Bolivia`s Struggle to Restore Democracy after OAS Instigated Coup

July 10, 2020

Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage

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Frederick B. Mills, Rita Jill Clark-Gollub, Alina Duarte
From Washington DC

On October 21, 2019, the Organization of American States (OAS) issued a fateful communique on the presidential elections in Bolivia: “The OAS Mission expresses its deep concern and surprise at the drastic and hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results revealed after the closing of the polls.”^[1] The mission’s report came in a highly polarized political context. Rather than wait for a careful and fair-minded analysis of the election results, it raised unsubstantiated doubts about the legitimacy of President Evo Morales’ lead as some of the later vote tallies were being reported. This was a bombshell report at a time when it appeared that Morales had garnered a sufficient margin of victory over his right wing opponent, Carlos Mesa, to avoid a runoff election.

The manufactured electoral fraud was quickly debunked by experts in the field. Detailed analyses of the election results were conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR)^[2] and Walter R. Mebane, Jr., professor of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Michigan in early November 2019.^[3] These were later corroborated by researchers at MIT’s Election Data and Science Lab^[4] and more recently by an article published by the New York Times^[5] featuring the study of three academics: Nicolás Idrobo (University of Pennsylvania), Dorothy Kronick (University of Pennsylvania), and Francisco Rodríguez (Tulane University)^[6].

All of these professional and academic analyses found the charges of fraud by the OAS to have been unfounded.

The OAS electoral mission, however, had already poisoned the well. The false narrative of electoral fraud gave ammunition to anti-Bolivarian forces in the OAS and the right wing opposition inside Bolivia to contest the outcome of the election and go on the offensive against Morales and his party, the Movement Towards Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo, MAS). During a three-week period, a right wing coalition led protests over the alleged electoral fraud, while pro-government counter protesters defended the constitutional government. The military and police cracked down on the pro-Morales protesters, while showing sympathy for right wing demonstrators. Then, on November 10, 2019, in its “Electoral integrity analysis,” the OAS doubled down on its dubious claims, impugning “the integrity of the results of the election on October 20, 2019.”^[7]

The track record of the OAS electoral mission, which was invited to observe and assess the election by the Bolivian government of Evo Morales, had already been stained by its 2015 debacle in Haiti.^[8] In the case of Bolivia, the mission politicized election results and set the stage for murder by a coup regime. It appears that there is not much political daylight between the judgment of the OAS electoral commission and the rabidly anti-Bolivarian OAS Secretary, Luis Almagro. Far from finding that the coup against Morales constituted a breach in the democratic order of Bolivia, the OAS simply exploited its position as arbiter of the election to rally behind the right wing coup leaders.

Morales resigns and a “de facto” right wing regime unleashes a wave of repression

Despite the relentless drive by Washington against Bolivarian governments in the region, President Morales was apparently unprepared for the disloyalty within his security forces and he was caught off guard by the OAS propensity to serve US interests in the region. MAS activists, legislators, union activists, Indigenous organizations, and social movement activists, however, continued to resist the coup even as they faced arrest and violence from the de facto regime.

The coup forces exercised extreme violence against authorities of the Morales’ administration and MAS legislators (the majority of Congress). Several houses were burned down and some relatives of authorities were kidnapped and injured, all with total impunity and without protection by the security forces.^[9]

With the OAS-instigated coup gaining traction within the security forces and police, as well as Morales’ political adversaries, the President chose the path of accommodation. He offered to reconstitute the electoral authority and hold fresh elections. This concession to OAS authority was met by calls from the police and military for his resignation. Rather than launch a campaign of resistance from the MAS stronghold of Chapare, Morales resigned his post, opting for exile in an unsuccessful bid to avoid further bloodshed. Jeanine Áñez, an opposition party senator with Plan Progreso para Bolivia Convergencia Nacional, proclaimed herself President after the resignation of Senate President Adriana Salvatierra, who refused to legitimize the coup with an unjustified “succession.”^[10]

The scenes in the streets of Cochabamba turned ugly. It was a field day for racist attacks on the majority Indigenous population. The Indigenous flag–the wiphala–was burned in the streets, and much fanfare was made when Áñez, surrounded by right wing legislators, held up a large leather bible and declared, “The Bible has returned to the palace.” Such attempts to resubordinate Bolivia’s plurinational heritage were met with widespread resistance.

