The role children, and consequently schools, play in the COVID-19 pandemic has been hard to work out, but that puzzle is now finally starting to be solved.
While children are thankfully much less likely than adults to get seriously ill, the same isn’t true for the adults that care for them. Evidence suggests schools have been a driver of the second wave in Europe and elsewhere. This means the safety of schools needs an urgent rethink.
It’s hard to detect COVID-19 in children
Infections with SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, in children are generally much more mild than in adults and easy to overlook. A study from South Korea found the majority of children had symptoms mild enough to go unrecognised, and only 9% were diagnosed at the time of symptom onset.
Researchers used an antibody test (which can detect if a person had the virus previously and recovered) to screen a representative sample of nearly 12,000 children from the general population in Germany. They found the majority of cases in children had been missed. In itself, that’s not surprising, because many cases in adults are missed, too.
But what made this study important, was that it showed young and older children were similarly likely to have been infected.
Official testing in Germany had suggested young children were much less likely to be infected than teenagers, but this wasn’t true. Younger children with infections just weren’t getting tested. The study also found nearly half of infected children were asymptomatic. This is about twice what’s typically seen in adults.
But children do transmit the virus
We’ve known for a while that around the same amount of viral genetic material can be found in the nose and throat of both children and adults.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean children will transmit the same way adults do. Because children have a smaller lung capacity and are less likely to have symptoms, they might release less virus into the environment.
However, schools did contribute to community transmission to some extent. This was made clear by the Al-Taqwa College cluster, which was linked to outbreaks in Melbourne’s public housing towers.
When researchers analysed cases in Victorian schools that occurred between the start of the epidemic and the end of August 2020, they found infections in schools mirrored what was happening in the community overall. They also found 66% of all infections in schools were limited to a single person.
Most students in Victoria switched to remote learning at the peak of the second wave.Shutterstock
This might seem encouraging, but we have to remember this virus is characterised by superspreading events. We now know that about 10% of infected people are responsible for about 80% of secondary COVID-19 cases.
Two major studies from Hong Kong and India revealed about 70% of people didn’t transmit the virus to anyone. The problem, is the remainder can potentially infect a lot of people.
What happened in Victorian schools was entirely consistent with this.
The risk associated with schools rises with the level of community transmission. The picture internationally has made this clear.
What we know about outbreaks in schools, internationally
After schools reopened in Montreal, Canada, school clusters quickly outnumbered those in workplaces and health-care settings combined. President of the Quebec Association of Infectious Disease Microbiologists, Karl Weiss, said
Schools were the driver to start the second wave in Quebec, although the government did not recognise it.
A report by Israel’s Ministry of Health concluded school reopening played at least some role in accelerating the epidemic there, and that schools may contribute to the spread of the virus unless community transmission is low. In the Czech Republic, a rapid surge in cases following the reopening of schools prompted the mayor of Prague to describe schools as “COVID trading exchanges”.
The opposite pattern has been seen when schools have closed. England just witnessed a drop in new cases, followed by a return to growth, coinciding with the half-term school holidays. This was before any lockdown measures were introduced in the country.
These observations are consistent with a study examining the effect of imposing and lifting different restrictions in 131 countries. Researchers found school closures were associated with a reduction in R — the measure of how fast the virus is spreading — while reopening schools was associated with an increase.
The risk has been spelled out most clearly by the president of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s equivalent of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Last week, he reported the virus is being carried into schools, and also back out into the community.
What we need to do
It won’t be possible to control the pandemic if we don’t fully address transmission by children. This means we need to take a proactive approach to schools.
At a minimum, precautionary measures should include the use of face masks by staff and students (including primary school students). Schools should also improve ventilation and indoor air quality, reduce class sizes, and ensure kids and staff practise hand hygiene.
School closures have a role to play as well. But they must be carefully considered because of the harms associated with them. But these harms are likely outweighed by the harms of an unmitigated epidemic.
In regions with high levels of community transmission, temporary school closures should be considered. While a lockdown without school closures can probably still reduce transmission, it is unlikely to be maximally effective.
The idea of moving to the country has gained momentum through the COVID-19 pandemic. Many workplaces have introduced new policies on working from home that give employees the flexibility needed to make the switch.
Lockdowns have shown many just how cramped and uncomfortable life can be when you cannot escape to the usual activities that get you out of the house. And if everything is closed, what is the point of being in the city and paying a higher rent or mortgage anyway? The Reserve Bank has noted rents have gone down and vacancy rates have gone up in major cities.
At the same time, some real estate agents have noticed an upturn in interest in renting or buying rural and regional properties. The demand in some regional areas has pushed up prices by as much as 30% in the year to October. It seems many are already making the switch to country living.
It sounds idyllic. Escape the rat race, have space to grow veggies and let the kids play outside. You won’t have to commute any more, and you might even be able to buy a house in the country at a time when city prices remain out of reach for many. You could be living the dream.
The surge of interest in living in coastal towns like Warrnambool in Victoria has already pushed up regional property prices.Greg Brave/Shutterstock
Find a place that matches your values
So how do you know if this is right for you, or a disaster waiting to happen?
In my research with people who moved to the country, I found successful moves came down to how closely aligned people’s values were with the attributes of the place they moved to. For example, some people value space and quiet more than bustle and activity. If they found these attributes in their new home, then they were able to craft a new life that was deeply satisfying.
When you look through the pages of a glossy magazine such as Country Style, you might find yourself yearning for the lifestyle it depicts – the grassy fields, the peaceful but quirky homes filled with flea-market finds, the home-grown abundance and the happy, contented people. These are long-held and highly regarded values that many hold dear.
The roots of these ideals are deep. Representations of the country as a rural idyll, a place to escape to, are centuries older than our current media.
Epicurus (340BC to 270BC) moved from the centre of Athens to the countryside just outside so he could grow vegetables and live simply. Virgil’s (70BC to 19BC) Eclogues emphasised a rural idyll, as did much later painters such as John Constable and Eugene von Guérard. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1845) is an oft-quoted classic about an urban dweller moving to a rural place to live a better life (albeit temporarily in his case).
Early Australian writers such as A.B. “Banjo” Paterson and Henry Lawson took up this nostalgic ideal in the fledgling colony. So did artists such as Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Charles Condor when they travelled to then-rural Heidelberg, now part of Melbourne, to paint the uniquely Australian countryside.
We know the media are a powerful factor in helping us develop and share our identity and personal narratives. We respond to television shows, books and magazines that we are interested in by becoming their audience. We might share values, goals, ideas or even similar stories with the media we watch. We then, consciously or unconsciously, learn from or adopt those ideas and values in a process of socialisation that shows us how we might live a better life.
Media are only a representation, however. A multitude of factors, not least of which are sales and advertising revenues, go into the process of decision-making as images and stories are crafted for the various outlets. There can be a tendency for media to adopt stereotypes as a shorthand form of communication, but these do not necessarily reflect the reality they purport to depict.
This might seem obvious, but it is all too easy to accept these images as truth when we are inclined towards that viewpoint anyway.
Do you value the things that make a rural place what it is, whether that is peacefulness, an absence of people, vistas of rolling hills, or the community of a small country town? If you do, there’s a good chance a move to the country will enable you to live more closely in line with your values and so be a successful one.
If, on the other hand, you value city-style living, which includes attractions, shops, events and being close to services, you might want to reassess whether a seachange or treechange is right for you.
In tax design as in many endeavours, it’s easy to work out how things should be; harder to work out how to get there.
In NSW, Treasurer Dominic Perrottet wants to replace the one-off stamp duty on real estate transactions with an annual land tax.
In the long run, this one single reform could produce the biggest possible gains of any tax reform, state or federal.
This graph from the federal treasury’s 2015 tax discussion paper makes the point.
It says the “marginal excess burden” (damage) done by real estate conveyancing taxes amounts to 70 cents for each dollar raised.
It means people and businesses change addresses less often than they should. Households live further away from their work than they would like to, are reluctant to move to where there is better work, and spend money extending houses instead of moving to better ones.
Businesses resist changing property location and type when changes in markets and costs suggest they should.
In contrast, the treasury found the marginal excess burden of land tax was negative. By that it means every dollar raised actually makes things better off by making land more likely to be used for its best purpose and making land less likely to be not used at all.
Swapping the worst tax the treasury modelled for the best tax it modelled ought to have a huge economic payoff for use of property, for productivity and for living standards.
It’d also be fairer.
The NSW Thodey Review of federal financial relations commissioned by Treasurer Perrottet notes that 26% of owner-occupiers have remained in the same property for at least 20 years.
Most of these long-term same property owners have benefited “not only from the services provided by the state over that time, but also from a once-in-a-generation land price windfall”.
In exchange for these gains, they have contributed very little towards essential services and critical infrastructure via property taxation. Others who have moved more often than the average to find a job, to be closer to schools, or to match housing size to changes in their family situation have picked up the tab.
Thodey also identifies other reasons for making the switch. Land tax revenue is more stable and predictable than revenue that soars and dives at times when people are buying or are not buying properties.
How you get there matters
The Australian Capital Territory is well on the way.
NSW is proposing a different approach. It is considering asking new buyers to “opt in” to an annual land tax in return for escaping stamp duty. Once a buyer has opted in, future buyers of that property won’t be able to opt out. They will pay land tax instead of stamp duty.
It’ll mean no property owner, new or old, need be a loser in the first instance.
But it will stretch out the transition and involve very large reductions in revenue for years to come, with smaller but still-substantial losses over decades.
As an illustration, assume that in year one, rather than paying $100 of stamp duty, the buyer chooses to pay a much smaller annual land tax.
NSW is going the long way
On average about 5% of properties change hands each year, meaning on average each is transferred once every 20 years. That means that to be revenue neutral in the long term the annual land tax should be set at 5% of the stamp duty.
If all the buyers in the first year switch over to land tax, the government will lose 95% of the money it would have got from stamp duty in that year.
With the passing of time and a larger share of owners paying land tax the shortfall will get smaller. But even after a decade, it might be as much as 50%.
Some buyers will never opt-in
And the voluntary opt in will give buyers who expect to hold a property for longer than average, for more than 20 years, an incentive to turn down the offer of land tax and pay (the lesser) stamp duty as before; while those who expect a short stay will opt for the (lesser) land tax.
This entirely rational behaviour will further reduce government revenue, aggravate the inequity of the system we’ve got, lock some owners into the properties they already own in order to avoid paying for government services, and postpone the benefits of moving to a system in which tax doesn’t distort the use of land.
It’s easy to see why Perrottet has gone for a voluntary switchover.
There are better ways to avoid double taxation
The ACT Labor government has just won it’s sixth consecutive election.LUKAS COCH/AAP
Without some sort of concession, recent buyers would find themselves taxed twice, once through stamp duty and then again through annual land taxes.
The ACT’s 20-year transition is one way to get around the problem.
A quicker way of realising the gains from switching while reducing double taxation would be to introduce land tax immediately and give recent buyers a partial credit for the stamp duty they’ve paid.
As an example, stamp duty paid in the past one, two, three, four and five years could receive a credit of 100%, 80%, 60%, 40% and 20%, respectively.
It would cost revenue over the transition period, but not as much as the opt in arrangement proposed by the NSW treasurer, and after that short period it would be revenue neutral. Importantly, it would reap the full efficiency benefits from day one, and ensure everyone paid the tax they should.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever travelled for weeks or months as a backpacker on a limited daily budget. Keep your hand up if you were made welcome in the places you visited on your OE, enjoyed chance encounters and experienced the generosity of strangers.
And did those experiences leave a lifelong affection for the places you visited and people you met? If the answer is yes, then we need to consider what might happen in New Zealand were Tourism Minister Stuart Nash’s latest ideas to become policy.
To recap, Nash told the Tourism Summit in Wellington last week the industry should move away from catering for low-spending backpackers and instead target the rich. This would solve two problems: the environmental damage allegedly caused by freedom campers (including using nature as their toilet), and the pressure of too many visitors in general.
Nash was right to say we cannot return to the pre-COVID normal when the border reopens and the tourism recovery begins. Overcapacity, strained infrastructure and environmental impacts meant growing community resistance was reaching a tipping point.
But do we really want to banish backpackers and position New Zealand as expensive and exclusive — the Switzerland of the South Pacific? There are five reasons this approach would be a mistake.
1. Big spenders are big polluters
Lower-budget travellers generally stay much longer than the average. They usually make a higher aggregate economic contribution than those whose daily spend is high but who pass through quickly.
Does New Zealand really want only the uber-rich to experience our natural wonders, when flying business class, travelling by cruise ship and hiring helicopters are the most environmentally damaging ways to do so?
If we were to consider the wider social, economic and environmental impacts of discrete tourism markets, we would be banishing the cruise industry first, not backpackers.
Not welcome? Backpackers unload their cheap camper van before leaving New Zealand.GettyImages
2. Backpackers bring many benefits
Because they stay longer, backpackers can bring wider benefits to our society, economy and environment. They tend to be more dispersed, bringing economic development and employment opportunities to regional communities.
Also, their travel behaviours tend to align more with the concept of regenerative tourism. Backpackers are more likely to be conscious of their carbon footprint, engage in beach cleanups, plant trees and involve themselves in conservation projects.
They are a seasonal labour force, too, as has been shown by critical labour shortages in rural and regional economies due to border closures.
3. The importance of diverse tourism
Backpackers and freedom campers support small regional tourism businesses, attractions and local services that would not survive without them. Backpacker hostels, home-stays, camping grounds and other low-budget accommodation subsectors would be at risk, as would many small and medium tourism businesses.
During crises it is important that tourism destinations have a broad portfolio of markets. This ensures resilience and mitigates potential economic impacts from periodic disruptions to global tourism. Furthermore, as the mayor of Queenstown has observed, today’s backpackers return in future as high-end visitors.
4. Tackling climate change and overconsumption
Social tourism refers to the principle that opportunities to engage occasionally in leisure and tourism are important for personal well-being and an inclusive society. It is a form of tourism based on an ethic of social inclusion, as opposed to exclusion based on wealth.
By contrast, the carbon-intense lifestyles and sense of entitlement of the super-wealthy are major barriers to climate action.
Our tourism policies should not celebrate and encourage over-consumption, which works against shifting attitudes towards less carbon-intensive and more sustainable travel.
5. Damage to our international reputation
Do we really want to be perceived as exclusionary and elitist? A colleague based at a university in the Netherlands, for example, reported a social media backlash:
Everyone is complaining about the news that Kiwis do not want to have us anymore and they are only interested in tourists who fly business class and hire a helicopter around Franz Josef.
Similarly, the policy can look petty. A story headlined “New Zealand vows crackdown on defecating backpackers” in the Times of India reported the New Zealand government’s promise “to take action against backpackers relieving themselves at natural beauty spots as part of post-coronavirus tourism plans”.
The Tiaki Promise is a charter for inclusive tourism based on host and visitor sharing mutual responsibility.
The post-COVID challenge
Should New Zealand’s post-coronavirus tourism rebuild really be perceived as revolving around the defecations of low-budget tourists? While there have been cases of disgusting behaviour, this problem can be actively managed.
Non-self-contained campervans could be required to park overnight in fully serviced camping grounds for a nominal fee. New Zealanders should not bear the costs of tourism, anyway. Local councils transfer the costs of freedom camping to ratepayers when they provide “free” overnight parking and toilet facilities — putting rate-paying local camping grounds out of business.
Above all, our tourism rebuild should be closely aligned with what makes New Zealand unique. First and foremost, it should be founded on the Māori principles of kaitiakitanga and manaakitanga — a mutual responsibility to care for the land and culture, as expressed in the Tiaki Promise charter.
This would honestly reflect the ideals of generations of Kiwis who have set off on their own OEs to experience the world. If we consider this a birthright, is it fair that we deny the same to others who want to visit us?
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rebecca Giblin, ARC Future Fellow; Associate Professor; Director, Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, University of Melbourne
Many culturally important books by Australian authors are out of print, hard to find as secondhand copies, and confined to the physical shelves of a limited number of libraries. Effectively, they have become inaccessible and invisible — even including some Miles Franklin award winners by authors such as Thea Astley and Rodney Hall.
By digitising out of print books and making them available for e-lending, the project will create a royalty stream for the authors involved, as well as income for the arts workers we are employing as proofreaders.
Commercial publishing lists, such as Text Classics and Allen & Unwin’s House of Books, do a great job of breathing new life into some of Australia’s lost books. But they often focus on literary fiction, to the exclusion of genre fiction, children’s books and non-fiction, which also need to be preserved.
Here are 10 of our favourites we’re excited to digitise so you can borrow from your local library straight to your e-device. We expect these and other books in the project to be available in the first half of 2021 – and you too can nominate a book for inclusion in the collection here.
Working Bullocks (1926) by Katharine Susannah Prichard
The novel describes the trials of Red Burke, a bullock driver in Western Australia, trying to make a living in a post-war Australia.
Just after the novel’s original publication, it was described by John Sleeman of The Bookman in the UK as “the high-water mark of Australian literary achievement in the novel so far”.
Metal Fatigue (1996) by Sean Williams
Sean Williams has written over 50 books, including co-authored titles with authors such as Shane Dix and Garth Nix which have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list.
Metal Fatigue was Williams’ debut. Set in a small American city 40 years after the end of a nuclear war, the residents must decide if they want to join the newly forming Re-United States of America.
Depicting a dystopic future of violence, shortages and a divided USA, it still feels remarkably current today.
I’m Not Racist, But… (2007) by Anita Heiss
This poetry collection from activist, writer and member of the Wiradjuri Nation, Professor Anita Heiss, skewers Australia’s racist underbelly.
I’m Not Racist, But… explores identity, pride and political correctness; proposes alternative words to the national anthem; and reveals how it is to grow up as an Indigenous woman in Australia.
This is a landmark work along Australia’s slow road to racial reckoning.
Space Demons (1986) by Gillian Rubinstein
The multi-award winning Space Demons was Gillian Rubinstein’s first book and began the much-loved trilogy of the same name.
It follows four ordinary kids drawn into a dangerous new computer game – instead of simply watching the game on the screen, they become part of it. And there is no way to know if they will escape.
With its gripping plot and local setting, Space Demons introduced many children to Australian science fiction – and led to many Australians first discovering their love of reading.
Noonkanbah: Whose Land, Whose Law (1989) by Steve Hawke, with photographs by Michael Gallagher
In 1979-80, the Yungngora people protested to stop the American company Amax drilling for oil on a sacred site on Noonkanbah Station, Western Australia.
This book is the detailed first-hand account of what became a high profile, ground-breaking land rights campaign, leading to the formation of the Kimberley Land Council. The Yungngora people wouldn’t have their native title rights recognised until 2007.
Alongside the reporting by Hawke, son of former PM Bob Hawke?, the book includes photographs taken by anthropologist Michael Gallagher.
This is an essential work of Australian history.
The Unlucky Australians (1968) by Frank Hardy
Frank Hardy was known for his political activism around labour rights, and as the author of 16 books. Almost his entire backlist is out of print, with the notable exception of Power Without Glory (1950).
In The Unlucky Australians, Hardy tells the story of the Gurindji people and the opening years of the strike they began in 1966.
Their protest against poor working and living conditions, seeking the return of their traditional lands, lasted nine years.
The Whitlam government returned some of those lands in 1975 with the historic transfer of “a handful of dirt” and the strike led to the passage of the historic Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act in 1976.
A vital piece towards understanding the shameful labour conditions inflicted upon Indigenous Australians, this book should never have gone out of print.
Inspired by three real life charismatic and dangerous individuals, these dark stories of abused trust and misplaced faith are transformed, taking on a gothic quality, with complex narratives, unlikely narrators and fairy-tale elements.
The White Garden is an ambitious novel following the misdeeds of the psychiatrist Dr Goddard (or Dr God, for short) in a hospital in the 1960s. Red Shoes takes us into the world of a religious cult. Cape Grimm looks at a religious order after its members are killed by their charismatic leader.
The Mindless Ferocity of Sharks (2003) by Brett D’Arcy
The Mindless Ferocity of Sharks is coming-of-age story about “Floaty Boy”, an 11-year-old with a love of body-surfing, his family, and what happens when his older brother disappears.
Described by the Australian Book Review as “Tim Winton on speed”, D’Arcy shines his own spotlight on Western Australia, exploring the duality of a life spent between the waves and the shore – and what happens when a family becomes torn apart by loss.
Untapped will launch with a free online celebration on November 24 at 6pm. Register for the launch here, nominate a book for inclusion at untapped.org.au – and let us know what you think we should digitise in the comments.
Australia’s actions should not be seen just through the lens of the strategic competition between China and the United States, Scott Morrison has said in a speech rejecting “binary choices”.
With China casting Australia as an extension of America, disrupting trade, and citing multiple grievances, Morrison reaffirmed the importance Australia put on wanting a positive bilateral relationship.
“Australia desires an open, transparent and mutually beneficial relationship with China as our largest trading partner, where there are strong people-to-people ties, complementary economies and a shared interest in regional development and wellbeing, especially in the emerging economies of Southeast Asia,” he said.
Equally, Australia was “absolutely committed” to its alliance with the United States, based on a shared world view, liberal democratic values and market-based economics.
“And at all times we must be true to our values and the protection of our own sovereignty.”
He acknowledged the global competition between China and the US “presents new challenges, especially for nation states in the Indo-Pacific”. Like other countries in the region “our preference is not to be forced into binary choices”.
