is just being discussed.”
Briefings recent The Prime Minister also reminded that pre-Parliament briefings were fairly recent.
“What’s happening now is that if Parliament convenes on Tuesday, a special meeting is held for all Members of Parliament to attend, where the CEOs and relevant officials explain all the bills and legislation that will later be tabled and discussed in Parliament,” Tuilaepa said.
“This is necessary to keep all Members of Parliament informed and to make their work easier. It doesn’t stop a Cabinet Minister from explaining [a bill] during an actual Parliament session but at least when the Minister speaks, members would have already had an understanding of the bills.”
Tuilaepa said the briefings improved the work of Parliament.
“It’s a big help to make the Members of Parliament understand the bills, keeping in mind that legislation is not that simple.
“In the past, Members of Parliament were only given new laws just before a session opens and there was no proper explanation. There was only be a brief from the minister when the bill was tabled for the second reading.”
The Prime Minister said the right time for the media to report on Parliamentary proceedings was when the House was in session.
‘Right time’ “That is the right time for them,” Tuilaepa said.
“I think these newspapers should order (fa’atonu) these kids who don’t understand. All they’re doing is reporting wrong information about laws that haven’t been discussed by leaders, which in turn misleads people.”
He also rejected suggestions that the ban on the media was restricting the public’s right to information.
“Keep in mind those days are different from these days. Remember, the reason why they (media) come is because they want to understand.”
Today, Tuilaepa said “e leai se mea e kaoga aku ai fua i kokogu.” (There is no need for them to be in there).
“The Government is explaining everything on Radio 2AP, this is also on digital and Facebook so there are three ways where these [explanations] are being publicised.
“So these kids-like opinions making it look like the Government has prohibited the releasing of information is a reflection of the decision to employ kids to write stories.”
Observer attacked It was then the Prime Minister again turned on the Samoa Observer.
“That’s why the Observer is always wrong and when they bring stuff, we make an effort to correct them, or even take them to Court, because they are wrong,” he said.
“Maybe this [conversation with 2AP] is useful so the Observer can hire boys and girls who are educated to write their stuff and know where to go.”
Tuilaepa also accused “newspapers” of spreading misinformation. He said this was why the government’s decision to live stream his media interviews was important.
“The newspapers have been spreading lies overseas which stir up trouble and cause people to be jealous,” he said.
“This is why so many Samoans overseas appear to have the wrong thinking. It is because of the way these matters are being reported just to try and sell their newspapers and yet it is creating friction between the government and Samoans overseas who hate the government.
‘Nothing bad’ “And yet nothing bad is happening.”
Tuilaepa added that the media was only interested in negative stories.
“With some people, they come and say to me, Sole, looking at the reports, it appears the only thing Samoan elderly men are doing is violating their daughters,” Tuilaepa said.
“But that’s because of the reports from here saying that the country is at war. See the kind of thinking being created by these people [news media].”
Quotes taken from a translation of what the Prime Minister said in Samoan. The transcript of the Samoan interview is on page 70 of the Sunday Samoan today. Mata’afa Keni Lesa is editor of the Samoa Observer. His editorial on the issue is here.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sanjaya Senanayake, Associate Professor of Medicine, Infectious Diseases Physician, Australian National University
New South Wales Health has confirmed three men in their 30s, 40s and 50s in Sydney have tested positive to the new Wuhan coronavirus after returning from China.
The outbreak is still in its early days, but the early identification and isolation of people suspected of having the virus will go a long way to preventing local transmission in Australia.
How many people have been infected worldwide?
There are now 1,323 confirmed cases of the Wuhan coronavirus worldwide, mostly among people in China.
The virus has also claimed 41 lives, including the youngest victim, a 36-year-old man in Wuhan.
Cases have also been identified in Japan, South Korea, the United States, France, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam.
The epicentre of the outbreak seems to be a seafood and live animal market in Wuhan. It was initially thought transmission had been from infected animals to those people at the market, with no or limited person-to-person spread.
Most of those who have died from the virus appear to have underlying health conditions, and we know for sure in the case of ten people whose health information has been released.
These people suffered from a range of chronic conditions, including high blood pressure (41%), diabetes (29%), stroke (18%), as well as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, coronary artery disease, chronic kidney disease and Parkinson’s disease.
If this pattern continues with the mounting death toll, older men with underlying health problems are at highest risk of dying.
How does it spread?
If the Wuhan coronavirus behaves like the other human coronaviruses such as SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and MERS (Middle East respiratory syndrome), droplets of saliva, urine, faeces and blood could all be infectious.
Contact with these substances – directly from people while they’re infectious, or indirectly from surfaces contaminated with these body substances – could lead to infection.
This is why prompt isolation of suspected cases and good infection control practises are so important, especially if a person turns into a “super spreader”. This means they produce large amounts of virus and are unusually infectious.
The World Health Organisation estimates the coronavirus has a reproduction number (R0) of 1.4-2.5. This means one infected person has the ability to infect 1.4-2.5 susceptible people. But this figure could be revised as the outbreak evolves.
The risk of transmission for SARS was highest five to ten days into the illness. If people were isolated early on in their illness, after showing symptoms, they were unlikely to infect anyone else.
But one study showed it was possible to be infectious with the Wuhan coronavirus without showing symptoms. This raises the possibility of an infected person transmitting the virus to others without knowing they’re sick. This would make it much harder for health authorities to identify and isolate the infectious people and to control the outbreak.
State and territory guidelines advise GPs and hospitals to insist people suspected of the virus wear masks and are isolated as soon as possible. They should also call ahead to their GP practice or hospital, so precautions can be in place before their arrival.
If the virus started to spread in Australia, which is unlikely, health authorities would likely advise people to avoid large gatherings and ensure they washed their hands frequently.
There is a role for masks when going to public places but their effectiveness depends on the type of mask, the duration it’s worn, and how well it’s fitted.
John Minto praises Iraqi protests against US aggression in the Middle East and calls for NZ troops to be recalled at a rally in Auckland’s Aotea Square today. Video: David Robie/Cafe Pacific
Pacific Media Centre
Veteran campaigner John Minto, UNITE union national director Mike Treen and other speakers today called on New Zealanders to “mobilise” against involvement in any war on Iran.
Hundreds were at the rally in Aotea Square in Auckland followed by a march to the United States consulate in protest over its “warmongering” in the Middle East.
“Make Love Not War” placard at today’s Aotea Square rally. Image: David Robie/Cafe Pacific
“Don’t Attack Iran”, “No war with Iraq or Iran!”, “NZ Troops out Now!” and “Shut down the Waihopai Spy Base!” and other slogans featured on placards at all three protests.
– Partner –
“All foreign troops – including New Zealand soldiers – need to leave Iraq now,” said Minto.
“We need to mobilise much bigger numbers than we did in 2003 – and I think we will.”
Minto said for NZ and other foreign soldiers to remain there in defiance of the Iraqi government’s recent request for them to leave was an “act of war”.
Peace and justice protesters at the Aotea Square rally today. Image: David Robie/Cafe Pacific
Protest support Support for the Auckland protest came from the Green Party, First Union, Unite Union, Love Aotearoa Hate Racism, Radio Inqilaab, Migrant Workers Association of Aotearoa, Anti-Bases Campaign and Socialist Aotearoa.
“Since calling this protest we have received endorsements from across New Zealand and as a result, GPJA has changed its name to Global Peace and Justice Aotearoa,” said Treen.
“We seek to link activists from around the country to build a strong movement for peace and justice.”
Those backing the protest include Iranian-born MP Golriz Ghahraman, Green Party foreign affairs, defence, and human rights spokesperson. who was unable to attend in person.
“My apologies and huge appreciation for the kaupapa of the anti-war march in Auckland, especially as a victim of American war profiteering in Iran and Iraq,” she told the organisers in a message of support.
Veteran campaigner John Minto speaking at the GPJA peace and justice rally in Auckland today. Image: David Robie/Cafe PacificPhotographer John Miller points out Roger Fowler in an earlier antiwar protest taken by him in the exact spot 48 years ago. Image: David Robie/Cafe PacificThe peace and justice movement’s new “sound machine” in action. Image: David Robie/Cafe Pacific
The first Australian case of Wuhan coronavirus has been confirmed, with a man being held under isolation in a Melbourne hospital.
News of the case came after Chinese authorities said they were treating 1287 patients with the virus, while the death toll has risen to 41.
The Melbourne patient is a Chinese man in his 50s who recently spent time in the city of Wuhan, where the deadly outbreak is believed to have originated in an illegal wildlife market.
New South Wales Health has confirmed five people in the state are being tested for coronavirus, but none of those cases have been confirmed.
– Partner –
Two people were discharged after returning negative test results in NSW yesterday. A child on an incoming flight prompted a scare at Sydney International airport last night, but Sydney Children’s Hospital says the child was assessed and then released.
European cases Europe’s first three cases were confirmed in France on Friday, with two patients being hospitalised in Paris and the other in the south-western city of Bordeaux.
On the eve of the Lunar New Year, transportation has been shut down in at least 13 Chinese cities with a combined population of some 36 million people.
At least eight hospitals in Wuhan issued public calls for donations of masks, goggles, gowns and other protective medical gear, according to notices online.
China’s government announced it was sending in military medics to Wuhan.
The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared the new coronavirus an “emergency in China” but stopped short of declaring it of international concern.
Symptoms include fever, difficulty breathing and coughing. Most of the fatalities have been elderly people, many with pre-existing conditions, the WHO said.
