Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith University

National crises, like the pandemics that can provoke them, come in stages. Each stage presents leaders with unique problems that require mental, moral and emotional agility to manage. Change is the only constant, as policies that work one moment fail to do so another. National crises challenge ideology. There is little room for rhetoric when people’s lives and livelihoods are on the line.

A New Approach, funded by the Myer, Keir and Tim Fairfax foundations, is a research initiative of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Its fourth, recently released report, Drivers of Arts and Cultural Policy Settings in Australia and Beyond, calls for a policy understanding of the cultural sector that scarcely exists.

This key part of Australian society has self-evidently not been at the front of the government’s mind. So, it is unlikely to hear the messages the report contains.

But it should. The Morrison government, like the Coalition governments before it, is wedded to the tropes of the extractive economy. After decades of “rationalising” Australia’s manufacturing sector, it is left with a handful of go-to industries it understands and/or whose lobbying has been successful (mining, construction, defence and agriculture, with a bit of tourism and small business thrown in).

Read more: Artists shouldn’t have to endlessly demonstrate their value. Coalition leaders used to know it

As the cultural sector is not one of the favoured few, the years since the Coalition’s election in 2013 have been ones of missed opportunity, ministerial posturing, and limp incrementalism. The government has given little thought and less support to the sector. COVID-19 has revealed an essential truth: Australia doesn’t have a cultural policy.

This has to change. In the post-COVID period a significant task of rebuilding faces Australia on both economic and social fronts. It will not be met by channelling the 1980s conservative energies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as Treasurer Josh Frydenberg proposes. The problems of stagflation and industrial reorganisation look nothing like the problems of collapsing aggregate demand and the promotion of sustainable growth.

New challenges require new responses, not a return to old ones. Wage stagnation, precarious employment and record-low interest rates make monetarist policies ineffective in the current climate.

It is fiscal instruments – government spending – that will determine whether Australia recovers swiftly from the effects of the current pandemic. The austerity era is over. Nations that spend nothing, will get nothing. The future belongs to those who are willing to build. That includes the Australian cultural sector.

Read more: The arts needed a champion – it got a package to prop up the major players 100 days later

Policy highs and lows

A New Approach’s fourth report should have been its first. It lays out the strategic landscape of cultural policy and gives a selective narrative of cultural policymaking since 1950. Key to the former is what the report calls “policy drivers”. It names four that have been dominant in Australia: collective identity, reputation building, social improvement and economic contribution.

What is a policy driver? In the report, they appear as a cross between a motivation, an aspiration and a management goal. At any rate, they are some kind of higher idea that are supposed to make sense of government action in the sector. It is both unfortunate and typical that none of the drivers identified are cultural ones, that Australian governments have apparently had little ambition to produce great art or support its creators. The core purposes of arts and culture lie in what it can do for other areas: identity, cohesion, industry and diplomacy. No wonder applying them has “often led to a lack of leadership in this area over the last 70 years”.

Australia’s cultural policy highs have been significant. Creative Nation was a world first in scope, content and tone when it appeared in 1994. But its prolonged lows have badly damaged a sector that has grown in spite of, not because of, government treatment. A New Approach’s historical timeline stops in 2010, three years before Creative Australia was released and legislation governing the Australia Council was rewritten, and well before cultural funding was (temporarily) increased.

A New Approach notes that “Australia’s current cultural policy settings are designed for an earlier era”. This is a misrepresentation. The government’s approach to the cultural sector has been a baleful cocktail of favourites and indifference. In the barren years after 2013, government energy was invested in “counter-drivers”: negative policy attitudes that framed culture as elitist, useless, metropolitan and lefty.

The report puts forward eight recommendations, ready-packaged for policy wonks as “Opportunities”. One is the stand-out: to create a National Arts and Culture Plan that “could inform more coherent arts and cultural policy settings and investment at all three levels of government”. The report even identifies the appropriate body for actioning such a plan, the Meeting of Cultural Ministers. This is our national cabinet for arts and culture. The mechanism for effective cultural policymaking in Australia has long been in place. It is time to use it again.

Read more: Paul Keating’s Creative Nation: a policy document that changed us

Growing beyond the rescue effort

Why should the federal government move out of its comfort zone and take an informed interest in a policy domain that it has all but disavowed? The small and belated pandemic support package currently offered suggests there is some recognition that cultural is important. But it is far from enough. Through a triple whammy of bushfire disaster, COVID-19 shutdown and economic depression, the country has received a body blow that demands active leadership to recover from.

Where the policy debate has focused on a need to “rescue” the cultural sector from the ill-effects of COVID-19, the emphasis must now be on growing it as part of a wider program of public investment.

ANA’s report touches on six areas where this might happen: capital expenditure; support for cultural organisations; community and amenity building, especially in regional Australia; Indigenous arts centres and First Nations cultural programs; and digital participation.

Faced with this list of options, the box to tick is “all of the above”. The need to assist artists and those involved in the production of culture is greater than ever. Many have missed out on previous support offered and are grieving as they see a lifetime’s commitment evaporate. Investment in cultural infrastructure needs to come from all levels of government, but especially from the federal one, where, as the report points out, expenditure in the cultural area fell 18.9% per capita between 2008 and 2018. The burden of proof lies with those who would do nothing.

Read more: Friday essay: the politics of dancing and thinking about cultural values beyond dollars

A useful start

A National Arts and Culture Plan won’t guarantee the government will come to its senses and treat the cultural sector with the seriousness it deserves. But it is a useful start. The arts minister, Paul Fletcher, is a cleanskin, with the capacity to implement a broader policy agenda. The states and local governments are aware of the importance of the sector and its role in a post-COVID recovery. The Australia Council is doing all that it can with the little that it has to cope with the serial disasters sweeping over artists and cultural organisations.

What’s wanted is a positive lead from the federal government. It doesn’t need to pretend to an expertise it doesn’t have. It needs to listen to the industry and policy representatives who can give it good culture-specific advice. Then it needs to open its wallet and get ready to spend.

That won’t be easy for a political party that has drunk deep at the small-government-balanced-budget well for so long and, in its own mind, to good effect. But a different world looms, and the cultural sector is central to it. Whatever “policy drivers” the government chooses to commit to, commit to some it must. The clock is ticking, the sector is ailing. There is simply no time to lose.

– ref. At moments like these, we need a cultural policy – https://theconversation.com/at-moments-like-these-we-need-a-cultural-policy-141974

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vasso Apostolopoulos, Pro Vice-Chancellor, Research Partnerships, Victoria University

During the COVID-19 pandemic we’re constantly being reminded to practise good hygiene by frequently washing our hands and regularly cleaning the spaces where we live and work.

These practices aim to remove or kill the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and thereby minimise our risk of infection.

But there have been some suggestions using hand sanitiser and practising other hygiene measures too often could weaken our immune system, by reducing our body’s exposure to germs and with it the chance to “train” our immune defences.

The good news is, there’s no evidence to suggest this will be the case.

Read more: Early exposure to infections doesn’t protect against allergies, but getting into nature might

The ‘hygiene hypothesis’

For healthy immune function, it’s important we’re exposed to a diverse range of bugs in the environment, known as microbes. Most of these don’t make us sick.

The belief that a high level of cleaning and personal hygiene weakens our immune system is a common interpretation of what’s called the “hygiene hypothesis”.

The hygiene hypothesis is a theory that suggests a young child’s environment can be “too clean”, and they won’t be exposed to enough of these microbes to effectively stimulate their immune system as it develops.

The argument is that this results in increased allergies, asthma and certain autoimmune disorders. But scientists have refuted this hypothesis in recent years, as research has shown there are multiple other reasons for the increased incidence of these conditions.

Importantly, being too dirty doesn’t help our immune system either. It generally makes inflammation worse.

What is the immune system?

The immune system works to protect our bodies against things that threaten to make us sick — from harmful chemicals, to bacteria and viruses, to cancer cells.

It’s made up of two lines of defence. The first is the “innate” immune system, which responds rapidly to a range of pathogens to fight infection and prevent tissue damage.

Next is the “adaptive” immune system, made up of immune cells that develop a more targeted or specific response to fight off harsher germs such as viruses. Adaptive immune cells work by recognising small parts of the virus on the outside of the infected cell (for example, lung cells), and destroying them.

These cells then become what we call “memory cells”. The next time they encounter the same virus, they can eliminate it straight away.

This development of the immune system starts after birth and declines in old age.

Read more: 5 ways nutrition could help your immune system fight off the coronavirus

What can weaken our immune system?

Some aspects of our modern lifestyle can weaken our immune system. These include:

But there’s no scientific evidence to support the notion that extra hygiene precautions will weaken our immune system or leave us more susceptible to infection by bacteria or viruses.

Microbes are everywhere: in the air, on food, and in plants, animals, soil and water. They can be found on just about every surface, including inside and outside your body.

The hygiene measures recommended during COVID-19 will help curb the spread of the coronavirus and greatly reduce our risk of infection — but won’t eliminate all microbes from our lives.

Read more: From hospitals to households, we can all be better at remembering to wash our hands

Keep it clean

Cleaning refers to the removal of microbes, dirt and impurities from surfaces. It doesn’t kill microbes, but by removing them, it lowers their numbers and therefore reduces the risk of spreading infection.

In contrast, disinfecting refers to using chemicals, known as disinfectants, to kill microbes on surfaces.

A combination of cleaning and disinfecting is the most effective way to get rid of microbes such as coronavirus.

Extra hand hygiene is of course one of the most important infection control measures.

We’ve been advised to clean our hands with soap and water for at least 20 seconds. If this is not possible, use hand sanitiser with at least 60% ethanol or 70% isopropanol.

Frequent hand-washing, especially if a sanitiser is used, can disrupt the natural skin biome, which can lead to increased skin infections. This can be managed with the use of moisturisers.

But the extra hygiene measures during COVID-19 won’t weaken our immune systems. On the contrary, they are vital in controlling the pandemic.

If you’re worried about your immune system, don’t stop washing your hands or keeping your house clean. Importantly, follow a healthy balanced diet, do regular exercise and look after your mental health.

Read more: How to clean your house to prevent the spread of coronavirus and other infections

– ref. No, the extra hygiene precautions we’re taking for COVID-19 won’t weaken our immune systems – https://theconversation.com/no-the-extra-hygiene-precautions-were-taking-for-covid-19-wont-weaken-our-immune-systems-143690

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

University of Canberra Professorial Fellow Michelle Grattan and University of Canberra Assistant Professor Caroline Fisher discuss the week in politics.

This week Michelle and Caroline discuss the closure of ‘non-essential’ businesses in Melbourne under stage 4 restrictions, the Morrison government’s paid pandemic leave, and Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton’s cyber security package.

– ref. VIDEO: Michelle Grattan on Melbourne’s stage four lockdown, Morrison’s cyber security package, and paid pandemic leave – https://theconversation.com/video-michelle-grattan-on-melbournes-stage-four-lockdown-morrisons-cyber-security-package-and-paid-pandemic-leave-144123

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ari Mattes, Lecturer in Communications and Media, University of Notre Dame Australia

Review: The Meddler, screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival

For movie scholars and enthusiasts, one of the worst things about the COVID-19 pandemic has been the shutting down of cinemas. It’s a fundamentally different experience watching a film on a small screen with friends and family – or by yourself – from watching a movie on a massive screen in a dark room surrounded by strangers. This is why people have historically continued to go to the movies, despite the challenges posed first by the introduction of television, then by home video, and now by streaming services.

Festivals like the Sydney Film Festival have attempted to adjust to the emergency context by operating as reduced online-only festivals. But watching a premiere in a packed State Theatre is not the same as watching the same film hunched over your laptop.

At the same time, it’s nice to have access to good films beyond the limited offerings from online services.