Addressing the British Policy Exchange on Monday night, Morrison warned that “our present challenge in the Indo-Pacific is the foretaste for so many others around the world, including the United Kingdom and Europe.”
Australia’s pursuit of its interests in the midst of the China-US strategic competition was made more complex by the assumptions made about its actions, he said.
“Our actions are wrongly seen and interpreted by some only through the lens of the strategic competition between China and the United States.
“It’s as if Australia does not have its own unique interests or views as an independent sovereign state. This is false and needlessly deteriorates relationships.
“If we are to avoid a new era of polarisation, then in the decades ahead, there must be a more nuanced appreciation of individual states’ interests in how they deal with the major powers. Stark choices are in no-one’s interests.
“Greater latitude will be required from the world’s largest powers to accommodate the individual interests of their partners and allies. We all need a bit more room to move,” Morrison said.
He said international institutions also had an important role as circuit breakers. “To provide the space and frameworks for meaningful and positive interaction to be maintained, as a bulwark against any emerging divide.”
Morrison talked up the role the OECD had to play “in support of open trade and market-based principles”. The Australian government is currently running a strong campaign to try to have former finance minister Mathias Cormann elected secretary-general of the OECD.
Morrison also noted the importance of the World Trade Organisation in promoting shared interests, as well as the G7-plus, and the Five-Eyes arrangement, where co-operation had extended beyond traditional security to the economic realm.
He lamented that “two of the most important economies in the region – the United States and India” had decided not to joint the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the recently-concluded Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership respectively.
“Of course, we respect those decisions. But they both remain welcome to join. Our response is straightforward.
“Working with our partners, we plan to make the TPP such a powerful force for open trade and investment that the US and, in the future, India and others will join without reservation. And that includes the UK.
“Interestingly, [China’s] President Xi Jinping has also now expressed interest in possible participation in the TPP,” Morrison said.
“The critical thing about the TPP is that it developed WTO-plus disciplines in key areas of intellectual property, digital commerce and state-owned enterprises.
“These are some of the areas where the WTO has fallen short.”
Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare insists his government will push on with the temporary suspension of Facebook while lawmakers explore ways to regulate social media.
In a statement in Parliament today, a fired-up Sogavare did not hide his government’s desire to suspend Facebook.
He said since that the announcement on social media of the suspension of Facebook, users had continue to use the social media platform “irresponsibly”.
Sogarave said he wanted laws in place to hold those responsible for violations to be held accountable.
“This goes to show that Facebook needs to be suspended so that relevant regulations can be brought to Parliament to regulate the use,” he said.
Sogavare told Parliament that his cabinet had agreed to suspend Facebook on November 12.
On the timing of the suspension, Sogavare said it would depend on the work.
Once “all arrangements are done before we move in to temporarily suspend it.” he said.
“Once we have regulations in place we will open it back.”
Robert Iroga is editor and publisher of Solomon Business Magazine. Articles are republished with permission.
The Victorian government plans a pilot scheme for up to five days sick and carer’s pay, at the national minimum wage, for casuals or insecure workers in priority industries.
Even though the initiative is at a very early stage, with $5 million in Tuesday’s state budget for consultation on the pilot’s design, the federal government immediately attacked the move.
Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter said it “raises a number of major issues”.
Once underway, the pilot would run two years in selected sectors with high casualisation. It could include cleaners, hospitality staff, security guards, supermarket workers and aged care workers.
“The pilot will roll out in two phases over two years with the occupations eligible for each phase to be finalised after a consultation process that will include workers, industry and unions,” a statement from Premier Daniel Andrews’ office said.
Casual and insecure workers in eligible sectors would be invited to pre-register for the scheme.
While the pilot would be government-funded, any future full scheme would involve a levy on business.
Andrews said: “When people have nothing to fall back on, they make a choice between the safety of their workmates and feeding their family.
“This isn’t going to solve the problem of insecure work overnight but someone has to put their hand up and say we’re going to take this out of the too hard basket and do something about it.”
But Porter said a fully-running scheme would put “a massive tax on Victorian businesses”, which would be paying both the extra loading casuals receive and the levy.
“After Victorian businesses have been through their hardest year in the last century, why on earth would you be starting a policy that promises to finish with another big tax on business at precisely the time they can least afford any more economic hits?”
Porter said it would be better to strengthen the ability of workers to choose to move from casual to permanent full or part-time employment if they wished.
He said this was what had been discussed in the recent federally-run industrial relations working group process involving government and employee and employer representatives.
“It must surely be a better approach to let people have greater choice between casual and permanent employment than forcing businesses to pay a tax so that someone can be both a casual employee and get more wages as compensation for not getting sick leave – but then also tax the business to pay for getting sick leave as well.”
Porter claimed the Victorian approach would be “a business and employment-killing” one.
In the pandemic the federal government has made available a special payment for workers who test COVID-positive or are forced to isolate and don’t have access to paid leave. The Victorian government has provided a payment for those waiting for the result of a COVID test.
The Morrison government will introduce an omnibus industrial relations reform bill before the end of the parliamentary ar, following its consultation process.
A central objective will be to streamline enterprise bargaining. Scott Morrison told the Business Council of Australia last week: “Agreement making is becoming bogged down in detailed, overly prescriptive procedural requirements that make the process just too difficult to undertake”.
He said various issues needed addressing. “The test for approval of agreements should focus on substance rather than technicalities. Agreements should be assessed on actual foreseeable circumstances, not far fetched hypotheticals.” Assessments by the Fair Work Commission should happen within set time frames where there was agreement from the parties.
Morrison said key protections such as the better off overall test would continue but “our goal is to ensure it will be applied in a practical and sensible way so that the approval process does not discourage bargaining, which is what is happening now”.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Roberto Musotto, Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre Postdoctoral Fellow, Edith Cowan University
It’s no secret the trail of data we leave online can reveal intimate details about our lives. And there are myriad people whose job it is to collect and sift through this, often with a goal to engage in targeted advertising.
Another use for the field of “social network analysis” could eventually be to help prosecutors in criminal courts make sense of huge amounts of digital evidence, collected both online and from devices offline.
This would be particularly useful in trials with several defendants, saving courts precious time and money. Criminal networks can use online spaces such as dark web marketplaces to organise crime and reach more victims and clients.
Transaction patterns, messages and page visits are all clues that can help unpack such a network.
What it is and how does it work?
Social network analysis involves using advanced computer software to explore segments of patterns that recur in social interactions, online and offline. It offers scholars a broad perspective on the world of human relations.
This form of analysis doesn’t just look at who you’re friends with on Instagram – it looks at which decisions you make as an individual, which you make in a group and how these layers of choices influence your world.
In its simplest form, these social networks can be presented in graphs. There are “nodes” (which represent people) connected by lines or “edges”. An edge could represent a phone call, message or meeting.
Look at the graph of the real network of the Al-Qaeda terrorists involved in the September 11 attack. Can you figure out who the most “connected” terrorist is?
This graph represents the hijacker network responsible for the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre.Valdis Krebs
The murky networks of crime syndicates
This information is often expressed in mathematical form, too. These numbers offer information about the dynamics of a group and the specific role of each individual within.
how the various members are connected with one another
how the members combine, or act alone, to carry out crime.
A judge in a preliminary hearing could consult a graph like the one above to help decide whether there is a case to be made against each member.
Mathematical metrics could further filter out individuals for which there is enough evidence to prosecute. This would also help judges reach fairer decisions on jail terms or acquittals.
Surfing through oceans of data
Due to time, money and human resource restrictions, often not all evidence from investigations is used in criminal court proceedings.
Social network analysis would greatly benefit prosecutors in criminal trials involving an excess of digital evidence, which continues to grow alongside general online data.
In Australia, any electronic device seized by authorities must be evaluated in court. Western Australia’s police force processes over 2.8 terabytes of data (2,800 GB) for every case it investigates.
In the 2008 trial of Bell Group v Westpac Banking Corporation, digital evidence extended the final judgement enormously to more than 2,000 pages.
Similarly, a 2016 civil case in Victoria, McConnell Dowell Constructors v Santam and Others, required counsel to go through 1.4 million documents in electronic format. This would have taken about 583 weeks.
The Supreme Court allowed (for the first time) a technology-assisted review to isolate the most “relevant” documents.
Moreover, large criminal investigations are often broken into multiple trials. While this is economical and maximises resources, it’s inherently risky because evidence can be evaluated differently depending on the court.
This is why the largest and most expensive Mafia trial in history, the 1986 Maxiprocesso trial, was heard by only one court and jury. The initial trial involved 349 hearings over almost two years.
The Maxi, or Maxiprocesso, trial was conducted against the Sicilian mafia in Palermo, Sicily. The trial started in February, 1986 and ended in January, 1992.Wikimedia Commons
In hindsight, discussions surrounding evidence in the trial could have been shortened had social network analysis been available at the time.
In any criminal investigation, there’s also potential for bias from investigating officers. This bias can introduce errors into the evidence pool, which may not be picked up during a trial, and subsequently distort any analysis conducted.
Technology: both a problem and a solution
Of course, social network analysis isn’t perfect. While it can tell us how an individual interacts with a syndicate, it can’t guide us as to whether that person should be considered separate to the main network or not. This remains the judge’s decision.
There are also limitations to how online networks can be investigated. Often, important data is stored outside police jurisdiction, or requires a search warrant from law enforcement before it can be accessed (such as with Facebook).
Other times, data that’s crucial for an investigation may be hosted on an encrypted service such as WhatsApp, or may be hard to trace if it was uploaded anonymously or under a fake persona.
Still, social network analyses could prove to be an invaluable support tool to help judges and jurors assess the value of evidence.
If both have a detailed and holistic understanding of the case, this will help ensure the right people are convicted — as quickly as possible and with the sentencing deserved.
Many of us might not be as fit as we were before the pandemic hit, and as community sport restarts and gyms reopen across the country amid eased coronavirus restrictions, some people might be at increased risk of injury.
If you do pull your hamstring in your first game back, or work from home life has left you with a sore neck and headaches, you might think about visiting a health-care professional to treat your complaint.
But your sister sees a physiotherapist, your mother a chiropractor, your friend an osteopath and your cousin a myotherapist. All of them come highly recommended, so who do you choose to help manage your aches and pains, and what are the differences between the four?
In Australia, physiotherapists, osteopaths and chiropractors have extensive university training and are registered with the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA). Myotherapists have completed an advanced diploma or bachelors degree in myotherapy or “musculoskeletal therapy”, but aren’t registered with AHPRA. All four types of health professionals are primary contact practitioners. This means you don’t need a GP referral to seek treatment.
You will find all four in private health care, but you’re more likely to be treated by a physiotherapist in the public sector (for example, at public hospitals) compared to chiropractors, osteopaths and myotherapists.
A physiotherapist assesses your problem, provides a diagnosis and helps you understand what’s wrong while considering your general health, activities, and lifestyle. They treat your complaint with a variety of “active” therapies, such as exercise programs and hydrotherapy. They also use “passive” therapies, such as massage, joint manipulation, and mobilisation (a technique used to increase movement of a joint).
There are many different sub-disciplines within physiotherapy. For example, some specialise in treating problems that arise from neurological conditions, like multiple sclerosis or stroke. Some also focus on assisting patients with heart and lung conditions, for example emphysema or after lung infections like pneumonia (or COVID!).
A chiropractor works on the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of mechanical disorders of the muscles, ligaments, tendons, bones and joints, and the effect on the nervous system. They have an emphasis on passive manual treatments, including joint and soft-tissue manipulation, and spinal adjustments. They may also prescribe exercises to help you rehabilitate from your condition as well as provide dietary advice.
Over the last decade, some forms of chiropractic care have come under media and scientific scrutiny, particularly in children and infants, and should therefore be approached with caution.
An osteopath focuses on the muscular and nervous systems, assessing the structure of the body to determine its impact on function. For example, the position of your spine and pelvis may impact on the way you reach over to weed your garden. Treatment involves a combination of active and passive therapies, including joint manipulation and mobilisation, massage, as well as postural advice and exercise programs.
A myotherapist works to assist your aches and pains by focusing on the muscles and joints. They offer a range of mostly “hands-on” treatments including dry needling, massage and joint mobilisation, but can also prescribe exercises.
The profession is not registered with AHPRA. Myotherapists are not formally recognised under the umbrella of allied health in some regions of Australia. As such, they were forced to delay reopening as coronavirus restrictions eased in Melbourne, as allied health including physiotherapists were allowed to reopen first.
There’s a lot of crossover in treatments offered between the four professions and not all services offered are supported by high-quality scientific research.
The discipline of chiropractic has come under intense scientific scrutiny and should be treated with caution.Shutterstock
So, what is the scientific evidence?
Understanding if your health-care professional applies evidence-based practice to their treatment will help you decide which therapist is right for you.
Evidence-based practice relates to how any health professional integrates their clinical knowledge with the best available research evidence, and your individual values and circumstances, to assess and manage your health-care complaint. Whether or not this is implemented into daily practice will vary on the individual therapist, and may not be consistent across the entire profession.
Scientific evidence supports the use of treatments where you, as the client, are actively involved in the management of your condition, including education and undertaking an exercise plan — what we call “exercise prescription”.
The breadth of scientific evidence for exercise prescription as a treatment for muscle, ligament, tendon, bone and joint complaints far outweighs the limited scientific support for the prolonged use of “passive” treatments like massage, manipulation, and adjustments. Research suggests these passive treatments should only be used as adjuncts to active treatments. This type of therapy may be appropriate in the early stages of your care, and let’s face it, most people love a massage.
However, in the long term, it doesn’t equip you with the skills required to manage your condition. It may even result in over-reliance on your health-care professional and cost you more in the long run. It’s important to find a health-care professional that empowers you to participate in appropriate exercise, develop skills to self-manage your aches and pains and maintain a healthy, active lifestyle.
The evidence suggests health care that empowers you to take control of your condition is more effective than passive therapies like massage, in the long run.Shutterstock
Anecdotally, we think that physiotherapists and osteopaths are well equipped to implement an active management plan for your aches and pains. However, as an individual, you should seek out a health-care professional that supports you to manage your own condition. You could do this by speaking to your doctor, reading the biography of your practitioner, or phoning the clinic to enquire about the type of care provided prior to booking an appointment. Your health professional should be someone that walks alongside you and guides you on your rehabilitation journey.
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to help decide if the health-care professional is the right fit for you:
will they consider my overall health status, social situation, and hobbies to create a treatment plan?
will they educate me on the importance of actively self-managing my aches and pains?
will they encourage me to undertake exercise and/or physical activity?
will they ask me about my goals and what I want the outcome to be?
will they help me determine what to do if my aches and pains flare up in the future?
Fiji’s rugby team is set to have another round of covid-19 testing today as they seek to salvage what is left of their Autumn Nations Cup tour of Europe.
Over the weekend it was announced the Flying Fijians would have their third consecutive test match cancelled due to a coronavirus outbreak in the squad.
The team’s match game against Scotland, originally set for November 29, has been cancelled like the other two other matches.
Fiji’s clash with Italy was supposed to be played last Saturday gone, but was called off after 29 members tested positive for covid-19 last week.
A test against France was cancelled the week before as it became evident the virus was present among the touring party.
Fiji Rugby CEO John O’Connor told RNZ Pacific there would be more coronavirus tests today.
The BBC reported organisers saying halting the Scotland match was “unavoidable” due to the 10-day isolation period for players.
There is still hope that Fiji would still be able to play their final scheduled match against the fourth-place Pool A side on December 5.
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
To the surprise of most pundits, substantial real estate price inflation has resumed, after a hiatus from 2017 to 2019. As to be expected, most of the usual tropes have been employed: a lack of supply, immigration (in this latest case returning New Zealanders), and low interest rates. The only missing trope this time is that of foreign buyers.
While none of these are wholly untrue, the real story is a ‘flow of money’ story, with the main issue being that money flows into certain places because it does not or cannot flow into other places. The second main issue is that financial bubbles have their own dynamic and momentum; so once started, bubbles can become quite difficult to stop.
We also should note that real estate bubbles – as monetary events – tend to coincide with sharemarket bubbles, and with exchange rate appreciations.
The central problem in 2020 is the inadequate flow of money into (and through) the government sector of the economy. In the absence of adequate lending into the government and real economy sectors, the money flows instead into the ‘bubble’ sector.
The 2003 to 2008 Bubble
From 2005 to 2007, the tradable section of the New Zealand economy was in recession; that’s the core section of the economy relating to businesses, such as primary industries and manufacturing, which compete internationally. Instead, in those years, an incipient bubble economy overtook the core economy. The Reserve Bank responded by tightening monetary policy, raising interest rates progressively towards a peak OCR (Official Cash Rate) of over eight percent early in 2008.
The underlying problem was the tradable-sector recession. It meant that money which would otherwise have been invested in the tradable-sector was diverted into the bubble sectors.
The actions of the Reserve Bank made the problem worse. By progressively raising interest rates, they kept pulling foreign money into New Zealand at a time when the core New Zealand economy was struggling, and no longer attractive to banks. This inflow of foreign money raised the New Zealand dollar exchange rate, further damaging the core tradable sector, and reinforcing the diversion of money into the bubble economy.
Many jobs were created in the growing bubble economy, and much tax was paid from the bubble economy. These were not the conditions which required the government sector to borrow money. So the New Zealand economy was awash with money, but neither the core economy nor the government were borrowing much of that money.
The money flowed into – that is, was lent into – the non-tradable economy of retail and real estate and financial (and related) services, despite high interest rates; indeed, because the high interest rates diminished the flow of money into the core economy, one can argue that, at that time, the house price and other bubbles persevered because of high interest rates. Further, if we go back to 2004 and 2005, it was probably higher interest rates that brought about the recession of the core economy that became New Zealand’s central economic problem of the years leading up to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).
The 2012 to 2017 Bubble
This bubble came in the wake of the GFC, and was created in the global economy by the premature ending of ‘fiscal stimulus’ measures, given names such as ‘fiscal consolidation’ and ‘austerity’.
To get out of an economic depression, governments need to take the lead by running very large financial deficits. If done properly, much of this money flows indirectly into the core economy; employment and tax revenues increase, and government-sector financial deficits naturally fall to normal levels. This should be done in a way so that a country’s exchange rate does not rise prematurely; thus interest rates need to stay low for quite a long time.
A classic case of this recovery and expansion being done correctly was the 1935 to 1938 first term of the First Labour Government.
In the years 2012 to 2017, most countries’ governments did this incorrectly. While interest rates did stay low, there was a big push worldwide for governments to cut back, substantially, on their borrowing. A result was that many important government-led programmes were stifled, and an opportunity to reverse income inequality was lost. In many countries, money that should have gone into government social spending and universal benefits went instead into the bubble economy. In countries like New Zealand, this was reinforced by large inflows of foreign money relative to the size of their economies.
Bubble dynamics reasserted themselves this post-GFC time, with much lower global interest rates than in previous times. While interest rates are significant to the core economy, they are largely irrelevant to the bubble sectors. If an ‘investor’ with $200,000 can borrow $800,000 to buy a million dollar property, and then sell the property for $1,100,000 one year later, that’s a 50 percent return on their money; a substantial personal gain whether the mortgage interest rate was four percent or ten percent.
Bubbles do come to a natural hiatus after about five years. From 2017 to 2019, the capital gains from property speculation diminished, less money was flowing out of China and other saver economies, and conditions in the core economic sectors in the world became more favourable for bank lending. Economies grew, with 2019 becoming a very successful year in the global economy; though with the proviso that substantial environmental problems, inequality issues and identity issues came to the fore of our concerns. (And Brexit completely dominated United Kingdom politics.) In New Zealand in 2017, a new Labour-led government created sufficient uncertainty to quieten a bubble economy that was already running out of puff; and legislation prohibiting foreign purchases of New Zealand houses had some direct impact on dwelling purchases as well as indirect impact through perceptions that capital gains would diminish.
In New Zealand, neither immigration nor housing supply were the main causes of real estate inflation. In an economy with a growing population and a housing shortage, the first symptom should be an increase in market rents. Rising house prices should then follow, as landlords’ yields increase. That’s not what happened. Rather house prices increased first; rents eventually followed, though many property ‘investors’ did not care so much about their rental income because increasingly their ‘wealth’ came from capital gains rather than from collecting rents.
The actual housing crisis in New Zealand had little to do with house prices; and much to do with inequality, a lack of social housing, and a broken private rental market. In the 2017 to 2020 period, social housing and the private rental markets have improved in many cities; in Auckland there are many newly constructed apartments, recently completed or still under construction, sited close to public transport nodes.
The 2020 Bubble
At a time of Covid-19 pandemic emergency, there were few expectations that a property bubble could happen. But the conditions for such a bubble soon emerged.
The first thing to note is that the Reserve Bank is not the problem. Not only is it following its mandate by expanding its balance sheet, it is seeing that the bigger picture requires such an expanded balance sheet in order to play its part in preventing a pandemic from becoming a great economic depression. Under current conditions, monetary policy will not be able to induce the inflation that it is mandated to achieve – indeed that mandate is a case of bad social science (a story to be addressed elsewhere). If substantial inflation does recur in the world – and it might sooner than most of us expect – it will be due to covid-induced supply-chain breakdowns in the coming few years; nothing to do with monetary policy.