Workers of all industries and sectors keep protests against Áñez going, to protect social laws created under Morales’s government (photo credit: MAS-IPSP, http://www.masipsp.bo).

After thirteen years of impressive economic growth, poverty reduction, recovery of the nation’s natural resources, and the inclusion of formerly marginalized sectors in the political life of the country under the leadership of President Evo Morales, Bolivia had now suffered an enormous blow to the liberatory project of the 2009 Constitution. But the coup fit perfectly into the US-OAS drive to recolonize the Americas.

Secretary General Luis Almagro, who would never let an opportunity to attack the Bolivarian cause go to waste, immediately recognized self-proclaimed President, Senator Jeanine Áñez, adding yet one more crime to the long list from his shameful tenure at the OAS.^[11] At a special meeting of the OAS on November 12, 2020 Almagro declared, “There was a coup in the State of Bolivia; it happened when an electoral fraud gave the triumph to Evo Morales in the first round.”^[12]

During the meeting, 14 member states of the OAS (Argentina, Brasil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the US, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Panama, Paraguay, Peru) and the unelected US-backed shadow government of Venezuela called for new elections in Bolivia “as soon as possible,” while Mexico, Uruguay and Nicaragua warned against the precedent being set by the “coup” against Evo Morales. The ambassador of Mexico to the OAS, Luz Elena Baños, described the coup against Morales as “a serious breach in the constitutional order by means of a coup d’etat,” adding “the painful days when the Armed Forces sustained and deposed governments ought to remain in the past.” ^[13] The Trump administration echoed Almagro’s declaration and moved quickly to endorse what was now a “de facto” government.^[14] The OAS was now at the service of two unelected, US-backed, self-proclaimed presidents (Juan Guaidó for Venezuela and Jeanine Áñez for Bolivia).

What followed was the brutal repression of widespread protests amid grass roots clamor for the return of President Morales,^[15] who, from his exile in Mexico and later Argentina, still held great clout among rank and file MAS militants and the popular movements. The horrific massacre in Sacaba, on November 15, followed by a massacre in Senkata, on November 19, carried out by the security forces, exposes the coup regime to future prosecution for crimes against humanity.^[16] Rather than pacify the country, the repression only galvanized the MAS, which still held a majority in the legislature, as well as the peasant unions and grassroots organizations in their struggle to restore Bolivian democracy. There was indeed a coup, but it had not and still has not been consolidated.

New elections could be compromised by lawfare

Today, Bolivia stands at a crossroads. In June 2020, popular calls were mounting for new elections and the restoration of democracy, despite the ongoing repression. In response to this pressure, on June 22, Áñez signed off on legislation to hold new elections in September. Former president Carlos Mesa (2003-2005) of the right wing Citizens Community Party would face off against the MAS candidate, former Minister of Finance (2006-2019), Luis Arce. Áñez’s decision drew the ire of Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo, who characterizes the most popular political party in the country as narco-terrorist. Murillo even threatened MAS legislators with arrest if they refused to approve promotions for the very military officials responsible for the repression.^[17]

Should democratic elections prevail, recent polls do not look good for the “de facto” regime. In a poll taken by CELAG between June 13 and July 3, the MAS candidate, Luis Arce, leads with 41.9% support, followed by Carlos Mesa, with 26.8%, and Áñez, with 13.3%.^[18]

Luis Arce, from the MAS party, leads the presidential race in Bolivia (Source: CELAG, https://www.celag.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/panorama-politico-y-social-bolivia-web-2.pdf)

Although Áñez initially said she would not run for president,^[19] she later decided to do so even over the objections of her fellow opposition members.^[20] The latter said that this went against her purported objective of only serving as a transition government until new elections could be held—initially on May 3, but later canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only was Áñez never a favorite in the polls, her de facto government has been unrelenting in its attempts to persecute the MAS and kick it out of the race.