The Meddler (or El Metido), the recent documentary from Australian filmmakers Daniel Leclair and Alex Roberts now playing online as part of the Melbourne International Film Festival, is, indeed, a good film.

An addiction

It’s also quietly but profoundly unsettling. The documentarians follow German Cabrera, an unassuming mechanic in Guatemala City. Night after night he prowls the streets with a camera, trying to capture footage of crimes, accidents, and, mainly, dead bodies.

Occasionally we cut to Cabrera’s footage, but mostly the camera observes him. Through the filmmakers apparent refusal to intervene in the world, a careful irony slowly develops: a split between Cabrera’s self-perception and what we are watching as viewers.

Cabrera believes he does this because he’s a truth and justice warrior – and he does provide the footage for free to local news networks – but the film suggests there is more to it.

We see a man obsessed, in his own words “addicted”, to capturing these gruesome images. This leads, through the course of the film, to the disintegration of his marriage.

The reasons for his obsession remain enigmatic, and the film avoids the kind of psychologising that a bigger budget documentary may have been compelled to offer. This benefits the film; it is much eerier because of its lack of exposition.

At times it plays like a less strident (and less funny) Werner Herzog character study.

Like Herzog’s Timothy Treadwell from Grizzly Man – a self-proclaimed naturalist and environmental warrior who ends up being killed by a bear – Cabrera is a self-appointed investigative journalist-come-superhero. As with Herzog’s film, we gradually realise that Cabrera, with his mute, reactionary stance on what he perceives to be limitless crime is, simply, a really weird guy.

Read more: Neverending stories – why we still love Unsolved Mysteries

Nightcrawlers all

Known as “the night watcher” on local news, Cabrera is a kind of real life version of Lou Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal), the stringer from Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. It is, perhaps, more disturbing that this is a kind of hobby for Cabrera, rather than work as it is for Lou.

This is starkly realised in a moment midway through the film when Cabrera captures a bereaved teenager screaming, “I want my dad!” The film cuts from Cabrera’s footage to him watching the teenager through his camera, totally unmoved by what he is filming.

This moment is subtle, and flips back on us too. As the viewers of the documentary we are also drawn to these horrific images. We are suckers for sensation and the stimulation of the extreme. Are we, too, meddlers as we watch, for example, injured and bloody people in the back of an ambulance?

In another scene, we are confronted with disturbing footage of a dead boy, his mother crying over him in the street. He has died during the day because of a medical condition. Cabrera’s narration tells us he was driving down the street and saw the boy and mum in the street so he stopped and filmed them.

As we wade with him through the blood and guts filled streets, we begin to realise how awful the whole thing is, and how profoundly deluded Cabrera is about the value of what he is doing.

We don’t buy his justification. Often he simply films, in an incredibly invasive fashion, people who have nothing to do with organised crime or gangs – people suffering mental illness, drug addicts, drunks.

Read more: True crime: it’s time to start questioning the ethics of tuning in

Memorable, creepy

And yet the film cryptically oscillates between contrasting responses to Cabrera, at times legitimising his urban vigilante-survivalist viewpoint. At the end of the film, the music becomes triumphant as we listen to Cabrera (sounding like televsion hero Arrow) talking about people needing to fight to save the city from criminals.

The Meddler is a minor but memorable film, beautifully shot, capturing its subject in a clinical, creepy fashion. Its one notable technical problem concerns the sound, which seems thin and poorly mixed in places, and the music, which is underdone and cliched.

For a low budget documentary, though, this is a minor criticism. We may not be able to watch it in cinemas – and this is one film whose impact would be amplified in that collective context – but at least we can watch it.

MIFF is online until 23 August 2020.

– ref. In The Meddler, we join a creeping nightcrawler as he chronicles death – https://theconversation.com/in-the-meddler-we-join-a-creeping-nightcrawler-as-he-chronicles-death-144054

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

The Royal Commission into Aged-Care Quality and Safety delivered it’s interim report in October 2019. Titled ‘Neglect’, it provided a scathing insight into the aged care industry – finding it centred around transactions not care. It minimised the voices of people receiving care, lacked transparency, and was staffed by an under-appreciated and under-pressure workforce.

The outbreak of coronavirus, and the second-wave of infections in Melbourne, has raised fresh questions. The virus has infected residents and staff en masse, leaving aged-care residents major victims of the pandemic.

Read more: View from The Hill: There’s no case for keeping secret any aged care facility’s COVID details

NSW Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells was the shadow minister for ageing for four years, during Tony Abbott’s time as opposition leader. She has made a detailed submission to the Royal Commission, critical of the government’s attempts to reform the troubled sector.

The Royal Commission is holding hearings next week to take evidence on the affects of the COVID virus. Among the questions Fierranvanti-Wells would like asked of the industry are

“How could you have avoided the situation that you were facing?

“What is it about the system that has led to you being in this difficult situation?

“What was in place to assist you in the event of a pandemic?

“Where have you found that the intersection between health and ageing has fallen over?

“Where could you have performed a better response if you’d had better medical services available in your aged care facility?

“And what workforce was required to have been available to you in your aged care facility to meet the potential of a pandemic?”

Concetta Fierravanti-Wells submission to the commission can be read here.

Additional audio

A List of Ways to Die, Lee Rosevere, from Free Music Archive.

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Concetta Fierravanti-Wells on aged care – what needs to be done differently – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-concetta-fierravanti-wells-on-aged-care-what-needs-to-be-done-differently-144098

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Damien Manuel, Director, Centre for Cyber Security Research & Innovation (CSRI), Deakin University

Australia’s long-awaited cybersecurity strategy, released yesterday, pledges to spend A$1.67 billion over the next ten years to improve online protection for businesses, individuals and the country as a whole.

The lion’s share of the cash will go towards policing and intelligence, with smaller amounts set aside for a grab bag of programs from cybersecurity training to digital ID. Much detail remains to be revealed, and whether the strategy succeeds in improving in the safety of all Australians will depend on how well it is executed over the coming decade.

Read more: Our cybersecurity isn’t just under attack from foreign states. There are holes in the government’s approach

The winners

As already announced on June 30, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) (which is based within the ASD) are big winners. They will jointly receive A$1.35 billion over the next ten years.

The funding will be used to:

• fight cybercrime

• build a new system to share information with industry about the tactics and operations of hackers, criminal syndicates and hostile foreign governments

• implement technology and processes to block malicious websites and viruses before they reach millions of Australians

• expand data science and intelligence capabilities (in other words, more cyber spies)

• establish new research laboratories

• transform the Joint Cyber Security Centres managed by the ACSC, including the placement of outreach officers to help support small and medium-sized businesses.

These businesses will be able to contact the ACSC for online cyber training to upskill staff and access a round-the-clock helpdesk for advice and assistance. It’s unclear how the government plans to assess this service, but high-quality advice and rapid response will be the keys for success.

The government will also implement an awareness campaign targeting small business, older Australians and Australian families to help improve community cyber safety. This is a long overdue measure, but it will need to be sustained and to resonate with the target audience to change the security culture and behaviour of Australians.

The losers

The remaining A$320 million, or A$32 million per year over ten years, will be spread over many programs largely aimed at businesses and the education sector.

Large businesses and service providers will be “encouraged” by the federal government to create tools and bundles of secure services to offer to small businesses. The cost of these secure services is unclear.

How the promised “encouragement” will occur is also open to interpretation. It may be the stick approach, with legislation, or the carrot, via tax incentives or grants.

This strategy has its dangers. The federal government may appear to be picking winners and losers in a complex ecosystem of service providers.

Wait and see

Cyber security professionals will be regulated to ensure clear professional standards, like plumbers and electricians. This is a good thing, but again, the details will be extremely important, such as who performs the accreditation, what framework they use, and how the program is overseen.

Businesses and academia will also receive yet more “encouragement”, this time to partner together to find innovative new ways to improve cyber security skills. This means an injection of A$26.5m into the Cyber Skill Partnership Innovation Fund, as part of the Cyber Security National Workforce Growth Program.

The fund will help support scholarships, apprenticeships, retraining initiatives, internships and other activities that meet the need of businesses. It sounds exciting, but again it is light on details and metrics.

Read more: Australia’s National Digital ID is here, but the government’s not talking about it

The strategy also discusses using digital identities such as myGovID to “make accessing online services easier and safer”. While this will help prevent identity theft and may be more convenient, it does raise the spectre of the return of the Australia Card concept. This national central identity register was proposed by the Hawke government in 1985.

We can also expect to see additional legislation introduced later this year, forcing critical infrastructure and systems of national significance to improve their cyber security. This is no bad thing, but it is unclear whether consumers or government will end up paying for it.

Execution of the strategy will be key

An Industry Advisory Committee will be established to guide and oversee the implementation of the strategy. Members of this extremely important committee are yet to be announced.

To be effective, the committee needs to include people from a variety of sectors such as healthcare, retail, manufacturing, finance, agriculture and education. As the government’s strategy makes clear, there is no one-size-fits-all solution for cyber security. The members of the committee must reflect a wide range of needs and diversity.

It is too early to tell whether the proposed strategy will deliver the right outcomes for Australian organisations, families and individuals. Until the strategy is executed, we won’t know whether and how it will deliver the promised safety improvements for all Australians.

– ref. Australia’s cybersecurity strategy: cash for cyberpolice and training, but the cyberdevil is in the cyberdetail – https://theconversation.com/australias-cybersecurity-strategy-cash-for-cyberpolice-and-training-but-the-cyberdevil-is-in-the-cyberdetail-144070

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Roxana Diamond, PhD Candidate, Flinders University

This article has links that contain graphic content

Many industries and employees have been hurt by COVID-19.

But sex workers, who face stigma and discrimination at the best of times, have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic.

The United Nations has warned,

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, sex workers all over the world are experiencing hardship, a total loss of income and increased discrimination and harassment.

As both a researcher in the area and sex worker myself, I have seen how sex workers have been an afterthought in Australia’s responses to COVID-19. And how it has been up to sex workers yet again to protect their community, underscoring the importance of decriminalising sex work.

Sex workers in Australia

“Sex work” is an umbrella term, describing the exchange of sexual services for money or other reward. The use of the term “sex worker” over “prostitution” reiterates that sex work is work and sex workers are deserving of the same rights and protections as any other profession.

There is no official data on the number of sex workers in Australia, but in 2014, the UN estimated there were 20,500.

Sex workers globally have long lobbied for the full decriminalisation of sex work. But in Australia, laws differ from state to state.

For example, sex work is largely decriminalised in New South Wales and the Northern Territory, while in Victoria and Queensland , some sex work is legalised.

Sex work is still criminalised in South Australia and Western Australia, while in Tasmania, brothel work and street based sex work is illegal, but private sex work is not. It is legalised in the ACT, where sole operators don’t need a license.

Legalisation creates a two-tiered system, where compliance is low and sex workers are heavily policed. For example, a 2012 Kirby Institute report estimated 50% of Victorian sex workers operate outside of the law.

We also know that the sex work population contains significant numbers of migrant sex workers, who face compounded levels of stigma, discrimination and criminalisation.

What has COVID meant?

When COVID-19 hit in March, the federal government listed brothels, strip clubs and sex on premises businesses as prohibited venues. This obviously had dramatic and immediate implications for sex workers.

The different legal and pandemic situations around Australia have seen differing COVID-19 restrictions and support, state by state, confusing sex workers.

For example, sex workers have been able to continue working outside of brothels in NSW. In Queensland and Victoria, brothels were closed and private sex work was banned.

As national peak body Scarlet Alliance notes, sex workers predominantly work for sex industry businesses as independent contractors. Or they are sole traders who work for themselves. So, some sex workers have been eligible for the JobKeeper Payment or the JobSeeker Payment with its additional Coronavirus Supplement. But for others, government support has not been an option.