We need to picture a (monetary) basin with three plugholes; yes we can use water flows as a good analogue for monetary flows (its called liquidity). When more money is required for the economy, the Reserve Bank supplies the basin with money by expanding its balance sheet. The first plughole leads to the ‘real economy’, which is households buying goods and services and businesses making and selling them. The second plughole leads to governments – the government sector including local governments – the ‘fiscal’ economy. The third plughole leads to financial markets; to an inherently speculative ‘bubble economy’ that includes the market for urban land. The draining of the (monetary) basin represents the injection of necessary money into the economy.
The three plugholes are:
real economy plughole (private sector)
fiscal plughole (public sector)
bubble economy plughole (speculative sector)
The Reserve Bank’s effective mandate is to ensure a sufficient flow of money into the real economy. But the commercial banks are the gatekeepers (plughole keepers!) which facilitate or inhibit the draining process.
The economy we inhabit can be likened to a human ecosystem below the plugholes, and the economy needs to be lubricated by sufficient quantities of money. Economic contraction (eg recession) occurs when the real economy is under-lubricated; inflation, on the other hand, may occur when the economy is over-lubricated. The bubble-economy is the part of the human ecosystem that is most susceptible to inflation; the real economy is usually able to slow down the circulation of money when it is over-lubricated, thus averting inflation.
The commercial banks manage these three plugholes, though unevenly. The extent of their gatekeeping relates to the different grades of ‘security’ that accompany different types of bank lending. Bank gatekeeping constrains the ‘real economy’ plughole, because ordinary business finance is the least secure form of lending. The fiscal plughole is subject to minimal bank gatekeeping, because governments’ legal powers to tax constitute a very high level of financial security. Bank gatekeeping is reflected in interest rates; ordinary businesses and consumers (eg via credit cards) pay the highest interest rates. Governments generally pay the lowest interest rates.
Typically, economic recessions follow financial crises. During financial crises, the ‘bubble economy’ plughole closes, precipitating the recession. This induces a loss of spending confidence, as people and businesses exposed to the bubble economy sharply retrench their spending. So the real economy plughole also closes; not fully, but substantially. This diminished monetary flow into the real economy is partly a result of less business and household desire to borrow, and partly a result of more stringent gatekeeping by the lending banks.
In such a recession, the ongoing success of the economy depends on the fiscal plughole. In 2009 we saw all governments open the fiscal plughole to save their economies – it was called ‘fiscal stimulus’. The New Zealand government response was comparatively muted; the New Zealand economy largely recovered as a result of new spending enabled by other countries’ governments’ stimuluses.
In 2020, the economic contraction had an unpredictable ‘exogenous’ cause rather than a predictable financial cause; namely, the Covid19 pandemic. In this case the bubble plughole never closed; that is the key point of difference this time. The private economy plughole, however, in 2020 closed to a similar extent to which it closed in late 2008 during the GFC. In response, the fiscal plughole briefly opened wide in New Zealand early in 2020, but then it closed again.
The result, by mid-2020, was a national economy with a basinful of new money, and only one substantially open plughole – the bubble plughole. So, guess what? The money drained through that plughole into the bubble economy. There was nowhere else for that money to go.
Who is to blame? Well, maybe the banks could gatekeep less re the real (private) economy plughole. But much of the private economy is in a balance sheet recession, so is not presently confident to borrow much, even if subject to reduced gatekeeping. Unsecured distress lending imposes high financial risks to the commercial banks.
The problem is the Government; in particular, the Minister of Finance. The fiscal plughole needs to be wide open, at least until the private economy plughole opens sufficiently as a result of increased governments’ contributions to the real economy. To discourage money from draining through the bubble plughole, and while awaiting the real economy plughole to reopen, the solution is one of fiscal policy. Opening the fiscal plughole is the solution.
The irony is that – by setting historically record low interest rates – the Reserve Bank is imploring both businesses and governments to borrow. The trouble is that businesses cannot borrow more (due to gatekeeping, and to their own balance sheets) and the government will not borrow more. The New Zealand government chooses to resist the strong price signals from a Reserve Bank which is implicitly begging the government sector to take the lead to defuse the now out-of-control bubble economy.
What the Government could do, this year
The newly-elected government is committed to passing legislation this year to reintroduce a 39 percent tax rate on high marginal incomes. While this tax increase may be an unnecessary expedient that complicates matters, we have to accept that this will happen.
So, as part of the same fiscal package, the government could and should also do the following, to be implemented on the same date as the new income tax bracket:
Replace the lower income tax brackets with a Basic Universal Income of $9,080 ($175 per week) per year to all economic citizens (resident citizens, resident permanent residents, and other people presently resident in New Zealand with working or student visas. For present beneficiaries, the first $175 per week of their benefit would become unconditional. (This provision would have no immediate financial impact on either beneficiaries or on persons earning more than $70,000 per week. By ‘lower tax brackets’, I mean the 10.5%, 17.5% and 30.0% brackets.)
Increase jobseeker and assisted living benefits by $25 per week, and accommodation supplements across the board by 10%. (This provision would mean that all such beneficiaries would be at least $25 per week better off.
Place a substantial ‘stamp duty’ tax on all second homes, all rented homes, and all homes owned by trusts.
Introduce a ‘good landlord’ voluntary warrant of fitness for rented houses, and exempt complying landlords and trusts from the new stamp duty.
The Basic Universal Income (BUI) and benefit increases, in an economy such at that in New Zealand at present, would soak up much of the money otherwise flowing into the bubble economy. The BUI would also free up labour supply – especially for young people presently constrained by the requirements of conditional benefits. And it will free up government agencies to help those people and families with more complex needs. The BUI will ensure that all adults in a household – including recently unemployed women with employed partners – will have unconditional access to a basic income.
The stamp duty will create a disincentive for speculative ‘investor’ money to flow into the real estate market. This money is pushing up prices in such a way that only people who already own houses – or whose parents already own houses – are themselves able to buy houses; and this money is treating houses as a form of financial wealth rather than as a place to call home.
The landlord warrant of fitness exemption becomes a ‘good landlord subsidy’, a way of using a monetary incentive to address the emerging problem of slum housing in New Zealand’s cities.
Summary
The present real estate price bubble is easily explained as the result of a lack of ‘rational’ fiscal policy. In economics, it is rational to respond to price signals; in this case the governments of New Zealand are not responding rationally to the lower interest rates made available to them, and are instead watching as much of the money they could and should be borrowing flows into the secondary housing market.
While there are many things the government could be spending money on – including higher wages in female intensive industries such as health and education – the Basic Universal Income and benefit increase cited above represent the best immediate uses of increased government borrowing.
The improved fiscal policy suggested is a case of win-win, immediately easing the stresses of daily life in today’s uncertain times, while also defusing the out-of-control real estate market.
I am not confident that the government will choose this or any other win-win option. Rather I believe they will choose a lose-lose option; continuance of unnecessary economic insecurity and escalating house prices.
The disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has been so profound, particularly for women, that it threatens to upend the progress on gender equality in recent years. During the lockdown, women were doing more of the unpaid labour – care and housework. They were also more exposed to the risks of coronavirus either as essential workers or working in industries, such as retail, hospitality and accommodation services, that were forced to close.
There is evidence also of significant impacts on men’s labour force participation. In some cases men’s job losses early in the pandemic have not been recovered.
The impacts of COVID-19 on women and men extend beyond work and home to education, particularly tertiary education enrolments.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ latest data, 112,000 fewer students were enrolled in tertiary education in May 2020 – at the height of the first wave – compared to a year earlier. This is the largest drop in enrolments in over 15 years.
Like other aspects of COVID-19, the impact was gendered with a far greater decline among women. There were 86,000 fewer women enrolled to study in May 2020 than in May 2019, compared with just over 21,000 fewer men.
Big fall was for women over 25
What do these data tell us about COVID-19, education, work and potentially the future?
These data tell us COVID-19 has not only severely disrupted the lives of women in the workplace and the home, but also in education.
The biggest decline in tertiary enrolments was among women over the age of 25: 60,000 fewer women over 25 were enrolled in university in May 2020 than in 2019.
This steep decline in enrolments is particularly surprising given Australia’s success in educating women and potentially puts the nation’s reputation at risk. Australia is ranked equal first in the world in terms of educational attainment for women, according the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Gender Gap Index. The country has been atop the list for well over a decade.
Juggling caring roles with study
These data remind us caring responsibilities not only affect careers or work-life balance, but also education. The sharp decline in female enrolments over the age of 25 suggests it was likely because of caring responsibilities.
Many of these women with caring responsibilities, for either young children or older family members, were likely forced to make a choice between caring and studying. And for those combining work and study on top of family commitments, many elected not to continue studying.
For many mature-aged students (those over 21), undertaking study is challenge, especially for those combining study with work and/or care. Previous research has shown a number of gendered expectations are put upon mature-aged students and their time.
For many of these mature-age women who are combining work and study, they increasingly do it flexibly or online and schedule it around other commitments. Others give up their leisure time for learning.
COVID-19 made that near-impossible. The loss of both family and formal childcare increased the burden of unpaid work for women at home. It was extended far into the workday and into the evenings where mature-aged women might ordinarily find time to study.
The data also highlight the gendered complexities of COVID-19 on education. Women’s enrolments were disproportionately affected, whereas the data showed significant increases in men over the age of 25 enrolling in university in May 2020 compared with 2019. Male enrolments in this age group increased by about 26,000.
This increase suggests men were either “forced” into tertiary education because of a lack of opportunities, or it was a deliberate strategy on their part to upskill so they could be more competitive for jobs once the economy recovers. In this way, older age groups of men have shown themselves to be similar to young people who tend to go into education during times of recession. This is perhaps in contrast to previous recessionary periods where the participation rate of older men declined considerably.
All of this has implications for the future, particularly for women. These data are worrisome because, even though the returns from education for women are poor, many women obtain a number of qualifications just to get on an even keel with men in the labour market.
These latest trends might make it harder for women in the long run. However, it is worth noting these data capture enrolments at a point in time – during the first wave of the pandemic. Things might have changed significantly since then.
In a new series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on page and on screen.
Trixie Belden, girl detective, does not rank in the world’s pantheon of cool sleuths. She’s unlikely to appear in a Coen brothers’ film (à la Marge Gunderson in Fargo (1996)), for example. Nor did she issue from the pen of hardboiled, mid-century crime writer Chester Himes.
Instead, she was the creation of Western Publishing — the American maker of Little Golden Books who wanted to market low-cost mysteries and adventures to children after the second world war — and Julie Campbell, a writer and literary agent who responded to their call.
Campbell wrote the first six books in the series from 1948 to 1958. The rest, some 30 or so, were composed by ghostwriters between 1961 and 1986 and published under the pseudonym, Kathryn Kenny.
As a child, I had no inkling of this origin story. So far as I knew, Trixie Belden was from Crabapple Farm, Sleepyside, in the Hudson River Valley. She had three brothers (two older, one younger) and her best friend was Honey Wheeler, met in the original book, The Secret of the Mansion (1948), which I read more than 30 years after it was first published.
Honey was rich and beautiful. So was Diana, who turned up a bit later in the series and was memorably said to have violet eyes. Trixie was neither of these things.
In the first book, at the age of 13, she found her detective vocation by uncovering the fortune of a deceased recluse. She also met its beneficiary. Jim Frayne, a runaway with a brutal stepfather, would become Honey’s adopted brother, Trixie’s blossoming love interest, and a member of the Bob-Whites, Trixie’s club of friends who formed the support cast for the Belden-Wheeler Detective Agency.
Whether searching for a lost weather vane or tracking down an arsonist, Trixie was at the centre of all the mysteries, which I avidly read and reread.
My attraction to Trixie was not a matter of projection or identification; my world was clearly unlike hers.
I did not anticipate that I would come across a rabid dog; rescue a pilot from a burning aeroplane; or have to suck blood from my brother’s toe to prevent his poisoning by a copperhead. (And that was all in only the first book of the series).
Trixie was obsessed with horses, I was more interested in her setter dog, Reddy. Trixie was terrible at maths, which had yet to cause me trouble.
The differences between us didn’t matter so much as our shared interest in “running all the information through [our] mental computer” (from 1977’s The Mystery of the Uninvited Guest). I wanted to figure things out, just like Trixie. She nonetheless had many amateur sleuth competitors on my primary school reading list.
The child-groups constituting the two former titles were like the Bob-Whites insofar as they also formed detective communities. Although to my mind they put inordinate value on passwords, badges and boarding school holidays.
Nancy Drew was undeniably admirable in her older sophistication but a little too polished for my still-developing taste. She was confident and self-contained, which is surely why Hollywood created movie versions of her and why the intrusion of the Hardy Boys franchise into her narrative made no sense to me. It wasn’t like she needed any help.
By contrast, Trixie Belden was more accommodating and needing of others. She sometimes said mean things, and would then regret them and apologise.
She knew she wasn’t as pretty as Honey or Diana and, while that worried her a little, she shrugged it off and had far more interesting existential doubts. In the 17th book, The Mystery of the Uninvited Guest, she speaks of feeling as if she were inside a glass box:
All the people of the world march past me … I know that when I can tell just one person who I am, the glass will melt and I can join the parade.
I’m sure at the age of eight or nine I had only a vague idea of what she meant, but it sounded a lot like what growing up was all about.
Sticky situations, mistaken identities and stolen jewels were always worked out, revealed or returned to their rightful owners in the end. And the motives behind these events weren’t always nefarious.
Goodreads
Reassurance was offered in the sympathetic knowledge that circumstances, rather than moral flaws, can bring about bad deeds, and that detection itself trod a fine ethical line.
Trixie’s conscience was pricked by her practices of eavesdropping, surveillance and occasional breaking-and-entering. At times she determined that the status quo, which her detective work ostensibly upheld, was not right.
Maths might have stumped her, but as Honey appreciatively recognised of her friend:
Trixie was a down-to-earth person, keenly aware of information gathered by all of her five senses — plus that extra sense called horse sense.
She might not be cool, today or then, but — well-surpassing her intended pulp-fiction status — Trixie Belden was smart and sensitive in the ways that mattered.
A Pacific Islands Forum-hosted webinar has called on the United Nations and Indonesia to be “more responsive” to the pleas of West Papuans and take action to resolve human rights issues in the Melanesian region.
The Secretary-General of the Forum, Dame Meg Taylor, the secretary-general of Pacific Council of Churches, Reverend James Bhagwan, diplomats and human rights activists made the call at the Suva-hosted online event on Friday.
“I do want and hope the UN will be responsive and the Indonesian government to also be responsive, so this matter moves forward and [we are] not continually having a conversation about it,” said Dame Meg.
She said that the UN high commissioner for human rights had been invited to visit West Papua, but this was not getting attention.
Dame Meg said that although her term would end next year, the issue of human rights in West Papua would go on as it was “ingrained very hard” for citizens of the region.
The webinar was part of the PIF’s Blue Pacific Talanoa series.
Rosa Moiwend, a West Papuan human rights activist, gave a stimulating message from a strong Melanesian and Pacific woman.
“The lives of West Papuans are a matter for all of us, so we need to take an action to save the lives of West Papuans no matter [what] your political backgrounds, or your standing. I think human lives is the most important thing,” Said Moiwend.
Covid no reason to delay action Reverend Bhagwan said the covid-19 pandemic should not be a reason to not act on the latest Pacific resolutions about West Papua.
He said the resolutions on West Papua to intervene have been long-standing and “we know that the invitation [to visit West Papua] and the discussions have happened well before covid came into the region”.
“The government of Indonesia [must] allow the fact-finding mission to visit West Papua and to respect the call of Pacific leaders in terms of the Human Rights Commission to send a team and respect those findings,” he said.
West Papuan activist Rosa Moiwend … “The lives of West Papuans are a matter for all of us.” Image: Laurens Ikinia/PMC screenshot
“We continue to urge the current chair and we acknowledge the work that their chair and secretary general had been doing and we look forward to discussions around the forum leaders meeting this year.”
“And we continue to call for the incoming chair of the forum to continue PIF leaders’ resolutions and report back to the forum leaders meeting in 2021.” “We need to open the story, we need access for information – this also includes access for foreign journalists to be able to come in and investigate.”
Indonesia ‘committed’ to human rights’ Indonesian representatives Dr Felix Wanggai and Nicholas Messet said that Indonesia was committed to promoting and protecting human rights.
“Indonesia is also facing its own [problems], but we are committed to promoting and protecting human rights and so alleged human right cases with principle of justice,” said Messet.
He said that human rights violations in West Papua never happened without law enforcement against the perpetrators.
“Not a single human rights issue goes with impunity,” he said.
Pacific Islands Forum webinar on West Papua … human rights top of the discussion. Image: Laurens Ikinia/PMC screenshot
“Indonesia believes that the PIF is not the forum to discuss the issue of territorial integrity of a sovereign countries, but on the other hand, PIF has a moral duty to see that human right issue must not happen to its members and dialogue partners countries, including Papua and West Papua which is part of Indonesia,” Messet said.
Dr Wanggai highlighted the commitment of the central government of Indonesia to human rights such as basic rights of access to health services, education, connectivity, water, housing for the West Papuan people.
“In the context of Papua, our government has defined the root causes in Papua, for example inequality, undeveloped area, lack of connectivity, and lack of the skill to manage their natural resources.”
Managing special autonomy framework Indonesia was continuing to manage the special autonomy framework for Papua and West Papua provinces.
“So, by the special autonomy framework, the government recognises Papuan identity in economic, culture, social and local politics,” said Dr Wanggai.
He also highlighted that the government recognised the importance of cultural affairs in solving human rights issues which he called Papuan cultural affairs, known as the Papuan People Assembly (Majelis Rakyat Papua).
However, Reverend Bhagwan said that he was concerned about the arrest of the members of the MRP and the breakup of public hearing meetings across West Papua.
“Here we receive information directly from our member churches and on the ground,” he said.
Last Tuesday, more than 50 people were arrested in Merauke at the meeting to discuss their concern over the special autonomy law,” said Reverend Bhagwan.
Moiwend said that the “invasion” by the Indonesia military in West Papua caused more human rights violations as it often became arrogant and oppressed the Papuans. It scared Papuans in the villages.
Human rights abuse still a problem She said that human rights abuse still continued.
“But I think one of the key aspects is the political aspect and we can’t deny that there is fighting between the Indonesian military and West Papua freedom fighters. I think when we look at this conflict, ordinary people have became a victim,” she said.
“We have thousands of internally displaced people now living in Wamena and another neighboring regency from Nduga.
“And we haven’t finished working on that issue and now we have Intan Jaya also with the same kind of background. The conflict is also related to the Wabu block which is related to the Freeport mining concession area.
“This needs to be addressed by the government of Indonesia. Two things, one is from the political aspect, and one is from the human rights aspect.
“The most urgent things right now is how the government deals with the human rights issue, especially the situation of women and children as internally displaced people in these two areas, but also in other parts like in Sorong,” Moiwend said.
Laurens Ikinia is a Papuan Masters in Communication Studies student at the Auckland University of Technology who has been studying journalism. He is on an internship with AUT’s Pacific Media Centre.
A young West Papuan musician, Kris Douw, who has written many powerful protest songs against Indonesia’s illegal military occupation in his homeland, has been beaten up by security forces, allege activists.
Douw was atacked about 8am on by Indonesian special forces at the Kodim Complex in Nabire, Papua, according to the Free West Papua Campaign website.
He suffered injuries to the face, including several broken teeth, and his body.
The website has circulated photographs of his injuries on social media, but did not give more details about the alleged attack.
“Shame on the Indonesian forces who carried out this cruel attack! This only goes to show the power that music holds,” the website said in a statement.
“A simple song of freedom is enough to make any Indonesian soldier tremble with fear at the idea of Papuans mobilising and becoming inspired after listening.
“This is why it is so important for musicians and songwritters worldwide to use their talents and privileges to expose what is really going on in Occupied West Papua.
“Because West Papuan musicians who do this are automatically at risk of being intimidated [such as the Vanuatu-based exiled group Black Brothers]. or tortured or even murdered [as in the case of Arnold Ap in 1984]…
“If they sing about what’s really going on in West Papua.”
A Kris Douw music track on YouTube.
THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO ARTISTS WHO SING FREEDOM SONGS IN WEST PAPUA.
This is young West Papuan musician, Kris Douw. He…
In controlled laboratory situations, face masks appear to do a good job of reducing the spread of coronavirus (at least in hamsters) and other respiratory viruses. However, evidence shows mask-wearing policies seem to have had much less impact on the community spread of COVID-19.
Why this gap between the effectiveness in the lab and the effectiveness seen in the community? The real world is more complex than a controlled laboratory situation. The right people need to wear the right mask, in the right way, at the right times and places.
The real-world impact of face masks on the transmission of viruses depends not just on the behaviour of the virus but also on the behaviour of aerosol droplets in diverse settings, and on the behaviour of people themselves.
We carried out a comprehensive review of the evidence about how face masks and other physical interventions affect the spread of respiratory viruses. Based on the current evidence, we believe the community impact is modest and it may be better to focus on mask-wearing in high-risk situations.
Simply comparing infection rates in people who wear masks with those who don’t can be misleading. One problem is people who don’t wear masks are more likely go to crowded spaces, and less likely to socially distance. People who are more concerned often adhere to several protective behaviours — they are likely to avoid crowds and socially distance as well as wearing masks.
