Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Chandra Salgado Kent, Associate Professor, School of Science, Edith Cowan University

Review: Whale Fall, written by Ian Sinclair and directed by Melissa Cantwell for The Kabuki Drop. Commissioned by PICA and co-presented with Perth Festival.

Whale Fall follows the emotional journey of a 12-year-old boy, Caleb (Ashton Brady), and his family grappling with Caleb’s desire to medically affirm his gender: letting go of the daughter they had; accepting and getting to know the son he has become.

We are immersed in an ocean setting. Ian Sinclair’s script carries a strong marine undercurrent from beginning to end: the beachside house, the young boy’s dream of becoming a marine biologist, his excitement in recounting his readings about intriguing sea creatures to his mother, Nadine (Caitlin Beresford-Ord), and the parallel theme of whale fall sewn into the story. This is the new life borne out of a dead whale when it reaches the ocean floor.

The play is as much about a young trans person’s journey as it is about Australians’ strong connection to the ocean and ever-increasing awareness of our ecological responsibility for its preservation.

In death, and life

Sinclair drew inspiration for his play from Rebecca Grigg’s 2015 essay of the same name, which she later developed into the book Fathoms (2020).

Contrary to common belief, most whales’ bodies are slightly higher in density than seawater. Unless their lungs are filled with air, whales will quickly sink to the bottom of the ocean.

Once decomposition of a dead whale sets in, the carcass’ density decreases and gas is produced through putrefaction. In marine environments over 100 meters deep, hydrostatic pressure is sufficiently high to hold carcasses on the seafloor.

On the seabed, the carcass transitions to what is scientifically called a “whale fall ecosystem” – a unique habitat island inhabited by a biodiverse and highly specialised range of marine organisms subsisting on the dead carcass.

Since their discovery in the late 1980s, it has become clear that whale fall ecosystems are abundant in certain regions of the deep sea. They support extraordinarily rich communities of species, which can be supported by one whale fall for decades.

Read more: A theatre project explores collective solutions to saving the ocean

Caleb explores the whale’s journey as a way of both escaping the emotional toll of his situation, and finding his path forward.

He sees the whale — a mammal like himself — living and dying in deep-sea darkness, before emerging and giving life in a new form.

The boy’s account of the whale’s journey into the abyss and transforming into whale fall is a delightful mixture of poetry and accurate scientific detail, conjuring images of what it might be like to undergo such a change.

Ashton smoothly rolls the scientific poetry off his tongue to describe the “buoyancy of the meat” of the sinking whale, “weighed down by bones, with white worms clinging to a parachute of muscle, a macabre marionette”.

He then takes us into the complex ecosystem of isopods, polychaetes, crustaceans and deep-sea fish that eventually scavenge and inhabit the carcass: incredible new life in the abyssal depths of the sea.

Ecological responsibility

Whale Fall brilliantly brings important social issues, and an intriguing and important ecological phenomenon, to a mainstream audience.

Under Melissa Cantwell’s direction, the performers tell the powerful story with tenderness, emotional outbursts and witty humour.

The dynamic tempo (sound design and composition by Rebecca Riggs-Bennett) is sometimes playful, intensifying to a climax and then releasing, only to be followed by a new wave of dynamic emotion, leaving you caught up in the journey.

Whale Fall highlights our internal battles to adapt to life’s challenges, its humanity, and important social issues regarding gender identity — all while communicating a message about ecological responsibility for safeguarding the ocean.

Only by exploring these issues through powerful, emotionally engaging and thought-provoking artistic works such as this one can we create the cultural changes required for a healthy society.

Whale Fall is at PICA Performance Space until 27 February.

– ref. Perth Festival review: Whale Fall is a powerful story about a trans boy, and the life of a whale – https://theconversation.com/perth-festival-review-whale-fall-is-a-powerful-story-about-a-trans-boy-and-the-life-of-a-whale-155733

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

What’s the difference between Google and Facebook?

One difference is that in the past week Google has more-or-less agreed to pay Australian news outlets for their content faced with the threat of government action to force it to.

Facebook most definitely has not, removing Australian news from its feeds.

Another is the reason why.

It’s that Google faces competition, whereas Facebook really doesn’t.

In economists’ language, that’s because Facebook enjoys a rare “network effect”, Google scarcely at all.

If I want to switch from Google to another search engine (something I’ve done) it costs me next to nothing. I might find it hard to move my search history over (although there’s probably an app for that) but otherwise the new search engine will either be better, worse or about the same as the one I left. I’m free to find out.

Google faces competition

It means that Google is forced to defend itself from competition (or the threat of competition) by providing an extraordinarily good service.

Not so Facebook. Although a relatively new concept in economics, the idea of a network effect dates back to at least 1908 when the president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Theodore Vail, spelled it out in a letter to stockholders.

“A telephone, without a connection at the other end of the line, is not even a toy or a scientific instrument,” he wrote. “It is one of the most useless things in the world. Its value depends on the connection with the other telephone — and increases with the number of connections.”

Facebook faces hardly any

The idea has since been expressed in a mathematical formula, but there’s no need to get into details. The world’s first telephone was indeed useless, the second allowed one household to reach only one other. But by the time there were millions, and almost every household had one, each telephone became incredibly valuable, allowing that household to reach almost every other household.

A startup that tried to compete with the phone system would be offering a very unappealing product. It wouldn’t be able to offer anything like the connections of the existing system until a huge proportion of the population signed up, meaning people would be reluctant to sign up, meaning it would stay unappealing.

Read more: We allowed Facebook to grow big by worrying about the wrong thing

Which is the point Vail was making. When it gets big enough, the telephone service is something close to a natural monopoly. There’s no point in anyone setting up a competing one (and in Australia we haven’t — the competing companies, Telstra, Optus and so on, share the one network).

The ASX stock exchange is another example, as is eBay. You could try to sell something on a different platform, but you wouldn’t reach nearly as many potential customers, so you mightn’t get as good a price.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission puts it this way in its report on Facebook: even if the government made it easier for a user to switch to another network, perhaps by mandating the transfer of data,

if none of the user’s friends or family are moving away from Facebook, that user would be unlikely to switch platforms

The “lock in” that happens when a network gets so big people feel they have to use it means it doesn’t have to treat them particularly well to get them to stay.

Seventeen million Australians use Facebook every four weeks — a huge proportion of the population, and an even bigger proportion of the population aged over 14 (80%).

Without Facebook, it would be hard to know what family and friends and long-lost classmates are up to — whether or not Facebook offers news. It doesn’t need to treat its users particularly well to get them to stay.

Facebook isn’t quite like the phone system. Young people find the fact that so many old people can use it to check up on them a turn-off and go elsewhere. But for the Australians already on it (that’s most Australians) it’s worth staying.

And there’s room for smaller specialised networks.

Linkedin has its own network for people concerned about the jobs market. If that’s the world you’re in, it’s wise to be on it because of the huge number of other such people who are on it. There’s not much point leaving it for something else.

It’s the same for Tinder, which services a different type of market.

Winner take all

It wasn’t always that way for Facebook. Fifteen years ago MySpace was how people connected, but not that many of them — it hadn’t grown to the point where network effects took over. When they did, there could be only one clear winner, and it happened to be Facebook.

Now not even its bad behaviour (Roy Morgan finds it is Australia’s least-trusted brand) can stop most people using it.

In the same way as people who want the lights on generally have to use the electricity company, people who want to catch trains generally have to use the railway and people who want to drive cars generally have to buy petrol, people who want to stay in touch generally have to use Facebook.

Which makes the government’s decision to remove its vaccination advertising campaign from Facebook silly. Facebook reaches 80% of its target audience.

Facebook has become a (trans-national) utility, unconcerned about its image. Attempts by one government, or even a coalition of governments, to force it to do anything are pretty much a lost cause.

No-one wanted it to be like this, and it’s not like this for Google. Facebook has moved beyond our control.

– ref. One of these things is not like the others: why Facebook is beyond our control – https://theconversation.com/one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-others-why-facebook-is-beyond-our-control-155748

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Damien Finch, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Melbourne

In Western Australia’s northeast Kimberley region, on Balanggarra Country, a two-metre-long painting of a kangaroo spans the sloping ceiling of a rock shelter above the Drysdale River.

In a paper published today in Nature Human Behaviour, we date the artwork as being between 17,500 and 17,100 years old — making it Australia’s oldest known in-situ rock painting.

We used a pioneering radiocarbon dating technique on 27 mud wasp nests underlying and overlying 16 different paintings from 8 rock shelters. We found paintings of this style were produced between 17,000 and 13,000 years ago.

Read more: At last, the arts Revolution — Archibald winners flag the end of white male dominance

Our work is part of Australia’s largest rock art dating initiative. The project is based in the Kimberley, one of the world’s premier rock art regions. Here, rock shelters have preserved galleries of paintings, often with generations of younger artwork painted over older work.

By studying the stylistic features of the paintings and the order in which they were painted when they overlap, a stylistic sequence has been developed by earlier researchers based on observations at thousands of Kimberley rock art sites.

They identified five main stylistic periods, of which the most recent is the familiar Wanjina period.

Styles in rock art

The oldest style, which includes the kangaroo painting we recently dated, often features life-sized animals in outline form, infilled with irregular dashes. Paintings in this style are said to belong to the “Naturalistic” stylistic period.

The ochre used is an iron oxide in a red-mulberry colour. Unfortunately, no current scientific dating method can determine when this paint was applied to the rock surface.

A different approach is to date fossilised insect nests or mineral accretions on the rock surfaces that happen to be overlying or underlying rock art pigment. These dates provide a maximum (underlying) or minimum (overlying) age range for the painting.

Our dating suggests the main period for Naturalistic paintings in the Kimberley spanned from at least 17,000 to 13,000 years ago.

The oldest known Australian artwork

Very rarely, we’ll find mud wasp nests both overlying and underlying a single painting. This was the case with the painting of the kangaroo, made on the low ceiling of a well-protected Drysdale River rock shelter.

We were able to date three wasp nests underlying the painting and three nests built on top of it. With these ages, we determined confidently the painting is between 17,500 and 17,100 years old; most likely close to 17,300 years old.

The 17,300 year old painting of a two-metre long kangaroo can be found on the ceiling of a Kimberley rock shelter. Damien Finch. Illustration by Pauline Heaney

Our quantitative ages support the proposed stylistic sequence that suggests the oldest Naturalistic style was followed by the Gwion style. This style featured paintings of decorated human figures, often with headdresses and holding boomerangs.

From animals and plants to people

Research we published last year shows Gwion paintings flourished about 12,000 years ago — some 1,000-5,000 years after the Naturalistic period.

With these dates, we can also partially reconstruct the environment in which the artists lived 600 generations ago. For example, much of the Naturalistic period coincided with the end of the last ice age when the environment was cooler and drier than now.

During the Naturalistic period, 17,000 years ago, sea levels were a staggering 106 metres below today’s and the Kimberley coastline was about 300 kilometres further away, more than half the distance to Timor.

Aboriginal artists at this time often chose to depict kangaroos, fish, birds, reptiles, echidnas and plants (particularly yams). As the climate warmed, ice caps melted, the monsoon was re-established, rainfall increased and sea levels rose, sometimes rapidly.

By the Gwion period around 12,000 years ago, sea levels had risen to 55m below today’s. This would undoubtedly have prompted long-term adjustment to territories and social relations.

This is when Aboriginal painters depicted highly decorated human figures, bearing a striking resemblance to early 20th-century photographs of Aboriginal ceremonial dress. While plants and animals were still painted, human figures were clearly the most popular subject.

Read more: ‘All things will outlast us’: how the Indigenous concept of deep time helps us understand environmental destruction

Reaching into the past

While we now have age estimates for more paintings than ever before, more work is continuing to find out, more accurately, when each art period began and ended.

For example, one minimum age on a Gwion painting suggests it may be more than 16,000 years old. If so, Gwion art would have overlapped with the Naturalistic period but further dates are required to be more certain.

Moreover, it’s highly unlikely the oldest known Naturalistic painting we dated is the oldest surviving one. Future research will almost certainly locate even older works.

For now, however, the 17,300-year-old kangaroo is a sight to marvel at.

Acknowledgements: we would like to thank the Balanggarra Aboriginal Corporation, the Australian National Science and Technology Organisation, Rock Art Australia and Dunkeld Pastoral Co for their collaboration on this work.

– ref. This 17,500-year-old kangaroo in the Kimberley is Australia’s oldest Aboriginal rock painting – https://theconversation.com/this-17-500-year-old-kangaroo-in-the-kimberley-is-australias-oldest-aboriginal-rock-painting-154181

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jacqueline Hendriks, Research Fellow and Lecturer, Curtin University

A recent petition circulated by Sydney school girl Chanel Contos called for schools to provide better education on consent, and to do so much earlier.

In the petition, which since Thursday has been signed by more than 5,000 people, Contos writes that her school

… provided me with life changing education on consent for the first time in year 10. However, it happened too late and came with the tough realisation that amongst my friends, almost half of us had already been raped or sexually assaulted by boys from neighbouring schools.

So, what core information do young people need to know about consent? And is the Australian curriculum set up to teach it?

What’s in the curriculum?

This is not the first time young people have criticised their school programs. Year 12 student Tamsin Griffiths recently called for an overhaul to school sex education after speaking to secondary students throughout Victoria. She advocated for a program that better reflects contemporary issues.

Australia’s health and physical education curriculum does instruct schools to teach students about establishing and maintaining respectful relationships. The resources provided state all students from year 3 to year 10 should learn about matters including:

• standing up for themselves

• establishing and managing changing relationships (offline and online)

• strategies for dealing with relationships when there is an imbalance of power (including seeking help or leaving the relationship)

• managing the physical, social and emotional changes that occur during puberty

• practices that support reproductive and sexual health (contraception, negotiating consent, and prevention of sexually transmitted infections and blood-borne viruses)

• celebrating and respecting difference and diversity in individuals and communities.

Despite national guidance, there is wide variability in how schools interpret the curriculum, what topics they choose to address and how much detail they provide. This is further compounded by a lack of teacher training.

Read more: Relationships and sex education is now mandatory in English schools – Australia should do the same

A study of students in South Australia and Victoria, along with repeated nationwide surveys of secondary students, have shown young people do consider school to be a trustworthy source of sex education. But most don’t believe the lessons have prepared them adequately for relationships and intimacy.

They want lessons that take into account diverse genders and sexualities, focus less on biology, and provide more detail about relationships, pleasure and consent.

The national curriculum also stops mandating these lessons after year 10 and many year 11 and 12 timetables are focused on university entrance exams or vocational learning opportunities. This means senior students have limited opportunity to receive formal sex education at a time when they really need it.

So, what should young people know about consent?

The term “consent” is often associated with sex, but it’s much broader than that. It relates to permission and how to show respect for ourselves and for other people. Consent should therefore be addressed in an age-appropriate way across all years of schooling.

The most important point about consent is that everyone should be comfortable with what they’re engaging in. If you are uncomfortable at any point, you have the right to stop. On the other side, if you see someone you are interacting with being uncomfortable, you need to check in with them to ensure they are enthusiastic about the activity, whatever it may be.

In the early years, students should be taught how to affirm and respect personal boundaries, using non-sexual examples like whether to share their toys or give hugs. It is also important they learn about public and private body parts and the importance of using correct terminology.

Read more: Why having the sex talk early and often with your kids is good for them

In later years, lessons should consider more intimate or sexual scenarios. This also includes consent and how it applies to the digital space.

Older students need to learn sexual activity is something to be done with someone, not to someone. Consent is a critical part of this process and it must be freely given, informed and mutual.

Consent isn’t about doing whatever we want until we hear the word “no”. Ideally we want all our sexual encounters to involve an enthusiastic “yes”.

But if your partner struggles to say the word “yes” enthusiastically, it is important to pay attention to body language and non-verbal cues. You should feel confident your partner is enjoying the activity as much as you are, and if you are ever unsure, stop and ask them.

Often this means checking in regularly with your partner.

Young people also need to know just because you have agreed to do something in the past, this does not mean you have to agree to do it again. You also have the right to change you mind at any time — even partway through an activity.

It’s not as simple as ‘no means no’

The most recent Australian survey of secondary school students highlighted that more than one-quarter (28.4%) of sexually active students reported an unwanted sexual experience. Their most common reasons for this unwanted sex was due to pressure from a partner, being intoxicated or feeling frightened.

We should be careful not to oversimplify the issue of consent. Sexual negotiation can be a difficult or awkward process for anyone — regardless of their age — to navigate.

Some academics have called for moving beyond binary notions of “yes means yes” and “no means no” to consider the grey area in the middle.

Read more: Forget the pick-up lines – here’s how to talk about your sexual desires and boundaries

While criminal acts such as rape are perhaps easily understood by young people, teaching materials need to consider a broad spectrum of scenarios to highlight examples of violence or coercion. For example, someone having an expectation of sex because you’ve flirted, and making you feel guilty for leading them on.

When it comes to sexual activity, we should be clear that:

• although the law defines “sex” as an activity that involves penetration, other sexual activities may be considered indecent assault

• a degree of equality needs to exist between sexual partners and it is coercive to use a position of power or methods such as manipulation, trickery or bribery to obtain sex

• a person who is incapacitated due to drugs or alcohol is not able to give consent

• wearing certain clothes, flirting or kissing is not necessarily an invitation for other things.

We should also challenge gender stereotypes about who should initiate intimacy and who may wish to take things fast or slow. Healthy relationships involve a ongoing and collaborative conversation between both sexual partners about what they want.

Consent is sexy

A partner who actively asks for permission and respects your boundaries is showing they respect you and care about your feelings. It also leads to an infinitely more pleasurable sexual experience when both partners are really enjoying what they are doing.

It is important that lessons for older students focus on the positive aspects of romantic and sexual relationships.

They should encourage young people to consider what sorts of relationships they want for themselves and provide them with the skills, such as communication and empathy, to help ensure positive experiences.

More information about consent:

– ref. Not as simple as ‘no means no’: what young people need to know about consent – https://theconversation.com/not-as-simple-as-no-means-no-what-young-people-need-to-know-about-consent-155736

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Simon Wilkie, Dean, Faculty of Business and Economics; Head of Monash Business School, Monash University

When I was the chief economist at the US Federal Communications Commission, we oversaw was the acquisition of DirecTV, the satellite pay-TV platform, by News Corp in 2003.

Prior to the merger, DirecTV did not own significant content, and content-rich News Corp did not own a pay-TV distribution platform.

Economic analysis showed the merged entity would have the incentive to raise the price of certain TV channels, such as the Fox broadcast network and Fox sports channels, that were sold to rival pay-TV distribution platforms and cable companies such as Comcast.

To counteract this anti-competitive harm, we developed what is known as the FCC arbitration mechanism if firms could not agree on a price for a channel.

This is the same mechanism the Morrison government’s news media bargaining code would impose on Facebook and Google in Australia to force them to compensate Australian media companies for linking to and using their content.

In the US context, the arbitration mechanism worked. In particular, News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch complained about his inability to raise prices and subsequently sold DirecTV to get out of the arbitration requirement.

Read more: Google’s and Facebook’s loud appeal to users over the news media bargaining code shows a lack of political power

But there are some stark differences between the US and Australian contexts. In particular, there were many other channels in the US that were not affected by the merger, so an arbitrator could use the market price benchmark for what was a reasonable price for a TV channel.

For example, a cable company such as Comcast could submit its contracts with broadcast television networks like ABC, NBC and CBS to benchmark the price for the Fox network.

In the Australian context, there is no such benchmark competitive price for the value of news content. Hence the government’s encouragement for parties to reach commercial agreements before the news media bargaining code takes effect, to better inform the arbitrator.

Although the aims of the bargaining code are laudable, Facebook responded last week with a drastic move: blocking the sharing and publishing of Australian news on its platform. Research indicates this could be devastating to the small news publishers in Australia.