Thailand has confirmed four cases, Japan, South Korea and the United States have confirmed two cases each, while Taiwan and Singapore have reported one each.
Indian nurse Indian authorities say an Indian nurse working in Saudi Arabia has also been infected, but Saudi health authorities say there has been no cases in the country so far.
Airports worldwide are screening passengers arriving from China, with the US warning travellers to exercise increased caution in China.
Hong Kong, which has two confirmed cases, is turning two holiday camps into quarantine stations as a precaution. Taiwan has banned anyone from Wuhan from going to the island.
Meanwhile, the Australian Federal government has raised travel advice for the provinces of Wuhan and Hubei in China to the highest level, due to the threat posed by the coronavirus.
The level four warning urges Australians not to travel to the region.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne said Chinese authorities had restricted travel in at least five Hubei cities and Australians going there may not be able to leave until restrictions are lifted.
Travellers are being warned that the level of assistance the government can provide is limited.
This article is published under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.
The US president “had no plan, no scheme, no constructive ideas whatever”, according to one of the world’s most influential economists.
He was “in many respects, perhaps inevitably, ill-informed”. He was “slow-minded and bewildered”, and failed to remedy these defects by seeking advice. He gathered around him businessmen, “inexperienced in public affairs” and “only called in irregularly”.
This assessment was written a century ago, in 1919, by the up-and-coming economist John Maynard Keynes.
The president was Woodrow Wilson, whom Keynes criticised for his inability to influence Europe’s post-first world war settlement in a way more likely to lead to peace and prosperity.
A century later the United States has another president out of his depth in global affairs. Wilson, at least, was a “generously intentioned” man. What would Keynes make of Donald Trump, whose policies are driven by a sense of entitlement and fear of being played for a sucker?
This week, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump flagged new fronts in his dangerous campaign of economic nationalism. He reaffirmed his intention to reshape the World Trade Organization, which he said been “very unfair to the United States for many, many years”.
He fretted about the “tremendous advantages” given to China and India. He threatened tariffs on European cars if the European Union didn’t agree to a “fair” free-trade deal.
The barrier-besotted president is pretty much everything Keynes warned against as ruinous to the prospects of a lasting peace.
A tale of two presidents
Keynes had observed Wilson at the talks in Paris to conclude the Treaty of Versailles, which set out the detail of terms and conditions following Germany’s surrender (on November 11 1918) to end the war.
Wilson had proposed 14 points for a “just and stable peace” but proved completely ineffectual at the talks. The result was a treaty with terms so punitive for Germany they arguably created the conditions for Adolf Hitler to come to power, and thus led to the second world war.
Wilson’s great failure was his inability to prevent punitive action. Trump’s is his love of punitive action. If his default stance in international diplomacy was to be summed up in a three-word slogan, it would be “Make Them Pay”.
In the longer term his administration’s intransigence on climate change may well prove Trump’s worst policy legacy to the world. But right now he is doing most damage through bringing back tariffs, particularly in the trade war started with China.
Trump has claimed (more than a hundred times in 2019, by one count) that he has made China pay by imposing tariffs on Chinese exports to the US. The truth, of course, is that US import tariffs “were almost completely passed through into US domestic prices”. China pays through its goods being less competitive.
Its initial modelling estimated the tit-for-tat tariffs would reduce the level of global GDP in 2020 by 0.8 percentage points. Trump’s “biggest deal anybody has ever seen” will reduce that harm, but by just 0.3 percentage points, meaning world growth will be 3.3%, rather than 3.8% in 2020. And that’s only, says IMF chief economist Gita Gopinath, if the deal proves durable.
The IMF’s October 2019 modelling included a breakdown of how much various economies would suffer in 2020 from the trade war. It estimated China’s real GDP would be 2 percentage points lower than otherwise, with the US down 0.6 percentage points. Europe and Japan would lose about 0.5 percentage points.
China’s economy is growing at three times the rate of the US – an estimated 6% compared with 2% – so the hit is almost equal. In terms of lost GDP per capita – a proxy measure for how much the tariffs cost individuals on average – the cost is about US$400 a year for both US and Chinese citizens.
Given China’s median income is well below that of the US, that forgone extra income hurts more in China – something fitting the Trumpian narrative that the trade war is making China pay more.
But the lesson of history is that punitive actions come back to bite. As Keynes so eloquently wrote a century ago, “the prosperity and happiness of one country promotes that of others”.
Crucial to peace and prosperity, Keynes said, was free trade, which he hoped could mitigate the adverse “new political frontiers now created between greedy, jealous, immature, and economically incomplete nationalist States”.
Wilson aspired but failed to replace a world order based on conflict between great powers with one based on rules and reason. Trump, by contrast, seems to prefer conflict over rules and reason.
A punitive approach to international economic relations failed a century ago. We have good reason to fear it now.
The bluehead wrasse is a fish that lives in small social groups in coral reefs in the Caribbean. Only the male has a blue head – signalling his social dominance over a harem of yellow-striped females.
If this male is removed from the group, something extraordinary happens: the largest female in the group changes sex to become male. Her behaviour changes within minutes. Within ten days, her ovaries transform into sperm-producing testes. Within 21 days she appears completely male.
But how does the wrasse change sex, and why did evolution select this system?
Also, given that fish share sex-determining genes with mammals, would an understanding of this provide new insight into how sex works in humans and other animals?
How does the transformation happen?
The trigger for sex change in the bluehead wrasse and some other species is social. When the male fish is removed, the largest female immediately senses his absence and adopts full male breeding behaviours the same day.
How this social cue translates into molecular action remains a bit of a mystery, but it probably involves stress. High levels of the stress hormone cortisol are associated with temperature-based sex determination in other fish and reptiles. Cortisol probably alters reproductive function by impacting sex hormone levels.
Stress could be the unifying mechanism that channels environmental information into a change in sex.
Our research traced changes in the activity of all 20,000-odd bluehead wrasse genes during the female to male transformation.
Unsurprisingly, we found the gene that produces the female hormone (estrogen) rapidly shuts off, and genes responsible for making male hormones (androgens) are turned on.
Hundreds of other genes required for being female (including genes that make egg components) also progressively shut down, while genes required for maleness (including genes that make sperm components) turn on.
Epigenetics
We also noticed changes in the activity of developmentally important genes whose roles in sex determination remain unknown. This included genes known to “epigenetically” regulate the activity of other genes.
Epigenetics refers to regulation “above the gene”. For example, there are many fish and reptile species in which the sex of developing embryos is determined by environmental cues, such as the temperature at which eggs are incubated. The sex is not determined by different genes, but by the environment impacting the activity of these genes.
Similar mechanisms regulate adult sex change in fish, so this may be important in translating the social cue into molecular action.
Surprisingly, we saw the turn-on of some powerful genes that are active in embryos and stem cells. These genes keep cells in a neutral embryo-like state, from which they can mature (differentiate) into any tissue type. They can also revert differentiated cells to an embryo-like state.
This suggests that transitioning from ovaries to testes in wrasse involves reversing the cell differentiation process – something scientists have argued about for decades.
Clown fish begin life as males, then change into females, and kobudai do the opposite. Some species, including gobies, can change sex back and forth. The transformation may be triggered by age, size, or social status.
Sex change is an advantage when an individual’s reproductive value is greater as one sex when it is small, and greater as the other sex when it grows bigger.
If females benefit more than males from being larger (because they can lay more eggs), male-to-female sex change is most advantageous. But if (as for wrasse) males gain more from being large, because they can better defend their breeding territories and mate with many females, female-to-male sex change is optimal.
Sex change might also advantage a population recovering from overfishing, which often targets larger fish and leaves the population deficient in one sex. Thus, a mechanism for replacing the missing sex would be an advantage.
Why can’t humans change sex naturally?
Male and female wrasse differ in size, colour, behaviour, but especially in their reproductive organs – the ovary and testes.
Sex change in the wrasse involves complete remodelling of the gonad from an ovary producing eggs to a testis producing sperm.
This differs from other fish that routinely change sex when they get big enough. Their gonads contain both male and female tissues, and sex change occurs when one outgrows the other. So, fish employ all sorts of strategies to get the most out of sex.
In contrast, humans and other mammals determine sex via a gene on the male-only Y chromosome. This gene triggers the formation of testes in the embryo, which unleash male hormones and direct male development of the baby.
The human sex system is nowhere near as flexible as that of fish or reptiles. There is no evidence any environmental factors influence the sex determination of mammalian embryos, let alone cause sex change in adults.
That said, humans share with all vertebrates (including fish) about 30 genes that control ovary or testis differentiation. Mutation in any of these genes can tilt development toward male or female, resulting in atypical sexual development, but never sex change.
Perhaps an understanding of epigenetic changes in fish sex can offer us valuable insight, as we wrestle with new ideas about human sex and gender.
Last year on Australia Day, Prime Minister Scott Morrison used Facebook to describe Australia as a place “made up of so many peoples”. But he also stressed the importance of January 26 as the day Australia “did change forever” and said all Australians “must come together” on this day.
Australia Day provides prime ministers with a platform to talk about national identity. Our leaders typically seize the opportunity to communicate their personal understanding of what “Australianness” is. They do so by mobilising the history of the nation, the politics of the moment and the ideology of their party.
But Australia Day also provokes fierce public debate over Indigenous dispossession, disenfranchisement and discrimination. The holiday doesn’t mean the same thing to all people, just as national identity doesn’t mean the same thing.
In a new research project, we used content analysis to examine all prime ministerial speeches on Australia Day from 1990-2017. This allowed us to quantitatively see how prime ministers represent Australian national identity through language over time.