On March 30 a government oversight agency (Gestora Pública de Seguridad Social de Largo Plazo) filed formal charges against MAS presidential candidate Luis Arce for “economic damages to the State” while he was Minister of Finance. According to the Bolivian Information Agency, his alleged crimes are linked to the contracting of two foreign companies to provide software for the administration of the national pension system.^[21]

The charges state that the previous administration paid US$3 million as an advance for a contract valued at US$5.1 million to the Panamanian company Sysde International Inc. However, said company never delivered the software. Consequently, the MAS administration contracted the Colombian company Heinsohn Business Technology for US$10.4 million, on top of which payments were to be made of US$1.6 million annually for the license and source code.

Luis Arce responded to the charges during a press conference,^[22] stating that during his tenure, “We entered into a contract for a system and the company failed us, so we filed suit against the company.” But he stressed that the charges simply seek to disqualify the MAS to prevent the party from participating in the presidential election.

Evo Morales took to Twitter to say, “The imminent electoral defeat of the de facto government is leading it to trump up new charges against the MAS-IPSP every day. Now, as we have denounced, they have filed charges based on false conjecture against our candidate to ban him from running for office because he is leading in the polls.”^[23]

On July 6, the Attorney General of Bolivia charged Evo Morales himself. The charges are terrorism and financing of terrorism coordinated from exile, and preventive detention has been requested. This is a rehashing of similar charges brought last November, charges denied by Morales.^[24]

The persecution against the overthrown government has not stopped. Seven former officials remain asylees at the Mexican Embassy in La Paz: the former Minister of the Presidency, Juan Ramón Quintana Taborga; the former Minister of Defense, Javier Zavaleta; the former government minister, Hugo Moldiz Mercado; the former Minister of Justice, Héctor Arce Zaconeta; the former Minister of Cultures, Wilma Alanoca Mamani; the former governor of the Department of Oruro, Víctor Hugo Vásquez; and the former director of the Information Technology Agency, Nicolás Laguna.

The current Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo, affirmed upon assuming power that the authorities of the constitutional government of Evo Morales would be “hunted” and imprisoned before any arrest warrant was issued.^[25] And now, eight months after the coup d’etat, the de facto government has refused to deliver safeguards to the asylum seekers at the embassy even though Bolivia and Mexico are parties to the American Convention on Human Rights, which in its article 22 establishes the right to seek and receive asylum^[26].

Calls for free and fair elections without subversion by the OAS

The consequences of the OAS’ bad faith monitoring of the 2019 Bolivian election cannot be overstated. Not only were lives lost in the chaos and violence spurred by the statements of the OAS Electoral Observation Mission, which also resulted in scores of injuries and detentions. But the de facto regime continues its reign of terror, even repressing people protesting hunger during the pandemic lockdown,^[27] while it dismantles the extensive social programs put into place during the years of MAS government.^[28] Despite the repression, grassroots social movements in Bolivia, most notably peasant and Indigenous women who have bravely withstood attacks by the de facto regime, continue to insist on true democracy. They are inspired by the 2009 Constitution creating the Plurinational State, with its promise of a “democratic, productive, peace-loving and peaceful Bolivia, committed to the full development and free determination of the peoples.”^[29]

Indigenous women have been at the upfront of the fight to restore democracy in Bolivia (photo credit: MAS-IPSP, http://www.masipsp.bo).

On July 8, the MAS-IPSP “categorically” rejected the participation of an OAS electoral mission for the September presidential election, on account of their responsibility for the coup against the constitutional government.^[30] The communique declared that “it is not ethical for [the OAS electoral mission] to participate again for having been part of and complicit with a coup against the democracy and Social State of Constitutional Law of Bolivia”, and “that [the OAS] is not an impartial organization to defend and guarantee peace, democracy and transparency, but rather a sponsor of petty interests that are foreign to the democratic will of the Bolivian people.” ^[31]

Bolivia is at a crossroads. Will the de facto regime of Jeanine Áñez, having completed a coup and in command of the security forces, allow a return to democratic procedures to resolve political differences? Or will she join her Minister of Government, Arturo Murillo, in seeking to undermine, through political persecution and lawfare, any chance that the MAS ticket will be on the ballot, let alone allow free elections to take place?