What happened when Google News was shut down in Spain

In an important study, Stanford economist Susan Athey and her colleagues Markus Mobius and Jeno Pal examined the impact of the withdrawal of Google News from Spain in 2014.

Similar to Australia today, Spanish regulators required that Google pay publishers for news content. In response, Google shut down Google News in Spain.

By studying the online behaviour of a large set of individual users who had agreed to be tracked, they found that overall online news consumption in Spain (as measured by page visits) declined by around 10%, which is consistent with other studies.

But thanks to the use of individual data, they were able to dig deeper and found the decline was concentrated on a specific set of users. People who specifically relied on Google News to initiate a news search reduced their news consumption by about 20%.

In a concerning finding, this reduction in news consumption disproportionately affected smaller publishers, who experienced a dramatic reduction in page visits. In contrast, large publishers saw an increase in visits to their landing page.

This was particularly true in cases of “breaking news”, where large publishers had the advantage of being first to report.

As a result, the authors wrote, large publishers likely saw their advertising revenues increase. And overall, there was also a change in the type of news people consumed, with fewer people gravitating toward breaking news, hard news and news from diverse news outlets.

Read more: Local news sources are closing across Australia. We are tracking the devastation (and some reasons for hope)

If the role of Facebook in Australia is similar to Google News in Spain in terms of driving traffic to individual news outlets, then the consequences of Facebook’s recent action will be dire for public interest journalism — and, in particular, the diversity of the Australian media landscape.

It will likely increase the market share of entrenched major media outlets and reduce visits to smaller players. If this is the case, the goals of the news media bargaining code will not have been met. It will have backfired.

Fixed payments won’t lead to more investment

There is a second and subtle point of economics relating to how the bargaining code is implemented. The arbitration rules under the code now require a digital platform to make a fixed payment to a media outlet for two years of content.

A fundamental principle of economics is that a fixed cost — or a fixed sum of revenue — does not affect a firm’s decision on how much of a product it makes or the quality of what it produces.

As pointed out by economist Josh Gans, this means a fixed payment from Facebook or Google to news providers will not necessarily lead to any more dollars being invested in journalism by major media firms.

If the objective of the code is to drive a healthier public interest journalism landscape, this is a shortcoming that needs to be addressed.

Read more: The old news business model is broken: making Google and Facebook pay won’t save journalism

To ensure the best possible outcomes for small-to-medium-sized public interest news producers — an important element of media diversity — the government should consider using the revenue from Google and Facebook for short-term capacity funding in the first 12 months of the code.

This would be funding specifically earmarked for the small- and medium-size publishers who will be the most adversely affected.

However, the principles of economics also tell us that a fixed amount of costs or revenue does affect one decision by a firm — the choice to either shut down or stay in business.

So, the code may have a positive effect on Australian public interest journalism to the extent that any payments may keep struggling, small publishers in business with an influx of steady cash.

This further reinforces that the focus should be on small publishers, rather than the larger news organisations.

Most of the attention on the code, thus far, has been on larger players. But if the real issue is in the sustainability of small publishers, we must look beyond the code to introduce additional mechanisms to ensure the viability of public interest journalism, including regional news or journalism for hyper-local markets.

This could include, for instance, taxation reform to fund public interest journalism.

Even with the best possible outcome under the code, measures such as this are necessary and must be implemented as a matter of urgency.

– ref. The news media bargaining code could backfire if small media outlets aren’t protected: an economist explains – https://theconversation.com/the-news-media-bargaining-code-could-backfire-if-small-media-outlets-arent-protected-an-economist-explains-155745

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hassan Vally, Associate Professor, La Trobe University

A lot has happened over the past year, so you can be forgiven for not having a clear memory of what some of the major concerns were at the beginning of the pandemic.

However, if you think back to the beginning of the pandemic, one of the major concerns was the role that surfaces played in the transmission of the virus.

As an epidemiologist, I remember spending countless hours responding to media requests answering questions along the lines of whether we should be washing the outside of food cans or disinfecting our mail.

I also remember seeing teams of people walking the streets at all hours wiping down poles and cleaning public benches.

But what does the evidence actually say about surface transmission more than 12 months into this pandemic?

Before addressing this, we need to define the question we’re asking. The key question isn’t whether surface transmission is possible, or whether it can occur in the real world — it almost certainly can.

The real question is: what is the extent of the role of surface contact in the transmission of the virus? That is, what is the likelihood of catching COVID via a surface, as opposed to other methods of transmission?

The evidence is minimal

There’s little evidence that surface transmission is a common way in which the coronavirus is spread. The main way it’s spread is by the air, either by larger droplets via close contact, or by smaller droplets called aerosols. As a side note, the relative role these two routes play in transmission is probably a much more interesting and important question to clarify from a public health perspective.

One of the best commentaries on COVID surface transmission was published in the journal Lancet Infectious Diseases in July 2020 by Emanuel Goldman, a professor of microbiology from the United States.

As he described, one of the drivers for the exaggerated perception of the risk of surface transmission was the publication of a number of studies showing SARS-CoV-2 viral particles could be detected for long periods of time on various surfaces.

You probably saw these studies because they received enormous publicity worldwide and I remember doing numerous interviews in which I had to explain what these findings actually meant.

As I explained at the time, these studies could not be generalised to the real world, and in some instances the media releases accompanying them tended towards overstating the significance of these findings.

The key issue is that as a general principal the time required for a population of microoganisms to die is directly proportional to the size of that population. This means the greater the amount of virus deposited on a surface, the longer you will find viable viral particles on that surface.

So in terms of designing experiments that are relevant to public health, one of the more important variables in these studies is the amount of virus deposited on a surface — and the extent to which this approximates what would happen in the real world.

If you understand this, it becomes apparent that a number of these virus survival studies stacked the odds of detecting viable virus by depositing large amounts of virus on surfaces far in excess of what would be reasonably expected to be found in the real world. What’s more, some of these studies customised conditions that would extend the life of viral particles, such as adjusting humidity and excluding natural light.

Although there was nothing wrong with the science here, it was the real world relevance and the interpretation that was amiss at times. It’s notable that other studies which more closely replicated real world scenarios found less impressive survival times for three other human coronaviruses (including SARS).

It’s important to note we’re relying on indirect evidence in assessing the role of surface transmission for the coronavirus. That is, you can’t actually do an ethical scientific experiment that confirms the role surface transmission plays because you’d have to deliberately infect people. Despite being such a seemingly straightforward question, it’s surprisingly difficult to determine the relative importance of the various transmission pathways for this virus.

What we have to do instead is look at all of the evidence we do have and see what it’s telling us, including case studies describing transmission events. And if we do this, there isn’t a lot out there to support surface transmission being of major importance in the spread of COVID.

We could save a lot of time and money

We need to put the risks of exposure to SARS-CoV-2 via the various modes of transmission into perspective, so we focus our limited energy and resources on the right things.

This isn’t to say surface transmission isn’t possible and that it doesn’t pose a risk in certain situations, or that we should disregard it completely. But, we should acknowledge the threat surface transmission poses is relatively small.

We can therefore mitigate this relatively small risk by continuing to focus on hand hygiene and ensuring cleaning protocols are more in keeping with the risk of surface transmission.

In doing this, we can potentially save millions of dollars being spent on obsessive cleaning practices. These are probably providing little or no benefit and being done solely because they’re easy to do and provide the reassurance of doing something, thereby relieving some of our anxieties.

– ref. Catching COVID from surfaces is very unlikely. So perhaps we can ease up on the disinfecting – https://theconversation.com/catching-covid-from-surfaces-is-very-unlikely-so-perhaps-we-can-ease-up-on-the-disinfecting-155359

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bob Pressey, Professor, Conservation Planning, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, James Cook University

Last week Australia joined a new alliance of 40 countries pledging to protect 30% of the world’s oceans by 2030 from pollution, overfishing, climate change and other environmental threats. Australia already boasts one of the largest networks of marine protected areas in the world, with about half of Commonwealth waters around mainland Australia under some form of protection.

Job done? Actually, no.

Despite the size of our protected areas, marine wildlife continues to vanish. A government report card recently scored the Great Barrier Reef a “D” for its failing health. Meanwhile, commercial fishing depletes non-target or non-economic species as collateral damage, and damages marine habitats through trawling, the marine equivalent of clear felling forests. These issues are extensive, but poorly understood.

So why the paradox? Our research analysis reveals that size is misleading. Marine zonings vary in their effectiveness in protecting biodiversity, and zones established in 2012, 2015 and 2018 put effective protection in the wrong places.

Unhelpful from the start

In a rich, developed country, a society’s commitment to nature conservation is measured by what it’s prepared to give up. In Australia, that’s not much.

In late 2012, Labor announced a massive increase in Commonwealth marine protected areas (MPAs). But it failed to mention that the placement of “highly protected zones” — which don’t allow any commercial extraction — had no effect on oil and gas activities and a very minor effect on commercial fishing.

As a result, the contribution of the 2012 MPAs to conservation was disproportionately small.

In 2015 the Federal Coalition changed the 2012 zonings. In 2018 the Coalition changed them again.

The Coalition was openly hostile toward the 2012 MPA expansion, so it came as no surprise the 2015 and 2018 MPA systems would become even more strongly residual — biased towards areas with least promise for extractive activities.

Our recent paper tells the story in detail, but here’s a summary.

Zoning the ocean to make almost no difference

Labor’s 2012 additions to the MPA system covered 2.4 million square kilometres, an impressive figure at first glance.

Under the Coalition, the boundaries of Labor’s new MPAs were not altered, but there were large changes to the internal zonings, which specify permitted uses, in 2015 and 2018.

The changes meant highly protected zones declined from 37% of the total MPA system in 2012 to about 22% in 2018. Other zones that allow fishing with varying restrictions, or that place few restrictions on commercial extraction, made up the rest. The conservation benefits of those other zones — dubbed “partially protected areas” — are dubious.

How much difference did all the zoning and rezoning make to marine conservation? Very little.

That’s because, from the start, highly protected zones were put in places with no petroleum extraction and low previous fishing yield. The bias was only exaggerated in 2015, and again in 2018.

Read more: 75% of Australia’s marine protected areas are given only ‘partial’ protection. Here’s why that’s a problem

By 2018, less than 1% of the area previously used for Commonwealth pelagic longlining had been protected from longlining. Pelagic longlining involves setting baited hooks on lines that can be kilometres long, suspended in the water. It can seriously harm non-target species, including sharks and seabirds.

Likewise, only about 1.5% of Australia’s previously trawled areas became covered by zones that prohibit trawling, a practice also known to have serious biodiversity impacts, such as destroying seafloor habitat.

The zoning of the Coral Sea tells part of the story. The 2012 highly protected zones carefully avoided most commercial fishing in this vast region of open ocean, and research showed the benefits to conservation were “minimal”. When the 2012 zones were changed, the area open to fishing methods that pose ecological risks increased further.

Is Australia really leading the world?

After the latest weakening — proposed in 2017 and formalised in 2018 — of the already weak 2012 marine protection, the federal environment minister and the director of Parks Australia said the revisions achieved the right balance between conservation and use.

Read more: The Coral Sea: an ocean jewel that needs more protection

In terms of commercial fishing, we show the “balance” was about 2% conservation and 98% use across all of Commonwealth marine waters, which cover almost six million square kilometres.

In real terms, Australia’s marine protection is minuscule, and its marine unprotected areas are vast — a failure that has attracted international criticism. In 2017, for instance, 1,286 researchers from 45 countries lambasted the federal government’s draft marine park management plans that are now in place.

The current highly protected zones might guard against future expansion of petroleum extraction and commercial fishing, as technologies and markets evolve. Unfortunately, however, the chances of that seem slim.

Australian MPA decisions since 2012 suggest strongly that, if highly protected zones are found to prevent profitable extraction, they will be downgraded or moved so they don’t get in the way.

Three ways Australia could lead the world (again)

Australia led the world with the 2004 rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, a systematic exercise that placed about a third of the Park in highly protected zones. But almost 17 years on, we can see plenty of room for improvement in marine conservation as we learn what works and what doesn’t.

Read more: The Great Barrier Reef is in trouble. There are a whopping 45 reasons why

How could Australia lead the world now? A first step would be to drop the deception that square kilometres say anything meaningful about conservation.

Our commitment to marine conservation will be measured by how much oil and gas we leave under the seabed, how many fish we leave in the water, and how we catch the others. Decarbonising and properly managing catchments and coastal zones will also be critical.

A second step would be to establish explicit, quantitative, scientifically informed goals for conservation of individual species and ecosystems in highly protected zones. The lack of such goals allowed zonings from 2012 to 2018 to be passed off as representative of marine environments, when they were not.

Read more: Humans threaten the Antarctic Peninsula’s fragile ecosystem. A marine protected area is long overdue

A third step would be to achieve explicit conservation goals through consultation with diverse stakeholders. This includes co-design and co-management of coastal MPAs that empower local communities and Indigenous peoples from the outset, rather than through consultation late in the process.

After many years of debate over MPAs, some will throw their hands up at the prospect of yet more planning. But that’s what’s needed to make Australia’s MPA zoning effective, along with the (recently elusive) vision and commitment needed for political leadership in real marine conservation.

– ref. Australia’s marine (un)protected areas: government zoning bias has left marine life in peril since 2012 – https://theconversation.com/australias-marine-un-protected-areas-government-zoning-bias-has-left-marine-life-in-peril-since-2012-153795

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gary John Brierley, Professor, Chair of Physical Geography, University of Auckland

When two West Coast rivers flooded on the same day in 2019, the Waiho tore down a bridge and cut off local communities for 18 days, and the Fox eroded a landfill, exposing 135 tonnes of rubbish that contaminated beaches more than 100km away.

A flood on the Rangitata River during the same year severed road, rail and power connections along the east coast of the South Island and cut a 25km path to the sea through prime dairy country.

We shouldn’t be surprised when our rivers break their banks — that’s just a river being a river. Current management practices in Aotearoa treat rivers as static, in the hope of making them more predictable.

But this can lead to disasters.

The recently announced reform of the Resource Management Act (RMA) is an opportunity to address river confinement, but it isn’t enough. We need to change the way we think about rivers.

By forcing rivers into confined channels, we are strangling the life out of them and creating “zombie rivers”.

Unless we change management practices to work with a river, giving it space to move and allowing channels to adjust, we will continue to put people and rivers on a collision course.

When flood risk is managed poorly, disadvantaged groups of the population are often disproportionately impacted. Given climate change predictions of more extreme floods and drought, the problem will only get worse.

Read more: Letting rivers run wild could reduce UK flooding – new research

Working with a river, not against it

A healthy river is resilient, constantly adjusting its path and regenerating habitats, with significant capacity to self-heal and recover from disturbance.

Although New Zealanders associate with the ecological and cultural values of living rivers, such as ancestral connections and places of food gathering (mahingai kai), our management practices continue to treat rivers as unchanging. This reflects a colonial approach that tries to confine rivers within defined corridors to maximise the availability of land and manage flood risk.

River confinement in New Zealand is the result of both engineering works such as stop banks, intentionally focused on flood defence, and the slow creep of agricultural encroachment. Current river management practices are funded by targeted rates paid by landowners. Their goal is to protect as much land as possible as cheaply as possible.

This has arguably been very effective to date and is understandable, but ignores other river values. It also misses the point that when design limits are exceeded, disaster usually follows.

Effective river management

There are always trade-offs. For example, planting introduced willows along river banks is a cost-effective way of trying to control the river in the short term. But willows spread aggressively and choke the river, diminishing habitat diversity and reducing the river’s capacity to transport flood waters and gravel. This exacerbates risk in the medium to long term.

In scientific terms, effective approaches to river management look after the geomorphology of river systems — the interactions that shape the changing mosaic of river habitats — alongside concerns for water quality and aquatic ecology. This requires analysis of flows and sediment deposition to assess how a river uses its energy.

Read more: When dams cause more problems than they solve, removing them can pay off for people and nature

When a river has space to move, it dissipates its energy. This builds its capacity to recover from disturbances and maintain a dynamic but stable state. Constraining a river’s flow into a restricted space concentrates flow energy, increases flood magnitude and accentuates problems downstream.

Rather than forcing a river into a defined place (which also often limits people’s access to it), more responsive and low-impact practices would embrace a harmonious relationship with dynamic, living and adjusting rivers.

Reframing environmental law

Just as landowners often perceive wetlands as potential farm land once drained, planted river margins are sometimes considered “wasted” land. Agricultural encroachment removed more than 11,000 hectares of braided river bed on the Canterbury Plains between 1990 and 2012.

The current wording of the Resource Management Act (RMA) allows this, as its definition of river bed assumes a static river channel. This is clearly inappropriate for braided rivers, which have multiple shifting channels.

That said, we are cautiously optimistic about reframing the RMA to promote more judicious choices of land for development.

Reducing the impacts of future disaster

International studies show that allowing a river to self-adjust is cheaper and more effective than active interventions that force a river into a particular place.

Europe and Japan have a long history of confining rivers. Once management practices start on this path, they become locked into progressively building more and more expensive hard engineering structures. Many rivers in Aotearoa New Zealand are less modified than those in other parts of the world. Changing management practices now can have a significant positive effect.

Contemporary scientifically-informed approaches to river management directly align with te ao Māori, wherein practices respect ancestral connections, living with rivers rather than seeking to control them. This presents an opportunity for regenerative relations to living rivers, recognising and enhancing their mana so they can function unimpeded.

Although rivers in Aotearoa are well described and we have some of the best databases and monitoring practices, this does not mean we are giving effect to the principle of Te Mana o te Wai, which aims to respect the natural need of a river to adjust as a living entity.

Working with the processes that create and rework a river channel and its floodplain will reduce the impacts of future disasters. Recognising the links between sections of a river and the whole catchment will help us assess how likely it is that the river will adjust to accommodate larger and more frequent future floods.

An honest discussion now could save us the direct and indirect costs of future clean-up and repair. Reanimating rivers seeks to respect the rights of healthy, living rivers that erode and flood in the right place and at the right rate.

This article is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the series here.

– ref. Why we should release New Zealand’s strangled rivers to lessen the impact of future floods – https://theconversation.com/why-we-should-release-new-zealands-strangled-rivers-to-lessen-the-impact-of-future-floods-153077

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elizabeth Baré, Honorary Fellow, LH Martin Institute, The University of Melbourne

Australian universities roughly doubled the number of casual staff employed to 23,000 (in full-time equivalents) from 2001 to 2019 (the latest year for which figures are available).

The greatest increase in casual staff has been in the academic workforce. The proportion of casual staff increased from 20% to 24% of this workforce in full-time equivalent (FTE) terms — as casual staff usually work part-time, we estimate that’s about 90,000 people.

Earlier this month, Universities Australia announced 17,300 university jobs had been lost due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It said the sector was likely to lose about A$3.8 billion in revenue in 2020 and 2021.

Based on previous analysis of individual university announcements in 2020 of job losses totalling around 6,000 FTE, it is highly likely most of the 17,300 jobs lost are people on casual or fixed-term contracts. A modest 10% reduction in academic casual staff would mean 9,000 lost their jobs. This has a significant impact on the capacity to teach domestic students.

There have been and will continue to be legitimate reasons for casual academic employment in higher education. A number of factors have prompted this steady increase in casualisation of academic work.

Two main considerations have been:

1. rapid growth in student numbers coupled with the decline in the real rate of government funding for teaching and research, making universities less keen to take on more “permanent” academic staff

2. very generous conditions attached to continuing employment, including 17% employer-provided superannuation, redundancy provisions well above community norms, highly regulated workload provisions and, for some, access to generous “outside work” entitlements.

Relying too heavily on casual academic employment could be detrimental in the long term for the student experience, research programs and universities — as well as for the staff themselves.

In 2020, Australian universities responded quickly and nimbly to the immediate emergency created by COVID-19. In 2021, as a fresh round of enterprise bargaining begins, universities have an opportunity to capture the disruption created by the pandemic and reform the terms and conditions for their increasingly contingent and casualised academic workforce.