That correlation between mask wearing and other protective behaviours might explain why studies comparing mask-wearers with non-mask-wearers (known as “observational studies”) show larger effects than seen in trials. Part of the effect is due to those other behaviours.
The most rigorous, but difficult, way to evaluate the effectiveness of masks is to take a large group of people and ask some to wear masks and others not to, in a so-called controlled trial. We found nine such trials have been carried out for influenza-like illness. Surprisingly, when combined, these trials found only a 1% reduction in influenza-like illness among mask-wearers compared with non-mask-wearers, and a 9% reduction in laboratory-confirmed influenza. These small reductions are not statistically significant, and are most likely due to chance.
None of these trials studied COVID-19, so we can’t be sure how relevant they are to the pandemic. The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is a similar size to influenza, but has a different capacity to infect people, so it is possible masks might be more or less effective for COVID-19. A recently published trial in Denmark of 4,862 adults found infection with SARS-CoV-2 occurred in 42 participants randomised to masks (1.8%) compared to 53 control participants (2.1%), a (non-significant) reduction of 18%.
The most comprehensive between-country study of masks for COVID-19 infection is a comparison of policy changes, such as social distancing, travel restrictions, and mask wearing, across 41 countries. It found introducing a mask-wearing policy had little impact, but mask policies were mostly introduced after social distancing and other measures were already in place.
The Conversation, Author provided
What might diminish the effect of masks?
Why might masks not protect the person wearing them? There are several possibilities. Standard masks only protect your nose and mouth incompletely, for one thing. For another, masks don’t protect your eyes.
The importance of eye protection is illustrated by a study of community health workers in India. Despite protection by three-layer surgical masks, alcohol hand rub, gloves, and shoe covers, 12 of 60 workers developed COVID-19. The workers were then supplied with face shields (which provide eye protection) — in addition to the personal protective equipment (PPE) described above — and none of the 50 workers became infected despite higher case load.
Why masks might fail to clearly protect others is more complex. Good masks reduce the spread of droplets and aerosols, and so should protect others.
Things that might make masks less effective.Paul Glasziou, Author provided
However, in our systematic review we found three trials that assessed how well mask wearing protects others, but none of them found an obvious effect. The two trials in households where a person with influenza wore a mask to protect others in fact found a slight increase in flu infections; and the third trial, in college dormitories, found a non-significant 10% relative reduction.
We don’t know if the failure was the masks or participants’ adherence. In most studies adherence was poor. In the trials very few people wear them all day (an average of about four hours by self-report, and even less when directly observed). And this adherence declined with time.
But we also have little research on how long a single mask is effective. Most guidelines suggest around four hours, but studies on bacteria show masks provide good protection for the first hour and by two hours are doing little. Unfortunately, we could not identify similar research examining viruses.
Making masks mandatory only in crowded places, close-contact settings, and confined and enclosed spaces may be more effective.Dan Himbrechts / AAP
Is it better to focus masks on the 3 Cs: covered, crowded and close contact?
In addition to the completed Danish trial, another ongoing trial in Guinea-Bissau with 66,000 participants randomised as whole villages may shed more light as it tests the idea of source control. But given the millions of cases and billions of potential masks and mask wearers, more such trials are warranted.
We know masks are effective in laboratory studies, and we know they are effective as part of personal protective equipment for health care workers. But that effect appears diminished in community usage. So in addition to the trials, new research is urgently needed to unravel each of the reasons why laboratory effectiveness does not seem to have translated into community effectiveness. We must also develop ways to overcome the discrepancy.
Until we have the needed research, we should be wary about relying on masks as the mainstay for preventing community transmission. And if we want people to wear masks regularly, we might do better to target higher-risk circumstances for shorter periods. These are generally places described by “the three Cs”: crowded places, close-contact settings, and confined and enclosed spaces. These would include some workplaces and on public transport.
We are likely to be better off if we get high usage of fresh masks in the most risky settings, rather than moderate usage everywhere.
During the recent American elections, the most eye-catching graphics were were the individual county tallies.
These showed that even when states appeared to be overwhelmingly Republican red, some still “flipped” to the Democrats on the strength of a smaller number of blue squares.
The trick? These azure islands denoted population clusters in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Phoenix.
The left-right chasm between urbanised Americans and the more sparsely distributed rural-regional ones was there to see in primary colours.
But the division itself was neither new, nor especially American.
Across England’s industrial north, British Labour’s Euro-centric cosmopolitanism cut little ice in the Brexit referendum of 2016, the same year once rusted-on working class Democrats first broke for Trump.
Labor struggling to reach ‘two Australias’
And of course in Australia, this trend is also well established.
Indeed, Coalition majorities have long been built on the need for niche-messaging. This sees Liberals garner the city vote, while mostly leaving the Nationals to reinterpret the conservative brand for bush sensibilities.
As a one-message-fits-all party, the ALP has struggled with this, and as the two Australias become more distinct and antagonistic, the strain is showing.
Labor’s primary vote nationally is stuck in the low-to-mid 30% range. In the resources states, it sits even lower. That’s too low to win a majority, prompting some in Labor to suggest a Liberal/National-style partnership with the Greens.
Labor needs to boost its primary vote if it is to win government on its own.Mick Tsikas/AAP
But it is far from clear how this would maximise the combined lower house seat haul, given they both court the same inner-city electors. What seems more obvious is that a joint Labor-Greens ticket would actually accelerate the drift of industrially-centred regional seats towards the Coalition.
Fitzgibbon and the coal dilemma
This is already happening.
According to Joel Fitzgibbon, who resigned last week from the shadow frontbench, Labor’s ambitious 45% by 2030 emissions cut at the last election proved this. After being pushed to preferences in 2019 on the back of a 14% primary vote slump, Fitzgibbon believes that “crazy” policy was kryptonite in his coal-dominated seat, and in regional communities up and down the eastern seaboard.
The Hunter Valley-based MP, and others in Labor’s right faction, argue such communities feel abandoned by a party beholden to inner-city progressives. There’s no doubt Labor MPs are increasingly pessimistic over their electoral prospects.
Some on the right insist the party is doomed unless it actively reconnects with its industrial roots, and that means dropping the climate change focus.
As Fitzgibbon told reporters when announcing his frontbench resignation,
We have to speak to, and be a voice for, all those who we seek to represent, whether they be in Surry Hills or Rockhampton. And that’s a difficult balance.
For Labor leader Anthony Albanese, this presents a near unsolvable puzzle. He needs to outflank the Greens on his capacity to form a government and deliver, and out-perform the Coalition on commitment. Now, he must also manage a rebellion inside his caucus from those who want to dump the party’s climate policy.
Labor MP Joel Fitzgibbon is pressuring the party to adopt a less ambitious emissions plan.Lukas Coch/AAP
Right-aligned MPs, buttressed by powerful unions, argue steering closer to the Coalition than the Greens is the only way to secure government.
But Labor’s paid-up membership and a majority of its MPs favour a clear acknowledgement of the scientific evidence — evidence that unambiguously calls for the phasing out of fossil fuels in the next decade or two.
In a sign of things to come, the blaze of publicity surrounding Fitzgibbon’s resignation completely derailed Labor’s attempt to highlight how the new Democratic White House had left the Morrison government exposed as the only serious economy explicitly not committed to a net-zero time-line.
But Fitzgibbon, who claims to have substantial caucus support, wants Labor to simply tuck in behind the Morrison government and allow it to take any political heat for emissions targets not met and voters left frustrated.
Yet this too would be politically calamitous.
There could be an election next year
With an election possible within 12 months, time to reconcile these oil-and-water imperatives is fast running out.
It is a perfect storm. On the one hand, there is rising pessimism over Labor’s ability to compete with the Morrison government – especially during a pandemic. On the other, rising community impatience for decisive climate action.
That the opposition has not yet named interim emissions targets for 2030 and 2035 despite a clear commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050, speaks to its nervousness. Its rhetoric stresses urgency and purpose, but its detail reveals hesitation.
Insiders know any repeat of its 2019 each-way bet on the Adani coal-mine will be a gift to the Greens.
As the policy show-down looms, so too does the ever-present danger to Albanese of it morphing into a leadership stoush. The left’s Tanya Plibersek and the right’s Jim Chalmers are regarded as the most credible alternatives.
Leadership speculation has bubbled up again, as Labor struggles with its climate stance.Samantha Manchee/AAP
While only a climate capitulation would satisfy right-wing malcontents, another school of thought favours a doubling down, based on the simple arithmetic that there are a dozen-plus Coalition seats held by margins of under 5% — more than enough to compensate for the loss of regional electorates.
Bold transition fund needed
Perhaps Labor’s only hope of keeping both sides in the tent is to propose a bold, generously funded transition fund.
This would not just talk about green jobs and retraining, but directly pay those workers who are displaced. It would include everything from the loss of income and retraining, to compensating for the loss of businesses, house values, and full family relocation costs.
Taking advantage of the low cost of borrowing, this multibillion brown-to-green transition fund could guarantee workers in phased-out sectors would not be left to carry the costs of what is a “national” responsibility and “national” economic reconfiguration.
This could this be Labor’s winning formula: representation, leading to reparation, enabling reform.
Last summer, many Australians were shocked to see fires sweep through the wet tropical rainforests of Queensland, where large and severe fires are almost unheard of. This is just one example of how human activities are changing fire patterns around the world, with huge consequences for wildlife.
In a major new paper published in Science, we reveal how changes in fire activity threaten more than 4,400 species across the globe with extinction. This includes 19% of birds, 16% of mammals, 17% of dragonflies and 19% of legumes that are classified as critically endangered, endangered or vulnerable.
But, we also highlight the emerging ways we can help promote biodiversity and stop extinctions in this new era of fire. It starts with understanding what’s causing these changes and what we can do to promote the “right” kind of fire.
Exceptionally large and severe fires have also been observed in areas with a long history of fire. For example, the 12.6 million hectares that burnt in eastern Australia during last summer’s devastating bushfires was unprecedented in scale.
The post-fire landscape in Flinders Chase National Park, Kangaroo Island, three months after an extremely large and severe bushfire last summer.Luke Kelly
But fire activity isn’t increasing everywhere. Grasslands in countries such as Brazil, Tanzania, and the United States have had fire activity reduced.
Extinction risk in a fiery world
Fire enables many plants to complete their life cycles, creates habitats for a wide range of animals and maintains a diversity of ecosystems. Many species are adapted to particular patterns of fire, such as banksias — plants that release seeds into the resource-rich ash covering the ground after fire.
But changing how often fires occur and in what seasons can harm populations of species like these, and transform the ecosystems they rely on.
Most are categorised as threatened by an increase in fire frequency or intensity.
For example, the endangered mallee emu-wren in semi-arid Australia is confined to isolated patches of habitat, which makes them vulnerable to large bushfires that can destroy entire local populations.
Likewise, the Kangaroo Island dunnart was listed as critically endangered before it lost 95% of its habitat in the devastating 2019-2020 bushfires.
Large bushfires threaten many birds, such as the mallee emu-wren.Ron Knight/Wikimedia, CC BY
However, some species and ecosystems are threatened when fire doesn’t occur. Frequent fires are an important part of African savanna ecosystems and less fire activity can lead to shrub encroachment. This can displace wild herbivores such as wildebeest that prefer open areas.
How humans change fire regimes
There are three main ways humans are transforming fire activity: global climate change, land-use and the introduction of pest species.
Global climate change modifies fire regimes by changing fuels such as dry vegetation, ignitions such as lightning, and creating more extreme fire weather.
What’s more, climate-induced fires can occur before the dominant tree species are old enough to produce seed, and this is reshaping forests in Australia, Canada and the United States.
Humans also alter fire regimes through farming, forestry, urbanisation and by intentionally starting or suppressing fires.
Introduced species can also change fire activity and ecosystems. For example, in savanna landscapes of Northern Australia, invasive gamba grass increases flammability and fire frequency. And invasive animals, such as red foxes and feral cats, prey on native animals exposed in recently burnt areas.
Importantly, cultural, social and economic changes underpin these drivers. In Australia, the displacement of Indigenous peoples and their nuanced and purposeful use of fire has been linked with extinctions of mammals and is transforming vegetation.
We need bolder conservation strategies
A suite of emerging actions — some established but receiving increasing attention, others new — could help us navigate this new fire era and save species from extinction. They include:
In Africa, reintroducing grazing animals such as rhinoceros create patchy fire regimes.Sally Archibald, Author provided
Where to from here?
The input of scientists will be valuable in helping navigate big decisions about new and changing ecosystems.
Empirical data and models can monitor and forecast changes in biodiversity. For example, new modelling has allowed University of Melbourne researchers to identify alternative strategies for introducing planned or prescribed burning that reduces the risk of large bushfires to koalas.
At the local and regional scale, Indigenous-led fire stewardship is an important approach for fostering relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous organisations and communities around the world.
Frank Lake, a co-author on our new paper, works with Yurok and Karuk fire practitioners, shown here burning under oaks.Frank Lake, U.S Department of Agriculture Forest Service Pacific Southwest Research Station.
And international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit global warming are crucial to reduce the risk of extreme fire events. With more extreme fire events ahead of us, learning to understand and adapt to changes in fire regimes has never been more important.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Martin Bliemel, Associate Dean of Research; Course Director, Diploma in Innovation, University of Technology Sydney
This essay is based on the Impact at UTS podcast series. The audio series examines how a diverse range of researchers embed knowledge exchange and impact in their research strategy.
Universities are facing great financial challenges and a swathe of redundancy programs is under way. Many senior academics are retiring early. Those that remain are picking up more teaching load. Research and teaching programs are both at risk of being seriously compromised.
Beyond the individual loss for people who have built careers exploring important research challenges, what may be less apparent is our collective loss as a society if academics are deprived of the time to explore tough questions that we need answers for.
It might be hard to look beyond the immediate crisis in higher education, but universities will remain crucial social institutions. Now is the right time to continue the conversation about what they are and who they serve. And what are their impacts?
As part of our Impact at UTS podcast series, we spoke to researchers about how they navigate collaboration, engagement – with communities, industry and government – and impact. The breadth and depth of these impact stories reveal many inter-related insights, which we present later in this article. (You can listen to a full podcast episode at the end.)
Why does university research impact matter?
Universities are uniquely placed to explore complex problems that our collective future depends on. They can do so in a rigorous, ethical, collaborative and enduring way. Peer review regulates subjectivity and biases.
Investing the time to confront complex problems is often beyond the appetite and patience of a corporate agenda driven by other imperatives, including short-term survival. Nationally, Australia continues to lag in OECD rankings for research and development. This is obviously not desirable, and it’s a symptom of bigger problems in the university sector.
The sector has rightly begun to question inward-looking measures of success and KPIs, which are largely based on quantifying research grants in and publications out. Only other researchers care about such things.
Here, we ask why is the research worth doing in the first place? What does it contribute beyond the esteem of academic colleagues?
The COVID-19 crisis has intensified the need to revisit the relationship universities have with society. Every academic needs to grapple with questions of why or when research should be prioritised over teaching and upskilling job seekers and job keepers.
While a shift away from crude input-output metrics towards research impact sounds appealing, assessing impact is much harder to do at scale.
And, perhaps more importantly, many academics are highly specialised. Some are amazing curriculum designers, teachers, grant writers, researchers, report writers, administrators, team managers, stakeholder engagers (if that’s a real word) etc. So, among academics, it’s only natural that some will focus on impact more than others.
Academics create value in myriad ways, and rarely do you find a “purple squirrel” – someone who excels at the full spectrum of work to be done. But, if impact is increasingly relevant to all academics, then a shift towards impact opens questions about performing as a team or individually.
There is also understandable scepticism and change resistance to the “impact agenda” among academics. They are already time-poor and highly scrutinised. Any additional reporting and accountability requirements, such as the Australian Research Council’s engagement and impact assessment, feel like the last straw for academics, especially those who are busy chasing yesterday’s KPIs.
The research engagement and impact agenda needs to be worked through with great care. For a start, measurement of anything indelibly changes it, and new KPIs can introduce perverse responses and behaviours.
Focusing on engagement and impact also reinvigorates important value questions. There is always a risk that fundamental research is viewed as having no foreseeable impact. Yet it has given us so many unexpected and significant societal benefits.
A classic example is radio-astronomy research by CSIRO and Macquarie University leading to wi-fi, which is an enabling technology for further innovations. Similarly, there was no guarantee of success at the start of decades of experimenting involved in innovations like HPV vaccines, cochlear implants and solar panels. Each innovation has directly and indirectly improved millions of lives.
Binary thinking about research versus impact, or applied versus fundamental research, is misguided, as societal benefits rely upon both sides of those coins. The tension of research versus teaching is similarly unproductive.
Learning from researchers with impact
We can look to outliers or “purple squirrels” to learn about research excellence with impact. Robert Langer is an outstanding example. One of his ventures, Moderna, is a leader in developing a COVID-19 vaccine.
Langer’s lab at MIT has generated thousands of articles and patents, raising billions of dollars to spin out over 40 companies. This work includes treating multiple forms of cancer, endometriosis, eczema, vocal cord damage and more, and has affected the lives of billions. His papers with industry collaborators are also discussed more widely than papers published by academics only.
Research by Robert Langer and his colleagues is estimated to have affected the lives of 2 billion people.
Global outliers like Langer are certainly inspiring, but can feel inaccessible for the average researcher.
For our Impact at UTS podcast series, we spoke to highly acclaimed but more accessible researchers about how they navigate collaboration, engagement and impact. We cast a wide net. Their work spans a variety of disciplines and issues, including rebuilding reefs, Indigenous rights and self-determination, beach safety, solving crime through trace detection, access to clean water, autonomous vehicles, and more.
What did these researchers tell us?
These impact stories consistently reveal many inter-related insights, including:
researchers’ desires to effect positive change align with the shift towards valuing benefits
researchers can be faithful to standards of academic rigour, ethics and independence while having material impact
engagement starts before a research project is formalised, and continues during and after it — gone are the days of throwing mono-disciplinary publications behind a paywall in the hope someone will discover it, make sense of the jargon and bridge the research-policy gap
engagement is based on shared values, which become shared language and shared understandings
formal agreements are important, but impactful collaboration is far from being transactional or contractual
it’s a team effort — there might be one chief investigator, but it’s often a team of researchers and several non-university stakeholders.
Fulfilling universities’ public purpose
These insights reveal a more holistic and integrated picture of research engagement with communities, industry and government. By engaging with research end-users early, researchers get a real understanding of the problem. This helps inform their research, leading to greater impact and adoption.
The lessons learned should resonate with academics from any discipline or stage of career. They are also useful to non-academics as they select which academic or university to reach out to.
Despite the COVID-19 chaos, what endures is that universities are institutions with a public purpose. In Australia, publicly funded agencies employ a significant proportion of the research workforce. University research thus plays a critical role in addressing complex problems and national needs.
A focus on the benefits that accrue from university research provides an opportunity for universities to enhance public trust and confidence in the value of their research. An engaged and supportive public may just be the most effective pathway towards creating the political will to adopt coherent, evidence-based policy.
For researchers, greater impact contributes to a virtuous research life cycle, including more sustainable funding. Last, but certainly not least, being able to draw on excellent research with impact in the classroom creates cutting-edge education and lifelong learning experiences in a way that more authentically includes the voices of the people impacted by the research.
Impact at UTS was made by Impact Studios at the University of Technology Sydney – an audio production house that combines academic research with audio storytelling for real-world impact.
More than one-third of young women in a nationwide survey said they missed at least one class, either at school or university, in the past three months due to menstrual symptoms, including pain and fatigue.
More than three quarters of young women said they had problems concentrating due to their period. Around half said they didn’t feel like they had performed as well on a test or assignment due to their symptoms.
We used a nationwide online survey to collect information from 4,202 teenagers and young women in Australia, aged 13 to 25, who were either at school or at tertiary education like university or TAFE.
More than half (60%) of the women in our survey said they wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking to a teacher or lecturer about how their period was affecting them.
How period pain affects education
Many young women experience menstrual symptoms. Almost three quarters report regular period pain, around half report fatigue, and more than one third report emotional changes such as mood swings. Studies show these menstrual symptoms can cause women to miss work or school and some previous studies in teenagers show it may potentially impact academic performance.
We wanted to understand how menstrual symptoms might be affecting young women in Australia with regard to their education, and how they manage these.
We asked young women about how often they got period pain and other menstrual symptoms, how it impacted their attendance or classroom performance, and explored how useful they found the sexual and reproductive education they had previously received.
In our survey, nine out of ten young women reported having had period pain in the past three months, and half reported pain every month. This is similar to previous findings in teenagers in Australia.
Their pain scores, which tended to be moderate to severe for most, didn’t change as they got older.
More than one-third of young women said they missed at least one class in the past three months due to their menstrual symptoms. This was almost identical no matter if they were at school or at university.
The negative impacts of periods also included missing sport and social activities. But more than half (60%) of young women said they wouldn’t feel comfortable speaking to a teacher or lecturer about how their period was affecting them.
Pain was the biggest factor in predicting how much their education would be affected, with higher pain scores having a much greater negative impact. This is a concern as it often occurs at a crucial time in their academic lives during their final schooling years. Absenteeism at this time can have long-term consequences due to exams and assignments in the senior years often determining which courses can be studied at tertiary education.