Our study found that prime ministers have consistently described Australianness as being male, heterosexual, white and having few class divisions. We found this pattern across both time and party.
Australia Day has typically been a time for leaders to stress unity and traditional Australian values.Mick Tsikas/AAP
Let’s not talk about class
Australia is a class-divided society. But prime ministers do not acknowledge this fact on Australia Day, regardless of their party.
We believe very deeply that a person’s worth is determined by their character and by the effort they put into being a good citizen, not according to their social class.
But prime ministers also avoid class as it hampers the myth-making of a unified Australian society. This undermines their rhetorical attempts to bring the nation together.
A bloke’s Australia
The overall tone of leaders’ speeches on Australia Day consistently refers to a patriarchal and heteronormative view of Australian identity.
For instance, we found male Australia Day award winners are mentioned in prime minister speeches at a rate of 3:2 compared to female recipients.
Howard dedicated large parts or whole Australia Day addresses to the achievements of Australian male cricketers such as Don Bradman (1997), Mark Taylor (1999), and Steve Waugh (2004). But he only managed two sentences when female sprinter Cathy Freeman won Australian of Year in 1998.
John Howard often used Australia Day speeches to glorify patriarchal and heteronormative norms.AAP Image/Alan Porritt
We also found men are consistently portrayed as strong and brave nation builders. In contrast, women are described as passive carers and mothers serving the nation.
In 2011, Julia Gillard described Queensland Premier Anna Bligh as having “steel in her backbone” yet also “occasional tears in her eyes” in her response to devastating floods.
Gillard also emphasised the protective masculinity of the Defence Forces, describing the “brave man […] who waded through chest high water to rescue an elderly lady” in the floods, as well as the diggers in Afghanistan who were “protecting the weak and allowing little girls to learn to read”.
Here in this country […] we are as new as the little baby in the arms of her migrant mother.
It’s important to note, too, there has only been a single mention of queer identity on Australia Day since 1990. This was when LGBTI+ rights advocate Rodney Croome was nominated for Australian of the Year in 2015.
activist who more than anyone else ended legal sanctions against gay people in this country.
Julia Gillard emphasised the masculine bravery of the Defence Forces on Australia Day, while her successors also employed gendered language.Lukas Coch/AAP
Minimising Indigenous viewpoints and violent history
When it comes to Indigenous people, prime ministers have been largely silent in their speeches. They have either minimised the racial violence in Australia’s history and the dispossession many Indigenous people feel – or haven’t mentioned it at all.
Prime ministers may well now conduct Acknowledgements of Country. But they have also have legitimised white possession through their descriptions of the importance of the day. In 2014, Tony Abbott said:
We are the grateful inheritors of two rich strands of history: a British heritage and an Aboriginal one […] we have become one people sharing the one land.
Abbott’s “one people” ignored colonial violence and contested sovereignties in favour of promoting national unity and white possession.
While our beginnings were marked with the cruelties and dispossession of empire, they were also accompanied by the idealism of the Enlightenment age. Australia was to be a great project.
Morrison acknowledged dispossession of Aboriginal land, but the dovetailing reference to Western Enlightenment undermined any potential recognition of colonialism’s brutal legacy.
The official date of Australia Day has been hotly contested by Indigenous people and activists, who instead call it Invasion Day.AAP Image/James Ross
Reproducing dominant Australian identities
Prime ministers do not challenge these rhetorical patterns on Australia Day because nationalism is seen as a non-partisan way to emphasise unity.
Further, those who see themselves reflected in prime ministers’ Australia Day speeches continue to support the day. This, too, draws boundaries around what is safe territory for prime ministers when highlighting national unity around Australianness.
Indigenous people continue to challenge these patterns by reconceptualising the celebration of Australia Day as a day of invasion and continuing dispossession.
But without a radical restructuring of the values, traditions and practices surrounding Australia Day, we can expect to see a continuation of these dominant conceptions of Australianness and the marginalisation of identities and peoples that fall outside these parameters.
Review: Family Values, directed by Lee Lewis, Griffin Theatre Company
Sophie Fletcher’s set for David Williamson’s new state-of-the-nation play comprises two major elements shoehorned into the intimate, asymmetrical diamond of the Stables Theatre.
Centre stage is an elegantly presented dining table: expensive-looking wine, fine glasses.
Upstage, taking up a quarter of the floor, a heftily constructed Federation-style staircase: a few steps up to a landing, an abrupt turn, and a flight ascending towards the low ceiling of the theatre.
Tosca floats through the space: the room is tasteful, refined, moneyed.
This is the house of retired judge Roger (Andrew McFarlane) and his wife, Sue (Belinda Giblin). The table is set for Roger’s 70th birthday party.
Almost immediately, their eldest daughter Lisa (Danielle King) – a divorced advocate for asylum seekers – storms onto the stage. With her is Saba (Sabryna Walters), a young woman medevac-ed from Nauru. She is now a fugitive from Border Protection, which, contrary to consulting psychiatrists’ advice, wants to return her to offshore detention.
Lisa demands the keys to the family holiday house to hide Saba; Roger refuses.
Their son Michael (Jamie Oxenbould), a divorced born-again Hillsonger arrives and, shortly afterwards, their younger daughter Emily (Ella Prince) with her fiancée, Noelene (Bishanyia Vincent), who is also the skipper of the Border Protection boat on which Emily serves.
Andrew McFarlane leads an outstanding cast.Brett Boardman/Griffin Theatre Company
Lisa, Roger and Sue conspire to hide Saba’s true identity.
Chaos ensues, with Williamson in vintage form.
A shattered veneer
Smack-down one-liners pepper slabs of soapbox rhetoric, laced with Fox news righteousness on the one hand and Saturday Paper wokedness on the other. Positions are taken and rebuked; (unlikely) alliances form, break, reconfigure. Tempers flare. Past injuries and long-harboured resentments fly; lines are drawn in sand and ultimatums delivered.
The whole thing escalates into a shouting match, a caterwauling pile-on of overlapping yells and screeches.
The veneer of middle-class suburban comfort and achievement shatters, revealing a catastrophic failure of values. Everyone is damaged, marriages and relationships in tatters; ill-informed at worst, partisan on a more generous account.
Everyone is scared: of losing their job, their reputation, their life’s work, of breaking the law (after a lifetime, Roger explains, of upholding it). Of being alone, unwanted; of not having a future.
Characters set off up the stairs, but get nowhere. The gentle retirement Roger has anticipated, surrounded by family reminiscing warmly about the good times, is shown up as a chimera: there were no good times, only jealousy, neglect and fear.
“All this shouting is getting us nowhere!” someone yells. The clamour fades. In the welcome silence, Saba moves to the apex of the Stables stage and tells it like it is.
She speaks of real suffering, of the experience of being at sea and on Nauru, of the callous indifference and violence of Border Protection officers.
Saba (Sabyina Walters) breaks through the melee to speak of real suffering.Brett Boardman/Griffin Theatre Company
Our domestic squabbles are bluntly implicated. Our carefully nurtured internecine (and Oedipal) grievances, our vanities, our pride — synecdoches for the poverty and empty stridency of our domestic politics — show us up, by contrast, as sooks.
Confronted by someone for whom the future has been foreclosed, for whom there is simply no hope, what do we make of our petty struggles?
Family Values is uncomfortable, confronting work, rendered with care, intelligence and a carefully tempered earnest exuberance by an outstanding cast.
Director Lee Lewis — at first blush an unlikely director for a new Williamson — is at the top of her game, deftly choreographing the ebb and flow of alliances, affording gag lines just enough space without sacrificing pace or yielding to gagging.
Lewis’s feel for the Stables theatre, fine-tuned over a remarkable tenure at the helm of Griffin, is pitch perfect. Amid the clamour of polemic and shifting allegiances the slightest nuance of gesture, shift of eyeline, or movement through the space reads with clarity and precision.
Lewis never allows us to lose sight of each character’s integrity, nowhere more emphatically than with Oxenbould’s Michael, deftly managing the line between parodic righteousness and disarming humility.
A plea for mobilisation
In the end, privilege is mobilised and matters resolved.
Apologies are tendered. Not all are accepted — things are never so easily resolved — although a bit of transactional barter seals the deal (for now). We are left gazing at the dining table, at the massive staircase — a Jacob’s Ladder no-one is able to ascend.
What are we all doing here?
How can we resolve the fundamental injustices of our times when we are all so imbricated in them?
Williamson suggests only through mobilising our own frequently ill-won privilege might we throw off the violence to which we subject others, to which we are ourselves subjected.
He — and Lewis — know their audience: we have heard nothing over the 90 minutes of the drama we do not already know. As we walk away through the dust and smoke-streaked summer night we ask ourselves not “What would we do in that situation?”, but simply, and more urgently, “What are we doing?”
Family Values is at Griffin Theatre Company until March 7.
In this record-breaking bushfire season, notifications from emergency managers have become a familiar feature of Australian life. Terms like “out of control” and “contained” are regularly heard as descriptions of the status of fires, but what do they actually mean?
The status of a fire is a description of the stage of the firefighting effort, not the nature of the fire or its likelihood of being a threat. This means that to understand what actions to take when an active fire is nearby, it’s important to follow the advice of your local fire and emergency information sources.
A fire described as “going” or “out of control” is one where parts of its perimeter are burning and have the potential to spread into unburnt areas.