A better deal for unis and staff

Here are five proposals that are readily achievable. Each would give better effect to universities’ stated commitments to value staff and allow them to fulfil their potential.

1. Allow fixed-term engagement for teaching duties

The Higher Education Industry (Academic Staff) Award specifically excludes the use of fixed-term contracts for staff whose main role is teaching. This provision can in turn be linked to the increasing use of casual staff for teaching. It limits the capacity of universities to take on new teaching staff in times of uncertain student demand.

Varying the award to allow universities to engage fixed-term staff for teaching duties would provide greater certainty for staff and a more consistent experience for students.

2. Change employment structures for teachers regularly employed as casuals

Limitations on fixed-term employment for teaching have resulted in expanded numbers of casual teachers. However, simply removing the restraint is unlikely to change employment patterns, as casual teaching tends to be concentrated in particular periods of the year.

A fixed-term contract that allows for engagement and payment across a year but with work more concentrated in specific periods will not only improve security of tenure, but also enable staff to undertake a broader range of tasks, including student consultation. It will also give these staff access to personal and professional benefits such as academic promotion.

3. Shift the casual pay structure from the 1980s to the 2020s

The current structure is based on the requirement to deliver hour-long lectures and tutorials and separate hourly rates for other academic duties such as marking, music accompaniment and nursing clinical supervision. All hourly rates attract a 25% loading to compensate for loss of annual and sick leave.

The Academic Salaries Tribunal (AST) codified the structure in 1980. The evolution of teaching since then means this structure no longer reflects the breadth of work required. These changes include:

• team teaching (staff collaborate on delivery)

• the flipped classroom model (students absorb the lecture and reading materials online at home, then discuss this or work on live problem-solving in classes)

• the use of workshops and other hands-on work

• online teaching where staff must be responsive to student work.

4. Create a reward/career structure for casual teaching staff

Many of these staff are both expert in their field and excellent teachers. They include industry professionals and practitioners.

Some universities have developed promotion systems for honorary staff, especially where an academic title is important to professional standing. These processes might be adapted for casual teachers. They could then be appointed or promoted to an academic rank based on merit and receive pay to match, albeit as a casual employee.

5. Allow for core entitlements to be portable

The careers of many academic staff are now built on concurrent or consecutive appointments at several universities. Universities generally have provisions for recognising prior service at another university, but these largely benefit continuing staff.

The creation of the higher education industry superannuation scheme, UniSuper, in 1983 is an example of a whole-of-sector collaboration that has benefited staff and universities. A similar cross-sector framework to recognise service at another university should be considered. This might extend to the training and accreditation of casual teachers, ensuring quality across the sector. And in the case of fixed-term staff, it might allow for core entitlements such as annual and sick leave to be more portable.

The pandemic has greatly sharpened Australian universities’ focus on their staff and HR policies, structures and strategies. This presents an opportunity to review and greatly improve the employment practices for casual academic staff, in particular those relating to core student teaching.

The detailed analysis on which this article is based can be found here.

– ref. COVID hit casual academics hard. Here are 5 ways to produce a better deal for unis and staff – https://theconversation.com/covid-hit-casual-academics-hard-here-are-5-ways-to-produce-a-better-deal-for-unis-and-staff-155357

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Wendy Stone, Professor of Housing & Social Policy, Centre for Urban Transitions, Swinburne University of Technology

Barriers to housing for people with pets around Australia are the focus of newly released national research by an interdisciplinary team. Why? Because laws are changing nationally but are highly inconsistent. A systematic national approach is needed to reduce the numbers of people who have to give up their pets to secure housing – especially as we return to post-COVID “normal”.

Six housing experts spanning five Australian universities undertook the study of animal-inclusive housing and options for reform, the first of its kind internationally. It assesses state and territory housing and legislative reforms in the private rental sector, social housing, homelessness services, strata title, aged care and caravan parks. Here they explain what they found.

Read more: As pet owners suffer rental insecurity, perhaps landlords should think again

– ref. Can I have a pet and be housed, too? It all depends… – https://theconversation.com/can-i-have-a-pet-and-be-housed-too-it-all-depends-155202

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Miles Pattenden, Senior Research Fellow, Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry/Gender and Women’s History Research Centre, Australian Catholic University

If Pope Joan — the infamous female pope of the 9th century – didn’t exist, you can see why someone would have had to invent her.

For the Catholic Church, she became a story of why women should not be allowed to hold power; for the Protestants, she was a helpful argument against falsehoods embedded in the papacy.

A woman who inveigled her way onto St Peter’s throne, some said the “Popess” was English; others German. A popular medieval version of her tale has her gender “discovered” during a papal procession because she gives birth while trying to mount her horse.

Was Joan real? Probably not. Does it matter? Probably not that much either. Her story tells us something important about wider attitudes to sex and gender in pre-modern Christian Europe.

But the story’s on-going popularity also reveals something of our own fascination with arcane and seemingly rigid gender-boundaries in the Catholic Church.

A figure of satire

Likely, Joan was born of a very Roman love of satire. Romans have excoriated political leaders for centuries by posting humorous verses on the so-called “talking statue” of Pasquino outside Piazza Navona.

Gendered tropes and sexual obscenities commonly punctuated these literary efforts. The humanist Niccolò Franco (1515-70) penned one which began “the pope, and all his prelates, are buggers.”

Pope Pius V had him executed.

A 17th-century pamphlet memorably imagines the cardinals in an on-going conclave as whores who fight for control of the bordello.

Joan is just the grand old dame of such creations.

Joan’s story first appeared in the chronicle of a Dominican friar in 1255. However, it is probably a century older from a period of upheaval when popes sought to consolidate their rule over Rome.

Many Romans resisted the pope’s encroaching authority and used Joan as a weapon to mock their priestly overlord. They drew on past scandals, notably the 10th century’s “pornocracy” or “rule of the harlots” when the papacy came under the control of Theodora, wife of the Roman consul Theophylactus, and her daughter Marozia.

Theodora helped install Sergius III as pope in 904 with Marozia as his concubine. Marozia’s son later became Pope John XI (931-35) and her grandson Pope John XII (955-64).

Joan’s story can be read as an allegory for those events when a woman really had been in control.

Let’s talk about sex

Joan also speaks to Christianity’s wider problem with sex.

Early Christians fused Greek philosophy with Jewish lore – but they took their sexual ethics from Aristotle, who was not altogether keen on the pleasurable act.

Joan, the promiscuous she-pope whose cervix dilated in the midst of performing sacred duties, was the very antithesis of the proper Christian virgin.

16th-century Reformation Protestants seized on this contrast with Christian teachings to cite her as evidence of the papacy’s essentially corrupt nature: verily, she linked it to the biblical Whore of Babylon.

Yet Catholics saw a different parallel for Joan: Queen Elizabeth I of England, a woman who never married nor produced an heir. Her Act of Supremacy (1559) had set her up as “Popess” of her own Anglican Church.

Joan and Elizabeth were painted as heretics, going against Church teachings. And, asked the Catholics, could Elizabeth really be any purer or more virginal than the Joan of legend?

What makes a man?

Both Protestants and Catholics also asked: could a woman really have fooled men in the way Joan is said to have done?

Protestants — adamant she really existed — reached into the historical record for examples of female cross-dressing such as Joan’s notorious namesake Joan of Arc.

Some speculated beardless Italians were so effeminate that Joan’s deception of them was quite believable. Others pointed to the wealth of accounts of Joan’s life in chronicles from before the Reformation which they thought impossible to refute.

They even found support in descriptions by Renaissance humanists of the sedia stercoraria, a seat with a hole in its centre used in papal coronations.

Was its purpose to check the new pope’s genitalia, they asked? And why would this need to be proven, unless that had ever been questioned?

Joan personified the Catholic Church’s essentially patriarchal nature. Her tradition became the exception to prove the rule.

Enduring tales

By the 18th century a consensus gradually emerged among both Catholics and Protestants that Joan’s life was purely fictional. However, today Joan continues to inspire as both sensation and symbol.

Some consider Joan a feminist pioneer, others see her as an early transgender figure.

Two Pope Joan films, in 1972 and 2009, present her as a feminist character. And Rihanna showed up to the 2018 Met Gala in a gender-bending pope outfit that strongly implied this, too.

But a transgender Joan has now had her own play and inspired the crowning cliché in Robert Harris’ thriller Conclave (2016).

As the Catholic Church finally confronts the yawning gap between the views of the Catholic faithful and its own teachings on sex and gender, Joan could be a pope for the 21st century.

Earlier this month a French nun became the first woman to hold a voting position at the Vatican.

But an actual female pope presiding over mass in St Peter’s? Don’t count on her any time soon.

– ref. ‘A promiscuous she-pope with a dilated cervix’: the legend of Pope Joan, who gave birth on a horse – https://theconversation.com/a-promiscuous-she-pope-with-a-dilated-cervix-the-legend-of-pope-joan-who-gave-birth-on-a-horse-155378

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emil Temnyalov, Senior Lecturer, Economics, University of Technology Sydney

Digital platforms like Facebook and Google give us easy access to media and information. But our collective dependence on these tech giants could in the long run reduce the quality of journalism, making us all worse off.

The tension between convenience for readers and funding for journalism has been highlighted by Facebook’s recent move to block news in Australia rather than pay media companies under new regulations.

Situations like this, where each individual acts in their own best interest but everybody still somehow loses, are surprisingly common in life. Economists see them through the lens of the “prisoner’s dilemma”, a famous fable from game theory that might well illustrate our digital platforms ecosystem.

What is the prisoner’s dilemma?

Imagine two prisoners being interrogated in separate rooms about a crime they’ve committed. Each is offered a reduced sentence if they provide evidence of the crime.

If both prisoners provide evidence, they are both convicted of the crime. If only one does, he or she gets a reduced sentence, while the other gets the harshest of sentences. If neither supplies evidence, the investigator can only convict them of a minor crime.

Now put yourself in either criminal’s shoes: whatever your co-conspirator does, it is always in your own self-interest to provide evidence. If your co-conspirator doesn’t, you get off with a light sentence. If your co-conspirator does too, you are both convicted, but you would have received an even harsher sentence if you didn’t provide evidence yourself.

Read more: The legacy of John Nash and his equilibrium theory

By this logic, both prisoners would give evidence (it is a “dominant strategy” for each of them) — but both would end up worse off than if they had both stayed silent.

This fable is one of the most famous and successful models of game theory — it has been widely used to study nuclear arms races, climate change, the evolution of cooperation, doping in sports, and many other phenomena.

Do digital platforms present a prisoner’s dilemma?

Digital platforms make it easy for users to access news and information by integrating them into the rest of their services. Seeking out news directly from providers would be less convenient.

When we choose to get news and information on these platforms, we individually value the convenience, but not the effect on news quality in the long run.

Google and Facebook dominate the news ecosystem without creating content themselves. We generate value when we use the platforms — but the quality of the news and information we get will depend on how much of that value ultimately goes to the journalists and newsrooms who produce the content in the first place.

Read more: How Facebook and Google changed the advertising game

If very little value goes to content providers, they may have little incentive to develop high-quality content. This is the classical prisoners’ dilemma outcome, where we are all worse off.

Alternatively, if digital platforms pass a lot of the value to content providers, we might all benefit from both high-quality content and ease of access.

Who captures the value of news and information?

Digital platforms capture enormous value by monetising the time and attention we spend on them, and the data we generate.

There are good reasons to think digital platforms bring significant value for news and content providers, but it’s hard to determine how much.

If easy access to news means people read more news than they would otherwise, then the digital platforms are creating value overall, and some of that would benefit the content providers.

Read more: Sure, interest rates are negative, but so are some prices, and when you look around, they’re everywhere

On the other hand, there are also good reasons to think very little of that value ultimately goes to news and content production.

Platforms have a very strong bargaining position in negotiations with providers over how much to pay for news. In part this is because platforms can easily substitute one news provider for another. An article from the Sydney Morning Herald and one from the Australian Financial Review on the same topic are likely to be very similar, apart from some nuance.

But a news provider can’t easily substitute Facebook for Twitter or Google for Bing, because the alternatives have much smaller audiences. So the news providers have a lot less power to negotiate, because they are more replaceable than the platform itself.

What makes digital platforms so irreplaceable?

Facebook and Google are as big as they are today thanks to network effects. When many people use a digital platform, the platform can attract even more users and create economies of scale. It can collect more and better data, and target advertising more effectively.

Markets with such network effects tend to be dominated by a few very large firms in the long run.

Read more: Our corporate cops allowed Facebook to grow big by worrying about the wrong thing

Digital platforms monetise their dominance of social media and search by selling advertising throughout their entire range of products and indirectly selling data about their users. The time and attention that we spend on digital platforms has enormous value, contrary to what Google Australia might want to claim.

What comes next?

Facebook turned off news content on its social media platform, in response to the Australian government’s proposed media bargaining code. Google has taken a more conciliatory approach, striking multimillion-dollar deals with several media companies.

Might we be better off this way in the long run? What if we did not consume our news and information on Facebook?

If platforms like Facebook do leave the news and information “market” in Australia, something else will fill the vacuum. People will not simply stop reading news. Rather, they would find alternative channels, or other platforms would step in to aggregate news.

The cooperative solution to the prisoner’s dilemma of news and information requires that we as a society consume news in a way that incentivises journalists to produce high-quality content. This could come about if we all individually choose to get our news content directly from those who produce it, or from platforms that pass more value to producers.

Ideally one might imagine a world with multiple platforms that aggregate news and provide convenient access to journalism. Because news and information are public goods, we might even imagine a non-profit platform which seeks to maximise informed-ness and digital well-being, rather than maximising the profit from eyeballs and user engagement.

– ref. Getting news from Facebook and Google is convenient — but it comes at great collective cost – https://theconversation.com/getting-news-from-facebook-and-google-is-convenient-but-it-comes-at-great-collective-cost-155720

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rachel Franks, Conjoint Fellow, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle

Book review: The Husband Poisoner, by Tanya Bretherton (Hachette).

Agatha Christie’s first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920), introduces her iconic Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot, and features her famous quip: “poison is a woman’s weapon”.

Of course, poison — sometimes referred to as Inheritor’s Powder — is not gender specific. Rather, poison can simply be the preferred means of murder for clever criminals. Those who, as sociologist and author Tanya Bretherton points out:

… believed the perfect murder was possible if it could be made to look like something else entirely and no one even realised that a crime had been committed.

The title of Bretherton’s fourth book, The Husband Poisoner: Suburban women who killed in post-World War II Sydney (2021), suggests a work focused on damaged, disgruntled or daring wives in the early 1950s who were looking for the perfect solution to an immediate problem. But she goes further to look at how other family members were also targeted. She also gives some clues to explain why seemingly ordinary women decided to try their hand at murder.

Read more: Friday essay: from convicts to contemporary convictions – 200 years of Australian crime fiction

Fact versus fiction

In a novel, writers usually ensure death by foul means is quickly established and everyone is a suspect. In real life, the poisoner’s goal for such a scheme is to make sure the idea of murder is never considered, death is something that is just … well, just unfortunate. Nobody is a suspect.

Poison is available to men and women, as the poisoner and the poisoned. This is a fact showcased when Emily Inglethorp, mistress of Agatha Christie’s Styles Court, unknowingly consumes strychnine. Yet, there is an unsettling number of examples of fictional and real-life female villains dispensing with people as easily as they might deal with a bug. This has long generated anxiety around the type of woman who might poison her husband instead of going through a messy divorce.

Some of this anxiousness is because there is a very specific type of malevolence present when one person decides to poison another. Poison requires planning — the methodical undertaking of procurement, delivery and the hiding of evidence. A show of grief or shock is helpful, but there is plenty of time for that. Poison is often slow.

Bretherton is an excellent story teller. Indeed, this book reads like good crime fiction with dialogue deployed to push the stories forward. From Yvonne Fletcher’s disposal of two husbands to Caroline Grills and her four victims, the women are vivid. You can see their desperation, their motivation, their living conditions, their terrible taste in fashion and their wickedness.

Read more: From crime fighters to crime writers — a new batch of female authors brings stories that are closer to home

These women also have something crucial in common: they chose thallium. Discovered in the mid-1800s, thallium — a colourless, odourless tasteless metal — is highly toxic and indiscriminate when it comes to killing insects, rats, and people.

Another thing these women share is a strange mix of cowardice and bravado. Sure, poison might circumvent an ugly confrontation, but it is a brutal way to kill somebody. To sit and watch, and to wait it out. Bretherton does not hold back in describing how the victims suffered.

Bretherton’s interest in the social context of crime is clear, as is her understanding of social change in Australia across the 20th century. The time frame for this work showcases a world that was changing rapidly, but one in which progress on women’s rights was painfully slow. This was a period that pre-dated no-fault divorce and saw women’s minimum wages set at only 75% of men’s wages.

It was also a time when rats presented a serious public health issue in Sydney, and so rat poison was easy to buy. For some, these conditions would inspire murderous plans. Although there were several high profile cases and prosecutions in the 1950s, we may never know how many people fell victim to rat poison.

The Sydney crime wave also inspired the 2011 television movie Recipe for Murder.

A recipe for murder

Bretherton sets this work apart from most other true crime texts through her integration of recipes. Poison is not easily administered in neat doses via a teaspoon. It needs a vehicle.

In exploring how women served up thallium in beverages and meals, she reinforces the subterfuge required to poison somebody by including recipes from a family cookbook compiled by her own mother. If you enjoy a good, home-made split-pea soup, then it is possible you might have a slightly uncomfortable moment the next time that dish is served.

This is one of the great fears of poison that Bretherton makes plain — it is so very domestic. All the killer really needs to do is concentrate on staying calm and pretending everything is normal. Set the table. Put out a potato and bacon pie. Ask, “Another cup of tea, dear?”

Typically, food in true crime is evidence for a timeline: the suspect was seen leaving a particular restaurant around 11pm; or the victim, based on stomach contents, was thought to have died between this hour and that hour. But the women in Bretherton’s book take familiar comforts and turn them into weapons. The “crime and dine” approach, more commonly seen in crime fiction, is very effective in The Husband Poisoner.

Read more: Friday essay: the meaning of food in crime fiction

The cases included have obviously been well researched, and there are several pages of endnotes. The book would have benefited from an index.

Bretherton’s work on the “thallium craze” offers a fascinating, if fiendish, cut of Sydney’s chaotic social fabric in the mid-20th century. Those who enjoyed her previous volumes and those interested in some of our darker histories will quickly devour The Husband Poisoner. Although, you might want to make your own cup of tea before curling up to do a bit of reading.

– ref. Book review: The Husband Poisoner is about lethal ladies and dangerously tasty recipes – https://theconversation.com/book-review-the-husband-poisoner-is-about-lethal-ladies-and-dangerously-tasty-recipes-154267

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adrian Beaumont, Honorary Associate, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Melbourne

With less than three weeks left until the March 13 Western Australian election, the latest Newspoll gives Labor a 68-32 lead, two-party-preferred. If replicated on election day, this would be a 12.5% swing to Labor from the 2017 election two party result.

Analyst Kevin Bonham describes the Newspoll result as “scarcely processable” and says it is the most lopsided result in Newspoll history for any state or federally.

Primary votes were 59% for Labor, up from 42.2% at the 2017 election, 23% for the Liberals (down from 31.2% in 2017), 2% National (5.4%), 8% Greens (8.9%) and 3% One Nation (4.9%). This poll was conducted February 12-18 from a sample of 1,034.

Premier Mark McGowan had an 88% satisfied rating with 10% dissatisfied (net +78), while Liberal opposition leader Zak Kirkup was at 29% satisfied, 41% dissatisfied (net -12). McGowan led Kirkup as “better premier” by a crushing 83 to 10.

A pandemic boost?

Other recent polls have been strong, albeit less spectacular for Labor. Bonham refers to a January 30 uComms poll that gave Labor a 61-39 lead, from primary votes of 46.8% Labor, 27.5% Liberal, 5.1% National, 8.3% Greens and 6.9% One Nation.