As Scarlet Alliance further explains, sex workers’ need for privacy and to protect themselves from stigma

can make it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for them to account for prior earnings if they now need urgent government support to survive.

Some sex workers have adapted their business model for the pandemic, by moving online. But the sex worker community is also hearing stories of sex workers facing homelessness and housing instability, along with difficulties buying food and basic items and paying bills.

The National Cabinet of Whores

As the pandemic took hold in Australia, sex workers quickly realised they would need to support themselves.

Read more: The right to bare arms: the history of Australian sex worker activism

In March, Scarlet Alliance, along with other Australian sex worker organisations, formed a working group known as “the National Cabinet of Whores”. Meeting every week, the Cabinet of Whores has developed advice around financial support, pandemic restrictions and back-to-work requirements.

It has also developed harm reduction advice for in-person work, such as not working if feeling unwell, screening clients and washing hands after touching money. These materials have also been translated into Chinese, Thai, Korean and Vietnamese.

The Cabinet of Whores has been crowdfunding to try and provide extra financial support for sex workers who have lost income and issued advice around transitioning to online, non-contact work. This includes webcam and phone sex work, offering social time on the phone or online and selling pictures and videos.

The importance of peer education

While some state governments have now developed COVID-safe plans for sex workers (led by sex workers), the public focus has been on policing the industry during the pandemic.

This emphasis damages ongoing efforts within the community to work safely.

The lack of clarity from governments about how and when services can re-open has also hurt efforts to help sex workers to earn an income and do it safely during COVID-19.

Read more: The stigma of sex work comes with a high cost

Sex workers have a strong tradition of working as a community to keep safe, supported and healthy.

Sex worker organising and peer education in Australia is already credited with excellent occupational health and safety, high condom use and low rates of sexually transmitted infections. Australia has virtually eliminated HIV in the sex worker population.

Importantly, research also shows how self-determination and peer education are more effective when it comes to protecting sex workers’ health, than criminalisation and police responses.

So, decriminalisation is key

COVID-19 has demonstrated once again how sex workers can mobilise to support themselves and reach marginalised members of their community.

However, it also shows how the patchwork of different laws in Australia can create confusion and makes things especially difficult in a crisis.

Rather than policing sex work, governments should focus instead on supporting peer education and harm reduction efforts. These are best practice models and are long-term solutions.

Sex workers are closely watching a Victorian government review, due to report in September, on the decriminalisation of sex work in the state. The campaign to decriminalise sex work in South Australia also continues. This week, the NSW Greens introduced a private members’ bill to protect sex workers from discrimination.

Full decriminalisation of sex work in Australia is critical. As this will enable all sex workers to access occupational work, health and safety protections and supports, just like other Australian employees.

This was important before COVID-19. It obviously even more critical now.

– ref. How the ‘National Cabinet of Whores’ is leading Australia’s coronavirus response for sex workers – https://theconversation.com/how-the-national-cabinet-of-whores-is-leading-australias-coronavirus-response-for-sex-workers-142833

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Cathy Foley, Chief Scientist, CSIRO

Universities and other research organisations in Australia have been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic.

In May, a group led by Australia’s Chief Scientist Alan Finkel forecasted severe impacts for our research workforce. These included the loss of the equivalent of up to 21,000 full-time jobs in universities this year, including around 7,000 related to research.

Read more: Universities are cutting hundreds of jobs – they, and the government, can do better

These effects are now becoming very real. Universities and other research institutions are losing income as international students disappear. Several universities have announced they will cut jobs, and plenty more are expected.

Recovering these jobs won’t be quick or easy. There will be lasting impacts on our research sector.

At the same time, however, science and technology are essential to the recovery from this crisis, and to the long-term future of our economy.

In 2019 CSIRO released our Australian National Outlook report, which identified the key areas to drive innovation to secure our future prosperity. It said we need to reinvent our industries to make us more unique and more profitable, or risk falling into slow decline. Little did we know we would already be in recession in 2020.

Future economic growth will depend on the creation of future industries such as advanced manufacturing, hydrogen, space and quantum technologies. Science, including social sciences, will also underpin the delivery of many public sector services, including water management, land management and defence.

Invest now to prepare for the future

Expertise doesn’t grow overnight. Australia’s response to COVID-19 has been led by scientists we invested in decades ago. To face the challenges of the future, we need to invest today in the people who will be the leaders of tomorrow.

Both men and women will be the leaders of the future. Evidence suggests women in STEM, who are already underrepresented, are being hit hard by COVID-19 impacts.

Read more: Chief Scientist: women in STEM are still far short of workplace equity. COVID-19 risks undoing even these modest gains

Supporting these women is a key to future success: research shows increasing the number of women in leadership positions by just 10% boosts a company’s market value by 6.6%, or an average of A$105 million. Extrapolate that across entire industries and you are going to get some big numbers.

One way forward

The best response to this crisis will vary for different organisations. CSIRO’s approach is to continue working with universities and business to run programs that grow Australia’s future STEM workforce.

Each year, CSIRO recruits around 100 graduates from STEM higher degrees as postdoctoral fellows. In the past 24 months we have recruited 155 of these, of whom just over a third are women.

This year we are making as many positions available as possible, as quickly as we can. We are currently recruiting 50 postdoctoral positions and we plan to advertise another 20 later in the year.

The challenge

Without a thriving science and technology sector, Australia will not generate the innovation that spurs economic growth.

There are many other postgraduate students looking for placements and jobs, as well as the university staff and academics who will potentially be retrenched.

These are highly skilled people and we need them in our workforce. Our challenge is to support them to be taken up in other sectors by organisations looking to boost research and development, or help them create new businesses of their own.

Continued investment in R&D during economic downturn can give industries and businesses a competitive edge.

Research by McKinsey following the 2008 downturn found organisations were reluctant to cut R&D activities, seeing them as a competitive advantage for future growth. Organisations that gained the greatest benefit from R&D expanded their programs.

With all these skilled researchers coming into the market, there is an opportunity for industry to take them on and increase business investment in R&D, which has fallen in recent years and left Australia well below the OECD average.

Read more: Can government actually predict the jobs of the future?

Either way, instead of letting this amazing workforce disappear, we have an opportunity to help them find a different pathway to impact, one that may also help Australian businesses boost the sophistication of their products at the same time. Lemons to lemonade, as they say.

We need our scientists now more than ever to help us develop the high-value industries that will secure our future jobs and prosperity.

We can’t let our future STEM skills become a casualty of COVID-19, or we will pay for it in decades to come.

– ref. We can’t let STEM skills become a casualty of COVID-19 – https://theconversation.com/we-cant-let-stem-skills-become-a-casualty-of-covid-19-143752

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicole Carnt, Scientia Senior Lecturer, School of Optometry and Vision Science, UNSW, Sydney, UNSW

You’re rushing and accidentally drop a contact lens on the bathroom floor. Should you:

a) run it under the tap and pop it in?

b) spit on it and do the same?

c) use the cleaning solution your optometrist insists you use?

d) replace it with a new lens?

e) do any of the above. It doesn’t really matter.

Don’t do what champion boxer and rugby league legend Anthony Mundine did in 2007 and go for (b) spit on your lens. He ended up in hospital with a severe eye infection.

If you chose c), it’s true that rubbing your lens with the cleaning solution for 20 seconds will remove some microbes. But you would need to soak the lenses in the solution for a minimum four to six hours to disinfect the lens effectively.

The best answer is d) replace with a new lens.

Running the lens under the tap, option a), risks your lens and eye becoming infected with a microorganism found in tapwater that could lead you to losing your sight.

Read more: Curious Kids: will I go blind if I shut my eyes and face the Sun?

Not all eye infections are harmless

Aren’t all eye infections conjunctivitis? Like the kids get, bit of redness, icky discharge, drops from chemist, all good after a week?

No. If your contact lens mixes with water, you could get a rare but severe infection called acanthamoeba keratitis.

Of the 680,000 contact lens wearers in Australia, we estimate 10-20 a year are affected by the condition.

Of these, we estimate about two to four people a year will need a transplant at the front of their eye to regain vision; about two to five people will need treatment for more than a year.

The condition mostly affects people who wear soft contact lenses, the main type worn in Australia.

We found about one-third of bathroom sinks in greater Sydney contain acanthamoeba. We assume it’s present in other parts of the country but no-one else has studied it so don’t know how common it is elsewhere in Australia.

Acanthamoeba are free-living protozoa (single-celled microorganisms) that feed on bacteria and cells at the front of the eye, the cornea. This leads to inflammation, disorganisation and destruction of the cornea, blocking vision.

The vast majority of acanthamoeba keratitis occurs in contact lens wearers.

But you can minimise your chance of getting it. Avoid exposing your lenses to water, including running them under the tap, in the shower or while swimming.

In fact, many new packs of contact lenses now carry “no water” warning stickers like the one below.

Another of our studies shows this particular warning sticker can change behaviour. Contact lens wearers who see this sticker are more likely to avoid water. Their contact lens storage cases were also less likely to be contaminated with bacteria, meaning less chance of bacterial infection and less food for acanthamoeba.

You can catch other eye infections too

While acanthamoeba infections are rare, bacterial eye infections are much more common, estimated to affect around four per 10,000 contact lens wearers a year.

About 13% of people whose eyes or contact lenses are infected with bacteria lose substantial vision. That’s equivalent to two lines or more on the vision chart optometrists use.

Read more: Explainer: what is conjunctivitis and how did I get it?

Most people’s infections improve in two to four weeks by using antibiotic drops.

However, bacterial infections can be severe and fast-acting. The main bacterium responsible for contact lens related infections is pseudomonas, another water-loving microorganism. It can sometimes burrow through the eye surface in hours.

There is no evidence to suggest wearing contact lenses increases your risk of being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19.

So how do I avoid all this?

These evidence-based tips for healthy contact lens wear will help you avoid infections:

• wash and dry your hands before handling lenses or touching your eyes

• rub, rinse and store contact lenses in fresh disinfecting solution. Topping up old solution with new is an infection risk

• clean your storage case with the disinfecting solution and leave to air dry upside down between uses

• don’t use water with lenses or cases

• avoid wearing your lenses overnight.

How do I know if I have a problem?

If your eyes sting, are red and watery, blurry or are otherwise uncomfortable while wearing your lenses, remove them.

If your symptoms get worse, visit an optometrist. GPs do not usually have equipment with enough magnification to diagnose potentially serious eye infections.

Pseudomonas is resistant to the strongest over-the-counter drops, chloramphenicol. But most optometrists can treat eye infections by prescribing eye drops and can refer you to an ophthalmologist (a specialist eye doctor) if needed.

– ref. How to keep your contact lenses clean (and what can go wrong if you don’t) – https://theconversation.com/how-to-keep-your-contact-lenses-clean-and-what-can-go-wrong-if-you-dont-141117

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Wayland, Lecturer, University of Sydney

As part of new research into missing persons in Australia, I have been asking people who return after disappearing what they needed or wanted. Mary, who has gone missing four times in the last few years, responded,

I just wanted someone to ask if I was OK when I came back.

Voices like Mary’s are not often heard, nor are their problems understood, when we talk about the mystery and intrigue of missing persons cases.

Every hour in Australia, 100 police reports are generated about the safety and well-being of a missing person. In the past decade, the rate of reports has increased by 30%, from 30,000 per year to almost 40,000 in 2019.

Nearly all missing persons (97%) return within two weeks, which causes these cases to be seen, by both the public and police, as simple search operations. Viewing missing persons in this way ignores the underlying issues that trigger disappearances, making prevention strategies more difficult to put in place.

As we mark National Missing Persons Week, we must recognise the need for new solutions to address the broader social and emotional factors that cause people to go missing to help stem the tide.

Missing episodes can be triggered by numerous factors: substance abuse, trauma, relationship breakdowns and the need to escape dangerous situations, such as domestic and family violence.