Many accepted pain as ‘normal’
Most of the young women in our study didn’t seek medical advice for their pain, even when it was severe. This is similar to what has been found in the past.
As their pain got worse they were more likely to think it was abnormal but weren’t any more likely to seek medical attention. This is probably due, at least in part, to the fact most young women think pain is normal and they just need to put up with it.
Unfortunately, this belief can often be reinforced when they speak to a medicalprofessional.
Only about half of young women at school had heard of endometriosis — a chronic condition in which cells similar to those that line the uterus grow in other parts of the body. It can cause significant pain, fatigue and reproductive issues.
Only about half of young women said they would seek medical advice if they had pelvic pain when they didn’t have their period. This is despite over half (55%) reporting they did experience pelvic pain (pain similar to their period but when not menstruating) at least once a month.
Many young women think period pain is normal and they should just bear it.Shutterstock
Severe period and pelvic pain when not menstruating are very common early signs of chronic pelvic pain (such as endometriosis), and delays in diagnosis may worsen outcomes for young women.
Education on menstrual health is incorporated into the Australian Foundation to Year 10 Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum. This positions health and physical education teachers as critical in providing students with evidence-based information in a relevant, timely and age-appropriate manner.
The young women we surveyed highlighted their schools’ shortcomings in educating them on how to manage period pain. One 16-year-old Victorian student said:
There was no practical information such as relieving symptoms and the use of sanitary items, only the biological effect on the body such as how hormones come into play. Personally that was not useful and I can’t remember much about it.
The young women saw a lack of support for period pain during their education and the negative impacts this may have. An 18-year-old student from Western Australia said:
In particular, no advice was given on dealing with pain (mine ended up being extreme) or what the process (if any) was at school for having menstrual pain taken seriously and treated as a consideration in test writing or sport class.
Teachers need to be more aware of potential impacts of period pain on education outcomes. And the curriculum must be expanded to focus on mitigation strategies for period pain.
There are some promisingmenstrualeducation programs, both in person and online, that have been developed to tackle these shortcomings, including some that also include parents and boys. Currently these programs are often ad-hoc, and need to be adopted as a consistent part of the school curriculum.
It is critical menstruation and period pain transcend being a girl’s or women’s issue alone and include all genders, as well as parents and caregivers, who are often called on to support and inform young people.
Governments want strong economies, diverse job opportunities and growing populations in regional cities. The Commonwealth’s City Deals and Smart Cities Plan have recently renewed focus on these priorities.
The main policy problem for regional cities has been creating enough employment opportunities to attract residents from capital cities. Unexpectedly, the COVID-driven trend towards remote working may have delivered a solution.
Suddenly, the potential of digital technology for working remotely is being embraced. Many people could live in regional cities while working remotely for employers elsewhere. If this trend continues, regionalism could well become the newest phase of Australian urbanism.
The east coast capitals developed first. Other capitals followed, along with industrial cities like Newcastle and Geelong. Regional cities grew at different speeds; some have longer histories than others.
The nationwide shift to suburbia started in the early 20th century and has accelerated since. The “Australian Dream” of owning a free-standing family home in the suburbs remains dominant. It drives the relentless expansion of outer suburbs, especially around the large capitals.
Decades of constant suburbanisation and expansion of capital cities fuelled the rise of metropolitan Australia. Here, expanding outer suburbs extend into surrounding hinterlands before eventually connecting with neighbouring cities and towns. Metropolitan Melbourne, Greater Sydney and South-east Queensland are examples.
A bird’s eye view of metropolitan Australia.Leon Brooks, Pixnio
Urban consolidation, focused on increasing the density of urban cores and inner suburbs, is another recent phase of Australian urbanism. It is promoted as an efficient way to improve the availability and mix of urban housing, while slowing unsustainable sprawl. The broad uptake of urban consolidation across Australia is one of the main reasons inner-urban living became desirable in recent times.
The Gasworks is an urban consolidation project in Newstead, Brisbane.Kgbo, Wikipedia
A common thread through the phases of Australian urbanism is that the overwhelming concentration of people and jobs in capital cities has been difficult to reverse. Until now, migrating to a regional city and bringing your job with you was a distant dream for most workers and policymakers.
Things may be about to change for regional cities. A new trend of people relocating from capital cities to regional areas appears to be gaining momentum.
This new internal migration creates a unique opportunity for governments to grow regional cities and stimulate economies.
Regional cities will benefit from expanding populations. More people will generate new cultural attractions, more social opportunities and greater vibrancy.
City revenues will rise as more taxes and rates start to flow through. Policymakers can then deliver much-needed liveability improvements.
Policy innovations for regional cities should focus on quickly delivering quality housing and social infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. Care must be taken to ensure rapidly rising rents and gentrification don’t displace existing residents. Displacement of regional city residents was a big problem during the mining boom.
Regionalism also presents opportunities and challenges for the capital cities. Growing vacancy rates for residential, commercial and retail space could become permanent. Falling populations and fewer workers will hurt some sectors. Sunk investment in infrastructure, including public transport, might be unrecoverable if projected user numbers don’t materialise.
Even if some residents leave capital cities, others will still arrive. There will probably be distinct demographic differences between the two groups. Most of those leaving will be established professionals with occupations they can continue remotely. Most arrivals will likely be interstate and overseas migrants, as well as graduates looking for entry-level professional roles.
For the next few years at least, the option to work regionally for a capital city employer is likely to be negotiated and earned, rather than automatic.
Regional future demands adaptable planning
The coming years will definitely not be business as usual for Australian cities. The rise in remote working will bring transformative changes.
It will not be enough to just plan for growth in regional cities. It is imperative to plan well, plan strategically and plan for the long term.
The move towards regionalism will have financial, social and environmental impacts. Established urban patterns may no longer hold. Policy responses will have to be innovative, flexible and dynamic.
Gold Coast, once a regional holiday destination, is now Australia’s sixth-largest city.Vape Fuse, Flickr
Governments may need to activate special regulatory and legal arrangements to effectively manage trends towards regionalism. The innovative frameworks for regional development in recent City Deals are illustrative of new policy approaches to shaping regionalism.
We see a shift in the distribution of some planning and development powers between tiers of government to prioritise certain projects. Changes will have to be justified by economic, environmental or social objectives. Even if necessary, it might cause controversy, upheaval and legal challenges.
Governments will need to be strategic, diplomatic and brave to maximise future opportunities for regional and capital cities. Recognising that regionalism looks like the newest phase of Australian urbanism is a good start.
The government’s Retirement Incomes Review paints an encouraging picture of the finances of retired Australians.
Most are at least as well off in retirement as they were while working, and most are more financially satisfied and less financially-stressed than Australians of working age.
But not all. The huge exception is retirees who do not own their own homes.
Whereas very few retired home owners are in poverty, most retired renters are.
Income poverty rates of retirees
Note: Data relates to 2017-18 financial year. Elevated poverty rate defined as 5 percentage points above retiree average.Retirees are where household reference person is aged 65 and over. There is overlap between some categories, for example, early retired and renter categories. Early retired means aged 55-64 and not in the labour force. Housing costs includes the value of both principal and interest components of mortgage repayments.Source: Analysis of ABS Survey of Income and Housing Confidentialised Unit Record File, 2017-18
So bad is the divide, the review found that even a 40% increase in Commonwealth Rent Assistance (the payment for pensioners) would reduce financial stress among renters by only 1%.
This is because rent assistance is low, covering only about 13% of the cost of renting.
Retirees who own their own homes don’t have to pay rent (and can still get the pension should their wealth be tied up in their home), and have a source of wealth that usually eclipses both their own superannuation and the wealth of renters.
Equivalised household wealth by asset type, for retirees
Note: Retirees are defined as households where the reference person is aged 65 or older and is no longer in the labour force. Household wealth has been equivalised using the OECD equivalence scale in order to take account of differences in a household’s size and composition. Values in 2017-18 dollars.ABS, Retirement Incomes Review
Most people do not regard their home as a retirement asset, a view compounded by rules that exempt it from taxes and the pension assets test.
They are also reluctant to borrow against the value of their home using facilities such as the Pension Loans Scheme, for the same reasons they are reluctant to touch any of the wealth they retire with.
Data provided to the review by a large super fund shows its members typically die with 90% of what they had at retirement.
Most retirees don’t use what they’ve got
Another study finds age pensioners die with about 90% of what they had on retirement.
Partly the reasons are psychological. The review says words such as “investments”, “savings” and “nest eggs” imply the assets aren’t for living on.
Before compulsory super, employer-sponsored schemes usually paid “defined” benefits that could be measured in terms of income per year.
In the new system, designed to break the connection between workers and specific employers, benefits were “accumulated” in funds that could most easily be measured by the amount in them.
It is difficult for most people to see how a lump sum converts into income stream, and even more difficult when it depends on the interaction with the pension.
Another reason retirees hang on to what they had on retirement might be a genuine (if misplaced) concern about the unexpected.
In fact, health and aged care costs are heavily subsidised. Most people’s spending on them doesn’t increase significantly throughout retirement, yet many people seem unaware of how little of their own funds they will need.
Partly this is because of the complexity of the aged care and health care systems and how poorly they are explained.
It’s created two systems
Providing help to retirees who actually need it (mainly renters, many of them single women) and getting people with assets in the form of superannuation, savings and housing to actually use them rather than pass them on in bequests are the two key challenges identified in the report.
They are problems that boosting the rate of compulsory super contributions (as pushed for by the funds and presently leglislated) won’t help with.
They are set to become worse.
Although home ownership rates remain high for people over the age of 65, a growing number of Australians are not entering the housing market.
Over 15 years, the number of Australians over 65 who do not own their home outright is expected to double.
As the amount in super funds grows (boosted by the legislated increase in compulsory contributions, should it take place), Australians with super are going to have even more relative to what they need and even less need to make use of it.
The report makes no recommendations, and doesn’t suggest that the solutions are easy.
Widening the pension asset test to include the home would leave many homeowners worse off and could generate distrust and destabilise the system.
Getting more Australians into home ownership has proved difficult and could never be a solution for all Australians, in any case.
We already have in place rules that require retirees to draw down their super, but often they withdraw the minimum amount permitted and then reinvest much of it in another savings vehicle outside of super.
We’ve created a system where most have enough or more than enough to retire on and others get nothing like enough.
In a new series, writers pay tribute to fictional detectives on page and on screen.
As a detective’s apprentice for over 60 years now, I’ve had work-experience stretches in the offices of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, Wilkie Collins’s Walter Hartright and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.
I count Lee Child’s Jack Reacher as a detective-investigator, though he would show little patience for an apprentice such as me. Peter Temple’s Jack Irish, Stieg Larrson’s Mikael Blomkvist, Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch, Tana French’s Antoinette Conway, Dervla McTiernan’s Cormac Reilly, and others have guided me along the way.
I can’t say I’ve learned much about how to solve crimes, or even how to face death, but I can say I’ve become addicted to a world where disasters abound and answers eventually arrive.
There has been one detective I’ve stuck with, and perhaps in some ways become more than his apprentice. I might have become his shadow for nearly a decade. Kurt Wallander, working out of the imagination of Henning Mankell. I think I stuck with Kurt, and felt for him because the novels were as much interested in the humdrum details of his life as the crimes he encountered.
Last week I finished re-reading the series of prequel novellas that introduced Kurt Wallander to readers: The Pyramid (first published in 1999).
It was in these stories Wallander’s father suddenly bought a house in the countryside and moved there to live alone and paint the same painting over and over again. Then he suddenly decided to travel to Egypt where he was arrested for trying to climb up the side of a pyramid (steeper than he thought it would be, he didn’t get far up it).
The shape of the triangular pyramid made some kind of murky, intuitive sense to Wallander as he grappled with a series of at first seemingly unrelated crimes and deaths. And this might be another reason I like the man: he is not particularly bright, though he is particularly persistent.
Of course I have watched and very much enjoyed the television incarnations of Kurt Wallander, including some of the latest Young Wallander episodes. But as a reader (admittedly of English translations) I have a certain textual man in mind so surely that I’m wary of television versions pushing him out.
‘I’m not cut out for this.’ New series Young Wallander shows the young Kurt wondering if he’s meant for the job.
I like it that he calls himself a police officer, not a detective, even in the final novel (2009’s The Troubled Man) after he has solved a lifetime’s worth of crimes and finds himself in his 60s doing exactly as his father did — buying a country house on impulse that sits listing among empty fields like a shipwreck.
In that final novel, what I like most of all is the relaxed build-up to crimes that will encompass the book. It takes us about 50 pages to get there as we follow Wallander through the buying of the country house, acquiring a dog, trying to train it, learning of his daughter’s pregnancy, becoming a grandfather, struggling to respect her new lover who is the father of her child, and finally coming to face his own fast-approaching decline into dementia.
It is not that he seems to be more “real” than other detectives, for any detective worth their salt has personal problems that round out the depiction of a flawed character they must deal with alongside the task of solving crimes. It’s a necessary convention. Wallander, though, did get under my skin.
The timing was right. Wallander is just that bit ahead of me in years — far enough ahead to allow my imagination room to be with him but not inside him. He has aged before my time, failed at all sorts of challenges with me (though he did his best), misunderstood himself, as most of us do, while managing to keep what was important to him going in his life.
His was no one’s envied life, but it was vividly a life lived with the kind of purpose we might question but could never treat with cynicism.
Swedish actor Krister Henriksson played the crusty Kurt from 2005 to 2013.IMDB
Wallander remained that convincing and slightly exotic stranger — the Swedish one who listened to opera in his car, sometimes drank too much alone, ate junk food, and let his temper get the better of him too often, while managing to face death and bring justice to his corner of the world repeatedly.
In truth, Wallander is probably too morose, too solitary and grumpy for me to ever truly like. But isn’t that the hallmark of any interesting friend in literature: someone you can be up close to in a book but not have to find a taxi for at the end of the night?
Over a lifetime of reading, detective fiction becomes a tribute to the real police all over the world who chase murderers down. We rely on them, and can mostly only imagine what damage this work does to their souls. I am not surprised that one time, after writing 100 pages of a Wallander novel about child abuse, Henning Mankell took his manuscript outside and burned it. There have to be limits to the stories and mysteries that see us through.
An Indonesian university student, Frans Josua Napitu, who reported his institution’s rector (vice-chancellor) to the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), has challenged the campus administration to an academic debate over accusations that he is involved with the Free Papua Movement (OPM).
“This accusation against me is baseless. What I did before was express solidarity with cases racism suffered by our sister and brother Papuans,” said the Semarang State University (Unnes) student, reports CNN Indonesia.
“That’s being a human. I myself follow the Gusdurian [philosophy of former president Abdurrahman ‘Gus Dur’ Wahid] of treating human beings as human beings. So, how could I possibly join a radical or separatist group.
“Come on dean, or Unnes officials, we’ll argue it in an open debate, an academic debate to argue the case”, said Napitu in Semarang, Central Java, this week.
Napitu took the opportunity to say that he also suspected the accusations against him by the Unnes authorities were an attempt to cover up an alleged case of corruption which he had reported to the KPK.
“This is not unrelated to what I did, reporting suspected corruption by the Unnes rector to the KPK. This is them panicking,” said Napitu.
Earlier, Napitu, a faculty of law student, reported the Unnes rector, Fathur Rokhman, to the KPK. On November 13 the receipt of the report was confirmed by acting KPK spokesperson Ali Fikri.
Later, Napitu was sanctioned by the Unnes campus authorities by being sent home to his parents for “moral character guidance”. Unnes faculty of law dean Rodiyah said that with this decision, the campus had also postponed all of Napitu’s obligations as an Unnes student for the next six months.
Unnes rectorate special staff member for legal affairs, Muhamad Azil Maskur, denied that the sanctions against Napitu were related to the KPK report. He said that Napitu had already written a letter declaring that he would not repeat his actions, the most fatal of which was Napitu’s involvement in an OPM sympathisers movement.
Baseless and anti-democratic Meanwhile, in response to the sanctions and accusations against Napitu by the campus authorities, the Indonesian Legal Aid Institute (YLBHI) and the all-Indonesia Legal Aid Foundation (LBH) network have criticised the move by the Unnes campus as baseless and anti-democratic.
“We and our YLBHI colleagues, there are around 17 LBH in Indonesia, condemn the attitude taken by Unnes in suspending [Napitu] as anti-democratic. Never mind the accusations of FN’s involvement in the OPM, which is fabricated and baseless. Unnes should instead protect and safeguard its students,” said Cornel Ghea from LBH Semarang.
In an official statement by the YLBHI and the LBH offices across Indonesia which was received Wednesday, they stated that Napitu’s suspension was a form of shallow thinking which endangers campus democracy.
“The actions of Unnes dean FH are very dangerous for students’ independent thinking. Unnes as an academic institution should protect students’ independent thought not instead use their power to intimidate independent thinking, suspending students, even very possibly dropping student out on fabricated grounds”, read the statement by the pro-bono legal aid network.
“Unnes as an academic institution should protect students’ independent thinking instead of using their power to intimidate independent thinking”, the statement said.
They are therefore asking the Witness and Victim Protection Agency (LPSK) and the KPK to take responsibility for providing legal protection to Napitu as mandated under article 15 of Law Number 19/2019 on the KPK.
Asking for response on actions The article reads, “The Corruption Eradication Commission is obliged to provide protection to witnesses or reporters who submit reports or provide information on corruption crimes that have taken place in accordance with legislation”.
In addition to this they are also asking the National Human Rights Commission (Komnas HAM) to supervise and take respond to the actions by the Unnes faculty of law dean who has violated the right to freedom of opinion and access to education.
“Through this statement, the YLBHI along with LBH offices support FN’s struggle, we also invite all civil society groups to stand in solidarity [with him], to stand shoulder-to-shoulder to provide support in fighting shallow thinking and the anti-critical stand shown against FN”, read the statement.
Media freedom defenders from Commonwealth countries have criticised many governments across the world that threaten and censor the work of journalists.
Three speakers condemned Chinese pressure “behind the scenes” on Pacific media and in Southeast Asia, the “backsliding” of media freedom in Australia, and raised the West Papua “self-determination” issue in the opening panel of the day-long webinar.
The speakers, UNESCO professor of journalism at the University of Queensland, Peter Greste, who was jailed in 2013 by the Egyptian regime while he was a foreign correspondent covering the Arab Spring for Al Jazeera English; Pacific Media Centre director Professor David Robie and editor of Pacific Journalism Review; and Reporters Without Borders East Asian bureau chief Cédric Alviani, who has lived in Asia since 1999, gave robust criticisms.
Media freedom has been taken up as a serious issue in Commonwealth nations, such as in the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and other countries.
Conference facilitator Professor Philip Murphy, who is also director of the institute, said people from across the world were “using technology to bring in speakers from right across the Commonwealth – it is a fantastic opportunity”.
Panel chair Sue Onslow said a key objective of the institution had been exploring how serious the Commonwealth cared about media freedom.
Open dialogue on ‘free flow’ “The Commonwealth charter signed in 2013 affirmed the members’ commitments to a peaceful and open dialogue on the free flow of information, including free and responsible media,” said Murphy.
The opening speaker, Professor David Robie, who is also convenor of the Pacific Media Watch freedom project at Auckland University of Technology, said Pacific governments were becoming increasingly “authoritarian” in dealing with the media, making it difficult for journalists to work independently and securely.
He condemned the Solomon Islands government’s decision this week to ban Facebook because of “abusive language” and “character assassination” against politicians, saying that little thought had begin given to implementing such a draconian gag.
The Commonwealth media freedom webinar hosted in London this week … critical issues of “weaponised” law, safety of journalists, fake news and censorship. Image: Laurens Ikinia screenshot
Dr Robie said Facebook and social media were vital for communication in the region and for many small media organisations that had integrated social media strategies into their news operations.
The Solomon Islands government itself was using Facebook for communicating with the public.
Dr Robie also criticised China for its media policies in the region, saying there had been “a trend in clamping down on Facebook in a number of countries in the Pacific” emulating a mainland Chinese lead.
He cited the Facebook threatening moves in Papua New Guinea and Samoa and the ban in Nauru as examples of Chinese influence.
China ‘undermining’ media norms “China is undermining the long-established independent media freedom norms,” he said.
There was speculation behind the scenes about the influence from China over governments because of extraction industries, such as logging, in an attempt to force silence.
“So, there is a worry and I think an increasing worry in the region about this,” said Dr Robie.
He also criticised the lack of coverage in Commonwealth countries such as Australia and New Zealand about issues concerning Pacific nations such as the decolonisation issue for French Polynesia, New Caledonia – “and especially West Papua”.
“These issues are becoming increasingly critical issues for the Pacific media with a particularly strong proactive line on this around the Pacific about West Papua, a cause célèbre if you like.
“Of course, it’s difficult because it is regarded as part of Indonesia and sometimes the statistics around media freedom issues in West Papua are hidden across statistics in Indonesia as a whole,” Dr Robie said.
He said that despite the lack of coverage from mainstream media in the region, West Papua was increasingly an issue for the independent Pacific media.
West Papua will be ‘big issue’ “This will become a very big issue in the next few years,” he said.
“Globally, you get international news organisations like Al Jazeera covering West Papua while much of the mainstream media in Australia and New Zealand don’t. Pacific nations news media are taking it up it as a critical issue for them.”
Professor Peter Greste , who is also spokeperson for the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, said that the practice of journalism was now being “weaponised” with anti-terrorism laws such as introduced by the Australian government.