There is also a pattern here. Since the pandemic began, governments that have managed to keep COVID cases down have been rewarded. This includes Queensland and New Zealand Labo(u)r governments at their respective October elections last year.

McGowan’s imposition of a hard WA border to restrict COVID has boosted both his and Labor’s popularity. There have been relatively few WA COVID cases, and life has been comparably normal with the exception of a five-day lockdown in early February.

Upper house a different story

But it’s not all good news for McGowan. While Labor will easily win a majority in the lower house, it will be much harder for the ALP and the Greens to win an upper house majority. The upper house suffers from both a high degree of rural malapportionment (where there are relatively fewer voters per member) and group ticket voting.

Group ticket voting, in which parties direct the preferences of their voters, was abolished in the federal Senate before the 2016 election, but continues to blight elections in both Victoria and WA.

Read more: Victorian upper house greatly distorted by group voting tickets; federal Labor still dominant in Newspoll

There are six WA upper house regions that each return six members, so a quota is one-seventh of the vote, or 14.3%. While Perth has 79% of the overall WA population, it receives just half of upper house seats.

There is also malapportionment in non-metropolian regions. According to the ABC’s election guide, the south west region has 14% of enrolled voters, the heavily anti-Labor agricultural region has just 6% of voters and the mining and pastoral region 4%. All regions return six members.

Despite the convincing lower house win in 2017, Labor and the Greens combined won 18 of the 36 upper house seats, one short of a majority. Bonham notes if the Newspoll swings were replicated uniformly in the upper house, Labor would win 19 of the 36 seats in its own right on filled quotas without needing preferences.

But group ticket voting and malapportionment could see Labor and the Greens fall short of an upper house majority again if Labor’s win is more like the uComms poll than Newspoll.

Federal Newspoll still tied at 50-50

This week’s federal Newspoll, conducted February 17-20 from a sample of 1,504, had the two party preferred tied at 50-50, the same as three weeks ago. Primary votes were 42% Coalition (steady), 37% Labor (up one), 10% Greens (steady) and 3% One Nation (steady).

Of those polled, 64% were satisfied with Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s performance (up one), and 32% were dissatisfied (down one), for a net approval of +32. Labor leader Anthony Albanese dropped five points on net approval to -7. Morrison led Albanese by 61-26 as better prime minister (compared to 57-29 three weeks ago).

During the last week, there has been much media attention on the rape allegations made by former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins against an unnamed colleague.

Read more: Brittany Higgins will lay complaint over alleged rape – and wants a role in framing workplace inquiry

However, it appears the general electorate perceives this issue as being unimportant compared to the COVID crisis. Albanese’s ratings may have suffered owing to the perception that Labor has focussed too much and being too negative on an “unimportant” issue.

Despite Morrison’s continued strong approval ratings and the slump for Albanese, the most important measure — voting intentions — is tied. Since the start of the COVID crisis, there has been a continued discrepancy between voting intentions based off Morrison’s ratings and actual voting intentions.

Newspoll is not alone in showing a close race on voting intentions or strong ratings for Morrison. A Morgan poll, conducted in early to mid February, gave Labor a 50.5-49.5 lead. Last week’s Essential poll gave Morrison a 65-28 approval rating (net +37).

Labor bump in Craig Kelly’s seat

As reported in The Guardian, a uComms robopoll in controversial Liberal MP Craig Kelly’s seat of Hughes has Kelly leading by 55-45. This is about a 5% swing to Labor from the 2019 election result.

The poll was conducted February 18 from a sample of 683 for the community group Hughes Deserves Better.

While additional questions are often skewed in favour of the position of the group commissioning uComms polls, voting intention questions are always asked first. However, individual seat polls have been unreliable in Australia.

Trump acquitted by US Senate

As I predicted three weeks ago, Donald Trump was comfortably acquitted by the United States’ Senate on February 13 on charges of inciting the January 6 riots.

The vote was 57-43 in favour of conviction, but short of the two-thirds majority required. Seven of the 50 Republican senators joined all 50 Democrats in voting to convict.

– ref. Whopping lead for Labor ahead of WA election, but federal Newspoll deadlocked at 50-50 – https://theconversation.com/whopping-lead-for-labor-ahead-of-wa-election-but-federal-newspoll-deadlocked-at-50-50-155735

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Lueck, Professor of Tourism, Auckland University of Technology

Freedom camping has a long tradition in New Zealand. Using your own vehicle as accommodation and parking in public spaces is seen as something of a birth right.

But when international tourists cottoned on to this cheap and cheerful way to see the country, things began to change. Foreign freedom camper numbers grew from 10,000 in the early 2000s to an astonishing 123,000 by 2018.

This massive growth inevitably led to resentment in local communities. Crowding at car parks and beach fronts, road congestion, littering and campers using the natural environment as toilets became a major concern.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the latest tourism report this month from the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment devotes one of its four main recommendations to better regulation of freedom camping in Aotearoa New Zealand.

The report, Not 100% – but four steps closer to sustainable tourism, argues for using the disruption caused by COVID-19 to reset the tourism industry as sustainable and internationally competitive in a climate-conscious world. As such, the old freedom camping model was arguably overdue for reform.

Freedom ‘freeloaders’

This is not the first time it has been a regulatory target. Perception of freedom campers as freeloaders came to head when New Zealand hosted the Rugby World Cup in 2011.

Read more: NZ tourism can use the disruption of COVID-19 to drive sustainable change — and be more competitive

The Freedom Camping Act 2011 (FCA) set out clearer conditions and definitions. It referred to camping in a tent or vehicle in a public space 200m off a road, coastline or Great Walk hiking track.

Local governments are empowered to pass bylaws that regulate freedom camping more tightly. In 2019, the central government announced investments of NZ$8 million in public amenities and education as well technology, such as the Ambassador App (for Android and Apple) to help monitor freedom campers.

Based on the controversy around freedom camping, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment made the following recommendations:

• vehicles to have a permanently plumbed toilet in order to be certified as self-contained, and vehicles should also have separate holding tanks for grey and black water

• the government reintroduce national oversight of the certification process […] and a national register of self-contained vehicles

• the government ensures freedom camping penalties represent a serious deterrent to undesirable camping behaviour.

Tourism rethink

Since the early stages of the pandemic, many voices have been asking to “reset the tourism button” in Aotearoa New Zealand and redevelop tourism guided by sustainability principles. We believe the current absence of international tourists offers the perfect opportunity.

Our research with participants from central and regional governments, regional tourism organisations, tourism businesses, community groups and individual citizens revealed mixed feelings about freedom camping, and how it should be regarded and managed.

Many were sceptical about putting the blame on international tourists for disrespectful behaviour, and argued many New Zealanders are stuck in the past. As one said:

My theory is, that most New Zealanders have had the pleasure, thanks to some friendly farmers, in the past to being able to camp wherever they like and they do believe that is a God-given right. Even though no longer they have a little car and a little tent, but they all have these larger motorhomes.

When it comes to the rubbish left behind in car parks, a story shared from South Island shows the misconceptions about (international) freedom campers:

Some locals got together and set up a camera and they watched it back and they noticed that pretty much every person that left some rubbish wasn’t the freedom campers, it was local teenagers […] the freedom campers, by and large, picked up their rubbish and took it with them.

In terms of congestion, some participants noted that freedom campers clog up small roads in communities, and should be kept out of town centres (such as in Akaroa), and from beach fronts (such as in Napier).

A car park at the town entrance would be a good solution to alleviate such problems.

Reform needed

We agree with the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment that the self-contained certification of vehicles needs to be strengthened. Smaller vans with portable camping toilets would not qualify as self-contained.

Vehicles should have permanently fixed toilets and holding tanks for wastewater. Portable camping toilets are inconvenient and are far less likely to be used. Larger motorhomes are less likely to release wastewater and sewage into the environment.

Read more: The mysterious existence of a leafless kauri stump, kept alive by its forest neighbours

The majority of our participants, while often critical, did not see freedom camping as the problem it is often portrayed to be.

In particular, they noted that international freedom campers bear the brunt of the blame when Kiwis are equally problematic, leaving rubbish or parking in unsuitable spaces, due to a sense of entitlement.

So the commissioner’s recommendations have the most potential to lead to a sustainable future for freedom camping by both international and domestic tourists.

– ref. Freedom camping needs new regulations and foreign tourists aren’t the only villains – https://theconversation.com/freedom-camping-needs-new-regulations-and-foreign-tourists-arent-the-only-villains-155621

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Natasha Kassam, Fellow, ANU National Security College’s Futures Council, Australian National University

This is an edited extract of an essay in the latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs, The March of Autocracy, published today.

It is the year 2049. China is celebrating having reached its second centenary goal – to become a “prosperous, powerful, democratic, civilised and harmonious socialist modernised country” by the 100th anniversary of the people’s republic.

Its economy is three times the size of the United States’, as the International Monetary Fund predicted back in the 2010s. The US remains wealthy and powerful – it has functioning alliances in Europe – but its pacts with Asian allies have fallen into disrepair.

For decades, Hong Kong has been accepted as just another province of China. Few dare to criticise the ongoing human rights abuses there, or in Xinjiang and elsewhere, because of the extraterritorial application of China’s national security laws. Taiwan, if not annexed, is isolated, with no diplomatic partners.

The legacy of Xi Jinping, who led China for more than 30 years, monopolises ideological discourse in China. His successors rule under his shadow.

Outside China, many of the third-wave democracies that transitioned in the second half of the 20th century have become far less liberal. Elections are held, but increasingly authoritarian governments have adopted many of Beijing’s technological and legal tools to manage markets and control politics. The internet is heavily censored.

Mistrust permeates every aspect of China’s relations with the West. International co-operation on climate change and the strong carbon-reduction commitments of the early 2020s have long been abandoned. The focus is on individual adaptation.

Australia remains a liberal democracy and a staunch defender of free markets and human rights. But these are no longer the default standards of global governance – they are minority positions associated mostly with Western traditions. No longer a top-20 economic or military power, Australia’s opportunities to make its mark internationally are few and far between.

An unsettling but plausible vision

This vision of a fragmented and decidedly less liberal international order is highly speculative, but also dispiritingly plausible.

It is unsettling to an Australian reader, not just because Australian foreign policy has been centred on a global set of rules and institutions since 1945, but because Australian identity is so enmeshed with the values of liberal democracy.

The 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper states that Canberra is “a determined advocate of liberal institutions, universal values and human rights”, in stark contrast to Beijing.

Read more: Xi Jinping’s grip on power is absolute, but there are new threats to his ‘Chinese dream’

All nation states, especially rising powers, desire a favourable global environment in which they can acquire power, prosperity and prestige. The postwar system greatly aided China, and it would be incorrect to claim Beijing wants to dismantle it entirely.

Similarly, it would be disingenuous to overlook the many instances where the US and other liberal democracies have behaved inconsistently.

But the Chinese Communist Party, which leads an authoritarian state, sees the liberal values embedded in the present order as a threat to its rule. Unlike the US, which at times ignores or violates these principles, China needs many of them to be suppressed, even eliminated.

As China seeks to remake the international order, the challenge is to understand where and how Beijing’s efforts will undercut its liberal character, and to identify where it is possible to resist.

How China is changing the world

Rather than upend the existing international system, Beijing’s approach today is to co-opt, ignore and selectively exploit institutions.

Xi has said:

reforming and improving the current international system do not mean completely replacing it, but rather advancing it in a direction that is more just and reasonable.

In late 2019, for instance, the World Trade Organisation’s appellate body ceased to function after the US – complaining about the organisation’s soft stance on China – blocked the appointment of replacement judges.

In many ways, the WTO’s structure is the epitome of a liberal rules-based system: countries relinquish some sovereignty and are bound by judicial decisions in the interests of resolving trade disputes.

In response, China joined with the European Union, Australia and other governments to set up a parallel stop-gap legal mechanism.

This was a reflection of the CCP’s nuanced relationship with the liberal international order. China needs a stable trading system and will agree to binding rules to preserve it. The odd trade dispute does not substantially threaten China’s ideological security.

In the future, Beijing should be expected to exert its influence on the current order. The challenge for states such as Australia is to identify when Beijing’s behaviour exceeds influence and begins to erode the system’s liberal foundations.

China is already skilfully manoeuvring within international institutions to guide their operations, press for reforms and promote the China model.

Chinese nationals run four of the 15 United Nations specialised agencies, including the Food and Agricultural Organisation and the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

Ironically, the democratic nature of international institutions benefits Beijing. Chinese representatives in a variety of forums, such as the World Health Assembly and committees of the UN General Assembly, muster coalitions of the Global South to ensure favourable votes on issues such as Taiwan’s (non)participation or to counter criticism of its repressive policies in Xinjiang.

China also elevates its government-organised NGOs, presenting an image of independence while drowning out the voices of independent civil society.

The China Society for Human Rights Studies, for example, has official consultative status at the United Nations as an NGO, but is co-located with Chinese government offices and staffed by Chinese government officials. It has vigorously prosecuted China’s human rights agenda.

Read more: The China-US rivalry is not a new Cold War. It is way more complex and could last much longer

The use of deft diplomacy and inducements to generate voting blocs is unsurprising. But China also seeks to change the system, diluting the liberal elements that threaten the China model and thus the CCP’s rule.

For instance, China has already succeeded in weakening the liberal character of international human rights. In 2017, it proposed its first-ever resolution to the UN Human Rights Council, headed: “The contribution of development to the enjoyment of all human rights”.

It prioritised economic development above civil and political rights, and put the primacy of the state above the rights of the individual. Despite objections and nay votes from Western members, the resolution passed. The subsequent report by the council’s advisory committee, a body of 18 experts supposed to maintain independence, referred mainly to Chinese party-state documents.

Chinese diplomats also block human rights resolutions at the UN Security Council, such as a February 2020 resolution on the plight of Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya.

While the US has arguably been similarly obstructive on resolutions about Palestine, it is for the narrow purpose of protecting an ally, rather than the broader project of weakening the rights themselves.

China has even been able to marshal the international system to defend and commend its behaviour in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

In 2020, at the 44th session of the UN Human Rights Council, a joint statement signed by 27 countries, including Australia, expressed concern at arbitrary detention, widespread surveillance and restrictions in Xinjiang and the national security legislation in Hong Kong.

A competing statement supporting the Hong Kong legislation received support from 53 states, only three of which are considered “free” by the non-governmental organisation Freedom House.

By working within the system to rally a voting bloc, Beijing was able to compromise the world’s peak human rights body. Tactics that have been successful in watering down human rights are now being employed in areas where norms are still being established, such as internet governance.

Preparing for the new world disorder

The history of liberal internationalism is replete with contradictions. Some say that in recent decades it is Washington, not Beijing, that has damaged the order most.

So can China really do more damage to an order already on life support? Liberalism is not just facing an external challenge, but one from within.

The answer requires optimism about liberalism’s capacity to self-correct across the arc of history, and scepticism that illiberalism can do likewise. As much as Donald Trump belittled, criticised and attacked America’s institutions, he also created the conditions for a course correction – Joe Biden’s victory.

Read more: China enters 2021 a stronger, more influential power — and Australia may feel the squeeze even more

The CCP is a well-resourced and well-organised political force. It has the potential to be far more effective than any iconoclastic but capricious populist in permanently weakening the liberal foundations of the global order. Much of China’s influence abroad is unavoidable. A rising power with the economic and military strength that China wields is unlikely to be deterred.

On this logic, optimism has no place. But it would also be mistaken to adopt a fatalistic approach. Instead, Australia and its partners must focus their efforts on those elements of the liberal order most worth preserving and most under threat.

The centenary of the people’s republic is still 28 years away.

– ref. How China is remaking the world in its vision – https://theconversation.com/how-china-is-remaking-the-world-in-its-vision-155377

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne

In his submission to the current Senate inquiry into media diversity in Australia, former prime minister Kevin Rudd warns that Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News Australia is following the template laid down by Murdoch’s Fox News in the United States to radicalise Australian politics. In a decade’s time, Rudd argues, we will see its full impact.

Given the destructive effect of Fox News on the functioning of American democracy, Rudd’s is an alarming prediction.

Whether it comes to pass, however, is another matter. Certainly there are several danger signs that it might, but there are also a few factors pointing the other way.

Read more: Can Fox News survive without Trump in the White House?

There are three big danger signs.

One is the unconstrained peddling of extreme right-wing propaganda, lies, disinformation, crude distortion of fact and baseless assertions that occurs each night on Sky News.

Here is a brief sample: Rowan Dean’s and Alan Jones’s repeated ravings about the “stolen” US election; Peta Credlin’s false claim that Rudd’s petition for a Murdoch royal commission was an exercise in data-harvesting, for which she had to apologise as part of a confidential defamation settlement; Jones’s disinformation about mask-wearing; James Morrow calling the Trump impeachment trial a “sinister plot by Democrats against the American people”.

The second big danger sign is the way Sky News has been able to extend its reach from a niche pay-TV base to free-to-air television via 30 WIN regional stations across Australia, and then through social media to the world.

After seeing its audience grow in the first half of 2020, Sky’s pay-TV audience ended the year shrinking. But being on free-to-air TV in regional Australia represents an opportunity for growth.

Data on current regional viewing levels are patchy and incomplete. However, prime-time viewing is reported to have grown 36% in 2020, and is claimed to reach 2.9 million unique viewers.

Sky’s non-TV platform is social media. YouTube, owned by Google, is a very important social media outlet for Sky, and that is where the viewer data reported here come from.

Facebook is also an important outlet. When Facebook blacked out Australian news on February 18, there were roughly 260,000 views of Sky’s announcement of its last appearance there.

If Facebook persists in its blackout, it will clearly damage Sky’s online reach.

The patterns of Sky News viewership on YouTube are revealing.

The big picture is that Sky’s Australian stories get tiny audiences, but stories about the United States get vastly bigger ones, suggesting Sky has developed a following in the US.

For instance, an Alan Jones piece, “Trump’s impeachment charge is ‘more Pelosi rubbish’ ” got 130,000 views.

And the right-wing US journalist Megyn Kelly’s piece, “Trump exposed hidden media bias”, got 467,926 views.

Read more: Courting the chameleon: how the US election reveals Rupert Murdoch’s political colours

Contrast these with Paul Murray’s local story, “Daniel Andrews still playing us v them with quarantine”: about 30,000 views, and Peta Credlin’s “Net zero by 2050 is the ‘economic suicide note for workers’”: about 2000 views.

This tells us Sky is not only playing to a US as well as Australian audience, but is tailoring its programming in ways that have worked for Fox News. At the same time, it is siphoning into Australia the kind of content that has been so divisive in the US.

The growth profile of Fox News shows Murdoch plays a long game.

Fox News started in 1996. Pew Research Center data show it straight-lined near the bottom of the cable ratings in the US for five years, took a jump at about the time of the September 11 attacks, another at the time of the Iraq war in 2003 and thereafter cleared away from its main cable news rivals, CNN and MSNBC.

Until the end of the Trump presidency, Fox News was never headed – then after Trump lost, it took a dive. In February 2021, it suffered its worst ratings in 20 years, coming third behind CNN and MSNBC.

This symbiotic connection between an incumbent government and the Murdoch organisation brings us to the third big danger: the relationship between News Corporation in Australia and the Morrison government.

Morrison is not Trump. Yes, he swaggered around in a baseball cap during the 2019 election campaign and, yes, he talks in slogans and sound bites. However, the danger comes not from Morrison’s political persona but from the relationship he and his government have built with News Corporation.

On one reading, it has become a commercial relationship between the government as client and News Corporation as provider of publicity services for a fee.

The fee has taken the form of two payments to Foxtel, one of A$30 million in 2017 and one of A$10 million in 2020, ostensibly for TV coverage of under-represented women’s sport.

No tender process, no publicly available information about the terms, no way of knowing how this public money is being spent. Then recent technical glitches in the televising of W League matches prompted the Greens to ask the auditor-general to investigate.