The responsibility for finding missing people usually falls to police and, in some circumstances, emergency search and rescue services. But police are often ill-equipped to handle these cases, especially when it involves searching for people with complex emotional health needs or those at risk of harming themselves.

These cases can also strain police and community resources. In 2000, each missing person was estimated to cost communities A$2,360 on average in search costs, loss of earnings while family members looked, and health and legal costs.

Our limited research in Australia can be enhanced by looking to other countries like Canada, where more funding has been invested in studying vulnerable population groups at risk of going missing.

This could help police more effectively respond to missing persons cases in partnership with health services.

What do returned missing people say?

Sarah Wayland (author of this piece) has been conducting research asking returned missing people to share their stories. In the last month, she has heard from 50 people who have painted a picture of vulnerability and disconnection that isn’t simply resolved when they return or are found.

A majority (80%) of respondents expressed shame on their return, explaining they didn’t want to be seen by family and friends, as well as those who helped search for them, as “attention seeking”.

Some also expressed frustration and anger at the lack of support services after they were found. As one respondent explained,

There’s no village and when you ask for help, no one is truly there to help, even though they say so.

Most respondents said they went missing primarily due to periods of distress or poor mental health, as well as in response to trauma in their families. Many chose not to tell others they were going to disappear.

Half of the respondents returned home on their own volition, while half were located by police.

Read more: Australia has 2,000 missing persons and 500 unidentified human remains – a dedicated lab could find matches

What researchers have found in Canada

In Canada, missing persons reports have remained relatively stable since 2015 — the first year national figures were collected — increasing by around 3% from 71,368 to 73,184 in 2019.

Lorna Ferguson and other Canadian researchers have found the vast majority of missing persons are dealing with mentally or emotionally distressing issues — similar to those in the Australian study.

Indigenous people (primarily women) and those struggling with addictions, mental illness or cognitive disabilities are also at a higher risk for going missing, research shows.

Read more: Missing and murdered Indigenous women inquiry: We must listen and act

Many of these mental and emotional health issues cannot be resolved by simply locating the individual, pointing to the strong need for enhanced strategies involving police and social services working together.

Several Canadian inquiries into missing persons have also noted the lack of international data on the number of people who go missing each year and the affect on police and public health resources. This makes it difficult to develop evidence-based prevention and intervention strategies to address the factors that cause people to disappear.

What can be done differently

1) Change the awareness focus

We need to view missing persons as a public health issue, rather than taking a whole of community approach. UK research has found that to be effective, awareness campaigns on missing persons must be targeted to doctors, mental health workers and emergency departments so they can recognise the signs that lead people to go missing earlier.

2) Enhance partnerships

Police and social workers need to work together to provide wraparound care. In both Australia and Canada, there is currently no routine follow-up care offered by health care professionals to missing people when they come back. Instead, police make referrals on a case-by-case basis depending on the health needs of the individual.

We need more effective partnerships between police and social workers, particularly in hot spots where people are more likely to go missing and when they return, to assist people in getting the help they need.

3) Invest more in research

We need to invest more funding in research on the factors that lead to disappearances, for instance, by conducting interviews with people who have returned. This will help us better understand the underlying triggers for disappearances and lead to more effective policies and services for those at risk of going missing.

– ref. ‘No one is truly there to help’: why so little is known about the reasons people go missing – https://theconversation.com/no-one-is-truly-there-to-help-why-so-little-is-known-about-the-reasons-people-go-missing-143615

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alistair Sisson, Postdoctoral Research Associate, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW

Social and public housing is intensely stigmatised in Australia and has been for several decades. Estates in particular are often labelled “ghettos”, framed as places of danger, drugs and vice.

This stigma can lead to discrimination against tenants and can harm their sense of self-worth, as shown in Australia and around the world.

But it’s not just the Pauline Hansons of this world who are responsible for reinforcing stigma.

Stigma is the product of government policies. It also serves government policies, like privatisation and redevelopment. Until we recognise that, we’ll struggle to remove it.

The source of the stigma

Public housing is stigmatised in many different ways, as we discovered when reviewing a decade of policy documents and media coverage.

Read more: Melbourne tower lockdowns unfairly target already vulnerable public housing residents

Since the 1970s, public housing has gone through a process of residualisation due to the declining number of dwellings and the tightening of eligibility criteria. In other words, it has become home to more and more people who are marginalised and disadvantaged and portrayed as:

[…] a detached underclass unwilling or unable to engage with labour market opportunities or mainstream norms and values.

There is also a view that concentrating disadvantaged people in one area can worsen the problems they face. Common but contested ideas about concentrated disadvantage and neighbourhood effects can lead to the stigmatisation of whole estates or neighbourhoods.

Racism has also added to the stigma of some estates over the last 50 years, as access for Indigenous people has improved and as non-white migrants have been permitted to immigrate.

Decline and design

Public housing can sometimes stand out due to poor maintenance, particularly in gentrifying areas where private housing is new or renovated.

Brutalist towers in inner cities and back-to-front Radburn estates in outer suburbs can also contrast with their wider neighbourhoods.

These stereotypes stem from policies from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s that encouraged public tenants to buy their homes.

But residents who lived in apartments were excluded from such schemes, and cheaply built homes on the urban fringe were less attractive to buy. So these two types of estates became the dominant images of public housing, especially in Sydney and Melbourne.

These policies also reveal how public housing is viewed as inferior to home ownership. Home owners are portrayed as independent and good citizens, despite extensive government subsidies.

Read more: As coronavirus widens the renter-owner divide, housing policies will have to change

Stigma in action

The stigmatisation of public housing has been reflected in several recent government policies.

For example, the shared spaces and facilities of the high-rise public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne, in Victoria, were used as justifications for the hard lockdown during the coronavirus outbreak. The tenants were represented as an exceptional risk requiring an exceptional response.

Police deployed 500 officers to enforce a lockdown of unprecedented severity, while apartment residents in other hotspots had more freedoms and forewarning.

The relocation and privatisation of public housing in Millers Point, in Sydney, NSW, was another case of governments using stigma to justify policy.

Read more: Last of the Millers Point and Sirius tenants hang on as the money now pours in

The NSW government claimed residents received huge subsidies compared to other public housing tenants. It argued this money could be used to fund more housing in cheaper places.

But as the Tenants’ Union of NSW pointed out, these subsidies were made to seem larger than they were by including the difference between market rents and tenants’ rents. The subsidies weren’t paid to residents and didn’t reflect the cost of providing housing.

Yet The Daily Telegraph’s Miranda Devine argued tenants living in higher-value areas were responsible for the long waiting list for public housing.

This misrepresents the huge magnitude of public housing shortages and distracts from chronic under-funding.

The break-up of public housing

Stigma has also been used to justify estate renewal. The demolition and redevelopment of estates like Waterloo in Sydney and Carlton in Melbourne, along with many others around the world, has been justified by the argument that tenants’ disadvantage can result from the cultures or environments of estates.

Breaking them up is presented as a solution to disadvantage and anti-social behaviour.

These arguments divert attention away from government failures in reducing poverty. They also mask the economic and financial objectives of redevelopment, which research suggests are the primary drivers.

Meanwhile, the harm to tenants is dismissed as a cost worth paying for new or better housing.

Solutions to stigma

By shifting blame for various problems onto public housing tenants and estates, stigma reinforces the status quo of inadequate funding and thus poor maintenance, dwindling supply and cannibalisation through redevelopment and privatisation.

It also obscures the culpability of governments and the failure of markets to provide affordable housing, adequate incomes and social support.

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

To destigmatise public housing, fundamental changes in our housing system are needed. Better design, maintenance and stories are helpful, but can only do so much.

Part of the solution is to end the preferential treatment of home ownership and to treat different tenures equally through housing and tax policy. The security, stability, quality and profitability of your home should not depend on whether you own it or rent it from a private landlord or a social one.

This starts with upgrading public housing and building much more for the hundreds of thousands on waiting lists and the many more who are struggling in privately rented or mortgaged homes.

– ref. Why public housing is stigmatised and how we can fix it – https://theconversation.com/why-public-housing-is-stigmatised-and-how-we-can-fix-it-142913

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

One of the many things COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on is the way many of us work.

Those fortunate enough to be able to work from home have been able to adapt to this new reality – and it certainly has been “new”.

Perhaps the biggest question for both employers and employees is whether working from home has led to a decrease in productivity.

The fact major companies such as Facebook and Twitter have said they will allow many employees to work from home permanently suggests work in some sectors can be done more efficiently outside a formal workplace.

Read more: Working from home: Twitter reveals why we’re embracing it

At a minimum, time saved from commuting and greater flexibility to multitask other elements of one’s life are positives from working from home. Lack of social interaction and the inevitable distractions in most home environments are negatives.

The degree and extent of increased productivity from working at home remains to be seen. It will depend on the way in which working in a team has evolved in a remote environment using online tools like Slack and Zoom.

The big question is how the nature of collaboration has changed under COVID.

Studying 3 million people

Thanks to a fascinating analysis by researchers from the Harvard Business School and New York University, we are beginning to get the first systematic evidence on how the nature of work has changed for those working from home during COVID-19.

The authors gathered aggregated meeting and email meta-data for 3,143,270 people working for 21,478 companies in 16 cities in Europe, the United States and Israel where government-mandated lockdowns were imposed in March.

As the authors put it:

These lockdowns established a clear break point after which we could infer that people were working from home. The earliest lockdown in our data occurred on March 8, 2020, in Milan, Italy, and the latest lockdown occurred on March 25, 2020, in Washington, DC.

To explore changes in worker behaviour, their analysis compares meeting and email data during the lockdown periods (typically a month long) with data for the eight weeks prior and the eight weeks after lockdowns ended.

The data they used came from “an information technology services provider that licenses digital communications solutions to organisations around the world”.

This meta-data indicates the actual behaviour of employees in real organisations. So it’s more robust than, say, a survey asking people what they did. Survey respondents might not remember accurately, or might not tell the truth, and those that respond may not be a representative sample.

In short, the meta-data enables the authors to draw detailed and interesting conclusions that survey data would allow.

It’s the detail of a paper like this that is, in a sense, the whole point. But the bottom line is this. Lockdowns have reduced the amount of time most workers spend in meetings, but increased their working hours.

Time in meetings

Their results show the number of meetings attended by workers increased, on average, by 12.9% during lockdown – with the average number of attendees per meeting increasing by 13.5%.

Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on meetings

But the average length of meetings fell by 20.1%, with the net effect being that people spent 11.5% less time in meetings.

In European cities such as Brussels, Oslo and Zurich, meeting length declined sharply and continued to fall in the month after the beginning of the lockdown. In the US cities of Chicago, New York and Washington DC, length of meetings declined less.

Read more: Teleworkability in Australia: 41% of full-time and 35% of part-time jobs can be done from home

Email and working hours

There was, also, a significant and seemingly durable increase in working hours, based on the number of hours between the first and last email sent or meeting attended by an individual in a day.

On average, the length of the average workday increased by 48.5 minutes.

Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on email

Longer workdays were common across the 16 cities during lockdowns. When restrictions were lifted, average hours returned closer to pre-lockdown levels in all but three cities – San Jose, Rome and New York City.

The evolving nature of work

It is perhaps too early to draw strong conclusions about these changing patterns of communication. But there are some intriguing possibilities.

Larger meetings may be needed to get “everyone on the same page” and create what economists call “common knowledge”. This may be both easier to do in phone or video conferences, and also more important in the absence of face-to-face communication.

Consistent with this, electronic communications extending beyond normal work hours seems like an inevitable consequence, albeit a negative one for work-life balance, particularly for people with caring responsibilities.

Read more: Forget work-life balance – it’s all about integration in the age of COVID-19

The nature of work was evolving before COVID-19, and it will continue to do so as many parts of the world continue with various forms of physical distancing.