Commonwealth Institute of Studies director Professor Philip Murphy … “using technology to bring in speakers from right across the Commonwealth”. Image: Laurens Ikinia screenshot
He recalled his experience while working in Egypt before he was jailed for 400 days over alleged “terrorism” and then deported.
Governments were increasingly taking national security legislation as an anti-terrorism law and using it to “come after the journalists”. Two of his Al Jazeera colleagues were still in jail in Cairo.
“I started to realise what was happening in Egypt was one of the greatest examples of the kind of things that were taking place all over the world. Not just in an authoritarian regime like Egypt or Turkey or China where journalists were being locked up with great impunity, but equally in liberal Western democracies, including here in Australia.”
However, Professor Greste said some progress had been made about reforming such laws.
Law reform progress in Australia “We are seeing some progress here in Australia to change the law, at least getting some legislative reform. In Australia, there is an opportunity to move.”
Reporters Without Borders’ Cédric Alviani said that citizens had a fundamental right to information, it was not just an issue about media freedom for media owners.
“We have to insist that press freedom is the freedom of the people to receive quality information, and somehow it should be called Freedom of Information – or maybe under another name – but somehow it would be less confusing as it’s a right of the citizens. It is enshrined in article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” he said.
“I believe we should start from the public spaces. Politicians or decision takers will only do this if it suits their interests, so I would say the public has to push for this. This is a right, and we have to push for our rights because every other person basically has an interest to remove this right.”
Alviani said that it was important for journalists to be accountable for their work as otherwise they would amplify disinformation and lead to a negative impact.
“Disinformation can boost the national security threat and only journalists can debunk fake news before it has become viral,” he said.
“If the journalists don’t do their job properly, they are going to amplify fake news, instead of debunking it.”
The seminar included panels on South Asia, Africa, Europe and Canada, the Caribbean with more than 16 journalists and media freedom defenders taking part, and with a large audience.
The sharply rising number of deaths from the covid-19 coronavirus in Mā’ohi Nui (“French” Polynesia) has triggered a corrosive war of words with a pro-independence party lawmaker, Élaine Tevahitua, accusing President Édouard Fritch of mismanagement of the crisis.
All the archipelagos of the Polynesian territory have now been hit by the out of control covid-19 – even the most isolated, Mangareva – since the borders were opened four months ago.
Another new death from covid-19 coronavirus has been condemned at Tahiti’s only hospital, Ta’aone, taking the total to 62, with 225 new infections in the past 24 hours.
This takes the number of people carrying the virus to 12,587 since it was first detected on March 13.
Eighty-five patients are in hospital, including 24 in intensive care unit whose stay at the hospital usually last around three weeks.
This long stay puts pressure on the number of beds available as the increase in covid-19 continues.
If this rate persists, it is likely there will be more than 100 deaths by the end of the year.
Open letter to Tahiti’s president Last week, the independence party, Tavini Huiraatira, wrote an open letter to the president, presenting statistics about “good management of covid-19”.
The letter cited examples to follow such as Fiji, Maldives, New Caledonia, and Samoa ranging from a small number of deaths to no cases at all, challenging the “abysmal death rate” under President Fritch’s governance.
New covid-19 cases in Ma’ohi Nui on 18 November 2020 … alarming statistics with a population of 278,000.
A tit-for-tat exchange on statistics followed with the president talking about a “one-sided story” from the opposition and criticising that no figures were given on the impact of covid-19 on the economy from those island nations.
Fritch also had a crack at the New Zealand and Australian governments which he called “the absent big brothers” for not readily helping their “free-association islands”. The president praised the French authorities for “helping” his government.
Calls by the opposition party for free tests on the entire population to have a better visibility of the virus spread and a return to a 14-day quarantine for tourists, seem to have fallen on deaf ears with the government, which described these moves as too costly.
Tahiti’s Ta’aone Hospital …. the lack of testing alarming and “dangerous” in the face of the big increase in Tahitian cases of covid-19 infection. Image: Infos-Tahiti
Epidemiologist Dr Pierre-Henri Mallet described the lack of testing alarming and “dangerous” in the face of the big increase in cases, saying “it is possible that 30,000 people have already been affected by this virus and one underestimates the number of cases”.
The French authorities and the local territorial government opened the border on July 15 to tourists – mainly from the USA and France – to save the local economy with tourism representing 20,000 jobs.
The first death was on September 10.
France fighting covid-19 and impacts on Ma’ohi Nui In France, the decisions taken by French President Emmanuel Macron in mid-October to impose curfews and a 15-day lockdown in many French cities since the beginning of November, seemed to contradict a policy that temporarily allowed French people to visit French Polynesia under the so-called priority “economic lifeline”. This was quickly abandoned.
President Édouard Fritch … the Tahitian local economy comes before people’s health and safety. Image: RNZ
The Fritch government says that another lockdown would be a catastrophe for the local economy, and these are some of the measures that have been taken instead:
Strictly limiting gatherings of people, especially in public places, and the prohibition of festivals or family events;
Closing of night clubs and “fun boats”;
Limiting the number of customers in restaurants;
Limiting the number of churchgoers of all faiths in places of worship; and
Ordering mandatory mask-wearing in the city centre and in public buildings.
For Tahiti and Moorea, a curfew was put in place from 9 pm to 4 am.
For the rest of the Society archipelago, no curfew, but many shops and bars, entertainment places, and sport centres were forced to close.
French High Commissioner Dominique Sorain oversees the country’s defence and home security, with the approval of the local government.
Once again, the economy trumped the local population’s health and safety according to the independence party.
While France is striving to save both the economy and the population, President Fritch seems bound on saving the economy first in Tahiti.
Is this another déjà-vu? It certainly looks like another case of déjà-vu, one such as the independence party reminds people about the lure of a better economy and a place in the history books promised by General Charles de Gaulle in 1964. That promise tempted the then Permanent Commission of the Territorial Assembly to offer the two atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa for nuclear testing.
There is a certain irony that covid-19 and the nuclear experimentation in French Polynesia are strikingly similar in terms of the lack of information and lack of transparency by the local government and the French authorities.
On September 15, all information about covid-19 was put on the back burner and press conferences reduced from three to one weekly in order to focus more on the late senatorial elections, silencing the effects of covid-19 on the population.
Social media users are complaining about the non-existent official numbers of the rate of patients “cured” who come out of a covid-19 hospitalisation with debilitating effects.
It has also been noted that patients who have not been in intense care unit, do display persisting health problems when coming out of hospital.
The secrecy shrouding these two problems for the Mā’ohi Nui population is therefore nothing new and history has often revealed the truth.
The Pacific diaspora lens in unmasking the secrecy As a member of the Mā’ohi Nui diaspora living in New Zealand, it is incumbent upon us to report what we see as outsides-insiders so that our communities back in our respective archipelagos are actively informed.
To speak specifically about Mangareva, one of the concerns that might be important in terms of the death rate, are the pre-existing condition factors.
What does that mean?
Diabetes, heart conditions, obesity are some of the diseases that covid-19 festers on but, as one of the heaviest islands hit by nuclear fallout, it might be important to ascertain how many of the casualties of the coronavirus were diagnosed with radiation exposure.
Also to evaluate how such pre-existing conditions have worsened the devastation of covid-19.
As it stands, in Mangareva only three people presented symptoms and were isolated on the neighbouring islands and hopefully no casualties will come out of this.
Medical reports on the number of casualties speak predominantly of Polynesian people and it seems fair to point out that so far French metropolitans are following the health and safety measures imposed by the government.
It could also mean that being financially better off than the local Ma’ohi, the French can afford a lifestyle that poor Mā’ohi people cannot.
By disseminating the information from New Zealand, my friends from other Pacific communities are actively concerned about this issue of covid-19 devastating the local population in Mā’ohi Nui.
We are ready to support through solidarity. It is therefore very important for us to inform on these issues that are far from being resolved, but for which we can show the solidary of our Pacific people and those back home in Mā’ohi Nui.
Ena Manuireva is an Auckland University of Technology academic and PhD candidate who is from Mangareva in the Gambier Islands, a remote southern archipelago in “French” Polynesia. He is a contributor to the Pacific Media Centre’s Asia Pacific Report.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jessica C Lai, Associate Professor in Commercial Law, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington
New Zealand is in an economic recession and the government is trying to spend its way through it with direct investment to boost the economy and jobs.
At the same time, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RNBZ) plans to lend retail banks money at low interest rates in the hope they are — as the reserve bank governor, Adrian Orr, put it — “courageous” in their lending choices.
But as the money does not need to be used for any particular type of venture, there are concerns it will inflame the already overheated property market.
Part of the problem is New Zealanders do not have many investment options. There is little to be “courageous” about.
This lack of investment options is partly due to the average New Zealander’s model of successful innovation.
Most of the big successful New Zealand innovation stories we see in the media are about people who sold their innovation to an overseas – typically American – company. This success allows the innovator to buy their “three Bs”: the Beamer, the boat and the bach.
But is this a true measure of successful innovation? Or could we do better to create more investment options and allow for more “courageous” investment?
Investment in local industry
Innovation involves creating and capturing value from new things – whether products, services or processes.
The New Zealand model of successful innovation is narrowly about creation, perhaps setting up and then selling a start-up. This model is shaped by skill shortages, funding issues and risk aversion, which limit innovative growth.
Big ideas struggle to grow in New Zealand. The model is about innovators capturing short-term value for their creations.
What might be truly beneficial to New Zealand is if innovations stayed here and more risks were taken locally.
If more investment was directed at commercialisation of local innovations they could be used to create and grow local industries. The resulting products or services could then be exported or licensed internationally to bring more wealth into New Zealand.
This would create more investment opportunities, as well as jobs and local know-how. In turn, wealth could be created and distributed across communities for a sustained period.
It’s worth pointing out that innovation is self-perpetuating. Once an innovative industry is developed in an area, this can generate further innovation in that area, because of skill development and the localisation of these skills. Silicon Valley exemplifies this.
Learn from the Māori perspective
We need not look far to find an alternative model of successful innovation.
During community consultation to develop Te Matarau a Māui – a regional Māori economic development strategy for the greater Wellington region – we were told time and again that the common strategic goal of “play to win” was too narrow.
A Māori perspective on innovation doesn’t focus on winners and losers, but on a vibrant blossoming innovation ecosystem. Innovation from this perspective is tied up with cultural knowledge and community identity.
This kind of innovation model leads to better distributed and long-term wealth creation, since value is embedded within and spread throughout the community.
Yet the tools, such as the Business Model Canvas, that we use to explore business ideas are based on hyper-individualistic, win-at-all-costs businesses.
New Zealand needs entrepreneurship and innovation tools that embed a richer perspective on success, more in line with the aspirations of the wellbeing economy and the Māori communities that developed Te Matarau a Māui.
A look to the future
We are not saying individual innovators should not be rewarded for their innovations. They should be. Nor are we saying that there aren’t success stories that involve local commercialisation. There are.
Moreover, we are not suggesting New Zealanders do not look outwards. They absolutely should.
But perhaps New Zealanders could shift their understanding of a success story for innovation, because we could have more innovation stories that involve further growth and benefit the well-being of communities.
Such a shift cannot happen until there is money to undertake the necessary risk to produce Kiwi innovations locally. International intellectual property portfolios should be developed in important markets, but we should invest in local capabilities to maintain operations in New Zealand. This would feed the New Zealand economy.
More provocatively, keeping innovations local would create more business opportunities that New Zealanders could invest in, aside from real estate. Perhaps this could help to cool down the property market.
So in light of RBNZ’s role to “promote the prosperity and well-being of New Zealanders”, contribute to a “sustainable and productive economy” and support “maximum sustainable employment”, perhaps it should think about tying its lending scheme to making sure local innovation stays local. Otherwise, we might be letting a good crisis go to waste.
It would be a waste if the Friday’s mammoth Retirement Incomes Review was remembered only for its finding that increases in employers compulsory superannuation contributions come at the expense of wages.
These are much bigger increases than the earlier two of 0.25% in 2012 and 2013.
And the wage rises they will be taken from will be much lower. The latest figures released on Wednesday point to shockingly low annual wage growth of 1.4%.
Should each of the scheduled increases in employers compulsory super knock 0.4 points off wage growth (which is what the review expects) annual wage growth would sink from 1.4% to 1%.
Private sector wage would sink from 1.2% to 0.8%, in the absence of something to push it back up.
Because inflation will almost certainly be higher than 1%, it means the buying power of wages would go backwards, all for the sake of a better life in retirement.
The review presents the finding starkly. Lifting compulsory super contributions from 9.5% of salary to 12% will cut working-life incomes by about 2%.
And for what? It’s a question the review spends a lot of time examining.
Most retirees have enough
The review dispenses with the argument that the goal of a retirement income system should be “aspirational”, or to provide people with higher income in retirement than they had in their working lives.
It finds that for retirees presently aged 65-74 the replacement rates for middle- to higher-income earners are generally adequate.
Many lower-income earners get more per year in retirement than they got while working.
If the increases in compulsory super proceed as planned, this will extend to the bottom 60% of the income distribution.
They’ll enjoy a higher standard of living in retirement than while working (and will enjoy a lower standard of living while working than they would have).
Most retirees die with most of what they had when they retired, leaving it as a bequest. They are reluctant to “eat into” their super and other savings because of concerns about possible future health and aged care costs, and concerns about outliving savings.
The review quite reasonably sees this as a betrayal of the purpose of government-supported super, saying
superannuation savings are supported by tax concessions for the purpose of retirement income and not purely for wealth accumulation
It’s the pension that matters
The pension does what super cannot. It provides a buffer for retirees whose income and savings fall due to market volatility, and for those who outlive their savings. 71% of people of age pension age get it or a similar payment. More than 60% of them get the full pension.
If there’s one key message of the review, it is this: it is the pension rather than super that matters for maintaining living standards in retirement, which is what the review was asked to consider.
It is also cost-effective compared to the growing budgetary cost of the super tax concessions.
The age pension costs 2.5% of GDP and is set to fall to 2.3% of GDP over the next 40 years as the super system matures and tighter means tests bite.
Treasury modelling prepared for the review shows that if more money is directed into super and away from wages as scheduled, the annual budgetary cost of the super tax concessions (mostly directed will exceed the cost of the pension by 2050.
There’s a real retirement income problem
A substantial proportion of Australians, about 30%, are financially worse off in retirement than while working, and they are people neither super nor the pension can help.
Mostly they are older Australians who have lost their jobs and cannot get new ones before they before eligible for the age pension or become old enough to get access to their super. Often they’ve left the workforce due to ill health or to care for others and are forced to rely on JobSeeker, which is well below the poverty line.
It’s much worse if they rent privately. About one quarter of retirees who rent privately are in financial stress, so much so that the review finds even a 40% increase in the maximum Commonwealth Rent Assistance payment wouldn’t be enough to get them a decent standard of living in retirement.
No recommendations, but findings aplenty
The review was not asked to produce recommendations. Instead, while noting that much of the system works well, it has pointed to things that need urgent attention.
It finds that pouring a greater proportion of each pay packet into the hands of super funds is not one of them, and in the present unusual circumstances could cost jobs as employers who can’t take the extra cost out of wages take it out of headcount.
The government will make a decision about whether to proceed with the legislated increase in compulsory super in its May budget, just before the first of the five increases due in July.
We’re often hearing alerts for different areas after traces of coronavirus are found in the wastewater, or sewage.
Most recently, fragments were detected at Benalla, in Victoria’s north, and at Portland, not far from the South Australian border. The Victorian government subsequently closed the border to South Australia, and urged anyone in these areas to get tested if they developed symptoms.
The idea of testing sewage to track the presence of a virus is not new. Scientists in Israel used it to monitor a polio outbreak in 2013.
While it is a useful tool for COVID-19 disease surveillance, it’s not entirely foolproof.
From drug use to COVID-19
We commonly use wastewater monitoring to estimate levels of illicit drug use in Australia. This is the sort of work our teams do, although this year we shifted our focus to look at methods of testing wastewater for COVID-19.
A virus monitoring program uses the same principle as wastewater monitoring for drugs. Microbes such as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, are passed mainly through a person’s gut, then come out in their stool, and enter the sewerage system after a toilet flush.
This process, called viral shedding, depends on the severity of the infection (generally, people who have a more severe infection shed more of the virus, though this isn’t always the case) and can occur for several weeks after symptoms have disappeared.
Although the virus doesn’t stay viable in the sewage for very long — you’re not likely to catch it if you come into contact with sewage containing virus — remnants of its genetic material may remain intact. When a daily sample is collected at a treatment plant, we can recover the RNA fragments.
Some research groups have suggested this approach may be able to detect a single infected person in a catchment of 100,000.
Wastewater testing is being used in many places around the world during the pandemic, not only Australia.Shutterstock
The technique is important
A variety of techniques can be used to recover the genetic material before we measure how much virus is present. The more virus there is in a sample, the easier it is to detect.
Currently, there are no agreed standard approaches — different teams testing wastewater for COVID in different places do it differently.
This is partly because we’re still working out the best method — each has its own strengths. Our research, currently under review, shows a method may be very sensitive in some cases but not in others.
Wastewater from a suburban area may contain mainly household effluent, whereas a sample from a more industrial area could contain various chemicals that may interfere with detecting the viral RNA. Wastewater is not homogeneous and its contents can even vary depending on the time of day.
We’re working on developing more robust methods that are less prone to being influenced by the wastewater source. In the meantime, we need to be a bit cautious when interpreting results from wastewater testing.
Once traces of SARS-CoV-2 show up in wastewater, it’s a likely indication that infected people live in, or have visited, the sewer catchment. However, it’s important that more than one indicator confirming virus RNA is included in the tests to minimise the risk of false positives.
Even then, a result may simply be a case of people who are recovering from illness, shedding virus after they’ve completed their quarantine, when they will no longer be infectious.
It’s important to carry out ongoing surveillance to determine if the signal peters out, or if the level of virus detected at the location increases. The latter would suggest an underlying spread of infections, and the need to step up targeted testing. This is arguably the strength of wastewater surveillance.
The detection of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater often means people in the area are encouraged to be tested.Dan Himbrechts/AAP
Conversely, when the results are negative, it may imply there are no infected people in the catchment. However, this could also mean the testing method is insufficiently sensitive to pick up infections. It’s possible infected people are located far from the sampling point, and no identifiable virus remnants remain in the sample by the time it’s collected.
There’s also the issue that many people in regional areas have their own septic tanks.
So like testing people for COVID, wastewater testing carries a risk of both false positives and false negatives.
Sewage surveillance can’t give us specific information, such as the location of the infected people or the number of infections. But as long as we understand its strengths and weaknesses, it’s a valuable complementary approach to guide targeted testing.
It can provide authorities with evidence that may inform whether they can relax restrictions in some communities, instead of applying blanket lockdowns. If we had COVID wastewater monitoring across South Australia (currently it’s only operating in Adelaide), it might have been able to indicate there were no cases in regional areas, and perhaps they could have avoided this week’s harsh lockdown.
With so much uncertainty about when and where the next outbreak might occur, monitoring wastewater could provide an early warning signal.
People in Benalla in Portland should be aware and get tested if they have any symptoms, according to public health advice. But at this stage, there’s no need for alarm.
It’s been a big week for South Australia. First, the announcement of a six-day lockdown to limit the spread of COVID-19. Then today we heard this lockdown may have not been needed, after a man lied to contact tracers, prompting an early lifting of restrictions.
In between, South Australians have been waiting in queues for up to ten hours for COVID-19 tests. And the state’s chief public health officer Nicola Spurrier warned the “worried well” not to clog up important public health services.
Labelling people anxious about COVID-19 the “worried well” isn’t helping, especially in a climate of uncertainty, as South Australia has experienced this week. It might also discourage people with mild symptoms to come forward.
So who are the “worried well”? And what should we really be doing to encourage the right people to get tested?
The “worried well” is a term invented to describe apparently healthy people who think they might have a disease or medical problem, so see a doctor or have testing.
The term carries the whiff of a sneer, along with the implication such people are wastinghealth resources.
It shouldn’t be confused with hypochondria, which is chronic anxiety about your health to the level it may be considered a psychiatric illness.
The “worried well”, in contrast, are often responding to a situation that asks people to be paying special attention to an aspect of their health.
They might attend more regularly than required for cancer screening, for example. They are also more likely to believe it is important to take responsibility for their own health — a concept public health messaging actually reinforces.
Dismissing people who seek medical attention for vague ailments or unsubstantiated risks as the “worried well” ignores the very real problem of the anxiety created by attention to particular illnesses.
Anxiety can cloud health perceptions and judgements, and prompt people to seek reassurance.
In the face of a global pandemic, where an invisible pathogen is transmitted often through pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic people, many of us are a bit anxious.
Vigilance can be useful for achieving compliance with the COVID-safe rules that have restructured our daily habits, such as physical distancing, avoiding touch and regularly washing our hands.
Anxiety is less useful if it results in people who have no known exposure and no COVID symptoms presenting for testing, particularly if there is a concern testing services may be stretched by demand.
However, applying a stigmatising label to such people is counterproductive.
Yes, it can be frustrating
In the context of an outbreak where there is urgent need to test people who have been exposed, and where testing capacity is being overwhelmed, reference to the “worried well” may be a symptom of public health officials’ understandable frustration.