Against these dangers are some mitigating factors.

One is that Australia’s compulsory voting system makes it very difficult for anyone to win an election with a primary vote that is not at least near the 40th percentile. A Trump-like “base” of 32% or so will not cut it here.

A second is that the religious right in Australia does not have the political clout it does in the US. Issues that excite the religious right, such as abortion, have been long settled here by the courts. The strong vote for marriage equality was another example of the broadly secular nature of our politics.

A third is that the Australian temperament is not, on the whole, excitable. While this means Australians are often excoriated as apathetic, it also means they are not easily outraged.

A fourth is that Australia’s conservatism is of a largely materialistic kind. Franking credits matter. It is also a conservatism that does not like extremism. Morrison seems at last to have realised that outside their Facebook echo chambers, the likes of Craig Kelly and George Christensen may be liabilities.

This pragmatic outlook among voters may prove to be a psychological bulwark against the firebrand reactionary politics promoted by Fox and Sky.

Having said that, there are plenty of emotion-charged issues that give Sky the opportunity to drive wedges into the Australian body politic: asylum-seekers, Muslims, Aboriginal recognition, African gangs, Asians, white supremacy, the pandemic and above all climate change. Sky is into them all.

If anything concrete is to be done to head off the threat seen by Rudd, it is going to involve public policy concerning media accountability, of which a fit-and-proper-person test for television licensees would be an essential part.

However, every attempt so far to exert meaningful accountability on the Australian media has come to nothing in the face of threats from the big media companies, including News Corporation.

Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull, as prime ministers, were in a position to do something about this. Instead, Rudd developed a friendship with the then editor-in-chief of The Australian, and Turnbull made changes to the media ownership laws that empowered Murdoch even more.

It is futile to hope that the Morrison government, engaged as it is in a highly questionable relationship with News Corporation, will do anything about it. As for Labor leader Anthony Albanese, when asked about a Murdoch royal commission, he reached for the barge pole.

If this form of politics-as-usual persists, then Rudd’s prediction cannot be discounted.

Then the nation would be relying on those qualities of the Australian character already mentioned. The question will be whether it will be enough.

– ref. Is Sky News shifting Australian politics to the right? Not yet, but there is cause for alarm – https://theconversation.com/is-sky-news-shifting-australian-politics-to-the-right-not-yet-but-there-is-cause-for-alarm-155356

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marc Pellegrini, Researcher, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute

Australia’s keenly awaited COVID vaccine rollout begins today, with the ultimate goal of vaccinating all Australians by October.

Here are the answers to some key questions.

Can I choose which vaccine I get?

No, there won’t be a choice for the average person. The current initial rollout of the Pfizer vaccine isn’t enough doses to vaccinate all of Australia. So the first people vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine will be frontline health-care workers, including aged care and hotel quarantine officers.

The AstraZeneca vaccine will be produced for the general public. It’s hoped that will be rolled out during March.

I can’t say how the logistics will run — that’s up to the government, presumably on a state-by-state basis. Most likely they will try to prioritise the highest-risk groups such as the elderly and people with chronic health conditions.

For most people it will be a case of waiting for further announcements as to when enough vaccine is available and it’s appropriate to make an appointment. Children are unlikely to be included in the vaccination program.

How will I be monitored for side-effects?

As doctors, when we vaccinate people we generally like to look after them for about 15-30 minutes, just to check they haven’t had an adverse reaction. That should be the practice for the COVID jab, just the same as for any vaccine.

For those 15-30 minutes you will generally just be sitting in a waiting area at the clinic. You will be monitored to see if you develop any symptoms such as hives or a rash, or wheezing. In those cases you would be monitored even more carefully and staff would take your blood pressure and pulse rate.

If you experience any symptoms once you’ve gone home, it would be up to you to contact your local doctor. Obviously, when trying to vaccinate 25 million people, health authorities can’t follow up with every individual. It’s very much up to them to follow up with whoever gave them the vaccine — whether their GP clinic or other health service.

Read more: COVID vaccine consent for aged-care residents: it’s ethically tricky, but there are ways to get it right

Should I still have the vaccine if I have an allergy?

That needs to be a conversation between individuals and their doctor, who can advise on a case-by-case basis. But, generally speaking, there are no common allergies that should stop you having a COVID vaccine. If someone has a peanut allergy they can have the vaccine, and the same goes for shellfish, wheat, eggs or any other common allergies.

Some people are allergic to an ingredient called polyethylene glycol, or PEG, which is found in more than 1,000 different medications and is used in the Pfizer vaccine as a mechanism to help deliver the viral mRNA (genetic material) into your cells. In the US and UK vaccine rollouts, a very small proportion of people seemed to have an allergy to this compound: with a million doses you might see about ten people have this allergic reaction. It is rare, albeit less rare than allergic reactions to influenza vaccines.

But no one has yet died from being vaccinated against COVID, so these cases are being captured effectively and are generally detected within the initial observation period of 15-30 minutes. Severe reactions can be treated with an epipen; less severe cases are just monitored.

People might already know they’re allergic to PEG and they shouldn’t receive the Pfizer vaccine, but if they don’t know, there’s no way of knowing that in advance.

Read more: How the Pfizer COVID vaccine gets from the freezer into your arm

The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine doesn’t contain PEG. It contains a related compound called polysorbate, which appears not to trigger the same allergy. If you have a known allergy to PEG you would probably be given the AstraZeneca vaccine.

It’s important to stress that these compounds are not preservatives — they are mechanisms to deliver the vaccines effectively.

Will I be fully protected? Do I still need to follow COVID restrictions?

The two vaccines have different efficacy rates — 95% for Pfizer, 62% for AstraZeneca — but these refer to their ability to prevent infection rather than disease. The fact is both are very good at preventing serious disease.

This means that, although you may still have a chance of being infected, you are much less likely to develop severe symptoms, and therefore less likely to infect others. Someone with severe COVID might be coughing and spluttering and spreading the virus more easily, while someone without symptoms might not.

Bear in mind there are two main reasons for the vaccine rollout. The first is to protect members of the public from getting very ill or dying.

The second aim is to provide a degree of immunity in the general population that will ultimately stop the virus circulating.

Of course, this second goal is much harder, which is why it’s still important that we follow any and all COVID precautions. But the hope is that over time we’ll see fewer and fewer people who are COVID-positive, and the risk of spread will fall.

Will the vaccine last forever or will I need to be revaccinated in future?

The current COVID vaccines require two doses, several weeks apart. It’s very tricky to say how long the resulting immunity will last, because globally we have only had these vaccines in use since December or so. It’s possible the immunity might last a year or longer, but at the moment it’s unclear. People might well have to be revaccinated at some stage.

We’ll start to get that data soon though. In fact we should have plenty more information by the time the AstraZeneca vaccine starts to be administered in high numbers in Australia around June or July.

Read more: 5 things you need to know about the AstraZeneca vaccine now the TGA has approved it for use in Australia

Will the vaccines work against mutant coronavirus strains?

In the fullness of time I expect we’ll start to see “escaped mutant” variants of the coronavirus that can evade the vaccine or make it less effective.

To an extent that’s happened already — the AstraZeneca vaccine looks to be less effective against the South African variant than against the other current variants. Having said that, although it’s not as effective at preventing infection, it still probably has a good chance of stopping you getting seriously sick.

Because we’re not vaccinating everyone in the world, there will always be a pool of people who can incubate new viral strains, potentially giving rise to new mutant variants.

There’s no doubt the vaccines will need to be updated from time to time to deal with this.

Thankfully this process will be relatively straightforward. mRNA vaccines such as Pfizer’s can be tweaked very quickly – virtually overnight – to accommodate new mutants. It’s a bit trickier with non-mRNA vaccines such as the AstraZeneca and Chinese vaccines, but it can still be done.

Will the vaccine rollout mean no more lockdowns?

The vaccine rollout should give us a much firmer handle on the spread of the virus. We can hope to stop seeing hotel quarantine workers being infected and spreading the virus outside, which is what has prompted the recent snap lockdowns in various Australian cities.

As for whether we’ll ever find ourselves in lockdown again, well, we’ll just have to wait and see. But if we’re still persisting with hotel quarantine and hosting arrivals from overseas, the vaccine program will hopefully mean we can afford to be much more liberal with opening our borders without fear that the virus will run rife.

Read more: The COVID vaccine is here. When and to whom will we need to prove we’ve had it?

– ref. Can I choose what vaccine I get? What if I have allergies or side-effects? Key COVID vaccine rollout questions answered – https://theconversation.com/can-i-choose-what-vaccine-i-get-what-if-i-have-allergies-or-side-effects-key-covid-vaccine-rollout-questions-answered-155649

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Narissa Bax, Marine Biologist, University of Tasmania

The military takeover in Myanmar this month is a serious setback for democratic reform. But the coup also threatens to permanently damage the Southeast Asian nation’s precious environment, and harm the people who rely on it.

Myanmar is renowned as a biodiversity hotspot, and supports more than 230 globally threatened species.

But the nation’s natural resources have been heavily exploited in pursuit of economic growth. In particular, logging, hunting, and fishing have created serious environmental problems.

The transition to civilian rule in 2011 meant conservation efforts could be deployed. It allowed researchers and practitioners such as ourselves to work in Myanmar, from the village to government level, to help manage protected areas. But the coup means this vital work may not continue.

An ecological gem

Myanmar’s forested valleys are home to tigers, elephants and other rare animals. The country hosts the largest tiger reserve in the world and is home to newly described primates such as the Myanmar snub-nosed monkey and the Popa langur monkey.

The mighty Ayeyarwady River is the nation’s lifeblood. It flows from north to south, feeding a vast floodplain that forms the country’s agricultural heart.

Myanmar’s coasts, marine islands, seagrass beds, coral reefs and mangrove forests are considered globally important. Mangroves, for example, are nursery grounds for fish and crabs, protect the coast from storms and store carbon dioxide, helping mitigate climate change.

A nation plundered

From the time of independence from British rule in 1948, Myanmar was plunged into civil war among its many ethnic groups. The struggle for control over natural resources has been central to these ongoing armed conflicts. After the military coup, Myanmar was isolated from 1962 until 2011. During this time, the military and other armed groups over-exploited natural resources to fund their campaigns, while enriching themselves. Social welfare was neglected, meaning vulnerable citizens were forced to further exploit natural resources to survive.

According to the World Bank, between 1990 and 2015 (part of which covers the period of civilian rule), Myanmar’s forest cover declined at an average rate of 1.2% a year. Over-fishing meant fish stocks have declined by as much as 90% since 1980.

Rampant destruction of mangrove forests along Myanmar’s coastline increased its vulnerability to storms. This exacerbated the damaging effect of Cyclone Nargis in 2008, which killed about 150,000 people and devastated the nation.

Read more: Dams on Myanmar’s Irrawaddy river could fuel more conflicts in the country

The bumpy road of civilian rule

Under the civilian rule of democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi, some environmental gains were made. However they were at the rudimentary stage and major challenges persisted.

For example, the opening up of Myanmar allowed bodies such as the United Nations, the World Bank and aid organisations to provide financial and technical support for community development projects. These projects are vital, because environmental destruction in Myanmar, as in other developing nations, is closely linked to poverty.

The democratic transition also meant non-government organisations could establish programs to document, understand and support biodiversity conservation, working in close collaboration with local communities.

These discussions led to initiatives such as Locally Managed Marine Protected Areas. These areas integrated conservation and sustainable development and were managed by the community.

Read more: COVID coup: how Myanmar’s military used the pandemic to justify and enable its power grab

However systemic social and political issues in Myanmar meant such gains were often undermined. For example, even under civilian rule, persistent corruption in Myanmar’s fisheries sector meant fishery crime flourished, undermining conservation efforts.

The Meinmahla Kyun Wildlife Sanctuary in the Ayerwaddy Delta is another good example of the complexities involved under democratic rule. The sanctuary was legally protected to preserve its significant mangrove habitats, as well as crocodiles, fishing cats, bats, crabs and birds.

But the restrictions were weakly enforced and at odds with the needs of locals to earn a livelihood from fishing and logging. To address this, we helped develop a five-year management plan which included sanctuary patrols and small-scale income-generating activities such as horticulture and eco-tourism.

But without sufficient resourcing and effective law enforcement, the plan was not fully implemented and unsustainable illegal activity in the sanctuary continued.

Much work to be done

Many Myanmar people want to earn livelihoods that don’t harm nature. But achieving this requires large amounts of funding that, to date, have not been made available.

Countries that provided aid to Myanmar are reconsidering their aid programs in the wake of the coup.

It’s understandable that the international aid community wants to distance itself from the military regime. But it’s important that development and conservation programs continue to be funded.

The military rulers have declared a one-year state of emergency, and it’s unclear when, or if, Myanmar will return to civilian rule.

If the coup is defeated, short-term measures will be needed. This might involve cash transfers, conditional on sustainable livelihood practices, similar to those used in disaster relief programs.

In the longer term, funding for community-based conservation and scientific partnerships in Myanmar should be prioritised.

Hope for the future

Even if Myanmar returns to a democratic government, significant change would be required before the nation completes the transition – one that empowers vulnerable people and protects the environment they depend on.

Myanmar is clearly at a troubling crossroads. But under the right political conditions, and with adequate international support, Myanmar could set a precedent for developing nations the world over, showing how a biologically diverse, resource-rich nation can balance between meeting existing livelihoods needs, whilst conserving nature for future generations.

Read more: Myanmar’s coup might discourage international aid, but donors should adapt, not leave

– ref. Before the coup, Myanmar’s stunning biodiversity had a chance. Now it is not so certain. – https://theconversation.com/before-the-coup-myanmars-stunning-biodiversity-had-a-chance-now-it-is-not-so-certain-155209

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kate Noble, Education Policy Fellow, Mitchell Institute, Victoria University

Many families in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales have been paying around double what families in other states and territories pay for preschool.

Median out of pocket costs for preschool, per hour, range from A$2.82 to $3.82 in Queensland, NSW, Victoria and the ACT. Yet in the Tasmania, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory, average hourly fees range between 84 cents and $1.70.

We mapped the variation in preschool policies, and how they impact on what families pay as well as participation rates, across all states and territories. Our report shows access to preschool education in Australia varies, depending on where children live.

What preschool costs across Australia

Australian governments recognise the importance of one year of preschool the year before school for a child’s educational journey. This is why the federal, state and territory governments co-operatively co-fund one year of preschool.

This arrangement has achieved high levels of enrolment in preschool in the year before school — nearly nine in ten children are enrolled nationally. But our analysis shows a substantial variation in costs to families across the country.

And nationally, enrolments are trending down. A recent Productivity Commission report shows participation in preschool in the year before school has declined over the past four years — from 92.4% of all children in 2016 to 87.7% in 2019.

Read more: Victoria and NSW have funded preschool for 2021. It’s shaping up to be a federal election issue

This has bucked the trend of growth from around 70% of children in 2008 to more than 90% in 2016-17.

Some of the states with the highest fees have also seen the largest drop in enrolments. For instance, 2019 median fees in Victoria were $2.75 per hour for preschool the year before school. Enrolment rates in Victoria dropped from 98.4% in 2016 to to 87.8% in 2019.

Median per hour fees in Queensland were $2.78 in 2019. Queensland enrolments in the year before school are down from 93.8% in 2016 to 84.8% 2019.

Enrolment rates have fluctuated somewhat, but remained fairly steady in Western Australia, South Australia, the ACT and NT.

Enrolment rates in preschool aren’t only affected by fees. Whether families send their child to preschool can depend on affordability, the number and type of facilities available, cultural values, distance and the family’s socioeconomic circumstances.

For example, the ACT had the highest enrolment rates for three-year-old preschool (that’s two years of preschool before school) in 2019 (71.3%) even though the median cost of three-year-old preschool is the highest out of all states and territories.

Participation rates are still lower among disadvantaged cohorts that would benefit most from preschool education.

In 2019, children experiencing disability, those living in remote and regional areas, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children were all slightly less likely to be enrolled in preschool compared with the national average.

A big reason for the inconsistency across Australia is the lack of funding stability and commitment from all levels of government to consolidate and build on our gains for one year of preschool, and continuing to strive for two years for every Australian child.

Three and four-year-old preschool funded differently

Fees for programs for three-year-old preschool frequently run into thousands of dollars per year, per child.

Enrolment rates in preschool two years before school are much lower than the year before school. Nationally, they are at around 50-60%, but are increasing.

There’s no national funding model to support three-year-old preschool. NSW and Victoria have recently started funding three-year-old preschool. The Australian Capital Territory has plans to do the same. Other states and territories provide very limited access to a second year of preschool, often costing families thousands of dollars per year.

Read more: Early childhood educators are leaving in droves. Here are 3 ways to keep them, and attract more

Median out of pocket costs per hour are around $2.90 in Tasmania and Queensland. They can go up to $4-5.44 per hour in WA and ACT.

It’s important to note that while per hour fees may sound reasonable, annual fees can be several thousand dollars per year for around six hours per week.

A lack of coordinated approach, and high fees for many families, mean many children are missing out on an important second year of structured, play-based learning before school.

What does this mean?

Around one-fifth of Australian children start school developmentally vulnerable, and many struggle to thrive in school and life.

Children attending a high quality preschool program participate in a play-based curriculum that supports their well-being, development and learning, helping to set them up for the best start.

So even a small backwards step in participation in preschool is a concern — and that’s what we’re seeing.

Research has clearly shown two years of preschool are more beneficial than one, and that the benefits are likely to be largest for disadvantaged children.

There are also likely to be substantial economic returns from a national policy supporting two years of preschool. Australian research shows that for every dollar invested in preschool, two dollars are returned into the economy.

Read more: Report finds every $1 Australia spends on preschool will return $2, but this won’t just magically happen

International research suggests these returns could be higher for the most disadvantaged children.

We now have a situation where cost, access and policy ambition vary wildly across the country.

Victoria’s recent funding boosts, offering free preschool for most children in 2021 and introducing permanent subsidies for three-year-old preschool, will likely increase enrolment in that state. But that’s still inconsistent nationally.

We have some clear options on the table to improve affordability, consistency, quality and participation.

The Australian government’s review of preschool delivery arrangements] provides some decisive recommendations, which the government has now been sitting on for more than a year. They include modelling the most efficient means of delivery, addressing workforce shortages, and more secure long-term funding.

When the funding agreement is next renegotiated, these recommendations should be implemented to secure the future of high quality preschool for all Australian children.

– ref. Families in eastern states pay around twice as much for preschool than the rest of Australia – https://theconversation.com/families-in-eastern-states-pay-around-twice-as-much-for-preschool-than-the-rest-of-australia-155218

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Katie Pickles, Professor of History, University of Canterbury

When the deadly second earthquake struck Christchurch ten years ago today, among the many things toppled by natural forces were statues of the city’s founding father John Robert Godley, colonial politician William Rolleston and imperial hero Robert Falcon Scott.

Far worse things happened, of course, but this break with the past came to feel powerfully symbolic.

My 2016 book Christchurch Ruptures was in large part about the risks of our thinking being trapped in the past and attempting to put things back as they were. Might letting these statues go allow the city to leave behind the colonial attitudes and practices they represented?

Instead, I suggested, we might focus on the contemporary inhabitants of the city and build on its historically moderate political streak.

This was just one of five such “ruptures” I identified that might guide the city’s need to regroup and move on. A decade later, I wonder to what extent those predictions have come to pass. Are they still relevant on the tenth anniversary of the earthquakes? And what unforeseen themes have emerged in the meantime?

Decolonising the city

Christchurch’s quake-damaged statues turned out to be unintentionally prescient. In 2020, there were international and national debates about the removal of colonial monuments past their use-by dates. Statues such as those of William Colston in the UK and John Hamilton in Waikato fell amid calls to “topple the racists”.