The perimeter is the focus as it is where unburnt fine fuels (consisting of the litter on the forest floor, shrubs and bark) are being ignited and burning rapidly. The flames of these subside quickly, so the majority of a fire’s interior consists of blackened area where only heavy fuels such as logs and branches continue to burn.
A fire will be given the status “going” when it is first detected or reported to emergency authorities. The status may also be used for fires that were controlled and subsequently breakaway (escape control).
“Going” fires will typically be the subject of concentrated firefighting effort to prevent growth and minimise the impacts to things of value (i.e. lives, property, infrastructure and ecosystem services). However the term is inclusive of all fires that are able to spread, so encompasses everything from shrubs burning under a tree hit by lighting to intense firestorms.
Contained or “being controlled’
A “contained” fire is one with a complete containment line around its perimeter. “Being controlled” will have a complete or near-complete containment line. Containment lines (also called control lines or firelines) are the main way to stop bushfires spreading.
While our images of firefighters involve hoses spraying water against the flames, water is, in fact, inefficient because of the vast amounts needed to douse the large amounts of burning vegetation and the difficulty of maintaining supply in rugged terrain.
Instead, to stop fires spreading, firefighters create containment lines where all fuels are removed in bands adjacent to the fire’s perimeter. This prevents the fire reaching unburnt vegetation, starving the flames of new material to burn.
Handtools can be used to break the continuity of fuels to prevent fires spreading.AAP/Dean Lewins
So how are containment lines created? Typically, with heavy machinery (often bulldozers), which scrape away all burnable material around the edge of the fire so nothing but mineral soil remains. In rugged terrain, this may be done by hand, by specialist crews using tools such as rakehoes and chainsaws.
Where there are existing areas of low fuel in the landscape, such as roads, bodies of water or previously burnt areas, firefighters may also include these as part of their containment strategy.
It’s not safe to construct a line where fires are spreading rapidly, producing many embers, behaving erratically, have deep flames or are exhibiting firestorm-type behaviours (where the fire is so intense it can generate extreme winds and even lightning).
At such times firefighters will either move to parts of the fire where behaviour is less intense (typically where the wind is pushing the flames away from unburnt fuel), apply indirect firefighting methods such as backburning (burning areas in front of the advancing fire) or retreat and focus on protecting life and property.
The exceptionally hot, dry and windy conditions of the 2019/20 fire season have resulted in many rapidly expanding bushfires that have overwhelmed the capacity of firefighters to build containment lines.
As a fire is being contained, crews will be assigned to patrol the already constructed parts of the line to prevent escapes. The burning-out of unburnt fuels within the containment lines may be done to reduce the chance this ignites and causes issues at a future date.
Roads can be used as part of a containment line.AAP/Dean Lewins
Under control, or ‘patrol’
A fire that’s “under control” has a full containment line around it, and there has been a degree of consolidation so fire escaping outside the lines is unlikely.
This consolidation is called “mopping up” or “blacking out”, and consists of crews working along the edge of the fire to extinguish or stabilise any burning material in the fire area within a set distance of the line.
The final status applied to bushfires is “safe”. This is where deemed that no sources of ignition within containment lines have the potential to cause escapes.
Once a fire is declared safe, it’s assumed no longer necessary to maintain patrols and the fire can be left alone.
After the fire season it’s common for management agencies to rehabilitate the containment lines, to restore the site to its prior condition to protect biodiversity values and water quality.
The status of a fire can change – even fires thought to be safe occasionally break away when hot and windy weather returns. Regardless of whether there are known fires in your area, it is important to have a bushfire survival plan and to pay attention to the advice of your local fire and emergency information sources
A Mongabay video message to supporters of the US journalist Philip Jacobson arrested in Indonesia.
By Michael Andrew in Jakarta
International journalists and agencies have condemned the arrest of American environmental journalist Philip Jacobson, who has been detained in Palangkaraya, Central Kalimantan, for allegedly misusing his residency permit.
The reporter and editor of Mongabay, a United States-based environmental news website, was detained on Tuesday after being placed under city-arrest for more than a month while immigration officials investigated his alleged visa violations.
Arrested under Article 122 of the 2011 Immigration Law, Jacobson, 30, could be subjected to a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to Rp 500 million (US$36,556) if convicted of the charges.
Paris-based international media freedom agency Reporters without Borders (RSF) has issued a statement denouncing the arrest as an act of intimidation.
– Partner –
“The Central Kalimantan immigration officials have massively overstepped their powers. We call on the Ministry of Law and Human Rights, which oversees the Directorate General of Immigration, to ensure that this journalist is immediately released in accordance with the rule of law,” the head of RSF’s Asia-Pacific desk, Daniel Bastard, said in a press release on Wednesday.
RSF said it had contacted Jacobson in Palangkaraya in early January before his arrest. Jacobson told the agency immigration officials were “carrying out an investigation” into his case and that he had done nothing more than attend a public meeting.
The director of the New Zealand-based Pacific Media Centre, Professor David Robie, called the punitive measures against Jacobson unjustifiable and unacceptable.
‘Untold damage’ “This slow detention then arrest of one of the world’s leading environmental journalists will do untold damage to Indonesia’s reputation on media issues and democracy,” he told The Jakarta Post on Thursday.
“The issue of a business visa is merely a technicality and can be solved bureaucratically. The reason why some journalists have other types of visas is because of the secretive and red-tape-mired processes applying to foreign journalists visiting the country.”
Dr Robie, covenor of the PMC’s Pacific Media Watch freedom project, said the type of journalism carried out by Jacobson and Mongabay were vital for confronting “the existential crisis of our time”.
“By arresting journalists, authorities clearly are wanting to bury their heads in the ground and refuse to face the facts and truth. Journalists like Jacobson, who has a highly respected track record as an environmental journalist, should be lauded not hounded.”
Award-winning Mongabay editor Philip Jacobson … his arrest comes shortly after Human Rights Watch issued a report documenting rising violence against activists and environmentalists in Indonesia. Image: Mongabay
Other journalists and environmental activists have taken to social media to voice their support of Jacobson with the hashtag #freephilipjacobson circulating on Twitter.
In a tweet, Sydney-based Indonesian sustainable forests executive Aida Greenbury called Jacobson an honest, passionate and dedicated journalist.
“He has been arrested. Indonesia: we are better than this. Revealing the truth is not a crime,” she tweeted.
Important work The Australian’s Southeast Asia correspondent Amanda Hodge tweeted that “Jacobson had done some of the most important work in Indonesia on [the] intersection of corruption [and the] environment.”
“The long-form pieces he’s written/ helped produce w @gekkoprojekt are essential reading. His arrest is deeply disturbing #freephilipjacobson.”
The Indonesian Journalists’ Safety Committee has also weighed in on the issue, calling the arrest of Jacobson an excessive measure that tarnished Indonesia’s democracy.
“The excessive actions against Jacobson call into question the government’s motives and should not reflect authorities’ allergy to criticism and oversensitivity toward his investigations on the environment for Mongabay.”
It called for Jacobson’s immediate release and for President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo to guarantee the protection of journalists working in Indonesia and “of the transparency of information and access of foreign journalists to cover in Indonesia on the basis of press freedom, freedom of information and human rights.”
According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) 2019 democracy index, Indonesia’s democracy has not climbed from its position of 64th of 167 countries.
Press freedom is also languishing with Indonesia ranked 124th of 180 countries in RSF’s 2019 World Press Freedom Index, above Uganda and below Malaysia.
This article is republished from The Jakarta Post. The author, Michael Andrew, a former Pacific Media Watch contributing editor, is an intern with the Post under the ACICIS programme.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Grant Jun Otsuki, Lecturer in Cultural Anthropology, Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington
Artificial intelligence-based (AI) programs are quickly improving at writing convincingly on many topics, for virtually no cost. It’s likely in a few years they’ll be churning out C-grade worthy essays for students.
We could try to ban them, but these softwares are highly accessible. It would be a losing battle.
Long-form writing, especially essay writing, remains one of the best ways to teach critical analysis. Teachers rely on this mode of assessment to gauge students’ understanding of a topic.
Thus, we need to find ways to help students of all disciplines thrive alongside advanced automation and smart systems, rather than resist them. This involves training students to work with AI tools, rather than banning them.
What are AI-powered text generators?
In February 2019, GPT-2, an AI-powered text generating system was released by OpenAI. Those interested can try the system themselves by following these instructions, or experiment with Talk to Transformer, an online tool made using GPT-2.
The idea behind GPT-2 is similar to the predictive text function on a smartphone. A machine learning system was given 8 million web pages, and told to look at blocks of text to predict what word would come next.
The system compared its guess with the actual text to “learn”. This was repeated billions of times, resulting in the GPT-2 software.
Often within minutes, GPT-2 can generate texts that look like they were written by a human. They’re grammatically correct, thematically coherent, engaging and even informative.
I gave GPT-2 this prompt: “The global system of university ranking has recently…”. Here are some sentences it generated:
The global system of university ranking has recently been the subject of heated debate, with many arguing that it is becoming increasingly irrelevant. In a report published in May, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that the system has become increasingly irrelevant, with the gap between the best and the worst universities in the world narrowing in recent years. The OECD found that in the past decade, the average quality of a university’s research output has fallen to its lowest level since the late 1970s.
There are several signs of a non-human hand at work, notably the repetition of “increasingly irrelevant”. There’s also the matter that no such OECD report exists. It was dreamt up by the machine.
That said, with a few revisions, the text could probably pass as being authored by a human.