Documenting the nature of that evolution, as well as the implications for productivity, workplace culture, and time outside of work will continue to be informed by remarkable data of the kind the authors analysed.

– ref. Vital Signs. Shorter meetings but longer days: how COVID-19 has changed the way we work – https://theconversation.com/vital-signs-shorter-meetings-but-longer-days-how-covid-19-has-changed-the-way-we-work-143894

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ian Moffat, ARC DECRA Senior Research Fellow in Archaeological Science, Flinders University

How did the first person evolve? Mabel, age 7, Anglesea, Victoria.

Hi Mabel, what a great question!

We know humans haven’t always been around. After all, we wouldn’t have survived alongside meat-eating dinosaurs like Tyrannosaurus rex.

How the first person came about – and who their ancestors were (their grandparents, great-grandparents and so on) – is one of the biggest questions archaeologists have. Even today, it puzzles us.

When all living things were tiny

When we think of how humans first came about, we have to first understand that almost every living thing evolved from something else through the process of evolution.

For instance, the first known example of life on Earth dates back more than 3.5 billion years.

Read more: A 3.5-billion year old Pilbara find is not the oldest fossil: so what is it?

This early life would have been in the form of tiny microbes (too small to see with just our eyes) that lived underwater in a very different world to today. At that time, the continents were still forming and there was no oxygen in the air.

Since then, life on Earth has changed incredibly and taken many forms.

In fact, for about a billion years during the middle part of Earth’s history (1.8 billion to 800 million years ago), life on Earth was nothing more than a large layer of slime.

A long, long lineage

All living humans today belong to a species called Homo sapiens.

However, we have a long line of family members called hominins who came before us – including our ancient human relative, the Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis).

Homo sapiens are the only hominin alive today.

Hominins first showed up millions of years ago, and changed in mostly small ways over a long time, through evolution.

Because of this complicated family tree, in answering your question we need to think about what you mean by “person”.

This may seem silly, because we know straight away when we pass someone on the street that they’re a person, rather than a dog or cat.

However, the differences between you and your early ancestor Lucy (more about her below) who lived more than 100,000 generations ago, are much smaller than the differences between a person and a dog. This is why the answer is complicated.

So I’m going to give you two answers and let you decide which you think is right.

You and I are Homo sapiens

The first answer is to assume the first “person” was the first member of our species, Homo sapiens. This person would have been just like you and me, but without an iPhone!

The oldest skeleton discovered of our species Homo sapiens (so far) is from Morocco and is about 300,000 years old.

This ancestor of ours would have lived at the same time as other members of the human family, including Neanderthals and Denisovans. Archaeologists have long argued about what makes us different to these other ancient types of humans.

Read more: How we discovered that Neanderthals could make art

The answer probably lies in our brains. We think Homo sapiens are the only species that can do things like create art and language – although some recent discoveries suggest Neanderthals were artists too.

It’s hard to know why Homo sapiens survived and the rest of our hominin family didn’t. But there’s a good chance the creativity that led to some wonderful early cave paintings found in France and Indonesia helped us to succeed over the last 100,000 years.

Old Lucy

Another way to answer your question is by assuming the first “person” was the first hominin to split off from the rest of our extended family, which includes chimpanzees and gorillas.

We can’t be sure exactly who our first ancestor was, but many scientists think Australopithecus afarensis is a good bet.

This species would have looked different to you and me, but still would have walked upright and used tools made of stone. The best example of this is a famous fossil skeleton called Lucy.

When Lucy was alive about 3.18 million years ago she was covered in hair. And she was probably about the same height as you are now, even though her bones tell us she was an adult when she died.

Her skeleton was found in Africa, and while we have a lot of it compared to other ancient hominin skeletons, it’s not complete. This makes it hard to work out who the first “person” was.

Most fossils from Lucy’s time are incomplete, and we only have a handful of bones to study from each extinct species.

This is why every new discovery in archaeology is so exciting. Each new fossil gives us a new chance to put the puzzle of our family tree together.

– ref. Curious Kids: how did the first person evolve? – https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-how-did-the-first-person-evolve-142735

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jed Montayre, Senior Lecturer (Nursing), Western Sydney University

COVID-19 is continuing to devastate Victorian aged-care homes, with 1,435 active cases now linked to the sector, and at least 130 residents having died.

The question of whether to automatically move residents with COVID-19 out of aged-care homes and into hospital has divided public and expert opinion.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to consider.

Read more: 4 steps to avert a full-blown coronavirus disaster in Victoria’s aged care homes

Different states have different policies

South Australia pledges to send any resident who tests positive for COVID-19 to hospital.

In New South Wales, a resident who tests positive is to be immediately assessed by the facility management, public health and local hospital services to plan the initial response — whether that’s a transfer to hospital or remaining at the home.

Victorian policy is similar. The public health officer responding to an outbreak notification will assess the patient and assist with this decision.

As of the beginning of this week, more than 300 Victorian aged-care residents with COVID-19 had been transferred to hospital. But that leaves a similar number remaining at home.

Certainly no other state is facing the pressure Victoria is to get this response right.

What can hospitals offer that aged-care homes can’t?

Specialist treatment

COVID-19 is a serious infection with very high death rates among frail older people.

While aged-care homes can provide a degree of nursing and medical care, hospitals are best positioned to provide specialist treatment and the sophisticated interventions many patients will need.

Better infection control measures

Arguably the key reason to move an infected resident to hospital is to stop COVID-19 spreading to other residents and staff. Aged-care settings are not conducive to infection control in the same way hospitals are.

First, they’re not designed like hospitals. As well as not having the same clinical features, many aged-care facilities follow a “boutique” design with common areas for gatherings and events. Residents and staff can easily congregate in these spaces.

The best efforts to isolate a resident with COVID-19 in aged care could easily be compromised. For example, it’s common for residents with dementia to wander in the corridors. Being contained may exacerbate these sort of behaviours among confused and anxious residents.

More highly trained nurses

Staff shortages in aged care were well documented even before the pandemic. A further depleted workforce during COVID-19 — due to staff off work and restrictions on working across multiple facilities — likely means they’re stretched even thinner. Staff may not always have the capacity to supervise isolated residents or follow infection control procedures.

The much higher ratio of highly trained nursing staff in hospitals should ensure better adherence to the guidelines around proper use of personal protective equipment.

For example, registered nurses in aged-care facilities don’t usually provide direct care to residents. Instead they supervise care provided by unregulated staff often with limited infection control training.

Read more: View from The Hill: Aged care crisis reflects poor preparation and a broken system

What are the disadvantages of hospital transfers?

Older people benefit from carers who know them

The care people receive in aged-care homes relies significantly on staff knowing the residents’ personal and clinical profiles. Aged-care facilities promote person centred care models, which value residents’ rights while striving to create a home-like environment.

Familiar faces who understand residents’ personal preferences may be particularly valuable during a time when residents aren’t able to see their loved ones.

Introducing a completely new environment during an illness, particularly for residents with dementia, may do more harm than good.

Limited knowledge about the resident could lead to unmet needs while in hospital, which could trigger behaviours that are difficult to manage.

For older adults with dementia, the likelihood of incidents like falls and infections increases when they’re admitted to hospital.

Read more: Social housing, aged care and Black Americans: how coronavirus affects already disadvantaged groups

The hospital perspective

Importantly, hospitals may not be able to cope with such a large influx of aged-care residents at one time. The rising numbers of COVID-19 cases from the general population, including older adults living in the community, have already put the health system under a lot of stress.

So there’s an argument that if COVID-19 cases can be managed within the aged-care home, they should be, to avert pressure from the hospital system.

Worryingly though, we’ve seen reports of the health department denying requests for aged-care residents with COVID-19 to be transferred to hospital.

Respecting autonomy and the right for care

On balance, as much as possible, it’s probably be better to transfer residents to hospital as soon as they test positive to COVID-19. This offers the best chance of preventing widespread infection among other residents and staff, and disease spread from the home into the community.

But we must also respect residents’ autonomy. They might have requested not to be transferred to hospital, even if their illness is life-threatening, by way of an advanced care directive. This might still be their wish, or the preference of their relatives and decision-makers.

Conversely, residents or their surrogate decision-makers might request hospital care, even when care is possible within the home. Again, we argue this is their right.

We should also allow people to change their minds, as these decisions may have been agreed upon before the pandemic.

Read more: Banning visitors to aged care during coronavirus raises several ethical questions – with no simple answers

– ref. Should all aged-care residents with COVID-19 be moved to hospital? Probably, but there are drawbacks too – https://theconversation.com/should-all-aged-care-residents-with-covid-19-be-moved-to-hospital-probably-but-there-are-drawbacks-too-143826

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Baker, Professor of Public Health, University of Otago

On Sunda

Your heading here

, New Zealand will mark 100 days without community transmission of COVID-19.

From the first known case imported into New Zealand on February 26 to the last case of community transmission detected on May 1, elimination took 65 days.

New Zealand relied on three types of measures to get rid of the virus:

1. ongoing border controls to stop COVID-19 from entering the country

2. a lockdown and physical distancing to stop community transmission

3. case-based controls using testing, contact tracing and quarantine.

Collectively, these measures have achieved low case numbers and deaths compared with high-income countries in Europe and North America that pursued a suppression strategy.

New Zealand is one of a small number of jurisdictions – including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Vietnam, Mongolia, Australia and Fiji – pursuing COVID-19 containment or elimination. Most have had new outbreaks. The exceptions are Taiwan, Fiji and New Zealand.

Australia adopted very similar responses to the pandemic and it is important to note that most states and territories are in the same position as New Zealand. But Victoria and, to a lesser extent, New South Wales are seeing a significant resurgence.

Read more: Two weeks of mandatory masks, but a record 725 new cases: why are Melbourne’s COVID-19 numbers so stubbornly high?

The key difference is that New Zealand committed relatively early to a clearly articulated elimination strategy and pursued it aggressively. An intense lockdown proved highly effective at rapidly extinguishing the virus.

This difference can be seen graphically in this stringency index published by Oxford University’s Our World in Data.

There are key lessons from New Zealand’s COVID-19 experience.

A vigorous, decisive response to the pandemic was highly effective at minimising cases and deaths. New Zealand has the lowest COVID-19 death rate in the OECD.

Total all-cause deaths also dropped during the lockdown. This observation suggests it did not have severe negative effects on health, although it will almost certainly have some negative long-term effects.

Elimination of the virus appears to have allowed New Zealand to return to near-normal operation fairly rapidly, minimised economic damage compared with Australia. But the economic impact is likely to keep playing out over the coming months.

Getting through the pandemic

We have gained a much better understanding of COVID-19 over the past eight months. Without effective control measures, it is likely to continue to spread globally for many months to years, ultimately infecting billions and killing millions. The proportion of infected people who die appears to be slightly below 1%.

The infection can cause serious long-term consequences for some people. The largest uncertainties involve immunity to this virus, whether it can develop from exposure to infection or vaccines, and if it is long-lasting. The potential for treatment with antivirals and other therapeutics is also still uncertain.

This knowledge reinforces the huge benefits of sustaining elimination. We know that if New Zealand were to experience widespread COVID-19 transmission, the impact on Māori and Pasifika populations could be catastrophic.

We have previously described critical measures to get us through this period, including the use of fabric face masks, improving contact tracing with suitable digital tools, applying a science-based approach to border management, and the need for a dedicated national public health agency.