The post-quake rebuild had already forced Christchurch to examine how it acknowledged its colonial past. While statues of Queen Victoria and James Cook would remain, it would be “within the context of the relationship that exists between iwi and Crown”, according to a joint statement in 2020 by Mayor Lianne Dalziel and Ngāi Tūāhuriri Upoko (head) Dr Te Maire Tau.

Read more: Putting culture at the core of the Christchurch rebuild

The city had entered a new era of seeking balance, biculturalism and partnership. For example, rather than extensively re-landscaping Victoria Square, with its Victoria and Cook statues, it was gently re-formed. New mana whenua markers, including two upright waka by Fayne Robinson, joined Riki Manuel’s 1994 Poupou. Robinson’s Mana Motuhake was described in the official literature as:

… a new element that offers balance to the bicultural narrative of our city and […] a celebration and reflection of our shared cultural heritage. The work will complement the existing statue of Queen Victoria and emphasise the enduring relationship between Ngāi Tahu and the Crown.

Importantly, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu has worked in partnership with the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority (CERA), Ōtākaro Limited and the city and regional councils in planning the recovery of Christchurch.

The Matapopore Charitable Trust is one example of the leadership that evolved in the rebuild. Formed as a steering group to represent the interests of Ngāi Tūāhuriri as the Christchurch Central Recovery Plan rolled out, the trust operates on a founding principle: Kia atawhai ki te iwi — care for the people.

Matapopore has developed narratives for the city’s emerging precincts that visibly evoke a shared sense of present and future. You can see this in Te Omeka Justice and Emergency Services Precinct, which includes Lonnie Hutchinson’s impressive Kahu Matarau, a protective aluminium kākāpo feather cloak.

You can see it, too, in Victoria Square, where three of 13 Ngā Whāriki Manaaki (woven mats of welcome) by Reihana Parata, Morehu Flutey-Henare and Wayne Youle symbolically weave “Ngāi Tūāhuriri/ Ngāi Tahu values and stories into the fabric of Christchurch’s urban environment”.

An alternative Christchurch

Christchurch can be stereotyped as a formal, conventional city. But there is another, alternative past whose ways of living have much to offer the present. From the late 19th century the city had been a hotbed of early feminism, as well as home to movements promoting health and fitness, scenic reserves and communal living.

That spirit appeared to flourish in the energetic and original GAP filler projects led by Coralie Winn and Ryan Reynolds. These involved numerous inventive civic installations, including book exchanges and a dance mat, aimed at forming strong communities.

Greening the Rubble, public art installations and a public festival of architecture, design and food (FESTA), directed by Jessica Halliday, all continued the city’s creative, quirky traditions.

Read more: 10 years since the Darfield earthquake rocked New Zealand: what have we learned?

The success of those projects stood in stark contrast to the disappointment many Christchurch citizens felt at the lack of attention given to the council’s “share an idea” consultation, and the dominance of top-down planning.

Frustration at unfinished “anchor” projects, such as the stadium and sports facility, only fuelled calls for alternative transport, swimming pools and collectivism in general. The Margaret Mahy Playground and Tūranga library were welcomed, but construction of a large convention centre, when COVID-19 has stopped tourism in its tracks, seemed out of touch with the zeitgeist.

In the meantime, a new “youthquake” further evoked the city’s radical spirit. Students marching for climate change action seemed to echo those before them who had protested over nuclear energy, South African rugby tours and various foreign wars. Will this Christchurch win through?

Diversity in adversity

In my book I advocated respect for all people, regardless of race, ethnicity or how long they’d lived in the city. In hindsight, the events of March 15 2019 lend that optimism a chilling undertone.

But in the wake of the terror attack there has been an outpouring of support for breaking down barriers between the city’s diverse communities. Perhaps a new sense of community, born of coping with the quakes, had fostered a more united approach to adversity.

On the other hand, rebuilding the central Anglican cathedral, symbolically reasserting an Anglo-Celtic dominance of the past, feels at odds with the new climate. Restoration is slow and controversial. The former bishop Victoria Matthews considered the financial cost too high and wrote that buildings, “however dear to our heart and beautiful, are secondary to our concern for people”.

Its tourism potential suspended for the time being, the cathedral’s symbolic place as the city’s heart and hope has faded. Restoring an imagined Englishness in a modern multicultural city, one that makes all its citizens feel at home, feels less urgent.

Read more: Christchurch five years on: have politicians helped or hindered the earthquake recovery?

Broken heart of the city

Ten years on there is still a lingering attachment to Christchurch as the “garden city”, a sentiment I argued had also ruptured. The future of the vast eastern residential red zone remains evocatively problematic. Plans for an Ōtākaro Avon River corridor are slowly emerging. Instead of rewilding it, however, vast tracts of domestic grass currently keep it tame.

I suggested the city centre would continue to decline, as it had done (like many other cities globally) before the earthquakes. It was time to think on a smaller scale, I argued, and not to restore what was there before.

And a decade later there are some exciting signs of a new urban sensibility, such as the Te Papa Ōtākaro/Avon River Precinct, with a promenade that takes its lead from the river and draws in diverse civic features, old and new.

But the pandemic has disrupted large, unfinished projects along with visions of a vibrant centre. Rather than live downtown, people are moving to new homes outside the city boundary — let alone the suburbs — leaving urban regeneration a work in progress. Another anchor project, the Breathe Housing Community, has just collapsed.

I saw the rise of these new suburbs and exurbs as worrying evidence of a de-centered city. Growth in the Selwyn and Waimakariri districts to the south and north of the city has continued unabated. In 2020 Selwyn had the largest net internal migration in the country. Millions have been spent on expansive northern and southern transport corridors that effectively bypass the city.

In the end, though, it is the people who are most important — and that is perhaps the biggest theme I see ten years on. The 2011 tragedy in which 185 people died and hundreds more were injured has cast a long and exhausting shadow.

The health, socio-economic and cultural well-being of so many has yet to recover. We can add to this story of struggle and pain the 51 deaths and many more injuries from the mosque shootings, and the fact that 12 of New Zealand’s 26 COVID-19 deaths have been in Canterbury.

At this moment, as was true a decade ago, the health and safety of the people are all that matters.

– ref. Ten years on, the earthquake still casts its shadow over Christchurch’s past, present and future – https://theconversation.com/ten-years-on-the-earthquake-still-casts-its-shadow-over-christchurchs-past-present-and-future-155124

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Aysin Dedekorkut-Howes, Senior Lecturer, School of Environment and Science, Griffith University

With most of the world’s people now living in urban areas, the coronavirus pandemic has highlighted the importance of urban resilience. It’s just as important for adapting to climate change.

Put simply, resilience is the ability of a system, in this case a city, to cope with a disruption. This involves either avoiding, resisting, accommodating or recovering from its impacts.

Our research, recently published in the journal Urban Research and Practice, examined two coastal Australian cities, the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast. Our aim was to identify ways to improve urban resilience to coastal climate hazards. We found the political aspect of resilience is often overlooked but is critically important.

Contrary to popular belief, building cities that are resilient to the impacts of climate change is not just about infrastructure. Urban resilience also has ecological, social, economic, institutional and, most importantly, political dimensions.

Read more: I lived through Hurricane Katrina and helped design the rebuild – floods will always come, but we can build better to prepare

Why it is hard to create truly resilient cities

Urban resilience has recently become a topic for strategic planning and policy. However, many local governments are struggling to implement the necessary changes. The reasons include:

1. a precise and universal definition of resilience remains elusive, making the idea difficult to implement in policies and plans

2. cities are complex systems, with interlinked physical, natural, social, cultural, political and economic dimensions.

Some definitions interpret resilience as building back exactly what was lost. Others suggest it requires adjusting or even completely transforming urban systems.

Consider what these two approaches mean when planning for urban floods, for example. One way uses a reactive approach to focus on repairing buildings and infrastructure. Or we can proactively transform all elements of urban systems to shift from “fighting water” to “living with water”.

Read more: Design for flooding: how cities can make room for water

We argue this second proactive approach to resilience is better. So how do we achieve this transformation?

The 6 dimensions of urban resilience

Transformative resilience requires decision-makers to take an integrative, innovative and long-term view. They need to consider all the elements of urban systems at once.

Previous research identified five main dimensions of urban resilience: infrastructure, ecological, economic, institutional and social. Our research revealed a so-far-neglected but critically important sixth dimension: political resilience.

In all resilience and adaptation efforts, planners and communities should consider these six dimensions at the same time. Failure to do so can mean resources and time are wasted without achieving the necessary results.

Infrastructural resilience is the capacity of engineering systems such as pipelines, energy networks and power grids to avoid or resist the impacts of disruptions. Our research on adaptation strategies for sea-level rise shows cities globally rely heavily on engineering structures to manage the impacts of coastal flooding and sea-level rise in already developed low-lying areas. The Gold Coast’s seawall is an example.

Ecological resilience is the ability of a city to use ecological systems to resist and accommodate the impacts of disturbances. Retaining mangroves and green space, for example, can reduce flood risks. Political and economic pressures to develop land and clear mangroves run counter to this approach.

Economic resilience includes strategies that allow individuals and communities to recover from the loss and damage caused by a disruption. Climate-related disasters have big financial impacts due to damage to homes, businesses, community facilities and infrastructure. Increasing resilience is expensive, however, and financial institutions’ investment and insurance decisions are critical in determining the patterns of development.

Institutional resilience focuses on the capacity of government and non-government organisations to support preparation, response and recovery efforts. Unfortunately, at least in the Australian context, our research shows state and national institutions and policies have not provided a clear and consistent direction for local governments.

Social resilience is the ability of the community and its networks to accommodate and recover from disturbances. This depends on effective, meaningful and timely community engagement. Residents are then empowered to build their own resilience. An informed and active community can also drive political change, which is a crucial element of transformation.

Political resilience deals with the capacity of the political system, and the commitment of key policymakers, to drive transformational change. A positive example is the leadership of the Lockyer Valley Regional Council in relocating and rebuilding the town of Grantham after the 2011 floods. A negative example is the decision by the Queensland Newman government (2012-15) to stop local councils taking sea-level rise into account in their local plans.

Read more: You can’t talk about disaster risk reduction without talking about inequality

The politics can be the biggest challenge

Of all the six dimensions of urban resilience, the political one often proves to be the most problematic when trying to develop and implement climate change policies or plans. A good example is Toowoomba residents’ rejection of recycled water during the Millennium Drought. It is not enough to have the best technical and economic responses; you need to be able to navigate the hazards of highly partisan and often irrational politics.

A bipartisan approach to climate change adaptation would go some way to overcoming the major reversals that we have seen in both adaptation and mitigation policies. Is this asking too much of our political leaders? The united response to the coronavirus pandemic, with co-operation bridging party-political divides and federal-state rivalries, suggests it is not completely beyond the realms of possibility.

This article is part of a series The Conversation is running on the nexus between disaster, disadvantage and resilience. You can read the rest of the series here.

– ref. You need all 6 pieces of the puzzle to build urban resilience, but too often it’s politics that leaves a gap – https://theconversation.com/you-need-all-6-pieces-of-the-puzzle-to-build-urban-resilience-but-too-often-its-politics-that-leaves-a-gap-152621

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Asher Warren, Lecturer, University of Tasmania

After its early cancellation in 2020, Dark Mofo just announced June dates for the festival this year, with “some trepidation” according to creative director Leigh Carmichael. Festival organisers said they hoped to create a program with international, national and local acts.

“There’s lots of risk, so it must really be worth doing,” said David Walsh, the owner of MONA, which hosts the festival.

Last year saw the sudden cancellation of arts festivals due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, events from Coachella to the Port Fairy Folk Festival are being put on ice again.

Conversely, Tasmania’s MONA FOMA festival last month saw a “hyperlocal” approach to programming. Unable to draw headliners from around the world, local artists were front and centre — of the 352 artists involved, 90% were Tasmanian.

By most accounts, it was a success with reviewers and audiences. Big hArt’s Acoustic Life of Boatsheds, which saw performers harness the history and function of waterside structures, was a highlight. MONA FOMA attracted an audience of over 35,000, with around 65% Tasmanian and 35% interstate visitors. Tickets were sold out within three hours of their release, according to organisers.

Could hyperlocal arts programming save Australia’s previously thriving festival scene?

Read more: Drawing inspiration in a pandemic — breath has always been central to theatre

Promises and pitfalls

As festivals here and around the world rethink their operations to adapt and continue during this pandemic, a variety of models have emerged.

The first was a shift to online offerings and live streamed events. Both the current Perth Festival and upcoming Adelaide Festival feature curated streaming offerings in their program — but have been careful to avoid giving it away for free.

The second model saw festivals emphasise local artists. While the “MONA effect” might imbue this hyperlocal approach with a sense of novelty, it is worth noting Tasmania’s vibrant theatre-making culture was locally focused long before the pandemic struck. The island’s arts ecology can offer some important insights into the promises and pitfalls of major festivals focusing on the local.

The first promise is the capacity for festivals to engage deeply with people and place. This can, through a diversity of local voices, build a sense of community that is complex and multifaceted. An accidental choir formed by seasonal workers from Kiribati who performed at MONA FOMA, for example, forced their inclusion into Tasmania’s cultural scene.

Locally focused festivals can also provide vital support for small to medium companies and emerging artists. Unrelenting cuts in federal funding across the years, prior to COVID-19, have disproportionately hit small and medium arts organisations and individuals. The federal rescue package for the arts — while welcome — is, as Julian Meyrick put it, “a pimple to a pumpkin” in terms of the scale of support the sector requires.

Read more: Latest arts windfalls show money isn’t enough. We need transparency

Festivals could, like many local governments, help address the shortfall by funding creative development programs and commissioning new work.

While major festivals have large budgets, these are dependent on drawing audiences. Traditionally the model has been to bring in works of scale from overseas, although this model is shifting.

Without travel, bringing international acts is out the question, and drawing audiences from interstate remains fraught. Snap lockdowns forced Perth Festival to reschedule hundreds of shows and put the Adelaide Fringe on tenterhooks. Which is to point out that a local focus needs to consider both artists, and audiences.

Growing local loyalty

Tasmania’s theatre ecology is again instructive here. While brimming with amateur and community-based theatrical activity, growth in the professional sector has been stagnant. Despite a range of recent, and relatively generous COVID support measures from the state government, funding remains in short supply.

The economic imperative to draw audiences means artistic innovation requires particular bravery. Or, of course, a large personal fortune like that of MOMA founder David Walsh who explained his post-pandemic-shutdown plans to the Australian Financial Review late last year …

I’ll mutate as the world mutates. I’m thinking local because local is all there is.

Read more: At moments like these, we need a cultural policy

Audience development — to increase interest in, and appreciation of, the performing arts — is key to developing a local focus.

The elephant in this particular room, however, is the rationalisation of festival funding through tourism. Much state, city and council support hinges on the “multiplier effects” of culturally driven visitation. A 2018 Create NSW report by KPMG estimates such “induced expenditure” in NSW in 2016 was $1.5 billion.

This rationale has driven the creation of bodies like Events Tasmania, and the 2015 Tasmanian Government Events Strategy, which awards funding for events on their capacity to bring and circulate visitors around the state.

A festival less travelled would be hard pressed to access this funding, despite delivering key elements of this policy — to foster artistic excellence and enrich community. Moreover, without significant investment to meet these policy aims, “locally” oriented festivals may lack the resources to guard themselves against insularity and parochialism.

Even prior to COVID, numerous festivals (Sydney, Perth, Ten Days) were already starting to give higher priority to local artists and stories.

One festival of particular note is The Unconformity, a small scale biennial festival that takes place in Tasmania’s wild north-west. Rather than shopping for shows on the arts market, the Unconformity brings in artists to engage with community and place through a range of residencies and projects.

This model has produced remarkable works of ambition and complexity, with strong participation from the local community. This is of course nothing new and harks back to the strong community focus of Australian arts festivals throughout the 1980s and 90s.

In the short term, audiences have proven keen to emerge from lockdown and return to festivals. MONA FOMA showed they can embrace the pivot to more local programming.

A renewed, ongoing focus on the local, with medium to long term commitment to developing audiences and artists across the nation might do more than save our festivals, it could help rebuild our arts industry in the wake of the pandemic.

Read more: Births, deaths and rituals: a revamped Ten Days on the Island explores Tasmania’s past and present

– ref. Without visiting headliners, can local artists save our festivals? – https://theconversation.com/without-visiting-headliners-can-local-artists-save-our-festivals-154830

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

Australia’s COVID vaccination program has begun with Scott Morrison joining a small group of recipients in a carefully orchestrated event, aimed at boosting confidence as the general rollout begins on Monday.

The first recipient was aged care resident Jane Malysiak, 84, from Marayong New South Wales, who was born in Poland and came to Australia soon after the second world war.

Sunday’s line up for the Pfizer shots included, apart from aged care and disability residents, workers in these sectors, and quarantine and border workers. These are the priority recipients for the first round of vaccination.

Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly and Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer Alison McMillan also got their shots, with McMillan assuring “it really doesn’t hurt at all”.

Morrison, decked out in an Australian flag mask, sat beside Malysiak, and encouraged her to follow his “V for Vaccine” sign – this went slightly awry when Malysiak’s fingers inadvertently turned in an “up yours” direction.

Morrison averted his eyes from the needle as he received his shot.

The Prime Minister called on the community to follow his and the other recipients’ example to “join us on this Australian path that sees us come out of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

He said he wanted Sunday’s pre-rollout vaccinations to give confidence. “Tens of thousands of people will be coming in tomorrow and I wanted them to know as they went to bed tonight that we have been able to demonstrate our confidence in the health and safety of this vaccination,” he said.

“Today is the beginning of a big game changer.”

Sunday’s figures recorded no community transmission anywhere in the country.

As the rollout starts, Newspoll showed government and opposition remained deadlocked on 50-50 on the two-party vote, but Scott Morrison extended his lead over Anthony Albanese as “better prime minister” to 61-26% (previously 57-29%). The poll is published in Monday’s Australian, and was taken Wednesday to Saturday.

Labor’s primary vote rose one point to 37% since the previous poll three weeks ago; the Coalition was steady on 42%.

Albanese’s net approval is minus 7, following a 3 point fall in his satisfaction level to 38% and a 2 point rise in dissatisfaction to 45%.

Morrison’s net satisfaction is plus 32 – his satisfaction rating increased a point to 64% and his dissatisfaction rating fell a point to 32%.

Although it has not hit his Newspoll numbers, Morrison will continue under pressure in parliament this week over who knew what in his office about the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins.

The Weekend Australian reported a second former Liberal staffer who alleges she was raped last year by the man named by Higgins.

Higgins has alleged she was raped in 2019 by a colleague in the Parliament House office of the then defence industry minister. Linda Reynolds, for whom both she and the man then worked.

Asked about the second allegation, Morrison said at the weekend:“I’m very upset about those circumstances”. He said he did not know who the woman was.

Late Sunday night, The Australian reported a third woman – a Coalition volunteer during the 2016 election campaign – has alleged she was sexually assaulted by the same Liberal staffer days before the election.

Higgins will lay a formal complaint to the police on Wednesday, which will start an investigation.

The Prime Minister said the inquiry by his departmental secretary Phil Gaetjens into who in the Prime Minister’s office knew about the Higgins rape allegation was to be finished “as soon as possible”.

Morrison has said he first knew of this allegation on Monday of last week, when the story was published, and his staff only knew the Friday before that, which was when journalist Samantha Maiden asked his office questions.

He made it clear he was angry he wasn’t alerted to Maiden’s inquiries. “I’ve expressed my view to my staff about that very candidly on Monday.”

The Special Minister of State, Simon Birmingham, indicated at the weekend that Higgins would be able to contribute to the terms of reference for the independent inquiry Morrison has announced into the workplaces of parliamentarians and their staff.

Higgins said in her Friday statement she had “advised the Prime Minister’s Office that I expect a voice in framing the scope and terms of reference for a new and significant review into the conditions for all ministerial and parliamentary staff”.