The condemnation of the coup by Mexico, Nicaragua and Uruguay on November 12 was just the start of international solidarity with the call for a return to democracy in Bolivia. On November 21, 31 US organizations denounced “the civic-military coup in Bolivia.” ^[32] On June 29, 2020 the Grupo de Puebla, a forum that convenes former presidents, intellectuals, and progressive leaders of the Americas, released a statement condemning the actions of the OAS. “The Puebla Group considers that what happened in Bolivia casts serious doubts on the role of the OAS as an impartial electoral observer in the future.”^[33] The international community can honor the clamour for free and fair elections in Bolivia by condemning the de facto regime’s use of political persecution and lawfare, supporting democratic elections in September, and rejecting any further role of the OAS in monitoring elections in the Americas.

Patricio Zamorano provided editorial support and research for this article.
Translations from Spanish to English are by the authors.
Main photo: Protest in front of the OAS building to oppose the coup, November 2019. Credit: Cele León)

Luis Arce, presidential candidate, and David Choquehuanca, running for the vicepresidency. They lead all surveys so far (photo credit: MAS-IPSP, http://www.masipsp.bo/).

End notes

^[1] “Statement of the OAS Electoral Observation Mission in Bolivia,” https://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodigo=E-085/19

^[2] “What Happened in Bolivia’s 2019 Vote Count?” https://cepr.net/report/bolivia-elections-2019-11/

^[3] “Evidence Against Fraudulent Votes Being Decisive in the Bolivia Election,” http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wmebane/Bolivia2019.pdf

^[4] “Bolivia dismissed its October elections as fraudulent. Our research found no reason to suspect fraud,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/02/26/bolivia-dismissed-its-october-elections-fraudulent-our-research-found-no-reason-suspect-fraud/

^[5] “New York Times Admits Key Falsehoods that Drove Last Year’s Coup in Bolivia: Falsehoods Peddled by the US, its Media, and the Times,” https://theintercept.com/2020/06/08/the-nyt-admits-key-falsehoods-that-drove-last-years-coup-in-bolivia-falsehoods-peddled-by-the-u-s-its-media-and-the-nyt/. See also the study by CELAG, “Sobre la OEA y las elecciones en Bolivia”, (Nov. 19, 2019). CELAG conducted a study of both the OAS report and CEPR’s analysis and concluded: “The findings of the analysis allow us to affirm that the preliminary report of the OAS does not provide any evidence that could be definitive to demonstrate the alleged “fraud” alluded to by Secretary General, Luis Almagro, at the Permanent Council meeting held on November 12 . On the contrary, instead of sticking to a technically grounded electoral audit, the OAS produced a questionable report to induce a false deduction in public opinion: that the increase in the gap in favor of Evo Morales in the final section of the count was expanding by fraudulent causes and not by the sociopolitical characteristics and the dynamics of electoral behavior that occur between the rural and urban world in Bolivia.” https://www.celag.org/sobre-la-oea-y-las-elecciones-en-bolivia/

^[6] “Do Shifts in Late-Counted Votes Signal Fraud? Evidence From Bolivia,” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3621475

^[7] “Preliminary Findings Report to the General Secretariat,” http://www.oas.org/documents/eng/press/Electoral-Integrity-Analysis-Bolivia2019.pdf

^[8] “Elections in Haiti pose post-electoral crisis, by Clément Doleac and Sabrina Hervé, Dec. 10, 2015. COHA. https://www.coha.org/elections-in-haiti-pose-post-electoral-crisis/

^[9] “El Grupo de Puebla rechazó el golpe contra Evo Morales y se solidarizó con el pueblo boliviano,” https://www.infonews.com/el-grupo-puebla-rechazo-el-golpe-contra-evo-morales-y-se-solidarizo-el-pueblo-boliviano-n281357

^[10] “Salvatierra: Mi renuncia fue coordinada con Evo y Alvaro,” https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.paginasiete.bo/nacional/2020/1/24/salvatierra-mi-renuncia-fue-coordinada-con-evo-alvaro-244454.html&sa=D&ust=1593696030403000&usg=AFQjCNE_kAMqtAOBGCXdjJV5nkBsfQEWPQ

^[11] “Almagro: Evo Morales fue quien cometió un “golpe de Estado,” DW. https://www.dw.com/es/almagro-evo-morales-fue-quien-cometi%C3%B3-un-golpe-de-estado/a-51218739