It is, after all, a delicate balancing act to get everyone deemed at risk to test in a timely manner, without their ranks being swelled by those seeking reassurance who believe they were at risk but who have no clear or likely route of exposure.
But that doesn’t make the “worried well” a fair or useful label, and may work against achieving the widespread testing needed to control infection.
We’d be better off promoting testing as doing the ‘right thing’
New South Wales and Victoria have promoted COVID testing as doing the “right thing”. Both emphasise people with COVID-like symptoms should be tested regardless of whether they have had a known exposure.
Similarly, the South Australian government is asking everyone with COVID-like symptoms to be tested, regardless of whether the symptoms are mild.
One of the risks of a phrase like the “worried well” is different people can interpret it in different ways. So if someone with mild COVID-like symptoms is worried they might be called one of the “worried well”, they might second-guess themselves and not get tested.
We have seen the dire consequences of people underestimating a sniffle, or mild respiratory illness, in the terrible tragedy of the Newmarch House aged-care cluster in New South Wales earlier this year.
Clear, consistent, targeted public health messaging works
Currently, in South Australia this means people with symptoms, people who have been identified through contact tracing, and people who have visited sites listed on the contact tracing website where exposure may have occurred.
Clear and consistent repetition of these groups is needed throughout relevant media, including the broadcast media, internet and social media.
Have the ‘worried well’ really clogged up testing?
It is not possible to assess how many of the more than 617,000 COVID tests conducted in the state so far met the criteria of credible risk according to the published criteria.
But if there is serious concern there is unnecessary testing, this needs to be swiftly addressed by explaining who needs testing and why. This needs to be repeated in multiple places, including being visible where people queue to test.
Clear and accessible pathways also need to be provided for people with COVID anxiety who don’t meet testing criteria, which the state government is beginning to address.
This is so people can be reassured in ways that do not involve unnecessary testing, and if necessary learn how they can address their concerns using the appropriate designated mental health services.
University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Assistant Professor Caroline Fisher discuss the week in politics.
This week the pair discuss the six-day lockdown in South Australia, despite dwindling cases, and how this lockdown will affect the prime minister’s hopes for an ‘open christmas’. Also discussed is the Brereton report in misconduct by SAS operatives during the Afghanistan conflict, and how allegations of war crime will affect Australia’s national identity domestically and internationally.
For decades, researchers have tried to find out what the zone is and how to enter it. And the assumption has been that there is one zone that we can experience.
Our research with athletes, however, suggests there may be two types of zone.
One is a “flow state”, where athletes describe effortlessly “letting it happen”. The other is a “clutch state”, where athletes report “making it happen” by purposefully and powerfully stepping up in a key moment.
Here’s how to decide which zone you need to be in — and how to get there.
Research with athletes suggests there may be two zones.Shutterstock
Flow vs clutch states
Much research or media reporting about the zone is often based on interviews with athletes which take place some months or years after their performances have happened.
This means our understanding has been based on old, and likely faded, memories. As a result, people remember their experiences as one zone.
For our research, we interviewed athletes within days or hours of exceptional performances, allowing them to describe their experiences in much more detail.
We heard frequently of different ways of being “in the zone”, sometimes employed during different parts of a challenge. As a polar explorer told us, “They’re definitely two different states.”
A marathon runner told us:
It was like two different races.
In the flow state, your performance effortlessly clicks into place as if you are on autopilot.Shutterstock
The flow state is where you become completely absorbed in what you are doing, you perform the task effortlessly — as if you are on autopilot — and it feels like everything harmoniously clicks into place.
The clutch state was described as “making it happen”, where athletes purposefully step up their effort and concentration during important moments in a performance.
This state describes clutch performance — a common term among fans and media in sport — such as Michael Jordan’s famous buzzer-beater in the 1989 playoffs (from from about the 2:00 mark in the video below).
We would all love to be in the zone more often. Now that the research is telling us there are actually two types of zone, a first step is to recognise which zone you’re aiming for.
Clutch performances occur in certain situations under pressure, when there is an important outcome on the line. Think meeting deadlines, running to catch the last bus home, or being at the end of a race with a personal best on the line.
Flow occurs in situations where there’s novelty, exploration, and experimentation. This might be playing a golf course for the first time, running a new route, or sitting down with a blank page and brainstorming ideas. There’s no pressure or expectation — you’re free to explore.
Both zones can happen in the same event too. For example, runners can be in flow during the start or middle of a race, and then realise they have a chance of breaking their personal best or a chance to win, and flip into a clutch performance at the end — like when Shura Kitata won in a sprint finish in the men’s 2020 London Marathon (from about the 2:05 timestamp in the video below).
How can you get in each zone?
Research suggests the type of goals we set plays an important role in getting into each zone.
Clutch performances occur when we realise there is an important outcome at stake, we understand what is required, and we step up our effort. You’ve probably done this before — like pulling an all-nighter to get your assignment finished, staying late at work to meet an important deadline, or pushing hard to record a personal best.
The key to these clutch performances is having a specific goal in mind, and understanding clearly what you need to do to meet the challenge (for example, “if I can run this last kilometre in under five minutes I can break my personal best”).
Once this challenge is set, it’s quite natural for us to increase our effort and intensity in order to achieve the goal.
Megan Rapinoe of the USA football team in action during the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup Final match between USA and Netherlands.Shutterstock
To get into flow, however, we need to think a bit differently. We need to create situations where we can explore — where we’re free from expectation and pressure.
An important part of this is setting open goals such as to “see how well I can do,” “see how many under par I can get”, or “see how fast I can run the next five kilometres”.
These open-ended, non-specific goals help avoid pressure and expectation, letting you gradually build your confidence, and increasing your chances of getting into flow.
Image by CDC/ Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM - https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=23312.
Analysis by Manqing Cheng – Doctoral Researcher in Politics and International Relations at University of Auckland. This is Manging’s first analysis for EveningReport.nz.
Precis: This article takes the WHO as an example to examine the difficulties for some international organizations in playing their due roles and tackling with the security threats of international concern such as a public health crisis of COVID-19. It is believed that an in-depth institutional reform is necessary for international organizations including WHO to adapt to the reset of globalization, the ensuing global challenges, and the transformation of global governance in the post-pandemic order.
Image by CDC/ Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM – https://phil.cdc.gov/Details.aspx?pid=23312.
Confronting the public health crisis as COVID-19, the existing global governance system has fallen into a state of partial failure, which is embodied in slow response and action of international organizations, increasing difficulty in coordination and cooperation between big powers, and the lack of leadership. WHO is clearly unable to coordinate national actions or to regulate behaviour and change prevention and control measures of various countries amid this pandemic. In recent years, the impediments to globalization, the rise of populism, the revival of nationalism and unilateralism allude to the inherent conflicts between international organizations and sovereign states. Disease is a non-zero-sum non-traditional security issue as its threat to all is undifferentiated. Since everyone is facing a common threat, international organizations that are instrumental for communication and preventive solutions should take the lead. But why some international organizations failed to function and why can it be hard for countries to utilize such platforms and work together? This article analyses that there are several major dilemmas restraining the role of international organizations, which are unlikely to be resolved in the short run. The following takes WHO in the pandemic as an example to explore its plight.
Difficulties and Dilemmas Confronting International Organizations
Above all, the WHO faces constraints from the sovereign states.
The first hinderance is financing. The most common way for all parties to play games in WHO is to influence the WHO agenda through financial leverage. WHO’s funding comes from two main sources: assessed contributions and voluntary contributions largely from member states and other sources such as philanthropic foundations and private sector. Assessed contributions have been a declining share of WHO’s overall budget in recent years, so the organization is increasingly relying on voluntary contributions. The trick is that most voluntary contributions come with explicit requirements and restrictions on their use. The only fund that WHO really has control and can flexibly allocate is about US$500 million a year in assessed contributions. WHO has been struggling to both invest in global public health and to cover its own operating costs. Take the 2018-2019 biennial budget as an instance, the total planned amount was US$4.422 billion (the actual implementation was US$5.3 billion), of which the assessed contributions were only US$957 million. As the biggest contributor to WHO, after President Trump announced a suspension for US funding on April 14, 2020, Director-General Tedros indicated that the US move would leave the organization with a financial gap that could interrupt the efforts to stop the coronavirus pandemic. When the greatest power takes an example, it is hard for others not to follow suit, particularly under the situation where all economies are suffering heavy losses.
The second is the recognition. As an intergovernmental organization, WHO has the legitimacy and capacity to act only based on state empowerment and authorization. In a broad sense, this “authorization” is also a recognition. A recognition of the existence and effectiveness of international organizations. Given the limits of human knowledge of various communicable diseases, WHO remains torn between taking initiative and being cautious in the event of an outbreak. After the outbreak of influenza A (H1N1) in 2009, WHO coordinated countries to take proactive measures and declared a “pandemic”, but was accused of “overreacting”. This was because H1N1 had been spreading all over the world, but the fatality rate was low. A joint report by the British Medical Journal and the Parliament of the European Commission criticized WHO for exaggerating the pandemic, causing panic among the public and triggering a global rush to buy vaccines for pharmaceutical companies to profit. After the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014, WHO was accused of poor early warning, ineffective prevention, and slow response. Critics claimed that the first Ebola patient was infected in Guinea in December 2013, but WHO did not officially declare an outbreak until three months later, when the virus had spread to neighboring countries. In this recent crisis, WHO’s status and value have been further weakened. During the present anti-pandemic process, the Trump administration continuously accused WHO of acting too slowly to sound the alarm about the coronavirus. A great power refuses to admit the role of WHO is parallel to not recognize and distrust the organization, which will inevitably impact the international organization’s authority and capability to act in its field. Facing public health threats, particularly from unknown viruses and emerging infectious diseases, WHO seems to be caught in a paradox: taking aggressive action to stop outbreaks before the situation becomes serious will be criticized as overreacting; and taking cautious attitude would be blamed for failing to contain the pandemic. The anarchy of international system makes international organizations have no coercive power in implementing measures. One of the authoritative sources of them is the level of expertise rest on knowledge. They hold the “power” to master data, publish information and set standards by virtue of their knowledge. Therefore, if a country questions its expertise, it can affect a range of the organization’s actions. If countries no longer use that knowledge as a standard, the authority of the organization will be undermined.
Secondly, the WHO is influenced at the systemic level.
First of all, international organizations are the product of globalization and multilateralism. In theory, the deepening of globalization should become a hotbed for the development of international organizations. In reality, nevertheless, globalization has deepened the antagonism between countries. We are witnessing more clearly the gap between countries and the changing political landscape within them. Some countries have risen in the process of globalization, while others have been divided in the process. Rising nations are more insistent on globalization, while declining nations only want to retreat. International organizations seem to become a burden no longer needed, living in the tension between the cracks. As a sub-agency of the UN system, WHO seeks to place health goals above power politics. But as an intergovernmental organization, WHO cannot avoid the shades of power game and geopolitics. As early as its establishment, the Constitution of the World Health Organization was delayed by the ratification of member states due to the confrontation between two camps of the U.S. and the Soviet Union. It was not until the outbreak of cholera in Egypt’s Suez Canal area that countries realized the importance of establishing a global public health organization and passed the Constitution in 1948. With the launch of the Marshall Plan, the eastern and western camps entered a period of fierce confrontation. In 1949, the Soviet Union led the Eastern European countries withdraw from WHO. In order to maintain the integrity of global public health system, then Director-General George Brock Chisholm retained the membership of the Soviet Union and other countries on the ground that there was no opt-out clause in the Constitution, so that the Soviet Union was able to rejoin in 1958.
Second, the new world pattern is evolving, and some countries are inclined to politicize global issues. The alleged politicization of health issues refers to use health issues as a tactic to pursue political goals. The introduction of political issues into WHO by some countries led to the dysfunction and overloading of the mechanism beyond WHO’s jurisdiction and weakened its original purpose of promoting public health. When Trump halted funding for WHO, he also expressed his dissatisfaction and anger at WHO’s repeated praise for China’s anti-epidemic efforts. He believes that the U.S. is investing a lot of money, but WHO is ultimately standing up for China. International organizations do not necessarily choose sides, but their support for one country in a certain area may be regarded as a preference to be resisted by the other party. WHO, in this case, is unwittingly entering the political gap between China and the U.S. Mutual recriminate and stigmatization, transfer domestic contradictions as well as shirk responsibility for the poor response to the pandemic aggravate the conflicts and frictions that already existed among member states, thereby result in the inefficient operation of international organizations. In this climate of mistrust and disunity, it is hard for all parties to act in concert.
Third, non-neutral rules of global governance are impacted. The current global governance system mainly relies on the rules formulated by western countries. However, these rules are non-neutral in the light of non-western cultures. That is, the meaning of the same system varies to different groups, and those who benefit from the established system or may benefit from some future institutional arrangement will strive for or maintain institutional arrangements that are favorable to them. Global governance rules exist upon intersubjectivity and only play a normative role if they are accepted by the majority. Non-neutral rules are difficult to promote consensus between western and non-western cultures. One consequence of this non-neutrality is that in the practice of global governance, the actual benefits or losses brought by different mechanisms to sovereign states are inequivalent. In an era when the developed economies dominate in the global governance system, such non-neutrality, while has always existed, is not as prominent as it is today with more and more non-western economies rise and enter the global governance system. This is illustrated in the case of COVID-19 striking big powers, as non-western actors are bringing their own practical experiences into the existing governance system, thereby shaking the governance structure dominated by the Western instrumental rationality. The concepts, principles and approaches of global governance begin to fall short in attuning to the reality of rapid development of globalization and the emergence of global challenges.
Lastly, the WHO has self-deficiencies in terms of operating rules and mechanisms.
First, WHO is already the largest and most authoritative international agency for epidemic prevention in the world, but it is still unable to play a leading role in this crisis. This is because international organizations and states are distinct in nature. States have sovereignty, while international organizations do not. Management personnel in international organizations are dispatched by member states, and there are no individuals independent of the state and belong exclusively to an organization. This makes it impossible for international organizations to operate in complete isolation from states. Additionally, an international organization is a platform where member states gather for discussion, vote to reach a resolution, and implement it. Basically, the consensus of major powers becomes the resolution of the international organization. That is, a balance exists between the views expressed by the representatives of member states within WHO. Leaders of international organizations has only the power to implement the policy. Taking the position of chief balancer, Director-General Tedros may be viewed as a consensus-maker instead of an authoritarian decision-maker. International organizations, whether intergovernmental or non-governmental, are coordinating bodies. Their decision-making power is limited. Whether member states, especially the big powers, have shared interests, common needs and collective policy orientation determines how much role the international organization can play.
Second, WHO has an “institutional inertia”. Its reform of governing structure lags behind the development of global health governance with its influence on the decline. Since 1999, the principle of zero growth has been introduced into the budgeting process of WHO. Consequentially, WHO is increasingly dependent on voluntary contributions and has shown a bilateralism in promoting projects, since most contributions are earmarked for specific purposes by donors. As some scholars note, voluntary contributions militate against multilateral governance and decentralize the authority of international organizations to donor countries.
All in all, from the perspective of internal factors, academics generally believe that WHO’s organizational culture is strongly functionalist, conservative, and increasingly corrupt in recent years. The failure of strategic planning and the over-decentralization of WHO’s structure render its internal system increasingly rigid. Moreover, there are issues of impartiality within WHO. As more and more information about WHO’s internal decision-making is exposed by the media, the fairness and transparency of WHO’s work are increasingly questioned. Many scholars agree that the financial interests of the medical experts who advise WHO on decision-making are intertwined with multinational pharmaceutical companies, making WHO difficult to be objective and neutral.
To date, no substantive breakthrough and sustainable progress have been made in any area of governance, terrorism, financial crisis, transboundary disasters, and climate change, etc. COVID-19 represents yet another failure of global governance. The root cause is the lack of international cooperation. In recent years, with the strong backtracking of populism, unilateralism, and power politics, international relations are shifting toward geopolitics, the sense of international responsibility and the trust of international community are declining. It seems that everyone knows the theory of win-win cooperation, however in reality, the spirit of cooperation is easily concealed, forgotten, and even deliberately abandoned.
Some Recommendations on Institutional Reform in the Post-Pandemic order
In the post-pandemic world, international organizations and multilateral mechanisms will face greater tests. Only through constant institutional reform can they adapt to a changing world order.
The first is toboost the leadership and appeal to perform the leading and coordinating role to full potential in global governance. The authority and expertise of international organizations are mainly reflected in the fairness and effectiveness of promoting international cooperation and solving global issues. This depends on the sufficient cooperation and support of member states on the one hand and on the strategic vision, leadership, and professionalism of international organizations from officials to staff, on the other. In response to global challenges like COVID-19, the UN needs to make corresponding reforms and adjustments. This would include convening relevant meetings at the earliest possible time to convey confidence to the world, unifying the goals of all parties, and drawing up global action roadmap. Specialized agencies under the UN need to carry out separate actions around their respective themes, update their own rules and norms in real time. WHO could be more empowered to upgrade the global public health governance system. The international community has had conducted some effective bilateral and local cooperation and gained positive experiences in the fights against SARS, H1N1 influenza and Ebola, but there is still a long way ahead to achieve global, sustainable and closer cooperation. It is necessary to improve the overall status of public health governance and reinforce WHO, so that it has more rights and higher international status similar to that of the IMF and the World Bank to organize experts and focus on scientific research, vaccine development and data sharing as well as help developing countries with weak health infrastructure to improve their response capacity. The international community has generally been underinvesting in public health. As of February 29, the U.S. was still more than half behind with its 2019 dues and US$120 million is defaulted for 2020. After the outbreak, the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund has been created by the UN Foundation, the Swiss Philanthropy Foundation and WHO, but similar efforts should be more institutionalized in future. Meanwhile, WHO must strengthen the institutional construction, such as build a global infectious disease monitoring, early-warning and emergency-boot mechanisms, further elucidate the rules and norms of public governance, formulate guiding principles that all countries must abide by, unify standards, and improve the control and binding force on relevant behaviors of various countries, but not limited to report information, temporary research and judge the situation. For now, though the role and status of WHO in global public health governance has been weakened to a certain extent, as the largest international health organization and one of the larger specialized agencies within the UN, WHO still has broad responsibilities to combat infectious diseases based on the Constitution of WHO and designated by its accession to the UN, as well as has the only authorization of leading and promoting effective development of international health law. Therefore, it is crucial to carry out effective reform of WHO. The direction is not “reprimand and denounce” by some member states targeted others and counteract each other’s efforts. Instead, it should be further enhancing the power of existing multilateral mechanisms, increasing financial support, and expanding bilateral or small multilateral public health cooperation to larger regional domain. For this purpose, the established China-Japan-ROK joint prevention and control mechanism and the public health cooperation within the ASEAN framework should be consolidated and then upgraded to the Asia-Pacific region. The European Union and the African Union should also act together and promote the integration of public health, and then on this basis, form the regional cooperation between Asia and Europe, among Asia, Europe and Africa as well as in a wider range.
The second is to strengthen the authority and expertise of international organizations. Globalization has never been entirely positive as a single-dimensional process. International organizations is the central force and the primary driver for global governance. The multilateral cooperation mechanism should include at least two functions: political leadership and advisory implementation. In the current international system, it is unrealistic to require specialized agencies to perform core political leadership because they do not have corresponding political authority and power resources. However, for multilateral organizations with rich expertise in a specialized field, it is the fundamental obligation to provide intellectual support and technical implementation for political decision-making. For example, the political leadership of G20 and the advisory implementation of WHO could converge and form a global action model to counter security threats more actively in global public health. WHO can gather information, propose professional suggestions, and provide a concrete scientific basis for the G20 to put forward global action plans. In this regard, G20 could be continuously elevated from short-term crisis response mechanism to long-term governance mechanism.
Conclusion
International organizations have accrued deep malpractices in managing global affairs. In the current COVID-19 and previous international public health emergencies, there are various difficulties in the operation of international organizations, confining them to take conductive actions, which in turn reducing the effectiveness of problem solving. The world seems to lack a consistent and coherent response in the face of a common enemy. A path of transformation should be explored. Only through constant change can international organizations be reinforced in the new order, otherwise it will be eliminated or replaced. However, we must also be aware that some curtailments are beyond the scope of international organizations and concern the whole international community. The reality of the COVID-19 has put the international community at a crossroads once again. Is it to turn the crisis into an opportunity and make the pandemic a driving force for community building through strengthening all-round cooperation and multilateralism? Or to reject international cooperation, shrink into a corner, and deepen the division of the world? Or to expand the conflict and make the outbreak a pusher of the law of jungle? The rational choice is certainly cooperation. COVID-19 is an acute crisis that not only takes a heavy toll on global public health safety, but also creates global threats to varying degrees in other fields through its spillover effects. Institutional reform needs the solid support of political will and cooperative consensus. Multilateralism is by far the most reasonable approach to global governance, and multilateral cooperation is the most democratic way to combat global threats. Whether global consensus can be reached and cooperation mechanism can be built out of the crisis will not only directly affect the success of anti-pandemic battle, but also have a far-reaching impact on the international relations and world order after the pandemic.
As we reflect on the value and place of children, this gives us a chance to look at how birth registration and birth certificates operate in Australia today.
As the UN notes, “a name and nationality is every child’s right”. Australian academics have previously argued, the convention “implicitly includes the right to a birth certificate”.
Yet not every Australian child is registered or has a birth certificate.