Birmingham said: “All past and present staff, including Brittany Higgins, will be able to participate in the review.

“I also welcome the input of past and present staff on the terms of the independent review and will be engaging accordingly.”

– ref. Morrison takes the shot to promote vaccine confidence, as government and opposition stay tied in Newspoll – https://theconversation.com/morrison-takes-the-shot-to-promote-vaccine-confidence-as-government-and-opposition-stay-tied-in-newspoll-155721

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Salter, Scientia Associate Professor of Criminology, UNSW

Child sexual abuse material — images and videos of kids being sexually abused — is a growing international problem. Almost 70 million reports of this material were made to US authorities in 2019. That figure rose still further in 2020, as the COVID pandemic drove children and adults to spend more time online

Police and online safety agencies have been sounding the alarm that online sex offenders are seeking to capitalise on the increased online presence of children, tricking and blackmailing kids into creating abuse images and videos. Parents are being called on to be especially vigilant.

However, the sad fact is that online exploitation begins at home for many kids, and in those cases their parent is the last person who can be trusted to keep them safe. One study of 150 adult survivors, who indicated they had appeared in sexual abuse material as children, found 42% identified their biological or adoptive/stepfather as the primary offender. More than two-thirds of such images appear to have been made at home.

Parental abusers are especially difficult to detect. They have constant access to their victims and almost total control over them. Children abused by a parent are the least likely group to tell anyone, and the shame and fear caused by victimisation makes it extremely difficult to speak out.

However, there is long-standing concern that parental perpetrators of child sexual abuse material have been overlooked as governments have instead focused on online threats outside the family.

Our study

The aim of our world-first study was to identify the circumstances in which parental figures (including biological, step and adoptive parents) produce sexual abuse material of their children in Australia.

We also provided recommendations on how to increase the chances of law enforcement and agencies catching abusers.

Our research team developed a database of 82 cases in which Australian parents or parental figures were charged with sexual abuse material offences against their children, as reported in media or legal databases from 2009 to 2019. Our team included academics in criminology, child welfare and law as well as a detective sergeant and a forensic paediatrician who specialise in such cases and provided front-line expertise.

What did we find?

Parental production of child sexual abuse material is a gendered form of abuse. Men were offenders in 90% of cases, and girls were victims in 84% of cases. Boys were victimised in one-fifth of cases, with multiple children abused in some cases.

The victim’s biological father (58%) or stepfather (41%) were most likely to be the offender. However, the victim’s biological mother was involved in 28% of cases, most often as a co-offender.

In eight of the 82 cases, the mother was the sole perpetrator. In these cases, the woman appeared to be producing this material of her children at the request of male acquaintances. In 22% of cases, there were multiple perpetrators involved in the face-to-face abuse, such as both parental figures, other relatives or acquaintances.

The victims were young, with more than 60% under the age of nine. In the 58 cases for which we had information about how the abuse was detected, only 20% of victims told anyone about the abuse. Self-blame, guilt, trauma and confusion about their feelings towards the abuser(s) were common among victims and were barriers to speaking out.

Three typical profiles of offending by parental figures emerged from our study:

1. the biological paternal offender who forms adult relationships and has children of his own to exploit

2. the step- or de facto parental offender who forms a relationship with a woman and exploits her children or seeks to obtain children by some other means (such as surrogacy)

3. the biological mother who produces sexual abuse material of her children at the behest of her partner or men with whom she is acquainted.

Read more: Why does it take victims of child sex abuse so long to speak up?

What does this mean?

Our study highlights that parental offenders are often highly premeditated in their abuse and exploitation of their children, which supports survivors’ descriptions of parental offenders. The offenders in our study were capable of maintaining adult romantic relationships and an otherwise “normal” facade.

The study has several implications for policy and practice.

First, sexual abuse prevention and online safety education programs can’t assume parents are protective. These programs should sensitively address the problem of abuse, exploitation and image-making by family members.

Second, some perpetrators groom and manipulate potential partners to gain access to children. Community education could help people identify the warning signs when an offender is trying to groom someone in a romantic relationship.

Read more: Child sex abuse survivors are five times more likely to be the victims of sexual assault later in life

Third, people with concerns their partner might be accessing child sexual abuse material need to be able to access non-stigmatising support and advice. Services such as PartnerSPEAK are crucial not only to support people partnered with offenders, but to promote early intervention in the offending and the protection of children.

Fourth, child protection and criminal justice interventions in sexual abuse often depend upon the child’s disclosure. However, this group of severely abused children were very unlikely to disclose. This finding underscores the need to alert protective adults to non-verbal signs of abuse.

The sexual exploitation of a child by a parent is a profound violation of trust. As Australia and other jurisdictions scale up efforts to prevent child sexual abuse before it occurs, we can’t overlook the ways that some perpetrators use their homes and families to exploit their children and create sexual abuse material.

As 2021 Australian of the Year Grace Tame said, as she accepted the award in the name of all survivors of child sexual abuse:

Just as the impacts of evil are borne by all of us, so too are solutions borne of all of us.

Read more: Dissociative identity disorder exists and is the result of childhood trauma

If this article has raised any issues for you, please contact 1800 RESPECT through their toll-free national counselling hotline or online. You can also find support through Lifeline on 13 11 14. The Blue Knot Foundation provides telephone counselling for survivors of childhood trauma on 1300 657 380.

– ref. New research shows parents are major producers of child sexual abuse material – https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-parents-are-major-producers-of-child-sexual-abuse-material-153722

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ross Garnaut, Professorial Research Fellow in Economics, University of Melbourne

Talk about returning the economy to normal after the crisis is misguided. Before the crisis, normal was nowhere near good enough.

Australia did indeed manage to go 28 years without a commonly-defined recession. But the expansion had three distinct stages.

The first, from the end of the early 1990s recession to the early 2000s, saw dramatic economic growth fuelled by dramatic productivity growth. In fact, Australia led the developed world in productivity growth — a remarkable development given that it had spent most of the twentieth century at the bottom of the developed country league table. Much of it was driven by the Hawke government’s economic reforms in the 1980s.

I call this first decade of the long expansion the productivity boom.

Australia continued to experience rapid growth in incomes for another decade, until 2013, this time driven by extraordinarily high export prices for metals and energy and the resources industries investment booms that followed.

First Hawke’s boom, then China’s boom

I call this second boom the China resources boom. It drew its strength from the world’s most populous country experiencing the strongest, longest and most resource-intensive economic growth of any developed country, ever.

During the China resources boom, as the world fell into the global financial crisis and bold fiscal and monetary stimulus in Australia and China made Australia one of only two developed countries to avoid recession.

Throughout these first two decades of the long boom, from 1992 to 2012, average Australian incomes, measured in international currency, rose from the bottom half of the developed country league table to the top-most tier. By 2013 Australian incomes were one-quarter higher than in the United States.

Then the dog days

Economic growth continued after 2013, but much more slowly, with stagnant output per person and decline in the typical household’s real wages and income. I call this third period the dog days. In the seven years from 2013 to 2019, while the whole developed world experienced slow and grumpy times, Australia drifted to the back of the slow-moving pack.

Unemployment has never again fallen to anywhere near the 4% it reached on the eve of the global financial crisis. Underemployment has grown and grown. Average household disposable income per person ended the seven lean years where it began — a period of income stagnation for ordinary Australians unprecedented since (and starting to challenge in longevity) the Great Depression.

Read more: Garnaut’s Dog Days

By 2019, average Australian incomes, again measured in international currency, were one-quarter below those of the US.

Many Australians are accustomed to thinking of Japan as something of an economic basket case. They might be surprised to learn that from 2013 to 2019 Australia underperformed Japan on the most important indicator of economic performance: output per person. If Japan is a basket case, on this measure Australia has been a worse one since the dog days began.

We need to lift our ambition higher

Returning to those day days is deeply unattractive, but it is what is almost certain to happen if the treasurer and Reserve Bank are as good as their words.

Josh Frydenberg has said he will maintain an expanded budget only until unemployment “is on a clear path back to pre-crisis levels”. He defines pre-crisis levels as “comfortably back under six per cent”.

That is nowhere near what Australia is capable of.

The truth is we won’t know what Australia is capable of until we run the economy strongly enough for long enough to see the emergence of market pressure for substantial wage increases. That might happen at an unemployment rate of 3.5%, or it might happen at an unemployment rate even lower.

Our bank should buy our bonds

Creating money to allow government spending to achieve early full employment comes with strings attached. So we should move as quickly as possible to full employment, while keeping debt to the lowest levels consistent with full employment on the earliest possible timetable.

Oddly, to not run the budget as hard as we can until we are at full employment could condemn us to endless increases in our public debt to GDP ratio because we wouldn’t be producing the GDP we were capable of. And it could damage our commitment to a liberal democratic political system.

The extra bonds needed to finance ramped up Commonwealth and state government spending should be bought by the Reserve Bank through expanding its balance sheet (creating money) rather than bought on the private market where they are likely to unhelpfully push up the value of the Australian dollar.

It should not be afraid to push rates negative

The Reserve Bank’s holdings of Australian government bonds are low by international standards, and they should be expanded. We should avoid running higher interest rates than other developed countries unless our economy is clearly stronger — even if that means negative short term interest rates.

Much contemporary economics presumes that negative or near-interest rates are impossible, or short-lived if they ever appear. The Reserve Bank treats them as anathema, to be avoided at all costs.

Read more: The Reserve Bank might yet go negative

That view has been challenged by the twenty-first-century reality of very high savings and low investment on a global scale. There is no reason to expect a return to “normal” higher interest rates soon, or, with certainty, ever.

Low rates make the interest costs of debt small. At current interest rates, a debt of about a trillion dollars — half of annual GDP and the highest contemplated so far — would incur interest costs of about 0.5% GDP. In Japan, with public debt heading towards two times GDP and with even lower interest rates, the budget cost is currently about zero.

Some (most likely new) businesses will do well in an ultra-low interest rates environment. Other more-established businesses will cling to guarantees of old rates of return and withhold investment, eventually being weeded out by Darwinian processes.

In my new book Reset: Restoring Australia after the Pandemic Recession, to be released on Monday I outline plans for a new business tax system that would reward businesses that invested and penalise those that lived off “economic rents” — over-high profits maintained by lobbying and barriers to competition.

Australians with established wealth have done extraordinarily well out of the low interest rates, rising asset values and high profit shares in the twenty-first century.

We are kidding ourselves if we think an extreme and growing divergence of fortune with less well off Australians is consistent with social cohesion and effective democratic government as we deal with intractable domestic and international problems.

And we should pay near-everyone a basic income

In my book I propose a form of basic income, I call it Australian Income Security, that would help stimulate the economy until full employment was achieved. My calculations suggest it is economically realistic.

Nearly all resident adult Australians would receive an unconditional fortnightly payment at the JobSeeker rate (about $15,000 per annum), indexed to the consumer price index. Extra would be paid to people who currently qualify for payments in excess of JobSeeker. The payment would attract no tax.

Beyond that payment, every dollar of Australians’ personal income would be taxed at 37% up to $180,000 and 45% after that.

Read more: ‘Whatever it takes’ should now include a universal basic income

Receipt of the basic payment would not depend on passing a bureaucratic test of whether the recipient had put sufficient effort into the search for a job.

Recipients could choose to look for a job in the knowledge they would keep 63% of every dollar of income from employment.

It would create a much stronger incentive to find work than the high effective marginal tax imposed by the present system as benefits are withdrawn.

Immigration should restart more slowly

Non-Australians and Australians who had not been resident for at least half a year would be excluded, as would people with taxable income above $250,000 or with net assets including super and a house of $2 million.

We will make earlier and stronger progress towards full employment and boosting living standards if we restrict our immigration program and refocus it on valuable skills.

Here I am not referring to the humanitarian component of our immigration program which is too small to be of much economic significance.

Read more: With our borders shut, this is the ideal time to overhaul our asylum seeker policies

Immigration increases both the number of people available to work and the demand for workers. Nevertheless, economic prudence argues for holding net immigration in the decade ahead to about the level in the first stage of Australia’s three-stage recession-free expansion – the productivity boom phase.

Immigration was then about 0.5% of the population per year, half what it was in the dog days that preceded the COVID recession.

Our reset should do much better than return us to the economy we left, but there’s no need to turn our backs on the best of our past. We have faced difficult challenges before and shown we are more than capable of meeting them, often by doing more than we have done before. This is one of those times.

– ref. The reset to lift us out of the COVID recession has to be bold: returning to where we were is nowhere near good enough – https://theconversation.com/the-reset-to-lift-us-out-of-the-covid-recession-has-to-be-bold-returning-to-where-we-were-is-nowhere-near-good-enough-155565

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ben Bramble, Lecturer, philosophy, Australian National University

Some of my vegan friends are reluctant to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

These vaccines do not contain animal products. Yet animals were used to develop and test them. For instance, early trials involved giving the vaccines to mice and macaque monkeys. So my friends say they feel uncomfortable having a product that uses animals in these ways.

I am very sympathetic to their concerns. Animals are treated appallingly in the production of many goods and in many areas of life.

Nonetheless, I believe vegans can get the COVID-19 vaccine in good conscience. Let me explain why.

Read more: Friday essay: on being an ethical vegan for 33 years

Getting the vaccine prevents harming others

A key feature of COVID-19 is you can catch it and pass it on without even knowing you have it, despite your best efforts to avoid this.

This means we each pose a potentially deadly risk to others. Getting the vaccine yourself greatly reduces the chance of you having serious disease. And evidence is emerging that vaccines reduce the chance of you passing on the virus to others.

This means there is an important difference between avoiding products like shampoos and cosmetics tested on animals and not getting the vaccine. Doing the former doesn’t put anyone else at risk. But doing the latter does.

Read more: Infected with the coronavirus but not showing symptoms? A physician answers 5 questions about asymptomatic COVID-19

Let’s start with fruit and vegetables versus cosmetics

Vegans acknowledge it is virtually impossible to avoid contributing to animal harm entirely. Even most fruit and vegetables are grown in a way that kills or displaces wild animals, uses fish meal and blood and bone to fertilise plants, or requires killing “pests” like mice to protect crops and grain stores.

Many vegans therefore distinguish between animals harmed in this sort of food production, and animals harmed more directly by the meat and dairy industries, as well as in the production of consumer products such as cosmetics.

What is the right basis of this distinction? One possibility is the latter group of animals are killed or harmed directly, as a means to an end, whereas the former group suffers harm as a mere by-product or side-effect of other processes.

But this cannot be the right basis. Killing animals for use in fertiliser or as pests is direct killing.

A more plausible basis for the distinction is unavoidably killing animals in the production of things that are necessary or clearly worth it. We need to grow large amounts of fruit and vegetables. And we cannot — at least, given current technologies — do so without killing some animals along the way.

But we do not need to consume meat or dairy, or wear animal-based clothing or cosmetics tested on animals. There are plenty of excellent alternatives.

So, in ethical terms, which of these products is a COVID-19 vaccine most comparable to: fruit and vegetables, or cosmetics tested on animals?

I think they are more like fruit and vegetables. COVID-19 vaccines are necessary — there is no other credible way out of this devastating pandemic. And the animal harm involved in developing and testing these vaccines was unavoidable. There was no reasonable alternative available, at least not without making big sacrifices in terms of how long we have to wait for vaccines to arrive.

For this reason, I think even though the vaccines used animals directly, their use under the circumstances was permissible, and so vegans can get these vaccines in good conscience.

Read more: Organic, free-range, fairtrade or vegan: how ethical consumption got so selective

Why can’t we test on humans?

Some might argue there is an alternative to using animals to develop and test these vaccines — using humans instead, in “human challenge trials”, where volunteers are exposed to the virus in lab-controlled conditions. In fact, the United Kingdom has just given the green light for this type of trial to go ahead for later stages of the testing process.

If we allowed humans to volunteer to be involved at earlier stages of the development and testing process as well, some might put up their hands for this, too. While human challenge trials face serious moral issues, it might be ethically preferable to use consenting humans rather than unconsenting animals.

But involvement at these earlier stages may be so dangerous too few people would volunteer, or we should not allow them to take part. Still, this is a proposal worth considering further.

Read more: Challenge trials for a coronavirus vaccine are unethical – except for in one unlikely scenario

But I still feel too awful

Some vegans might accept my reasoning but find they just cannot bear to use a vaccine tested on animals.

To these people, I would say: it is perfectly understandable and reasonable to feel uncomfortable about getting the vaccine for this reason. It doesn’t follow, though, that you shouldn’t get it. If the only way to save the planet or your fellow humans is to kill an animal, you should do so even if it is incredibly emotionally hard to do so.

Even so, if as a vegan you simply cannot bring yourself to get the vaccine, this won’t make me grumpy in the same way it makes me grumpy when I hear others — for example, anti-vaxxers motivated by conspiracy theories — say they won’t get vaccinated.

Your reluctance to get the vaccine is rooted in a legitimate grievance about human mistreatment of animals more broadly.

By contrast, people who refuse to get vaccinated because they think Bill Gates is hoping to microchip humanity have no such legitimate grievance behind their aversion.

Humanity caused the pandemic

Experts widely predicted a pandemic would happen sooner or later. Many believe it was a direct result of human activity — indeed, mistreating animals.

Moreover, the fact there aren’t good alternatives to using animals in development and testing is due largely to society’s failure to properly explore and fund such alternatives earlier.

Nevertheless, under current circumstances, our need to use animals to develop and test these vaccines is real.

So, the correct path is not to reject COVID-19 vaccines. It’s to reluctantly accept them and lobby hard for better treatment of animals.

– ref. Are COVID vaccines vegan? Should I get one anyway? An ethicist explains – https://theconversation.com/are-covid-vaccines-vegan-should-i-get-one-anyway-an-ethicist-explains-155221

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Professor of Architecture, University of Adelaide

This history of the development of universities is the first of two articles on the past and future of the campus. This is a long read, so set aside the time to read it and enjoy.

Once the first atomic bomb exploded on July 16 1945 in New Mexico, the world would never be the same again. Scientists and engineers had turned an obscure principle into a weapon of unprecedented power. Los Alamos, the facility where the bomb was designed, was run by the University of California.

This was a turning point for universities. As they increasingly focused on scientific research, the role of universities worldwide – and their campuses – changed.

Before the first world war, the largest investment on most campuses was the university library. After the second world war, investment shifted decisively to laboratories and equipment.

A key reason for the increasing focus on university research was the lessons of the first world war. After the war, governments of rich countries took an increasingly interventionist role in directing and encouraging the research and development of artificial materials, weapons, defences and medicine. Universities or institutes associated with universities did much of this work.

Read more: Universities and government need to rethink their relationship with each other before it’s too late

By 1926, the Council for Science and Industrial Research, the predecessor to the CSIRO, and the organisation that would become the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) had been founded in Australia.

A gradual turn towards research

In the UK, many of the older universities were not that keen on applied research. Chemistry, engineering and physics were taught at Oxford between the wars, but by 1939 the chemistry cohort was just over 40 students, of whom “two or three were women”.

It wasn’t until 1937 that Oxford drew up a plan to develop the “Science Area” with new buildings, but in that same year, the university also agreed to reduce its size to avoid a fight with the Town over “further intrusion on the Parks”.

Facilities at Cambridge for physical sciences were slightly better, but not by much, despite its historical focus on mathematics. The Cavendish laboratory in which the New Zealander Ernest Rutherford discovered in 1911 that the atom had a nucleus was small, dark, damp and ill-equipped.

This relative lack of interest in experimental sciences at Oxbridge was unhelpful for science research in Australia, because our six small state-run universities tended to follow their lead. As an indication of its priorities, the University of Adelaide built its humanities buildings in stone and its much more modest science facilities in brick.

Nobel laureate and University of Adelaide Professor W.H. Bragg carried out his pioneering experiments on X-ray crystallography in Adelaide during 1900 to 1908 in a converted storeroom in the basement of the Mitchell Building. His lab is now a storeroom again.