There are a number of systems similar to GPT-2, including Google’s BERT, ERNIE2.0, XLNet and Facebook’s RoBERTa. But GPT-2 has caught on with tinkerers across the web – lauded for its power and ease of use in generating new texts.
Available now near you
GPT-2 comes in forms that let anyone use it easily, even without a powerful computer. Such tools are a looming problem for schools and universities.
In an experiment, I fed the system 188 student papers on Keith Basso’s book Wisdom Sits in Places, written for an anthropology course I teach. GPT-2 “learned” for about thirty minutes, after which it generated some paragraphs.
One begins:
In this essay, I will show how conceptions of wisdom connect with place-names in Wisdom Sits in Places, by explaining how place-names serve as moral compass. I will also cover the cultural sphere of “notions of morality”, which is explained by the stories behind the place-names.
The text reads like an essay. It’s divided into four paragraphs and describes what appears to be examples from the book.
I would have failed the text as is. The writing isn’t perfect, and in places the writer seems to lose their train of thought. However, with slight human revision, an essay worthy of a C would be within reach.
Adapt, don’t resist
People are already experimenting with GPT-2 for poetry, text-based role-playing games, and plays written in a Shakespearean style. Worryingly, it could also produce endless streams of fake news.
What can institutions do about such “plagiarised” work flooding their classrooms?
But it’s unclear how such a ban could be enforced once AI software is as easy to access as Candy Crush. Institutions could look to existing rules against academic misconduct, but accurate detection becomes a problem. As AI-generated texts get better, how will we prove (without watching them) that a student did or didn’t write a text themselves?
We can’t, so we should take a page from cyborg chess play, where players embrace chess-playing computers to become better themselves.
Rather than pretending AI doesn’t exist, it might be time to train people to write with AI.
Most good writers don’t write in isolation; they talk and revise their work with others. Also, 90% of writing is revision, which means the ideas and arguments in a text change and develop as a writer reads and edits their own work.
Thus, systems such as GPT-2 could be used as a first-draft machine, taking a student’s raw research notes and turning them into a text they can expand on and revise.
In this model, teachers would evaluate a work, not just on the basis of the final product, but on a student’s ability to use text-generating tools.
Powerful AI tools could one day help us analyse and communicate complex ideas.
What should we judge our students on?
All of the above prompts a question we need to consider if we’re to live in an AI-friendly world: why do we teach students to write at all?
One major reason is many jobs rely on being able to write. So, when teaching writing, we need to think about the social and economic implications of a type of text.
Much of today’s media landscape, for instance, runs on the continuous production and circulation of blog posts, tweets, listicles, marketing reports, slide presentations, and e-mails.
While computer writing might never be as original, provocative, or insightful as the work of a skilled human, it will quickly become good enough for such writing job, and AIs won’t need health insurance or holidays.
If we teach students to write things a computer can, then we’re training them for jobs a computer can do, for cheaper.
Educators need to think creatively about the skills we give our students. In this context, we can treat AI as an enemy, or we can embrace it as a partner that helps us all learn more, work smarter, and faster.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has asked the head of his department to investigate whether Bridget McKenzie violated ministerial standards when she dispensed sports grants to clubs in marginal seats and those being targeted by the Coalition in last year’s election.
It is generally accepted by Australians that “public office is a public trust”. The nature and extent of that trust, however, is continuously being debated.
This is especially true in an age of virtually unlimited potential for scrutiny of governments, and unlimited scope for the court of public opinion to take submissions (and make judgements) about ministerial conduct – well-founded or otherwise.
The late (and much lamented) John Clarke once told me his main role as satirist-in-residence to the nation was to remind the Australian people how fragile their democratic institutions are.
Almost a decade later, we are told on good authority that a significant proportion of young Australians do not trust “government”, to the point where many might well prefer military rule.
This is one reason why codified and enforceable standards of ministerial ethics and conduct will remain relevant – and expected – in our country.
Early steps toward enacting standards
Australia hasn’t always had a set of ethical standards for ministers and government officials. It is a relatively recent phenomenon which came about during Prime Minister John Howard’s time in office in the 1990s.
The idea was first broached in 1978 when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser commissioned Nigel Bowen to conduct a review of conflict of interest matters involving officials.
Instead of regulation, however, the committee sought to rely on the “court of public opinion” to deter unseemly conduct by MPs.
In the next few years, the culture of government in Australia began changing radically, and quickly.
When the Fraser government introduced both the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act and the Freedom of Information Act, the opportunities for public scrutiny of ministerial decision-making – and conduct more generally – significantly affected public expectations about the way “the business of government” was done.
At a stroke, new standards of conduct by decision-makers at all levels were needed for the first time, for a new era of accountability and “speaking truth to power”.
Standards put forth by Howard and Faulkner
While the Hawke Labor government chose not to bring in new ministerial standards in 1983, Howard did so in 1996 – 20 years after Bowen.
After Howard introduced his ministerial code of conduct, a significant number of ministers were forced to resign over various conflict of interest matters, and the code was amended to be less onerous.
Against this backdrop, Opposition Senator John Faulkner introduced draft ethics and integrity standards to the Labor shadow cabinet. It was adopted as party policy in 2001.
The Faulkner standards, which I co-authored with George Thompson on Faulkner’s staff, drew on public ethics principles, legal definitions and community norms regarding the integrity expected of public officials.
The standards introduced by John Faulkner have been endorsed by every government since 2007.Alan Porritt/AAP
The standards recognised several challenges for parliament in policing its own members, chiefly that parliament had not enacted a code of conduct itself and had recently passed laws prohibiting it from expelling an MP for misconduct.
It therefore became the responsibility of the prime minister to enforce the standards.
The Rudd government endorsed these standards of ministerial ethics when it came into power in 2007. And each prime minister since then has endorsed a version of the standards, largely unchanged.
Challenges of enforcing standards
Every version of the standards has reminded ministers of their ethical and fiduciary duty to respect the trust placed in them by the public, and maintain public trust in parliament and our system of government.
Yet, challenges remain when it comes to interpreting and enforcing the standards. Notably, the standards impose a “waiting period” for former ministers and their staff to take up certain forms of employment after leaving office.
Yet, no government has sought to introduce statutory bans on specific jobs for former officials. There is also a lack of specific information about what forms of employment conduct are, and are not, permissible.
This lack of specifics emerged as a notable problem in the recent cases involving Christopher Pyne, Julie Bishop and Andrew Robb after they took up new roles that raised questions after leaving office.
There were similar problems in earlier cases involving former Labor ministers who left office. This requires immediate remedy.
In the two decades since the Howard code, new ways of thinking about integrity in public office – and ministerial conduct, in particular – have also emerged.
The common law offence of “misconduct in public office” has become extensively used in North America in cases involving unethical and prohibited conduct by government officials, such as abuse of office, bribe-taking, vote-buying, unlawful lobbying and conflicts of interest.
There has also been a major revival in the prosecution of this offence in the UK, Hong Kong and Australia in recent years, generally for corruption cases.
The offence now ranks as the charge of choice for anti-corruption investigators and prosecutors in a host of jurisdictions, yet it has been the subject of relatively little academic research or recent commentary.
Personal responsibility for conduct
But ethics standards can only do so much – MPs and former ministers, in particular, must also take responsibility for their own conduct, irrespective of any formal sanctions which might apply.
It is always the minister’s personal responsibility to uphold the letter and the spirit of the oath of office, because of what that oath represents.
As former US Senator Alan Simpson once said:
If you have integrity, nothing else matters. And if you don’t have integrity, nothing else matters.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Penelope Bryant, Consultant in Paediatric Infectious Diseases and General Paediatrics, Murdoch Children’s Research Institute
Australian children have one of the highest rates of antibiotic use in the world. More than half have received at least one course by their first birthday.
While antibiotics are one of the miracles of modern health care, they have some drawbacks. The overuse of antibiotics increases the risk of bacterial resistance in the wider community. For individual children, antibiotics may have side effects, particularly if used inappropriately.
We also have some research about the effects of antibiotic use in early life on longer term health, such as in increasing the risk of asthma, inflammatory bowel disease like Crohn’s disease, and obesity.
New research from New Zealand has found children given antibiotics in the first one to two years of their life may be at a greater risk of having a higher body-mass index (BMI) or becoming obese by the age of four or five.
But the risk is small, and not a reason to withhold antibiotics from a child if they really need them. Let’s take a look.
A number of studies have suggested antibiotic use, both during pregnancy and in early childhood, may be linked to various chronic conditions, including asthma, gastrointestinal diseases such as Crohn’s disease and coeliac disease, and juvenile arthritis.
Antibiotics in pregnancy have also been associated with an increased risk of serious infections in children.
These reported effects of antibiotics are likely to arise in part from their disruption of the microbiome – the microbial community in our gut. Antibiotics kill off not only the bacteria causing the infection, but also bacteria in the microbiome, including the ones that do us good.
The make-up of our microbiome affects the immune system and is central to harvesting, storing and using energy from food. Scientists believe disruption of the microbiome can affect metabolism.
There’s a lot of evidence from animal studies linking antibiotics with increased weight, and antibiotics have been used as growth promoters in meat production for decades. The possible link between antibiotics and obesity in humans is an area of intense interest.
Childhood obesity predicts obesity in adulthood. And as children are among the highest users of antibiotics, several studies have focused on whether antibiotics in pregnancy and early life are associated with childhood BMI and obesity.
However, these studies are often small, rely on parent recall for antibiotic use, and don’t account for confounders, such as the mother’s weight or socioeconomic disadvantage.