When we think of children’s development and care, we don’t tend to think of the barriers to gaining such an important document. Or the appropriateness of an administrative process of birth notification and registration that hasn’t changed much in more than 160 years.
To reduce burdens on families and increase social engagement among the marginalised, we need seriously to consider alternatives to the traditional birth certificate.
With growing digital connectivity, are paper-based birth certificates still relevant?
Why do we need birth certificates?
All births in Australia are required to be registered by a parent or carer with the relevant state or territory registry office for births, deaths and marriages. This service is free.
All Australian babies need to be registered after they are born.www.shutterstock.com
Birth registration is also a fundamental human right — it provides a record of the name, birth details, and very existence of someone. It also provides a government administrative function, helping to determine population estimates.
Birth certificates, on the other hand, aren’t automatically issued in Australia – there’s a fee involved with gaining this crucial piece of identification, potentially violating human rights.
These paper-based certificates are vital documents, needed for a huge range of crucial life events, from enrolling in school to opening a bank account, getting a passport, applying for government benefits, learning to drive, holding a tax file number to work in paid employment — even getting into a sporting team.
There’s a cost
The cost of a birth certificate varies across states and territories, but they are not insignificant. The Australian Capital Territory has the highest fee at $65.00, Victoria has the lowest at $33.80 (plus an additional $10 for postage).
All registry offices in Australia with the exception of Queenslandcan waive the fee. But information about fee exemptions is near impossible to find. Birth, Deaths and Marriages in Victoria is the only jurisdiction to make such information available on its website, but the process appears complicated and eligibility very narrow.
Not everyone has a birth certificate — and this is a problem
Despite the importance of birth certificates, not everyone has one.
Experiencing financial difficulties, moving house, being wary of government, and having lower English proficiency are among the reasons people may not have a birth certificate.
Births still go unregistered in Australia, mostly among people from disadvantaged and minority groups, including First Nations Australians and children of parents born overseas and from non-English speaking backgrounds.
Estimates suggest about 3% of births are not registered by a child’s fifth birthday, but this declines as young people approach the age of 15. Milestone events, like starting school and applying for a tax file number or driver’s licence, are triggers for either the realisation a birth isn’t registered or a prompt for registration.
There are no data on how many people in Australia do not hold birth certificates. The Victorian registry office reports the “majority” of people apply for a birth certificate when a baby is registered, but even they don’t know the actual numbers.
Milestones, like starting school, can prompt a realisation a child does not have a birth certificate.www.shutterstock.com
Investments have been made to increase the completeness of birth registration, particularly among First Nations Australians and in Victoria, but this has not extended to increasing the accessibility of birth certificates.
If births are registered for free, it follows that birth certificates should (and could be easily) be part of the free registration process.
Not having a birth certificate can render people invisible, particularly for the already vulnerable. Without a birth certificate, full recognition and participation in society including through education and employment is hindered.
There are other ways
The birth registration and certification process has not kept up with contemporary expectations.
Australian birth certificates themselves, for example, have altered very little since the 1930s — they remain paper-based and include similar information.
There are other systems available to make identification processes easier, but these also rely on individuals having paper copies of their birth certificates. The Australian government’s documentation verification service (DVS) is a central database enabling interrogation and confirmation of identity documentation.
Banks can use the DVS system, for example, to confirm the identity of an individual without seeing a birth certificate, relying on the birth certificate number.
There are, of course, safety issues when it comes to maintaining the security of identity data. But with so much other sensitive information now digitised, these risks can be managed. It’s also doubtful they outweigh the practical and equity concerns about continuing to rely on paper-based birth certificates.
What about Sweden?
Other countries are doing this better. Babies born in Sweden are immediately registered and added to a population address register by the hospital or midwife responsible for delivering the child. The child’s name is then updated by their parents or carers, and important information relating to each Swede is maintained throughout their life.
All Swedes are immediately registered by the hospital or midwife when they are born.www.shutterstock.com
Australia has a similar hospital and midwife notification system in the National Perinatal Data Collection(NPDC). The NPDC isn’t used to help register births – it’s health-focussed — but it (or a registry-based) notification system has the potential to assist in redressing the invisibility too many Australians experience.
A better process for babies
The costs associated with buying a birth certificate for a baby appear more of a revenue raising endeavour than a public good.
Australia holds a number of different data system capabilities that could replace the outdated paper-based scheme of birth registration and certification.
Yes, there are security and logistical concerns, but we can manage them. It is most important to create a system where every baby is granted their fundamental human rights of recognition.
From a demographic perspective, we will have a more accurate and timely picture of all Australians — no matter the socioeconomic circumstances they might be born into.
The Reciprocal Access Agreement (RAA) reached in principle this week by Japan and Australia provides a legal framework for the Australian Defence Force and the Japanese Self-Defence Force to operate in each other’s territories.
It has taken six years to get to this point. There are various reasons for this, but a significant stumbling block has been Japan’s death penalty and the Australian government’s opposition to it.
This 2018 strategy sets Australia apart from other countries that have abolished the death penalty because of its outward-looking policy of pursuing abolition in other countries. It is not limited to advocating the restricted use of the death penalty in instances where Australian nationals are sentenced to death — as was the case with Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan. It takes a principled stance against the death penalty “in all circumstances for all people”.
No guarantees on death penalty – yet
The bilateral defence co-operation with Japan is a case in point. The negotiations stalled because the Australian government wanted an assurance Australian Defence Force members would not be sentenced to death, even if convicted of crimes punishable by death under Japanese law.
However, in June 2020, it was reported a breakthrough was made in the negotiations where the Japanese authorities were considering replacing the death penalty with the maximum sentence that would be applied under Australian law.
With the in-principle agreement, it has been reported that if an ADF member were to be convicted of serious crimes in Japan, the punishment would be considered on a “case by case” basis.
It is unclear, however, how this case-by-case mechanism will operate. There is no public guarantee to date that Australian soldiers would not be subject to the death penalty.
Interestingly, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Japanese-language media were silent on this sticking point.
A “case by case” approach may appear like a step back from the breakthrough reported in June, if it means members of the Australian Defence Force could be executed in some cases.
That said, we remain confident the Australian government will not concede in finalising the RAA with Japan. The Australian government’s 2018 strategy is unequivocal in its principled stance against the death penalty. Entering into an agreement with the full knowledge that the death penalty may be applied to its citizens would be a clear breach of its own pledge.
There is yet no clear indication if Australian soldiers would be spared the death penalty should they be convicted of a crime that carries this sentence in Japan.Cpl Raymond Vance/ADF handout/AAP
How governments can work towards abolition
The death penalty tends to be viewed in binary terms: either countries have it or they don’t. It is often cast as a domestic criminal justice policy, with international organisations such as the United Nations having some influence.
We pay less attention to the subtle ways in which abolitionist governments can restrict the application of the death penalty in retentionist countries. For example, this may involve:
refusing to extradite those who may face the death penalty
refusing to co-operate in mutual legal assistance
in the case of Australia and Japan, receiving prior assurance before an offence has been committed that the death penalty will not be applied.
This is what William Schabas referred to as the “indirect abolition” of the death penalty. It offers much potential as a template for how Australia might achieve its 2018 strategy in the region.
Casting our eyes from Japan to Vietnam, we find another strategic partnership with Australia that may eventually prove ripe for indirect abolition.
Australia recognised that Vietnam’s amended Penal Code has abrogated the death penalty for seven crimes, and encouraged Vietnam to move towards abolition of the death penalty.
So it seems an ideal time to push for creative ways to realise the 2018 strategy. This is especially so given that the Australian and Vietnamese prime ministers agreed in August 2019 to develop an Enhanced Economic Engagement Strategy with the aim of becoming top ten trading partners and doubling bilateral investment.
While Australia has taken a principled stance against the death penalty with Japan and in its interactions with Vietnam, we do not know how this commitment would translate to other situations, with other nations.
Australia might lack the necessary soft power to nudge other countries to align themselves with its mission. Alternatively, Australia may have enough economic power to push its agenda even though retentionist governments may view its death penalty diplomacy as unwelcome interference in their domestic criminal policy.
Asia lags behind the global trend away from the death penalty. The Philippines, Sri Lanka and the Maldives have taken steps to reinstate the death penalty or resume executions. Bangladesh has expanded the reach of the death penalty.
Australia is at a pivotal moment in terms of testing its own commitment to its strategy, especially in our region. This is a critical time for determining its role in advocating for abolition of the death penalty in Asia.
Afghanis who say they have witnessed torture and murder at the hands of Australian soldiers want the chance to testify in court as well as compensation, a journalist says.
He was commenting on a four-year inquiry that found “credible information” supporting allegations of war crimes by the country’s special forces.
Major-General Paul Brereton’s report also said junior soldiers were often required by their patrol commanders to shoot prisoners to get their first kill in a practice known as “blooding”.
The inquiry also found evidence soldiers gloated about their actions, kept kill counts and planted phones and weapons on corpses to justify their actions.
Afghan journalist Bilal Sarwary has interviewed some of the victims’ families. Speaking from Kabul, he told RNZ Morning Report: “They told me about torture, about helicopters, about women and children getting scared and murder.”
One victim had told him four of his family had been killed – two brothers and two cousins.
In another village he spoke to a number of victims about their bad experiences and they described “murders after murders”.
“One man did say to me that he wanted to look up in the eyes of these killers and ask them why did they kill so many innocent Afghans.”
Another man he interviewed could not stop crying as he likened the sound of bullets from a gun with a silencer to “drops of water”.
“These families… have been telling me that they want to get justice, that they want to make sure this is a transparent process and that those responsible are brought to justice.”
They have asked him if those directly affected will get the chance to fly to Australia to give evidence in courtrooms there, Sarwary said.
Many of the people involved were very poor and they had also asked him about their chances of receiving compensation from Australia.
Sarwary said that the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission has demanded that Australia adopts a transparent process as it lays charges against the perpetrators and there should be compensation for victims.
Former SAS paramedic Dusty Miller, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012, told the ABC he had witnessed a number of unlawful killings and had since struggled with “psychological wounds”. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot
‘We crossed a very bad line’ – ex-soldier The Brereton inquiry heard from more than 400 witnesses, including former SAS paramedic Dusty Miller, who was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012.
He told the ABC he witnessed a number of unlawful killings and has since struggled with “psychological wounds”.
He said he felt vindicated after reading the report and was in no doubt that some of the soldiers needed to go to jail for their crimes. It might be hard for the Australian public to accept such behaviour had occurred, he said.
“We’ve got this proud ANZAC tradition that we’re trying to uphold but unfortunately it’s like finding out that Santa Claus isn’t real.
“We crossed a very bad line and we crossed it for a number of years and we need to pay that price now.”
The report also warned that more killings would be revealed in the future and Miller said he was sure that is true.
Some soldiers’ lives had been ruined by what they had witnessed in Afghanistan. It also meant the end of his own military career, Miller said.
‘Everybody knew what was going on’ “Everybody knew what was going on. It was a day-to-day occurrence. We normalised it… you certainly had to go along with what was happening because the alternative would have been professional suicide. You’d have been ostracised.
“There was no way you would have flagged this with the commanders or speak up – that would have been unthinkable.”
Miller said the commanders must have known what was happening especially as they had debriefs after every mission.
However, it was “a minority group” who acted badly and the majority of men he served with were “honourable” although they operated in a “dog eat dog” aggressive environment.
Jon Stephenson: “They deliberately planned and carried out unlawful actions, alleged war crimes.” Image: RNZ
Clear differences between NZ and Australian troops, says author Investigative journalist Jon Stephenson, the co-author of Hit and Run, the book which led to the Operation Burnham Inquiry, said there was a difference between the way Australian forces behaved and the conduct of New Zealand forces.
“It’s clear that for Operation Burnham the allegations concerned civilian casualties but they weren’t deliberate. The New Zealand forces were involved in an action in Afghanistan that led to civilian casualties but they didn’t intend for those people to die,” Stephenson told Morning Report.
“Whereas in the Australian case, there’s a clear difference, in that they deliberately planned and carried out unlawful actions, alleged war crimes – shooting people who were in their custody and posed no threat or civilians.”
Australian and New Zealand troops worked together in some places, such as headquarters, but they did not go out in large numbers on missions together.
After New Zealand troops had bad experiences working with the US in Afghanistan a decision was made that New Zealand troops would operate as independently as possible so they would not be “contaminated” by some of the behaviour they saw.
In some cases they did support missions, but generally they acted on their own or with the Afghans, Stephenson said.
Australian federal police will investigate the specifics and decisions will be made about which troopers should be prosecuted over the 39 alleged murders. This process may take years, he said.
“It would be my expectation, based on what I’ve heard, and the people I’ve spoken to, that there will definitely be a large number of prosecutions.
“It’s inconceivable to me given that, for example, people have been shown on camera shooting unarmed young men in a field who posed no threat, that there will not be successful prosecutions, convictions and some people will serve serious jail time.”
Defence Force chief General Angus Campbell identified a significant problem with what he called “toxic warrior culture” in Australian forces and this was not seen in the New Zealand forces.
However, Stephenson said it is important for New Zealanders to consider if their troops had served as many rotations in the same same high intensity conflict areas and had lost as many troops in conflicts as the Australians did whether such a culture might evolve.
He believes that NZ troops would not have resorted to this type of behaviour.
“I think there are significant cultural problems in the Australian military. They have got a very different attitude towards indigenous people than our troopers have.
“That’s not to say that our forces have acted impeccably at all times, but I do think there are significant cultural differences, training differences between New Zealand and Australia.”
With New Zealand’s smaller numbers it was also easier to identify bad behaviour.
This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rona Carroll, Senior Lecturer, Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice, University of Otago
Demand for healthcare for transgender people is on the rise in New Zealand but training for health professionals to develop basic competencies is lagging behind.
Medical education needs to change urgently to prepare doctors to adequately care for their transgender and non-binary patients.
Transgender and non-binary health
We use the term transgender (or trans) to refer to people who identify with a gender different to that assigned to them at birth. The term non-binary describes people who don’t identify with the male/female gender binary.
There are other gender identities such as takatāpui, a traditional Māori term which has been reclaimed to embrace all Māori who identify with diverse genders and sexualities. Not everyone will identify with these umbrella descriptors.
Transgender identities are not an illness or a mental health problem. They are a variation of human experience.
In the Youth’12 survey of 8,500 high school students carried out in 2012, almost half of the transgender students reported experiencing depressive symptoms. One in five had attempted suicide in the year prior to the survey.
The Counting Ourselves survey in 2018 also showed high rates of mental health problems and a higher risk of suicide and substance abuse.
It highlighted the difficulty many transgender and non-binary people face in accessing gender-affirming healthcare. Many already had negative experiences and said they avoided seeing a doctor because they were worried about being disrespected.
Not all trans people will require access to hormone therapy or surgery, but many do. Removing barriers to healthcare is essential. Trans and non-binary people have specific health needs to affirm their gender identity and to reduce gender dysphoria — the distress that can occur when someone’s gender identity differs from the sex assigned to them at birth.
Case studies used to teach medical students rarely show diversity of sexuality or gender identity. When you don’t see yourself or the population reflected in your learning, it can send a message that this isn’t important or relevant to future practice.
Just as we want our future doctors to reflect the population they will treat, the medical curriculum should evolve to do so, too.
Transgender healthcare teaching needs to be part of all medical speciality, nursing and allied health training, so that trans and non-binary patients can expect some basic cultural competence in all areas of our health service. Care and sensitivity are required in certain specialities — including endocrinology, obstetrics, gynaecology, sexual health, mental health, urology and breast surgery. But it is most important in general practice where we receive most of our healthcare.
Best healthcare practice for transgender people is based on an informed consent model, which views the patient as the expert in their identity.Hannah Peters/Getty Images
From dysphoria to celebration
While some care requires hospital specialists, general practitioners (GPs) can provide much gender-affirming care.
GPs are experts in supporting people with normal life issues, as well as addressing physical and psychological needs in a holistic manner.
GPs who wish to provide gender-affirming care based on an informed consent model, should be supported and encouraged to do so. This aligns with best practice models that view the patient as the expert in their identity and recognise them as a competent adult who can make choices about their own healthcare.
A multidisciplinary approach with the GP at the centre, supported by other specialists where necessary, is an ideal model. Financial and educational support for primary care to take the lead in this area would increase patients’ access to care and reduce the need for referrals to secondary care, freeing up appointments for people who need them.
There are simple steps health providers can take to make transgender and non-binary patients feel more welcome and respected, including:
Outward signs of acceptance in the practice environment, such as a rainbow flag, relevant posters and pamphlets
gender-neutral toilets
enrolment forms with appropriate questions around gender identity, names and pronouns.
These things in themselves can make a difference, but need to be backed up by staff who use people’s correct names and pronouns and do not make assumptions around gender or sexuality.
Healthcare providers who treat their transgender and non-binary patients with respect and support them to affirm their individual gender identity contribute to making them comfortable attending appointments. The result is improved health and well-being.
Better medical training and practice also require changes in societal attitudes, and that’s where we all have a role to play.
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Breunig, Professor of Economics and Director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
The government’s much-anticipated Retirement Incomes Review has found that increases in employer’s compulsory superannuation contributions are financed by reductions in workers’ wage growth.
This isn’t obvious, and it certainly isn’t what the superannuation industry has been saying.
Legally, those contributions (at present 9.5% of each wage) come from employers, on top of the wage.
Employers are required to pay them under a legal instrument known as the “superannuation guarantee”.
But employers have to get the money from somewhere.
Compulsory super was introduced in 1992 with the intention the money would come out of funds that would otherwise have been used for wage increases. The document said workers would be
forgoing a faster increase in real take-home pay in return for a higher standard of living in retirement
Government ministers encouraged employers to shave wage increases to pay for increases in compulsory super. In 2012 then minister Bill Shorten explained:
a portion of what would have been employees’ increases will go into compulsory savings
Then in February groundbreaking research by the Grattan Institute on 80,000 enterprise bargaining agreements over three decades of compulsory super found that was indeed what has been happening.
Grattan found that on average, 80% of each increase in compulsory super has been taken from what would otherwise have been a wage increase.
And now, in work commissioned by the Retirement Incomes Review using completely different data (from the Tax Office instead of enterprise agreements) and an entirely different analytical approach, so have we.
Here’s what we did
Imagine three companies (A, B, and C) offering an identical job in the same city with three different annual total compensation packages: $117,000 (A), $112,000 (B), and $109,500 (C).
The three companies offer the same wage ($100,000), they only differ in the amount of super they pay their workers: 17% (A), 12% (B) and the legally-required 9.5% (C). In this example, total compensation equals wages plus superannuation.
In a competitive labour market (which we largely have in Australia), job seekers would flock to company A, which offers the best compensation package.
How might B and C respond to get workers back?
By offering higher wage growth in subsequent years than A. Higher wage growth would ultimately lead to a catch-up in total compensation levels across the three firms, over time.
Examining the administrative tax records since compulsory super has been set at a single standard rate, that is indeed what we found – when a firm paid super at more than the standard rate, those firms that paid less or merely the standard rate lifted wages by more.
Put another way, the firms that paid their workers more than the legislated rate of super lifted their wages by less.
What happens when compulsory super is increased?
Legislated increases to the standard rate of compulsory super increase firms’ labour costs, but only for firms that pay the standard rate (in our example that’s firm C which we will call a super guarantee “SG” firm).
By comparing the difference in wage growth of employees in “SG firms” to “above SG” firms (companies A and B) during periods when the minimum super guarantee was increased, we can determine how companies pay for the increase in labour costs.
The ATO has insights into super and wages.
We already know that wage growth for “SG firms” is higher than “above SG” firms.
The question is: how does that change when the SG increases?
If “SG firms” find the money to fund the higher SG from somewhere other than wages, it won’t change at all.
If they pass on some or all of the cost to their workers in lower wage increases, then their wage growth should slow relative to that of “above SG” firms.
Our examination of Tax Office data finds this is what has happened.
Our results show that when the legislated compulsory super contributions increased from 8% to 9% in 2002 and again from 9% to 9.25% in 2013, companies passed on 71% to 100% of the cost to workers in the form of reduced wage growth.
What about other findings?
Two other studies, one funded by Industry Super, do not find a trade-off between super increases and wage increases (and in some instances present a case for superannuation increases leading to wage increases).
As we are seeing in the current debates about pausing increases in compulsory super, it tends to be politically easy to raise compulsory super when wage growth is robust and convenient to pause increases when wage growth is slow.
The correlations observed in these studies (that wage growth has been high when compulsory super has been increased) may well be picking up on the timing of increases in compulsory super – that they have been introduced at times when wage growth has been strong rather than they have caused strong wage growth.
Increases in compulsory super come at a cost to the wages of workers.
They might result in higher retirement incomes later in life (although this is uncertain because the settings of the age pension mean an increased superannuation balance is not directly correlated with an increase in retirement living standards).
But they leave less disposable income available to workers and their families to consume today or to save through alternative means.
They also cost the government money.
An increase in compulsory super contributions might one day reduce age pension expenditure, a question examined by the review.
But in the years before then, the government would forego substantial tax revenue because the extra super would be taxed at a lower rate than wages.
These are important things for the government to consider as it decides whether to proceed with the legislated increase in compulsory super from 9.5% of salary to 12% in five steps of 0.5% between July 2021 and July 2025.