The post-war transformations

The application of university research had been a German strength since well before the first world war with the rise of the Humboldtian model of higher education, which favoured research over scholarship. A key reason the Allies prevailed in 1945 was that the United States in particular rapidly improved its capacity to carry out and apply research, based on the Humboldtian model.

In 1917, MIT established a naval aviation school. The University of Washington soon followed MIT’s example.

This decision had a direct bearing on the success of the Boeing company following construction of the Boeing wind tunnel at the University of Washington’s Seattle campus in 1917. It led directly to the development of advanced aerodynamics for the Boeing 247 of 1933, which provided the template for all subsequent commercial airliners.

The Australian university system between the wars offers no such exemplars. The focus on applied research was foreign to the prevailing university culture in Australia at the time. As Hannah Forsyth writes in A History of the Modern Australian University, not until the 1940s did “scholarly esteem began to move away from ‘mastery’ of disciplines towards the discovery of new knowledge”.

New research facilities and new campuses

New technologies led to a host of new post-war industries, including commercial aviation, television, plastics, information technology (IT) and advanced health care. The demand for skills to operate these new industries was the primary driver of an explosion in university enrolments.

University science research in Australia only got a serious start in 1946 with the foundation of the Australian National University (ANU) and the Commonwealth Universities Grants Committee, which became the Australian Research Council (ARC).

As Robert Menzies, the prime minister from 1949-66, later wrote:

The Second World War brought about great social changes. In the eye of the future observer, the greatest may well provide to be in the field of higher education.

In Australia, about 80% of our universities have been founded since the second world war. The growth of the sector has been startling.

Read more: Australia doesn’t have too many universities. Here’s why

All of the institutions founded during the Menzies era were sited on large campuses in the suburbs or beyond. Although mainly Commonwealth-funded, they were designed and delivered by state public works authorities to tight budgets on land provided largely by state governments. UNSW, Monash, Griffith, La Trobe, Flinders and WAIT (now Curtin) share a heritage of economical buildings on large parcels of land.

The key reasons for this approach were to minimise cost and maximise capacity for growth and change. Low to medium-rise buildings on land surplus to state needs maximised bang for buck. Development costs per square metre of building were about half that of a campus in the central business district (CBD) of cities.

This was not a new discovery. The universities of Stanford, Berkeley, Caltech, Tokyo, Wisconsin and Peking, all founded in the 19th century, used this model for similar reasons.

Fortunately, the states were generous with land they didn’t need. Of all the universities built in the Menzies era, only UNSW with 39 hectares has a significant land area constraint. The other universities have at least 50ha and several have well over 100ha. This has given them some headaches, but also lots of options.

Research by ARINA, an architectural firm specialising in higher education, community and public design, shows that virtually all universities built since 1949 – that’s more than 90% of universities in the world – have large campuses with densities less than 500 students per hectare. The University of Bath, built in 1966, is typical of post-war UK universities with 59ha and 16,000 students in 2021, less than 300/ha.

The same is true even in small city-states such as Hong Kong and Singapore. The National University of Singapore has a campus of about 140ha with 37,000 students (264/ha) and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology has 55ha with 11,000 students (200/ha).

Most new universities in Europe, Asia, India and the Middle East still rely on the large campus model. The University of Paris-Saclay, for example, is being built on 189ha of former farmland 15km south of the Paris orbital motorway.

Broad-acre campuses are popular with students as measured by surveys of educational experience such as the Australasian Survey of Student Engagement (AUSSE) and the US National Survey of Student Engagement (NESSE). The most popular campuses in Australia are Bond, New England, Griffith and Notre Dame. RMIT and UTS, the highest-ranked CBD campuses finish in the middle of the pack, a long way behind the leaders. A similar phenomenon can be seen in the UK and the US.

Read more: Looking beyond the sandstone: universities reinvent campuses to bring together town and gown

Campus model goes corporate

The ARINA research indicates broad-acre campus models have also become increasingly part of the physical organisation and accommodation of many commercial operations.

In 2020, 63% of the top 30 US Fortune 500 index and 87% of the top 30 tech companies in the index were located in suburban and extra-urban settings, mostly campuses. This includes well-known tech companies such as Apple, Alphabet, Facebook, Tesla and HP, but also less obvious candidates such as Walmart, Exxon Mobil and Amazon.

In the UK, 28% of all FTSE 100 companies and 54% of FTSE Techmark 100 companies by market capitalisation are based outside greater London.

The reasons for this are straightforward: capital and operating costs for research-based firms are lower outside a CBD. While some Australian universities are choosing to head into the city, much of the new economy appears to be heading for the suburbs. It’s happening for the same reason that universities started to migrate there over a hundred years ago.

Read more: The rise of the corporate campus

– ref. A century that profoundly changed universities and their campuses – https://theconversation.com/a-century-that-profoundly-changed-universities-and-their-campuses-151765

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Fan Yang, PhD candidate at Deakin University, Deakin University

Facebook’s “news ban” in response to Australia’s proposed media bargaining code, has been hard to miss if you’ve spent any time on social networks in the past day or so. The social media platform has effectively halted all posting of links from Australian news pages and stopped people in Australia from posting or viewing international news as well.

Read more: Facebook’s news is gone. Here’s where to turn for trusted information

The change happened overnight, and may be undone if either Australia or Facebook backs down. But if the current situation continues, it may leave Facebook operating much more like the Chinese platform WeChat, where news is ruled by platform-specific content houses cranking out huge volumes of low-quality articles. And that might suit Facebook quite well — if not the public.

What is WeChat?

WeChat is the major social media platform in the People’s Republic of China. It’s also used by many people around the world, including in Australia. While the PRC and Australia have very different political systems, this shouldn’t stop us paying attention to their similarities.

WeChat is as privately owned as a company can be in China, and is often described as the Chinese Facebook. But WeChat is an even more pervasive platform, combining its own set of built-in tools, payment services and communications networks with a range of optional apps and utilities from messaging services to games and more.

Read more: Thinking of taking up WeChat? Here’s what you need to know

In short, WeChat does everything. Because of this, entire news organisations have set up inside the platform. These are known as WeChat Official Accounts (WOAs), and are roughly equivalent to “blue tick” accounts on other platforms such as Twitter.

If Facebook’s Australian news embargo continues, we think something like the WeChat model might develop here. In our research, we have shown it’s very common for features and interface elements to move between English and Mandarin digital media.

People might have a general idea that some aspects of US-based social media have been reproduced by Mandarin language services (such as WeChat’s Instagram-copying “Moments” product) but the copying goes both ways. The stickers, GIFs, QR codes, live commenting, and direct messaging used by the likes of Faceboook, Twitter and LinkedIn were copied from WeChat, Weibo and Bilibili.

How news works on WeChat

Countless media entrepreneurs have set up WOAs since they were launched in August 2013. These accounts produce millions of news posts every day, and unlike traditional media outlets posting on Facebook, these posts are not accompanied by external links to a version of the article hosted elsewhere. WeChat is their whole audience, and they make money by renting out advertising space within their articles.

One of us (Fan Yang) conducted research with 24 Australian-Chinese employees of WOAs. These organisations appear to employ far fewer journalists than traditional media — and sometimes none at all. There are already many Australian-run WOAs operating almost entirely with short-term interns, most of whom do not identify themselves as professional journalists. Instead they are content producers translating published English news into Mandarin and reappropriating stories with editorial spin.

Read more: How Australia’s Mandarin speakers get their news

These organisations largely rehash existing news content, often with clickbait headlines and exaggerated accounts of events. Stories are often aggregated from multiple news sources, or simply copied entirely, perhaps being passed through an automated translation service twice to avoid directly reproducing sentences.

From the fringes to the mainstream

If we were to see the development of platform-specific Facebook news services modelled on the WeChat system, only a handful of media workers would be needed. They would perform multiple roles as writers, editors, marketers, content producers and translators.

As these jobs might only require marginal professional experience in a specific field (such as politics, lifestyle, sports, or nature and environment), the work could be outsourced to places or regions where the labour cost is lower.

With the shrinking readership and advertising revenue in the traditional news industry, content farms and outsourced journalism have already become a common way to churn out a high volume of speedy and inexpensive content. Many fringe groups already operate this way on Facebook, run by anti-vaxxers, flat-Earthers, white supremacists and more. In the absence of more traditional news on Facebook, there is no reason this model couldn’t spread further.

Information control

When comparing China and Australia, we often think of divisions such as China’s shutdown of the “foreign” internet since 2009 and the current diplomatic and trade tensions. However, both nations have seen similar shifts in the way that information is controlled on their dominant platforms, and both have high levels of media concentration.

Whether the changes to Facebook will lead to increased levels of WeChat-style platform-specific news production houses, or an increased visibility of those that already exist, remains to be seen. This may depend on how independent and start-up media find a way forward, although we believe the WeChat model may be successful for some.

We would suggest, however, that there are already two key messages to take away from the current situation. The first is to note that while regulation of social media is possible, political will is largely absent without the support of incumbent media organisations. This can be seen in the deals Google has recently established with several media companies.

Also, only Google and Facebook have been the focus of the media bargaining code so far. Can we expect regulation of Reddit, Discord, TikTok, WeChat, Twitter, or even MySpace and Ello? What about news platforms that link to other news platforms? These developments have not yet played out.

The second is that Facebook will defend its capacity to operate on its own terms, and will fight hard to prevent either states or competitors dictating how its services operate or how it governs content. Despite Facebook refusing to accept journalistic outlets as formal competitors (as this would likely invoke various national oversight mechanisms for journalistic content), they are nonetheless in competition for audiences and advertising.

Anything that could shift people into Facebook-specific news-advertising contexts with independent editorial teams would be a highly desirable outcome for the platform.

– ref. The WeChat model: how Facebook’s ban could change the business of news – https://theconversation.com/the-wechat-model-how-facebooks-ban-could-change-the-business-of-news-155629

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

University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Paddy Nixon discuss the week in politics.

This week Michelle and Paddy discuss the political and personal ramifications of the alleged rape of former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins, as well as a victory of the crossbench in the government’s decision to abandon watering down the BOOT provision of their fairwork amendment. Also discussed, Facebook’s decision to prevent the publication of news media on its website.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on Brittany Higgins, BOOT and Facebook – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-brittany-higgins-boot-and-facebook-155643

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Anne Décobert, Lecturer in Development Studies, University of Melbourne

In recent years, international donors have poured large amounts of aid into development and peacebuilding programs in Myanmar. But when military forces seized power in a coup earlier this month, the international aid community was left grappling with how to respond.

The UK has announced it will review its aid programs to Myanmar, while New Zealand has committed to ensuring its aid does not benefit the military.

The US has indicated it will redirect development assistance away from the military state and toward civil society.

Other embassies in Myanmar, including Australia’s, have condemned the actions of the military and called on security forces to refrain from violence, but haven’t specified yet how they will adjust their aid programs.

And international NGOs working in Myanmar have voiced their commitment to supporting local and national civil society partners.

Yet, it will take time for donors and international agencies to find new ways forward and disentangle their programs completely from the Myanmar government and the complex administrative structures that were developed over the past decade.

The situation illustrates the need for more flexible and politically sensitive approaches to aid programming in countries like Myanmar that are transitioning to democracy and are prone to setbacks like this.

Read more: Myanmar’s military reverts to its old strong-arm behaviour — and the country takes a major step backwards

How aid has evolved in Myanmar

When Myanmar was last ruled by the military in the 1990s and early 2000s, Western donors mainly provided humanitarian aid by bypassing the state.

For some, this meant supporting community-based organisations like the Back Pack Health Worker Team and non-state systems like the Karen Department of Health and Welfare. Such organisations historically worked across borders (“cross-border aid”) and in partnership with ethnic armed organisations, fighting for self-determination in the country’s disputed borderlands.

But when Myanmar began its democratic reforms in 2011, donors engaged more with the state and increasingly channelled aid directly through government agencies or through international agencies based inside the country.

Donors also focused more on long-term development goals. By 2013, official development assistance to Myanmar had reached US$6 billion — almost a 60-fold increase compared to 2005.

Over the past decade, international aid to Myanmar has fostered an increasingly vibrant civil society. It supported large-scale development programs in sectors like health, education and livelihoods.

A number of donor-funded initiatives also supported both state systems as well as community-based organisations and non-state actors in border areas. This developed valuable collaborations between individuals and groups that were historically divided by conflict.

But the shifting aid economy was not all positive.

Community-based organisations and non-state actors serving ethnic minority communities often felt sidelined from key decisions affecting their activities. Many faced funding cuts or were forced to access donor support through more bureaucratic funding streams inside Myanmar, instead of through partner agencies in places like Thailand, as they did in the past.

Internationally funded development initiatives were also seen as undermining Indigenous health and education systems and increasing centralised state control over border areas.

And peacebuilding initiatives were criticised for being co-opted by the military and bolstering efforts by the central, Bamar-dominated state to consolidate control over ethnic groups in border regions.

Rolling back of last decade’s achievements?

The coup not only draws increased attention to these issues, but also throws into question much of the development and peacebuilding work that has taken place in recent years.

With the military now in control and key ministerial leaders replaced or having resigned, work to develop government systems and capacities has ground to a halt. Development workers fear the past decade’s achievements will be rolled back.

The ability of international NGOs and UN agencies to continue their operations is also now in question, with staff safety and access to local communities jeopardised.

Myanmar’s junta historically restricted international access to people in ethnic minority regions along the borders. The new regime — if it remains in power — could create a similarly difficult environment for aid workers.

And community-based organisations face other difficulties. A civil disobedience movement is intensifying across the country among civilians opposed to the coup, leading many people employed by the government and in other industries to boycott work.

As such, many banks are closed and organisations cannot access funds for the day-to-day running of their programs.

Leaders of community-based health organisations working in border areas also tell me that much of their funding is now funnelled through centralised administrative systems, which are frozen and would not be able to operate under the military regime.

People need these health services more than ever, due to the shutdown of official health systems, the potential for increased violence in border areas and the ongoing COVID-19 crisis.

As a result, the leaders of these health organisations are asking donors to support community programs and once again fund cross-border aid. Yet, they don’t know how donors will be able to adapt to the current situation or what this will mean for them.

Read more: COVID coup: how Myanmar’s military used the pandemic to justify and enable its power grab

The need for flexible and politically sensitive aid programs

After the coup in Myanmar, much criticism has been directed toward international actors for their faith in the country’s shaky political transition. But what is really needed is a constructive dialogue about how foreign governments and aid organisations should approach development and peace-building in countries like Myanmar.

A new approach is needed that recognises countries do not always transition from conflict to peace, or from military rule to democracy, in a linear fashion. Rather, they can be unstable and subject to major setbacks.

Read more: Australia must do more to ensure Myanmar is preventing genocide against the Rohingya

This means supporting vulnerable people in such countries requires a two-pronged approach that combines both flexible and shorter-term “humanitarian” aid and longer-term, more state-focused “development” assistance.

International donors and agencies must also build greater flexibility and concrete contingency plans into their programs from the outset when working in “transitional” countries.

In Myanmar, international donors shouldn’t pull out of the country entirely. Instead, they must listen to and work with community and civil society actors to devise programs that can be adapted to an evolving and unstable situation.

This should include support for community-level groups that were developed in response to decades of military rule and have the experience and structures in place to continue helping people in the current climate.

– ref. Myanmar’s coup might discourage international aid, but donors should adapt, not leave – https://theconversation.com/myanmars-coup-might-discourage-international-aid-but-donors-should-adapt-not-leave-154742

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Joshua Gans, Professor of Strategic Management, University of Toronto

The Conversation is a great news site. But, for the most part, people don’t read it like a newspaper. Instead, articles on specialised topics are shared with other people. One way is via Facebook.

Yesterday, almost none of that was possible worldwide for the Conversation’s Australian content because Facebook opted to ban all news (even seeming news ) from Australian sources to avoid being designated for compulsory negotiations under legislation before the Australian parliament.

The government’s new media bargaining code was a response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry that found it was hard for content providers, including but not limited to news organisations – to deal with platforms whose rules were always changing.

Parts of these grievances are legitimate, and relate to editorial and algorithmic issues. Others relate to the platform’s stranglehold on online advertising.

But rather than tackle these issues head on, Australia’s government sliced out a sliver of the sites affected – news sites – and attempted to fix things for it, saying it’s concerned about competition.

Competition policy without more competition

To any economist, the point of competition policy is to encourage competition. In this case, either more digital platform options for consumers, or more news content options.

But the government’s legislation seems to be uniquely designed to deliver neither.

The code allows news organisations to negotiate with large digital platforms about things such as how their algorithms work to prioritise content, and money.

And money is what it is really all about. The news organisations want more of it, large digital platforms have it. It’s that simple.

The code empowers news organisations to get money from digital platforms by

• making it unlawful for digital platforms that do not pay up to provide links to Australian news, giving big news outlets quasi-monopoly bargaining power

• allowing deals to be made without the need for authorisation by a regulator concerned about the public interest

• providing a regulatory stop-gap should that not happen, whose design is tilted in interest of one of the parties

This last step requires a little explanation.

It is not unknown, especially in Australia, for competition policy to work by first allowing parties to negotiate, and then imposing a regulated settlement only if they fail.

And its normally about empowering the little guy, in the belief that’s what leads to socially desirable outcomes.

Little guys locked out

But not in this case. It is only the large news organisations that would be allowed to negotiate over money.

It’s quite different to the system adopted in France, whose government is able to collect money from digital platforms via a tax, which can, should the government wish, be distributed to content providers on a criteria other than naked private interest. The French system isn’t clearly pro-competition either, but it at least provides a mechanism that could enable good outcomes to occur.

Read more: Banning news links just days before Australia’s COVID vaccine rollout? Facebook, that’s just dangerous

The Australian process fails to deliver competition in two ways.

First, it allows the treasurer, rather than a judge, to designate the platforms the process will apply to. He is unlikely to designate a platform that large media organisations have no problem working with, as that will entail work.

Second, the treasurer is unable to designate a platform that doesn’t carry any Australian news. So if a digital platform wants out, it can get out.

Both of these things have begun to come to pass in the last day — even before the code has been legislated.

Facebook gains a bargaining tool

Google has done deals with some large news outlets and thereby signalled it will do deals with others to ensure it is not designated. It means Google won’t have to deal with all of the other smaller voices that also have a problem with it.

Facebook have opted out of the news content business altogether, as the law allows it to. It decided Australian news wasn’t worth it, at least for now. Australians can still share news from around the world, which in some ways is more valuable to them than local news they are already aware of.

Facebook might be doing it to get a better deal when negotiations take place.

Read more: Why Google is now funnelling millions into media outlets, as Facebook pulls news for Australia

Bizarrely, before the government’s proposed legislation, if Facebook had excluded content from suppliers in order to get a better deal, Australia’s Competition and Consumer Commission could have prosecuted it for exclusionary conduct.

The new code gives Facebook a license to do what it has just done, and argue that it could not have been exercising market power because it was merely using the steps identified in the code as necessary for it to avoid compulsory arbitration.

Never mind that this really means Facebook

• has been able to demonstrate to news outlets how much they need it

• is now able to get news organisations to agree to better conditions than if it had not been given this licence.

In other words, the entire process has had the (I hope) unintended consequence of enhancing the very market power that it claimed to intend to contain.

No more platforms, no more competition

Those games aside: where will this end up? It will end up with the large digital platforms doing deals with the largest news outlets. Those deals will be multi-year lump-sum payments which enable everyone to go about their business. There will be no new digital platforms, no new content providers, no more competition.

The shareholders of the large digital platforms will be a few million dollars poorer and the shareholders of large Australian news outlets a few million dollars richer.

There will be no improvement in any competitive outcome whatsoever. As often happens in Australia, oligarchies will consolidate, and consumers will get nothing.

– ref. Facebook versus Australia: the government hands Facebook a free pass – https://theconversation.com/facebook-versus-australia-the-government-hands-facebook-a-free-pass-155628