Some studies have also shown no association between antibiotic use and childhood obesity. But these have also had limitations, so the link between antibiotics and obesity has remained unclear.
New research
Two new studies from New Zealand, published yesterday, looked at children from two cohorts – the B4 School Check and Growing Up in New Zealand – hoping to answer this question.
They were large, carefully conducted studies using national antibiotic dispensing data and standardised measurements. The B4 School Check study included more than 150,000 children and their mothers, and the Growing Up in New Zealand study more than 5,000 children.
Both studies found antibiotics taken at every stage through pregnancy and early childhood (one to two years) had an effect on obesity at four years old. The proportion of children who were obese increased with increasing numbers of courses.
For example, if you had a group of four-year-olds who had received more than nine antibiotic prescriptions in their lives, and a group who had received none, there would be twice as many children in the antibiotic group who were obese.
The results suggest antibiotics in the first years of life – a period when the microbiome is changing rapidly and most susceptible to outside influences – may have a strong association with later obesity.
Both studies attempted to adjust for important confounders. The Growing Up in New Zealand study adjusted for family demographics, screen time and other lifestyle factors, but the association between antibiotics and BMI remained.
The B4 School Check study tried to control for unmeasured confounders (such as genetics) by looking at twins and siblings where only one child was obese. In doing this, they found the association between antibiotics and weight diminished.
However, because of potential limitations in a sibling study design, such as differing confounders operating in each sibling, sharing of microbiome between siblings, and the smaller sample size, it’s not possible to rule out the overall finding antibiotics are associated with increased weight gain.
There are many factors that influence a child’s weight.From shutterstock.com
Making sense of the findings
The average four-and-a-half-year-old girl weighs 17.2kg. In both studies, the average weight is over 18kg, so they are already heavier cohorts.
If the adjusted findings (that is, all confounders already taken into account) from the Growing Up in New Zealand study are applied to a four-and-a-half-year-old girl – with no antibiotics, she weighs an average of 18.65kg (already nearly 1.5kg above average weight). If she has received four to six courses she weighs 18.99kg (adding 340g). Both these weights are still within the normal range according to the World Health Organisation and the standards used in the two studies.
The argument could be made these small changes may not be important at an individual level, but may be relevant at a population level or as children get older.
While they don’t provide definitive answers, these two studies contribute high-quality data to the debate. There appears to be some small effect of antibiotics on the metabolism, particularly in the first couple of years of life, when the microbiome is most vulnerable to disruption.
However, this is in addition to many other more important and modifiable factors we know are risk factors for obesity.
Even if the antibiotic association is real, the Growing Up in New Zealand study points out the effect is small in early childhood, especially when compared with factors such as the mother’s weight and socioeconomic disadvantage.
So should I give my baby antibiotics?
Parents can sometimes find the decision of whether or not to give their children antibiotics a difficult one. They may be worried about possible side effects, or the threat of antibiotic resistance in the wider community.
These concerns can all be discussed with a GP, who will advise, based on the child’s illness, the most appropriate course of action.
Although antibiotics should be used only when needed (for example, they shouldn’t be used for viral infections, only bacterial ones), concerns about obesity should not play a significant role in the decision to use antibiotics.
Not using antibiotics when they are clinically indicated will not prevent obesity, and could be harmful to the child.
Parents are a child’s first and most important teachers. Parent involvement in their child’s learning can help improve how well they do in school. However, when it comes to helping kids with homework, it’s not so simple.
While it’s important to show support and model learning behaviour, there is a limit to how much help you can give without robbing your child of the opportunity to learn for themselves.
Be involved and interested
An analysis of more than 400 research studies found parent involvement, both at school and at home, could improve students’ academic achievement, engagement and motivation.
School involvement includes parents participating in events such as parent-teacher conferences and volunteering in the classroom. Home involvement includes parents talking with children about school, providing encouragement, creating stimulating environments for learning and finally – helping them with homework.
The paper found overall, it was consistently beneficial for parents to be involved in their child’s education, regardless of the child’s age or socioeconomic status. However, this same analysis also suggested parents should be cautious with how they approach helping with homework.
Parents helping kids with homework was linked to higher levels of motivation and engagement, but lower levels of academic achievement. This suggests too much help may take away from the child’s responsibility for their own learning.
Help them take responsibility
Most children don’t like homework. Many parents agonise over helping their children with homework. Not surprisingly, this creates a negative emotional atmosphere that often results in questioning the value of homework.
Most children don’t love homework.from shutterstock.com
Homework has often been linked to student achievement, promoting the idea children who complete it will do better in school. The most comprehensive analysis on homework and achievement to date suggests it can influence academic achievement (like test scores), particularly for children in years seven to 12.
But more research is needed to find out about how much homework is appropriate for particular ages and what types are best to maximise home learning.
When it comes to parent involvement, research suggests parents should help their child see their homework as an opportunity to learn rather than perform. For example, if a child needs to create a poster, it is more valuable the child notes the skills they develop while creating the poster rather than making the best looking poster in the class.
Instead of ensuring their child completes their homework, it’s more effective for parents to support their child to increase confidence in completing homework tasks on their own.
Here are four ways they can do this.
1. Praise and encourage your child
Your positivity will make a difference to your child’s approach to homework and learning in general. Simply, your presence and support creates a positive learning environment.
Our study involved working with recently arrived Afghani mothers who were uncertain how to help their children with school. This was because they said they could not understand the Australian education system or speak or write in English.
However, they committed to sit next to their children as they completed their homework tasks in English, asking them questions and encouraging them to discuss what they were learning in their first language.
In this way, the parents still played a role in supporting their child even without understanding the content and the children were actively engaged in their learning.
2. Model learning behaviour
Many teachers model what they would like their students to do. So, if a child has a problem they can’t work out, you can sit down and model how you would do it, then complete the next one together and then have the child do it on their own.
Instead of watching TV in the evening, set aside time to read a book while your child does their school work.from shutterstock.com
3. Create a homework plan
When your child becomes overly frustrated with their homework, do not force them. Instead, together create a plan to best tackle it:
read and understand the homework task
break the homework task into smaller logical chunks
discuss how much time is required to complete each chunk
work backwards from the deadline and create a timeline
put the timeline where the child can see it
encourage your child to mark completed chunks to see the progress made on the task
4. Make space for homework
Life is busy. Parents can create positive study habits by allocating family time for this. This could mean carving out one hour after dinner for your child to do homework while you engage in a study activity such as reading, rather than watching television and relaxing. You can also create a comfortable and inviting reading space for the child to learn in.
Parents’ ability to support their child’s learning goes beyond homework. Parents can engage their child in discussions, read with them, and provide them with other ongoing learning opportunities (such as going to a museum, watching a documentary or spending time online together).
Children’s living environments in Australian capital cities have changed significantly in the past ten years. This is particularly the case for the growing numbers of families raising children in private, inner-city, high-rise housing. Our study of one such area shows families rely heavily on their neighbourhoods to meet their children’s needs and make up for a lack of space in the home. Many saw access to green, natural spaces as vital.
Families represent half of all Australian apartment dwellers, and nearly half of them have children, according to 2016 Australian Census data. The number of families living in apartments increased by 56% between the 2011 and 2016 censuses. Despite its growing popularity, there is evidence this type of housing is not meeting the needs of Australian families.
The City of Yarra is a Victorian municipality that has had a six-fold increase in the number of apartments over the past ten years. A household survey found residents in high-density areas of the municipality were less satisfied with their neighbourhood as a place to raise children.
In our recently published research, apartment-dwelling families described “living outside the house”. Unlike suburban families who could spend more time in their own homes, the families in this study depended on local environments due to the limited space within apartment complexes.
However, aspects of this environment were challenging. More needs to be done to support families raising children in these settings.
Seeing neighbourhoods through parents’ eyes
The use of Photovoice allowed us to “walk a mile in the shoes” of parents raising children in private, high-rise dwellings in Yarra. Parents were given up to three weeks to photograph aspects of apartment living and surrounding environments they saw as benefiting or challenging them when raising preschool children. The photographs were then discussed in individual interviews and a group session to help us explore their key experiences.
Access to green, natural spaces was non-negotiable for families in our study to counterbalance the confines of apartment-living. Several parents photographed the river environs. One parent explained its importance for her mental well-being this way:
If I was in our development and not close to these kinds of things I couldn’t live there, it just feels so vital, so important to me that because of how we live. I need nature, I need space, I need to be able to have that really accessible, otherwise it would make living how we’re living not doable at all.
A study participant’s photograph taken in the City of Yarra captioned ‘Here I come fishies’.Author provided
Our findings also revealed natural spaces supported children’s well-being. Ranging from play areas to learning spaces, places to take risks to sites to engage with animals, all of these are key for children’s health and development.
Unsurprisingly, public playgrounds were important for apartment-dwelling families. However, local cafes were equally noted as valuable places for families to gather.
If you go out for a coffee on Sunday morning you can see lots of kids playing around, running around … especially living in a place like this there’s no backyard or trampoline or anything like that, so this is what people do in this area, just go out with kids and let them run around a little bit.
Access to local schools and young children’s exposure to traffic, however, were two aspects of high-density living the families had to balance against the benefits of continuing to live and raise their children in these neighbourhoods.
Our finding that parents had difficulty accessing local schools and child care further supports the argument that private high-rise housing in Australian cities has been designed without considering children as residents.
Aligning with previous overseas studies, including from New Zealand and the Netherlands, young children’s exposure to traffic was a particular concern in our study.