Read more: New Zealand hits zero active coronavirus cases. Here are 5 measures to keep it that way

Maintaining elimination depends on adopting a highly strategic approach to risk management. This approach involves choosing an optimal mix of interventions and using resources in the most efficient way to keep the risk of COVID-19 outbreaks at a consistently low level. Several measures can contribute to this goal over the next few months, while also allowing incremental increases in international travel:

• resurgence planning for a border-control failure and outbreaks of various sizes, with state-of-the-art contact tracing and an upgraded alert level system

• ensuring all New Zealanders own a re-useable fabric face mask with their use built into the alert level system

• conducting exercises and simulations to test outbreak management procedures, possibly including “mass masking days” to engage the public in the response

• carefully exploring processes to allow quarantine-free travel between jurisdictions free of COVID-19, notably various Pacific Islands, Tasmania and Taiwan (which may require digital tracking of arriving travellers for the first few weeks)

• planning for carefully managed inbound travel by key long-term visitor groups such as tertiary students who would generally still need managed quarantine.

Building back better

New Zealand cannot change the reality of the global COVID-19 pandemic. But it can leverage possible benefits.

We should conduct an official inquiry into the COVID-19 response so we learn everything we possibly can to improve our response capacity for future events.

We also need to establish a specialised national public health agency to manage serious threats to public health and provide critical mass to advance public health generally. Such an agency appears to have been a key factor in the success of Taiwan, which avoided a costly lockdown entirely.

Business as usual should not be an option for the recovery phase. A recent Massey University survey suggests seven out of ten New Zealanders support a green recovery approach.

New Zealand’s elimination of COVID-19 has drawn attention worldwide. We are about to publish an overview of the approach in the New England Journal of Medicine. We support a rejuvenated World Health Organization that could roll out an elimination model in other countries where there is public support for this approach.

– ref. 100 days without COVID-19: how New Zealand got rid of a virus that keeps spreading across the world – https://theconversation.com/100-days-without-covid-19-how-new-zealand-got-rid-of-a-virus-that-keeps-spreading-across-the-world-143672

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Fuhrer, Professor of Physics, Monash University

Coronavirus lockdowns have led to a massive reduction in global emissions, but there’s one area where energy usage is up – way up – during the pandemic: internet traffic.

Data-intensive video streaming, gaming and livestreaming for business, university and school classes, is chewing up energy.

Read more: Netflix has capitalized on social isolation, but will its success continue in a post-coronavirus world?

Estimates can be notoriously difficult and depend on the electricity source, but six hours of streaming video may be the equivalent of burning one litre of petrol, due to emissions from the electricity used to power the data centres which deliver the video.

In fact, the energy associated with the global IT sector – from powering internet servers to charging smartphones – is estimated to have the same carbon footprint as the aviation industry’s fuel emissions (before planes were grounded).

But Australia is a global leader in research to lower the energy used in IT, which is vital for meeting the streaming demand without the environmental cost.

Where does the data come from?

Video requires huge amounts of data, and accounts for around 80% of the data transmitted on the internet. Much of the energy needed for streaming services is consumed by data centres, which deliver data to your computer or device. Increasingly housed in vast factory-sized buildings, these servers store, process and distribute internet traffic.

Research in 2015 found data centres may consume as much as 13% of the world’s electricity by 2030, accounting for about 6% of global carbon dioxide emissions. And the European Commission-funded Eureca project found data centres in EU countries consumed 25% more energy in 2017 compared with 2014.

Imagine what those figures will look like at the end of this year of home-bound internet use.

Read more: Where’s your data? It’s not actually in the cloud, it’s sitting in a data centre

Meeting demands with Moore’s law

The growth in IT is often taken for granted. In contrast to the old days of dial-up internet, we now demand a three-hour movie, in high definition, to download immediately. We want phones that can take video like a pro.

None of this is free. Nor is it sustainable. Every year the number of computations, or transmission of information through space, done globally, increases by 60%, according to 2011 research.

All this computation uses “transistors”. These are tiny switches that amplify electrical signals, and are made using silicon-based technology.

For the past 40 years, our ever-increasing need for more computing was largely satisfied by incremental improvements in silicon-based computing technology – ever-smaller, ever-faster, ever-more efficient chips. We refer to this constant shrinking of silicon components as “Moore’s law”.

For example, since the late 1970s the length of transistors reduces by about 30%, and the area by about 50%, every two years. This shrinks the energy used in switching on and off each transistor by about 50%, which is better for the environment.

While each transistor uses only a tiny amount of energy, there are billions of transistors in a typical computer chip, each switching billions of time per second. This can add up to a vast amount of energy.

We need better chips

Recently it has become much harder (and much more expensive) to pursue such trends, and the number of companies pursuing smaller components is dropping off rapidly.

Globally, four companies manufactured chips with 14 nanometre (nm) transistors in 2014, but in recent years they’ve struggled to continue shrinking the size of silicon transistors. Global Foundries dropped out of this race altogether in 2018, and Intel experienced enormous problems with manufacturing at 10 nm. That leaves only two companies (Samsung and TSMC) making 7 nm transistors today.

So the answer isn’t to switch off Netflix. The answer is to create better computer chips.

But we’ve got everything we can out of silicon, so we need to use something else. If we want computing to continue to grow, we need new, energy-efficient computers.

Australia is a leader in low-energy solutions

Australia is leading the world in this new field to replace conventional electronics. The ARC Centre of Excellence in Future Low-Energy Electronics Technologies (FLEET) was established in 2017 to address exactly this challenge.

Last year scientists at FLEET published research in Nature revealing the discovery that the “topological” material sodium-bismuthide could be the key to achieving ultra-low energy electronics.

These so-called topological insulators, which led to a 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics, conduct electricity only along their edges, and in one direction, without loss of energy due to resistance.

This discovery is a first step towards the development of a low-energy replacement for conventional silicon-based electronics.

Read more: Why are scientists so excited about a recently claimed quantum computing milestone?

Other top research centres in Australia are addressing different parts of this challenge. For example, one centre is working to reduce the energy used in ubiquitous communication of digital data. Another two are taking a different tack, developing an entirely new quantum technology for computing which promises to enormously speed up, and improve the efficiency of, certain difficult computing tasks.

Other countries are equally focused on developing alternatives to the unsustainable need for better and faster electronics, since we cannot sustain the energy needed for these existing and future technologies.

All of these technologies are still confined to specialised laboratories and are probably at least a decade away from finding their way into everyday devices. But we don’t expect the demand for computing to go away, and the energy problem in IT will only become more urgent.

– ref. Bingeing Netflix under lockdown? Here’s why streaming comes at a cost to the environment – https://theconversation.com/bingeing-netflix-under-lockdown-heres-why-streaming-comes-at-a-cost-to-the-environment-143190

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Deanne Gannaway, Senior Lecturer in Higher Education, The University of Queensland

The federal government’s proposed increase in the cost of studying humanities and communications degrees at Australian universities has stirred much debate. One aspect that should not be overlooked is that these changes will disproportionately affect women.

Under the proposed changes, student contributions for social science, communications and humanities (not including English and psychology) will increase by A$7,696 per year. That’s double their current cost.

Read more: If the government listened to business leaders, they would encourage humanities education, not pull funds from it

Pushing women into STEM?

The government’s proposal has already been described as social engineering, given the government’s declared aim is to boost numbers of graduates in areas of expected employment growth, including teaching, nursing, agriculture, STEM and IT. The intention of lowering fees in these areas appears to be to attract more students to study these disciplines in preference to humanities.

If the idea is to encourage students to leave the humanities and study science instead, it’s a flawed approach. It would take a lot more than simply changing the cost of study to attract women to the field.

Women remain underrepresented at only 27% of the STEM workforce across all sectors, despite a range of initiatives designed to improve the balance.

For women, the real deterrent to studying STEM-related disciplines is related to employment outcomes and conditions, and challenges in even entering a STEM-based workforce. STEM women are likely to earn less than their male counterparts and also face poorer pay prospects than those who study humanities.

Perhaps more importantly, women in STEM have few examples of role models who clearly own the STEM space – reinforcing a notion that STEM-based work is male-dominated.

Read more: Women in STEM need your support – and Australia needs women in STEM

Pushing women away from humanities?

Increasing the costs of the humanities, then, might not push people into STEM or into areas such as nursing or education. But it might push them away from studying the humanities, and away from the vital work they do in a range of industries.

According to the federal government’s 2019 Graduate Outcomes Survey, 64.2% of humanities graduates were in a full-time position six months out from graduation. Many were employed in positions in public administration, education, business, health and science and technology – the very industries the proposed changes target. In these roles, they draw on skill sets acquired in their humanities degrees; skills that are remarkably similar to those Industry 4.0 capabilities employers are crying out for.

Read more: How the humanities can equip students for the fourth industrial revolution

Women earn less, and will pay more

Raising costs of studies in the humanities means these disciplines will shore up an effective reduction in government funding. In the longer term, women will bear the costs of this “saving”.

Read more: The government would save $1 billion a year with proposed university reforms — but that’s not what it’s telling us

The reality is that humanities and social science disciplines attract more students than any other subject areas – the majority of whom are women. Women have consistently represented the bulk of enrolments in humanities and social science disciplines over the past ten years. In 2018, they accounted for two-thirds of enrolled students.

Consequently, under the government’s proposal, many women will pay more for their tuition and yet they are likely to earn less than men.

Gender roles continue to have an impact on the career trajectories and earning potential of women in Australia. Even though this gender pay gap is narrowing, primary child-caring roles and responsibilities — including taking time away from work, working part-time or leaving the workforce completely — are mainly assumed by, and expected of, women.

As a result, female university graduates earn, on average, 27% less than men over their careers. This means women take longer to pay off their student debt.

The Australian university debt scheme is often praised because it doesn’t incur interest rates or have a timeline for repayment. However, the tangible effects of a larger debt mean women humanities graduates will be in debt for longer. They will have less disposable income for longer. And they will have limited capacity to invest money, and so expand income, for longer.

The argument that programs that traditionally attract more women – such as nursing and education – will be made cheaper, and therefore more accessible, doesn’t stack up either. Because there are more women in humanities-based degrees than other programs, the proposed changes still mean women will bear the brunt of these increases. Or be forced out of higher education if their calling isn’t teaching or nursing.

Making higher education unaffordable for women just adds to a raft of conditions that already ensure inequalities.

Read more: An open letter to Australia’s Education Minister Dan Tehan — signed by 73 senior professors

– ref. Why degree cost increases will hit women hardest – https://theconversation.com/why-degree-cost-increases-will-hit-women-hardest-141614

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alistair Sisson, Postdoctoral Research Associate, City Futures Research Centre, UNSW

Social and public housing is intensely stigmatised in Australia and has been for several decades. Estates in particular are often labelled “ghettos”, framed as places of danger, drugs and vice.

This stigma can lead to discrimination against tenants and can harm their sense of self-worth, as shown in Australia and around the world.

But it’s not just the Pauline Hansons of this world who are responsible for reinforcing stigma.

Stigma is the product of government policies. It also serves government policies, like privatisation and redevelopment. Until we recognise that, we’ll struggle to remove it.

The source of the stigma

Public housing is stigmatised in many different ways, as we discovered when reviewing a decade of policy documents and media coverage.

Read more: Melbourne tower lockdowns unfairly target already vulnerable public housing residents

Since the 1970s, public housing has gone through a process of residualisation due to the declining number of dwellings and the tightening of eligibility criteria. In other words, it has become home to more and more people who are marginalised and disadvantaged and portrayed as:

[…] a detached underclass unwilling or unable to engage with labour market opportunities or mainstream norms and values.

There is also a view that concentrating disadvantaged people in one area can worsen the problems they face. Common but contested ideas about concentrated disadvantage and neighbourhood effects can lead to the stigmatisation of whole estates or neighbourhoods.

Racism has also added to the stigma of some estates over the last 50 years, as access for Indigenous people has improved and as non-white migrants have been permitted to immigrate.

Decline and design

Public housing can sometimes stand out due to poor maintenance, particularly in gentrifying areas where private housing is new or renovated.

Brutalist towers in inner cities and back-to-front Radburn estates in outer suburbs can also contrast with their wider neighbourhoods.

These stereotypes stem from policies from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s that encouraged public tenants to buy their homes.

But residents who lived in apartments were excluded from such schemes, and cheaply built homes on the urban fringe were less attractive to buy. So these two types of estates became the dominant images of public housing, especially in Sydney and Melbourne.

These policies also reveal how public housing is viewed as inferior to home ownership. Home owners are portrayed as independent and good citizens, despite extensive government subsidies.

Read more: As coronavirus widens the renter-owner divide, housing policies will have to change

Stigma in action

The stigmatisation of public housing has been reflected in several recent government policies.

For example, the shared spaces and facilities of the high-rise public housing towers in Flemington and North Melbourne, in Victoria, were used as justifications for the hard lockdown during the coronavirus outbreak. The tenants were represented as an exceptional risk requiring an exceptional response.

Police deployed 500 officers to enforce a lockdown of unprecedented severity, while apartment residents in other hotspots had more freedoms and forewarning.

The relocation and privatisation of public housing in Millers Point, in Sydney, NSW, was another case of governments using stigma to justify policy.

Read more: Last of the Millers Point and Sirius tenants hang on as the money now pours in

The NSW government claimed residents received huge subsidies compared to other public housing tenants. It argued this money could be used to fund more housing in cheaper places.

But as the Tenants’ Union of NSW pointed out, these subsidies were made to seem larger than they were by including the difference between market rents and tenants’ rents. The subsidies weren’t paid to residents and didn’t reflect the cost of providing housing.

Yet The Daily Telegraph’s Miranda Devine argued tenants living in higher-value areas were responsible for the long waiting list for public housing.

This misrepresents the huge magnitude of public housing shortages and distracts from chronic under-funding.

The break-up of public housing

Stigma has also been used to justify estate renewal. The demolition and redevelopment of estates like Waterloo in Sydney and Carlton in Melbourne, along with many others around the world, has been justified by the argument that tenants’ disadvantage can result from the cultures or environments of estates.

Breaking them up is presented as a solution to disadvantage and anti-social behaviour.

These arguments divert attention away from government failures in reducing poverty. They also mask the economic and financial objectives of redevelopment, which research suggests are the primary drivers.

Meanwhile, the harm to tenants is dismissed as a cost worth paying for new or better housing.

Solutions to stigma

By shifting blame for various problems onto public housing tenants and estates, stigma reinforces the status quo of inadequate funding and thus poor maintenance, dwindling supply and cannibalisation through redevelopment and privatisation.

It also obscures the culpability of governments and the failure of markets to provide affordable housing, adequate incomes and social support.

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

To destigmatise public housing, fundamental changes in our housing system are needed. Better design, maintenance and stories are helpful, but can only do so much.

Part of the solution is to end the preferential treatment of home ownership and to treat different tenures equally through housing and tax policy. The security, stability, quality and profitability of your home should not depend on whether you own it or rent it from a private landlord or a social one.

This starts with upgrading public housing and building much more for the hundreds of thousands on waiting lists and the many more who are struggling in privately rented or mortgaged homes.

– ref. Why public housing is stigmatised and how can we fix it – https://theconversation.com/why-public-housing-is-stigmatised-and-how-can-we-fix-it-142913

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW

One of the many things COVID-19 has had a dramatic impact on is the way many of us work.

Those fortunate enough to be able to work from home have been able to adapt to this new reality – and it certainly has been “new”.

Perhaps the biggest question for both employers and employees is whether working from home has led to a decrease in productivity.

The fact major companies such as Facebook and Twitter have said they will allow many employees to work from home permanently suggests work in some sectors can be done more efficiently outside a formal workplace.

Read more: Working from home: Twitter reveals why we’re embracing it

At a minimum, time saved from commuting and greater flexibility to multitask other elements of one’s life are positives from working from home. Lack of social interaction and the inevitable distractions in most home environments are negatives.

The degree and extent of increased productivity from working at home remains to be seen. It will depend on the way in which working in a team has evolved in a remote environment using online tools like Slack and Zoom.

The big question is how the nature of collaboration has changed under COVID.

Studying 3 million people

Thanks to a fascinating analysis by researchers from the Harvard Business School and New York University, we are beginning to get the first systematic evidence on how the nature of work has changed for those working from home during COVID-19.

The authors gathered aggregated meeting and email meta-data for 3,143,270 people working for 21,478 companies in 16 cities in Europe, the United States and Israel where government-mandated lockdowns were imposed in March.

As the authors put it:

These lockdowns established a clear break point after which we could infer that people were working from home. The earliest lockdown in our data occurred on March 8, 2020, in Milan, Italy, and the latest lockdown occurred on March 25, 2020, in Washington, DC.

To explore changes in worker behaviour, their analysis compares meeting and email data during the lockdown periods (typically a month long) with data for the eight weeks prior and the eight weeks after lockdowns ended.

The data they used came from “an information technology services provider that licenses digital communications solutions to organisations around the world”.

This meta-data indicates the actual behaviour of employees in real organisations. So it’s more robust than, say, a survey asking people what they did. Survey respondents might not remember accurately, or might not tell the truth, and those that respond may not be a representative sample.

In short, the meta-data enables the authors to draw detailed and interesting conclusions that survey data would allow.

It’s the detail of a paper like this that is, in a sense, the whole point. But the bottom line is this. Lockdowns have reduced the amount of time most workers spend in meetings, but increased their working hours.

Time in meetings

Their results show the number of meetings attended by workers increased, on average, by 12.9% during lockdown – with the average number of attendees per meeting increasing by 13.5%.

Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on meetings

But the average length of meetings fell by 20.1%, with the net effect being that people spent 11.5% less time in meetings.

In European cities such as Brussels, Oslo and Zurich, meeting length declined sharply and continued to fall in the month after the beginning of the lockdown. In the US cities of Chicago, New York and Washington DC, length of meetings declined less.

Read more: Teleworkability in Australia: 41% of full-time and 35% of part-time jobs can be done from home

Email and working hours

There was, also, a significant and seemingly durable increase in working hours, based on the number of hours between the first and last email sent or meeting attended by an individual in a day.

On average, the length of the average workday increased by 48.5 minutes.

Impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on email

Longer workdays were common across the 16 cities during lockdowns. When restrictions were lifted, average hours returned closer to pre-lockdown levels in all but three cities – San Jose, Rome and New York City.

The evolving nature of work

It is perhaps too early to draw strong conclusions about these changing patterns of communication. But there are some intriguing possibilities.

Larger meetings may be needed to get “everyone on the same page” and create what economists call “common knowledge”. This may be both easier to do in phone or video conferences, and also more important in the absence of face-to-face communication.

Consistent with this, electronic communications extending beyond normal work hours seems like an inevitable consequence, albeit a negative one for work-life balance, particularly for people with caring responsibilities.

Read more: Forget work-life balance – it’s all about integration in the age of COVID-19

The nature of work was evolving before COVID-19, and it will continue to do so as many parts of the world continue with various forms of physical distancing.

Documenting the nature of that evolution, as well as the implications for productivity, workplace culture, and time outside of work will continue to be informed by remarkable data of the kind the authors analysed.

– ref. Shorter meetings but longer days: how COVID-19 has changed the way we work – https://theconversation.com/shorter-meetings-but-longer-days-how-covid-19-has-changed-the-way-we-work-143894

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Program Director, Household Finances, Grattan Institute

A big part of the Morrison government’s response to COVID-19 has been allowing people early access to their superannuation.

Australians who have claimed hardship have applied for A$30.7 billion to date.

This has been happening in an environment in which compulsory super contributions are set to climb from 9.5% of wages to 12% over the next five years starting in July next year.

Many in the super industry and former prime minister Paul Keating argue that these scheduled increases have to go ahead in order to repair the damage done to the super balances of Australians who withdrew super.

However, new Grattan Institute modelling shows most Australians will have a comfortable retirement even if they have spent some of their super early.

Withdrawals cost less than you might think

Under the government’s scheme, people who have lost their job or had their hours cut or trading income cut by 20% or more were allowed to withdraw up to $10,000 from their super between April and June, and up to another $10,000 between July and December.

More than 500,000 have cleared out their super accounts entirely. Treasury expects total withdrawals to reach $42 billion.

Retirement incomes will fall for workers who withdraw their super, but not by as much as might be thought.

The pension means test means that the government, via higher pension payments, makes up much of what’s lost.

Read more: Why we should worry less about retirement – and leave super at 9.5%

The result is that a typical (median income) 35 year old who takes the full $20,000 would see their retirement balance fall by around $58,000 but would see their actual income over retirement would fall by only $24,000.

Put another way, in retirement that worker would earn 88% of their pre-retirement income instead of 89%.

Both are well above the 70% post-tax replacement benchmark used by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Mercer Global Pension Index to determine how much is needed in retirement.

Workers on median incomes who withdraw the full $20,000 will remain well above that benchmark, even with compulsory super contributions staying where they are, at 9.5% of salary.

The very highest and very lowest income earners will receive less extra pension to compensate, and will have less of a cushion.

For most, 9.5% will remain enough

Defaults such as compulsory contributions have to be set so they work for most of the population.

While around one in five Australians have accessed their super early, four in five have not. Policy makers can only justify forcibly lowering someone’s living standards during their working life – by lifting compulsory super – if they are protecting that person from an even worse outcome in retirement.

Our modelling shows workers on all but the highest incomes will retire on incomes at least 70% of their pre-retirement post-tax earnings, the so-called replacement standard.

The graph shows that many low-income workers will receive a pay rise when they retire, even if they withdraw the full $20,000 from super.

Of course, some low-income Australians remain at risk of poverty in retirement – especially those who rent. They struggle even more before they retire.

Boosting rent assistance would do far more to help them than would higher compulsory super contributions, and would do less to make them poor while working.

COVID is another reason to keep super where it is

Before COVID-19, there were good reasons to abandon the planned increases in compulsory super; among them that it would do little to boost the retirement incomes of many Australians, that it would drain government tax revenues and widen the gender gap in retirement incomes.

COVID provides another reason. Previous Grattan work has shown that higher super comes at the expense of future wage increases. It’s a conclusion the Reserve Bank has also reached.

Read more: Think superannuation comes from employers’ pockets? It comes from yours

The retirement income review at present with the government is likely to come to the same conclusion.

Increasing compulsory super contributions in the midst of a deep recession would slow the pace of recovery. And that would be bad news for all Australians, regardless of how much we end up with in super.

– ref. Early access to super doesn’t justify higher compulsory contributions – https://theconversation.com/early-access-to-super-doesnt-justify-higher-compulsory-contributions-143087

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robert Phiddian, Professor of English, Flinders University

For a long time, the answer has been yes. When Saturday Night Live, John Oliver and the satirical establishment railed at him, the president’s supporters were only strengthened in their belief there was a highbrow plot against their guy. Trump met anger with anger, and the effect of satire on public opinion played out to a very noisy draw.

Now, however, three months out from the election in this most bizarre of years, the wheels may be falling off the Trump bandwagon. And satirists like Sarah Cooper, with her brilliantly economical lip-synching of the president’s speeches, seem to be adding to the Trump campaign’s problems in politically effective ways.

Satire might be biting back, at least to the extent of nipping at Trump’s heels, while The Virus and his response to it are breaking his image as a strong leader.

Those of us who enjoy satires like to imagine that the good ones (that is, the ones that make us laugh) change minds and form public opinion. This silver bullet effect, though possible, is extremely rare, as the long experiment in combative public rhetoric called the Trump presidency has demonstrated.

The case for yes (satire is broken)

Satire makes us laugh, so we conflate it with comedy, which also makes us laugh. However, the laughter of satire is essentially “laughing at”, rather than the “laughing with” of benign and joyous comedy. It is more critical and appeals to harsher emotions in the audience. To be specific about the satirical element of cartoons, essays, sketches, and the rest – it mobilises the emotions labelled by psychologists “the CAD triad” of contempt, anger, and disgust.