A participant’s photograph taken in the City of Yarra captioned ‘Commuter traffic’.Author provided
Families adapted by cycling along bike paths and using online shopping. Ultimately, though, they taught their children to adapt to their environment from a young age. As one parent put it, they have to “grow up quick (and) know how to look after themselves”.
How to improve neighbourhoods for families
Families wanted green spaces to be protected rather than overshadowed by increasing development. They argued that more local traffic calming measures were required. They also wanted child-care facilities and preschools to provide high-quality outdoor space to make up for the lack of outdoor space in apartment complexes.
Finally, they noted missed opportunities to provide more family-friendly spaces. For example, more cafes, restaurants and community spaces could be incorporated at the street level of large apartment complexes.
The implication for policy is state government apartment design guidelines need to go further to consider the environments surrounding apartment complexes. Implementing the recommendations from a checklist developed for child-friendly high-density housing in Western Sydney would be a good start.
The Bank for International Settlements – the “central bank” for central banks – made headlines this week with a report outlining how the next major financial crisis may come from unexpected climate risks.
The book calls these risks “green swans” – a play on the term “black swan”, coined by author Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Black swans, Taleb writes in in his 2007 book, are events that are highly improbable, wide-ranging or extreme in their impact and can typically only be explained after they occur.
An example in the financial markets is how the supposedly risk-free investment strategy of the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in the late 1990s spiralled out of control and nearly took down the global financial system.
Green swans are the climate-related equivalent of black swans.
This is more than just a cute analogy. One of the defining features of black swans is they cannot be modelled using standard mathematical techniques. As the BIS report puts it:
Black swan events can take many shapes, from a terrorist attack to a disruptive technology or a natural catastrophe. These events typically fit fat-tailed probability distributions, i.e. they exhibit a large skewness relative to that of normal distribution (but also relative to exponential distribution). As such, they cannot be predicted by relying on backward-looking probabilistic approaches assuming normal distributions (e.g. value-at-risk models).
Climate risks have the same features:
Climate-related risks typically fit fat-tailed distributions: both physical and transition risks are characterised by deep uncertainty and nonlinearity, their chances of occurrence are not reflected in past data, and the possibility of extreme values cannot be ruled out.
Where green swans differ from black swans is that, given what we know about climate science, it is highly likely there will be extreme, financially devastating effects.
Australia’s recent bushfires are a notable example of the more frequent extreme events expected. In the United States, there have been more than a dozen “billion dollar” climate and weather disasters every year in recent years.
Sharnie Moran and her daughter Charlotte prepare to flee bushfires near Nana Glen, in northeastern New South Wales, on November 12 2019.Dan Peled/AAP
The problem is that we don’t know which extreme climate events will occur. This makes them hard to plan for. It also makes them hard for financial markets to deal with.
If these events could be statistically modelled, at least there would be well-functioning insurance markets for them.
But green swans, by their very nature, defy such predictability.
More than this, green swans can set off cascading additional risks. The BIS book notes:
Climate-related risks are not simply black swans, i.e. tail-risk events. With the complex chain reactions between degraded ecological conditions and unpredictable social, economic and political responses, with the risk of triggering tipping points, climate change represents a colossal and potentially irreversible risk of staggering complexity.
This characterisation of green-swan events seems pretty on point. The big question, of course, is how policy should respond to the presence of these risks.
The BIS report emphasises the role central banks can play.
[…] central banks must also be more proactive in calling for broader and coordinated change, in order to continue fulfilling their own mandates of financial and price stability over longer time horizons than those traditionally considered. We believe that they can best contribute to this task in a role that we dub the five Cs: contribute to coordination to combat climate change.“
The report suggests some things central banks might do. They could keep interest rates lower than they would otherwise be to make “green stimulus” cheaper for governments. They could take account of environmental sustainability goals in determining what securities they hold and the financial stability policies they pursue.
Some of these suggestions I’m not keen on.
I’m for meaningful action on climate change. With co-author Rosalind Dixon, I’ve proposed the Australian Carbon Dividend Plan. I’m also for central bankers highlighting the risks of climate change, as the Reserve Bank of Australia deputy governor, Guy Debelle, has done.
Confusing ends and means
But central banks shifting their mandates to take account of climate risks confuses ends and means.
Yes, climate change is an existential threat. Yes, more needs to be done. And yes, central banks are powerful institutions. But it simply doesn’t follow that they should take on responsibility for policy action on climate change.
One problem is they don’t have the right tools. Central banks can’t impose a price on carbon, for example. The tools they would have to rely on – as the BIS report makes clear – is tinkering with their bond portfolios and keeping interest rates low.
But interest rates are already at historical lows and this hasn’t led to large-scale green stimulus. That is a political problem, not one for central bankers.
A second problem is the potential damage to central banks themselves as institutions. The more central banks are seen as political, the more pressure there will be to make them “accountable” and “democratic”. Such a movement, though well-meaning, could politicise bank boards and damage the virtue of their autonomy.
Climate change hasn’t been addressed by the political process, and that is a tragedy. But asking other powerful institutions to step into the breach might make matters worse, not better. Ultimately, we need to face up to the pressing political problem of climate change.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vanessa Cavanagh, Associate Lecturer, School of Geography and Sustainable Communities, University of Wollongong
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains images and names of deceased people.
I remember brushing my teeth over the green enamel sink. I would gaze out the window at a prominent grandmother and ponder her age. This grandmother had soft pink skin, smooth and dimpled, and incredible curves that burled in places. She stood at least 25 metres tall.
She was one of the sentinel trees which stood strong on the property where I grew up in Colo Heights, northwest of Sydney, at the edge of Darkinjung Country.
To begin to understand this connection, you might start by thinking about how every native tree on this property grows in its perfect place. Thousands of generations of evolution caused for it to grow right there. Each plant belongs to that very soil, and under that particular sky. Each plant is connected to the next, also growing in its own perfect way. Just like this grandmother tree, the plants are all families to each other. A community that is woven together with every element of nature participating.
This is Country. It includes the plants, the animals, the weather, rocks, fire, soils, waters, air, all of planet Earth. The powerful celestial beings too. They are all crucially important, in their belonging place.
Humans are part of this community, evolving together. Our relationships with each other, human and non-human, helped us thrive as the longest continuous culture on Earth. There is much to learn from honouring this connection.
These are not new thoughts. I am not trying to be a clever person. Indigenous people have shared this story for millennia. Indigenous people have adamantly protested against greedy environmental destruction.
When trees are treated as family, their loss is deeply felt. And firefighting efforts – here at Colo Heights in November – are indeed heroic.AAP/Dean Lewins
A layered coincidence
I returned home to Colo Heights in the first week of 2020 to review the damage the Gospers Mountain bushfire caused.
The Rural Fire Service had done a brilliant job protecting the main house.
But for this grandmother tree, the combination of ongoing drought and persistent flames ended her reign at the far edge of the yard. The sight of this old tree with her crown removed brought warm, stinging tears to my eyes. It was a deep hurt of losing someone far older and wiser than me. Losing someone who was respected and adored. Someone with knowledge I cannot fathom or comprehend. When I told my mum that evening she reacted similarly, a personal and family loss. To others she might just be a big tree.
Yet we know too, that Country is powerful and will recover. These trees return to the earth, and their legacy will regenerate, we each have our cycles.
It’s not inconsequential I’m having these experiences of fire right now. I’m an Aboriginal woman and scholar, researching the ways in which Aboriginal women are, and are not, involved in cultural burning practices in New South Wales. I explore and promote the layers of meaning — historical record, educational tool, and cultural expression — Aboriginal women’s stories reveal, such are present in my own stories.
A childhood immersed in nature
My parents bought our 25-acre heavily forested property in the late 1960s, 35 kilometres from the closest town. Buying this property in Colo Heights was important for Mum and Dad because they wanted their kids to grow up in the bush, to have that connection. They also wanted to have the security of owning a place of their own, away from departmental housing and government interference in Aboriginal cultural welfare. Thus, it became a place for extended family to come to, to avoid the controlling gaze of others.
RFS captain and the author’s father Dennis R. Cavanagh.Courtesy National Museum of Australia
My late father, a Wonnarua man, started a 40-year career as a labourer and heavy machine operator in the NSW Department of Main Roads as it was known then. He also volunteered in the local RFS over four decades, and he was captain for some of this time.
Mum is a Bungum Bundjalung woman, a life-long social justice advocate and a vocal feminist. Before having us kids, Mum was involved in the lead-up to the 1967 Referendum doing advocacy work and attending demonstrations. When I started high school, Mum returned to paid work in Aboriginal women’s refuges.
50 years hasn’t slowed Mum down. I can’t recall a childhood summer when my parents didn’t spend days volunteering at the RFS shed. It was something most families participated in, and a real strength of our rural community. My brother still volunteers with Colo Heights RFS. He is one of many Aboriginal fire fighters across the nation.
My parents gave me my love of the bush, and a strong sense of justice, which undoubtedly inspired me to pursue a career in environmental conservation.
At 20 years of age I secured my first job with the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. As part of the firefighting responsibilities of this role, I trained as a tree-feller and Remote Area Fire Team member — getting winched in and out of fires by helicopter.
I saw some amazing places while putting in fire containment lines, or mopping-up and blacking-out after bushfires. I’ve seen firsthand the devastation bushfires can wreck. But seeing the land around my childhood home destroyed, brought a different type of grief.
It has been one month since the fire passed through Colo Heights. Returning has been an incredibly emotional journey. With me is my partner, our two kids and their cousin who was evacuated from his home.
The fire had burnt right up to our letterbox and spread across most of the property. The fruit trees my Mum and Dad planted – blood plums, pears, bush lemons – all burnt out. A farm shed, water tanks, pipes and electricity poles, were also compromised. There is so much work to do.
The blackened ground is blanketed with a thick layer of dead leaves, dropped by the grandmother trees and her kin. The two-toned fallen leaf suggests some fell immediately after the fire, while others died and fell later.
Walking sounds like stepping on thousands of brittle eggshells. I hope if it rains, the leaf litter slows the erosion. This Country is wounded, it’s sandy and fragile.
As we follow the track that meanders towards the rear of the property, we notice a pink stain on the ground and low branches. During the fire event a water bomber plane dropped retardant to slow the fire’s spread and ferocity. Despite these efforts, many trees have been stripped bare of foliage.
Prior to the bushfire, the forest canopy would have created ample shade, making dappled light along the track. This time as we walk, the stark light of the brightly overcast sky causes me to squint as I look up at the non-existent canopy. I’m hurting for those old grandmother trees with their crowns removed.
There are signs of life, though. Familiar responses of native plants to fire: nuts bursting open and setting seed, vivid epicormic growth bursting through the charred bark. Birds were calling and we see a few small animals: beetles, a huntsman spider, a cicada shell hitched to a blackened tree. Occasionally there are patches of green.
But the fire has stripped away the forest kilometre after kilometre, across ridges and into gullies. There’s little for larger animals to eat, drink, or places for them to live.
Country is so dry, I wonder if much will survive. Country is already sick from drought; this fire adds to the illness.
Time to listen
Sitting quietly, we hear a large tree crashing down and echo through the gully. Another granny whose reign had ended.
“Will it grow back Mum?” my son asks.
The reassuring mother he needs in the face of all this devastation, replies: “I really hope that it’ll recover, but us humans need to do better in the way we live with Country. That’s why I take you and your sister to those Indigenous Fire workshops and teach you about Country.”
Returning to the bushfire site makes me reflect on all the training I received in the National Parks and Wildlife Service, and how it was founded on Western scientific methods.
At the time, I was one of only two Aboriginal people working in the department locally, and there were only a handful of women in these roles.
The positions I held in this department changed over the years. As I moved into heritage management and research roles, I was able to promote greater inclusion of Aboriginal women. In undertaking my PhD, I continue to empower Aboriginal perspectives in my work, specifically highlighting Aboriginal women.
Aboriginal women should be encouraged to engage in caring for Country. Amanda Shields from the Darkinjung Local Aboriginal Land Council inspects the regrowth in Kulnura.AAP/Joel Carrett
the critical importance of Indigenous land management to the ongoing maintenance of biodiversity is increasing and becoming better understood.
This is true for all of Country: river and sea Country, sky Country and astronomical knowledge, human and non-human. Indigenous knowledge and systems provide valid models of sustainable existence.
The success of this requires Indigenous people and systems leading the process, and more roles for Indigenous people across environmental conservation practice, policy and research. Fundamentally, however, Indigenous knowledge should not be excerpted and cropped into models that don’t suit.
Fire will continue to be part of our relationship with Country, and we need to take notice of what isn’t working. Indigenous people have been contributing to debates on fire over several decades. There is growing interest in Aboriginal fire knowledge. Where cultural burning has been initiated, Indigenous people experience benefits, including in the south east of the continent.
Working together
The need for stronger, fairer collaboration is obvious. Indigenous and non-Indigenous people can work together. For example, my PhD research contributes to broader bushfire research, through its attachment to the NSW Bushfire Risk Management Research Hub.
The preliminary results of my research suggest Aboriginal women are, and wish to engage in cultural burning in NSW. The Aboriginal women I have spoken to demonstrate an awareness of gendered influences to their full participation, such as trying to gain access into a male-dominated field.
The women I’ve spoken to also want to respect cultural protocols and fire knowledge integrity. Perhaps the greatest outcome of my research thus far, has been the opportunity to promote and amplify that cultural burning can and should involve Aboriginal women where appropriate.
Women’s engagement must be encouraged for all Indigenous caring for Country activities. There must be opportunities made for Aboriginal voices, and Aboriginal women’s voices to be heard and listened to.
The author’s children at the National Indigenous Fire Workshop Dhungala 2019.Lauren Tynan, Author provided
Mother
The intricate network of kinship between humans and the non-human needs to be restored to help heal Country and protect it into the future. Though regulatory frameworks are challenging, conversations about fire can provide a space to share knowledge and spark conversations about nature, risk and healing.
As an Indigenous person, researcher and parent (including as an Auntie within a large family) I want us to take better care of our Mother Earth. Future generations need Indigenous leadership, in this space and many other spaces, right now.
Bridget McKenzie’s future is looking bleak, her position having worsened significantly this week.
At its heart, the McKenzie affair is simple. Before last year’s election, the then-sports minister allocated grants to sporting organisations on an overtly political basis, rather than following the objective ranking determined by an assessment process under the program’s guidelines.
It was a clear misuse of taxpayers’ money.
Defences the government offered after she was exposed in last week’s blunt Audit Office report were spurious.
It insisted, for instance, this was different from the notorious “sports rorts” affair that claimed Keating government minister Ros Kelly, who’d famously used a “great big whiteboard” in her pork-barrelling operation. The truth is, it’s little different.
This week Nine newspapers revealed McKenzie had been given membership of a gun club she funded, and she failed to comply with declaration-of-interest provisions.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison could find it easier to get rid of McKenzie on the grounds of this non-disclosure than for rorting the grants scheme, which would involve the government admitting the impropriety of a pretty endemic practice.
The statement of ministerial standards, which covers disclosure, says a minister
may be required to resign if the prime minister is satisfied that they have breached or failed to comply with these standards in a substantive and material manner.
In political terms the situation is complicated.
Prime ministers these days hate giving scalps to the opposition. And McKenzie’s blond head has certain layers of protection.
She’s in cabinet not because she’s Morrison’s pick but as deputy leader of the Nationals, elected by her party. Unless Nationals’ leader Michael McCormack consented, Morrison could be stirring trouble with the junior Coalition partner if he insisted she go.
Also, in distributing grants on a political basis McKenzie was likely acting according to the expectations of others around the government. MPs were lobbying for sporting organisations in their electorates. Morrison has admitted his office would have passed on representations.
The fact McKenzie is a senior woman adds to the political difficulty.
The prime minister has launched a couple of investigations into the affair.
Attorney-General Christian Porter is obtaining advice on whether McKienzie actually had the legal power to make the decisions herself – a question raised but not answered in the Audit Office report.
Crucially, Phil Gaetjens, secretary of the Prime Minister’s department, is examining whether she has breached the ministerial code (which on any ordinary reading she certainly has).
Everything is suddenly hanging on the Gaetjens’ probe. Morrison, who seems to have now noticeably distanced himself from McKenzie, said on Thursday: “I will look at that [Gaetjens] advice and take whatever action is necessary”.
Offsetting the downsides of ditching a senior minister, there could be benefits for the government if McKenzie went, beyond lancing this nasty boil.
There’s been speculation it could open the question of McCormack’s leadership but that’s unlikely.
McKenzie, who’s been a poor performer, has sharp critics within her own party. If the Nationals made Water Resources Minister David Littleproud deputy and McCormack promoted one of the women newly elected last year (for example Perin Davey or Susan McDonald, both senators like McKenzie) that could strengthen their frontbench.
The removal of McKenzie would also provide the opportunity for a ministerial reshuffle, and a chance to shift Taylor. But would Morrison feel constrained, unwilling to concede a point to Taylor’s critics? Some say so.
Parliament meets the week after next, with the government in bad shape, thanks to Morrison’s missteps during the fires, the government’s defensiveness on climate change and the ministerial scandals.
The longer-term risk for him is that some, perhaps many, voters have re-thought the generally positive views they had of him before the election. This goes deeper than just immediate criticism.
We can’t know whether he can erase this negative perception. But it does call for a rethink about his prime ministerial durability.
Remember how after his unexpected May victory there was much talk about Morrison being in the box seat for the 2022 election? Recent events suggest bets at least should be more heavily hedged.
Memories of Kelly also bring to mind the experience of Prime Minister Paul Keating. Like Morrison, Keating performed the political “miracle” of triumphing at what had appeared an unwinnable election.
In the same way as Morrison a generation later, Keating won in 1993 through his sheer ability as a campaigner, bolstered by the personal and policy vulnerability of his opponent.
But then Keating lost (by a big margin) in 1996. He’d dodged a bullet in 1993, but the electorate kept the gun loaded and fired when it saw no good reasons against doing so.
Few recent prime ministers have proved durable, even when they appeared set up to be so.
Bob Hawke was, and John Howard too. But Kevin Rudd, after a strong win in 2007, was brought down in a party coup before he could fight the following election. It was all too late by the time Labor reluctantly reinstalled him, to replace the undurable Julia Gillard.
Tony Abbott followed the path of Rudd, winning from opposition only to be removed before the next election.
One might have expected the popular Malcolm Turnbull to have lasted. But no; after doing badly in 2016 he was ousted in 2018.
Morrison is fortunate on several fronts. His current troubles are early in the parliamentary term. A rule change he executed in the run-up to the election protects him from being brought down in a coup. Anyway, he hasn’t a rival hunting him.
On the other hand, despite being a relatively new PM, he is leading a government in its third term.
Morrison has plenty of time and opportunity to recover. But if the next election goes to Labor, this summer of actual and political disaster might be looked back upon as a decisive turning point.