Satirists dream that the objects of their critique will shrivel under the coruscating force of their truth. This seldom happens, and never with experienced public figures. Mostly politicians ignore the satire or try to laugh it off, giving the real or fake impression they are good sports. Mostly their supporters ignore or reject it. Meanwhile, those already disposed to agree with the satire go along for the emotional ride. They vent their anger, contempt, or disgust on the person or behaviour of the target, and political life in countries with free-ish media rumbles on.

John Clarke and Bryan Dawe fed the discontent of the discontented through seven prime ministerships over nearly 30 years. The format didn’t tire because a public appetite for satire at the expense of the powerful is ever present.

It is an important part of the ecology of liberal democracies when they are functioning well, and a more urgent one in times of malfunction. It cheers us up and does something to keep the bastards honest.

Read more: Farewell John Clarke: in an absurd world, we have never needed you more

So it’s no surprise Donald Trump didn’t resign in early 2017 after John Oliver or Saturday Night Live exposed some policy flaws to ridicule. It is, however, a surprise that the massed forces of the satirical industrial complex haven’t managed to strip much paint from him or his supporters over the years.

The public shaming mechanism implicit in political satire has been singularly ineffective in moving public opinion on his presidency, and here are two reasons why.

First, Trump is shameless – he refuses the shaming mechanism that is part of satire’s deal utterly. Normal politicians (excluding those in authoritarian regimes} at least pretend to be able to take a joke at their own expense. They buy originals of cartoons, submit to comedians at press gallery dinners, and arrange their faces in a rictus loosely signifying amusement when caught on the back foot by a member of the public.

Trump refuses all this. He hasn’t attended a White House Correspondents’ Dinner as president, and he fires back with anger and disgust whenever ridiculed. He doesn’t soak up or process the hostile emotions of satire. He returns them with exaggerated force.

Second, his supporters seem to mirror this reaction. The anger and disgust satirists seek to vent on the president, Trump supporters vent straight back on the attackers in “the elites”. The public emotions are amplified rather than diffused. Division increases, and in the favourite verb of the culture wars, opinion is weaponised.

This theatre of anger and disgust has largely worked for Trump. It has distracted his opponents and energised his supporters. The polls suggest the numbers for and against him have been very stable, and until recently, he has stayed within striking distance of a second term.

The case for no (satire may be rising again)

Things may be changing at the moment, for many reasons. A gap has opened between Trump and Biden in the polling and, if satire has anything to do with it, the key emotion is contempt.

Trump has revelled in the energetic emotions of anger and disgust, but his image as a strong leader capable of “making America great again” can bear very little of the cold detachment that characterises contempt. Australian journalist Jonathan Swan’s facial expressions and follow-up questions in his celebrated Axios interview with the president this week reflect low-voltage disdain rather than more combative emotions.

That approach kept Swan in the room and civilly engaged while his interviewee hung himself out to dry, appearing bumbling and unconvincing rather than a channel for the anger of the dispossessed.

As Farrah Tomazin in the SMH wrote of Swan’s interview:

It had all the withering satire of an ABC sketch featuring comedic duo John Clarke and Bryan Dawe […] Except this wasn’t satire at all, but a serious political interview with US President Donald Trump merely 91 days from one of the most consequential elections in US history.

Cartoonists and sketch comedians are fastening onto things like the cool, hard separations from the Trump circus by Generals Mattis and Milley. This mobilisation of contempt may really shift a few votes. In a democracy, especially such a divided one as the US, voting intention only has to move a couple of points to be decisive.

It’s true satire is seldom influential in elections. Very occasionally it can contribute to a wave of anger that wipes someone out, as perhaps happened to Jacob Zuma in South Africa, and may yet happen to Boris Johnson in the UK.

Contempt is, however, a risk for a once-strong leader who has been weakened by events. It can act as a solvent on the uncommitted, whereas anger and disgust only tend to motivate the committed.

This has happened once in Australia, not so long ago. In her brilliant Quarterly Essay on the electoral demise of John Howard, Judith Brett argued he was gone the moment the Chaser team infiltrated the APEC motorcade with an Osama bin Laden lookalike.

This was political satire that was reaching far beyond the usual suspects on the liberal left, and in the process turning the government’s national-security credentials into a national joke. When the Chaser motorcade breached the Great Wall of Sydney, Howard’s days as a strong leader were over.

When Howard made people angry or proud with strong borders and the “War on Terror”, he went from strength to strength. When The Chaser and others made him look like old Uncle John wandering the streets in a green and gold tracksuit he lost crucial support.

Something like this might be happening to Donald Trump. As the nation’s death toll from COVID-19 grows, volleys of anger and disgust that tend to confirm audiences more vigorously in their convictions may be turning into a growing trickle of contempt.

In an electorate close to evenly poised, this might sap the conviction of a significant numbers of voters in a sufficient number of states to make a difference.

Sarah Cooper’s lip-synching reproductions of Trump’s speeches don’t shout angrily at the president, or present him as a terrifying menace. A fine-featured and expressive woman of Jamaican origin mouthing some of his less coherent interviews and news conferences just makes him look ridiculous.

She started with a TikTok video called How to Medical that parodies the presidential mansplaining of bleach as a prophylactic for COVID-19 with surgical precision.

It reminds me of John Clarke’s renditions of every Australian politician as himself in his own suit and voice. Cooper keeps her target’s voice (she even credits Trump as a writer) but subverts it with her vivid critical presence. While Clarke used the ethical standards of an older Australia to undermine the media spin of his victims, Cooper calls Trump out from a more modern America.

She incarnates a new turn in the cycle of American self-creation where puffy old men in suits are beginning to seem washed up.

Is this a sign of the tide changing irrevocably against Trump? Maybe not – the number of those who have underestimated his superhuman power to refuse shame is legion. His core support has never been a majority, but it has been incredibly durable.

All the same, too many more clips like Cooper’s or cartoons like this one by Clay Jones about Trump’s photo op with the Bible on June 1, and he’s in trouble. If you have come to think of someone as a dilapidated dill, you tend not to care much, or vote, for him.

Cooper’s parodies, Swan’s interview, and Jones’s cartoon detach viewers from the high emotions that Trump has ridden to defy attempts to shame and ridicule him. The cooler emotion of contempt may yet prove more corrosive.

– ref. Friday essay: has Donald Trump broken satire? – https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-has-donald-trump-broken-satire-143682

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

COVID-19 has now made us two Australias. There’s Victoria – most specifically Melbourne – and then there’s the rest of the country.

Melbourne’s extraordinary lockdown complete with curfew is an act of desperation by Daniel Andrews’ government, as it fights a daily tally of several hundred new cases.

Scott Morrison will remember when he berated the media for using the term “lockdown”. Now he finds himself using it all the time.

Melbourne has become a city where citizens are supervised by police and soldiers. Its economy will be crushed. Regional Victoria’s lockdown is somewhat milder but it will take a big toll.

By contrast, at least in terms of COVID itself, the other seven states and territories are, Scott Morrison said on Thursday, “in a fantastic position”.

Well, sort of. NSW is holding the line, with a few cases that so far thankfully have not morphed into a dangerous spread.

But while we are living as two Australias, we are one country. That means the huge whack the virus is inflicting on Victoria is dragging down the rest of the nation, holding back recovery.

The dire turn of events is affecting political leaders’ responses. Risk averse premiers are running their states as gated communities.

Morrison maintains a level of public solidarity with Andrews but the PM may find himself under mounting pressure from those within his party and its base who want the economy given a much higher priority.

David Kemp, a Liberal cabinet minister in the Howard government and party elder, wrote in the Australian Financial Review this week, “The federal government is making a great mistake if it does not call [the Victorian situation] out. It apparently believes that the priority is to maintain unity in the national cabinet. There is no true unity, and the pretence is inhibiting the national debate …

“This pretence is now dividing the Liberal Party and demoralising its supporters, in Victoria at least. It is also undermining national economic recovery by sanctioning gross policy overreach.”

In early May Morrison released a path out of the COVID restrictions that would have had us in reasonable shape everywhere now. Instead, we might as well hire a fortune teller to predict where we’ll be when.

The way ahead depends on two uncertainties. Will the Victorian lockdown bring COVID-19 under control? And will the virus be stopped from breaking out elsewhere?

The government has produced Treasury’s estimates of the cost of the Victorian stage 4 lockdown.

Previously Treasury said Victoria’s recent stage 3 restrictions would reduce GDP by $3.3 billion (0.75% of a percentage point) in the September quarter. The new restrictions will cut GDP in that quarter by $7-$9 billion, slicing about 1.75 percentage points off quarterly GDP growth.

The combined effect of the Victorian measures through the September quarter will be to contract growth by $10-$12 billion (2.5 percentage points).

Treasury estimates 250,000-400,000 more people will become effectively unemployed (this includes both those losing jobs and those still in jobs but working no hours). It forecasts Australia’s unemployment rate will rise above the previous estimated peak of 9.25% – released only a fortnight ago – and peak nearer to 10%.

Andrews, under intense political pressure and substantial criticism (although opinion is mixed), is sensitive when asked about the cost Victoria is imposing nationally. “There’s costs all over the place whether it be in dollar terms or in funerals,” he said.

“I’m not going to be trying to put a price tag on this. This is what we have to do, we have no choice … otherwise this won’t be six weeks, it will be six months or longer. And we’ll have to continue to bury people, we’ll have to continue to deal with an economy that is essentially closed.”

Andrews is in the ultimate corner. If stage 4 fails, the future becomes too awful to contemplate.

Victoria’s crisis is forcing the federal government into policy gyrations. After announcing a fortnight ago tighter eligibility requirements for JobKeeper post September, now it has announced an easing. The cost of the latest changes in eligibility plus the extra numbers of businesses coming onto the program because of the Victorian situation is $15.6 billion, taking the total cost of JobKeeper to $101 billion.

That Victoria is a “separate” Australia is brought home in the arrangements for parliament’s sitting from August 24.

Morrison was criticised for cancelling the early August sitting. He’s committed to the coming one, not least because the government needs to legislate some pandemic measures.

On the advice of acting Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly, Victorian MPs going to Canberra must quarantine for 14 days beforehand. That starts from 11:59pm this Sunday.

In a letter to Morrison, Kelly said that in the context of Victoria, the sitting led into uncharted waters. “The situation in Victoria is not improving at this time,” he wrote. Victorian MPs presented “a significant risk” to ACT citizens, particularly those working in parliament house, as well as to parliamentarians and staff from elsewhere, “with the possibility of seeding into other jurisdictions”.

Kelly prefers the politicians quarantine in Canberra, but said this could be done in Victoria. The conditions are strict. While in home quarantine, no one from the household can leave for any reason and no one can visit.

One MP immediately dubbed the household isolation the “hold-the-family-hostage option”.

In practical terms, on the present sitting pattern, Victorians choosing to isolate in Canberra would only be able to return home for about a fortnight between this weekend and when parliament adjourns for the year on December 10.

Labor has been demanding parliament sit. But in a hook up of Victorian Labor members on Thursday, some were reluctant to meet the stringent conditions. As a result Albanese proposed Victorians should be allowed to tune in virtually. They would not be able to vote.

There are other wrinkles. For example, Queensland has banned arrivals from the ACT, so how about federal MPs going home? A Queensland government spokesman says, “Queensland MPs returning from Canberra will have to quarantine. National agreement is being sought on detail.”

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Health Minister Greg Hunt intend to quarantine in Canberra. Perhaps they’ll hope the odd curry delivery is ferried from The Lodge.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: COVID divides the nation and isolates MPs from Victoria – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-covid-divides-the-nation-and-isolates-mps-from-victoria-144094