^[12] https://twitter.com/oas_official/status/1194389549037830145?lang=en

^[13] “La OEA y la crisis en Bolivia: un choque de relatos irreconciliables”, EFE, Nov. 12, 2019. https://www.efe.com/efe/usa/politica/la-oea-y-crisis-en-bolivia-un-choque-de-relatos-irreconciliables/50000105-4109588

^[14] “Statement from President Donald J. Trump Regarding the Resignation of Bolivian President Evo Morales,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-donald-j-trump-regarding-resignation-bolivian-president-evo-morales/

^[15] “With the Right-wing coup in Bolivia nearly complete, the junta is hunting down the last remaining dissidents,” https://thegrayzone.com/2019/11/27/right-wing-coup-bolivia-complete-junta-hunting-dissidents/

^[16] “Brutal Repression in Cochabamba, Bolivia: So far nine killed, scores wounded,” COHA. https://www.coha.org/brutal-repression-in-cochabamba-bolivia-november-15-2019/

^[17] “Bolivian regime threatens to imprison lawmakers, officials,” https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Bolivian-Regime-Threatens-to-Imprison-Lawmakers-Officials-20200524-0004.html

^[18] “Encuesta Bolivia, July 2020”, CELAG, https://www.celag.org/encuesta-bolivia-julio-2020/

^[19] “Evo Morales busca un candidato y Añez dice que no participará en elecciones”, https://www.lavoz.com.ar/mundo/evo-morales-busca-un-candidato-y-anez-dice-que-no-participara-en-elecciones

^[20] “A Jeanine Añez hasta los aliados le critican su candidatura”, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/244221-a-jeanine-anez-hasta-los-aliados-le-critican-su-candidatura

^[21] Gestora Pública denuncia formalmente al exministro Luis Arce por daño económico al Estado” https://www1.abi.bo/abi_/?i=452014

^[22] “Luis Arce asegura que la denuncia en su contra busca inhabilitar su participación en las elecciones”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DYvPUk643w

^[23] “Fiscalía boliviana acusa de terrorismo a Evo Morales.” https://www.eltiempo.com/mundo/latinoamerica/fiscalia-boliviana-acusa-de-terrorismo-a-evo-morales-515054

^[24] “Fiscalía boliviana acusa a Morales de terrorismo y pide su arresto,” https://www.hispantv.com/noticias/bolivia/470654/anez-morales-terrorismo-detencion

^[25] “¿Quién es Arturo Murillo?”, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/239232-quien-es-arturo-murillo

^[26] “American Convention on Human Rights,” https://www.cidh.oas.org/basicos/english/basic3.american%20convention.htm

^[27] “Valiente resistencia en K’ara K’ara enfrenta represión policial y militar”, https://www.laizquierdadiario.com/Valiente-resistencia-en-K-ara-K-ara-enfrenta-represion-policial-y-militar

^[28] “Bolivia’s Coup President has Unleashed a Campaign of Terror,” https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/05/bolivia-coup-jeanine-anez-evo-morales-mas

^[29] “Bolivia (Plurinational State of) Constitution of 2009,” https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Bolivia_2009.pdf

^[30] MAS-IPSP tweet, July 8, rejecting OAS mission for September elections.

^[31] “El MAS rechaza observadores de la OEA en elecciones bolivianas,” July 9, Telesur. https://www.telesurtv.net/news/bolivia-movimiento-socialismo-rechazo-observadores-oea-20200709-0002.html

^[32] “31 US organizations denounce the brutal repression in Bolivia,” COHA. https://www.coha.org/31-us-organizations-denounce-the-brutal-repression-in-bolivia/

^[33] ttps://www.telesurtv.net/news/grupo-puebla-rechaza-oea-observador-internacional-20200629-0085.html

From nuclear refugees to climate justice – the Rainbow Warrior legacy

By Asia Pacific Report -

July 10, 2020

SPECIAL REPORT: By David Robie, who sailed on the original Rainbow Warrior to Rongelap and is author of the book Eyes of Fire.

Thirty five years ago today the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was bombed in Auckland’s Waitematā Harbour by French secret agents in a blatant act of state terrorism, killing a photojournalist.

People’s campaigns have moved on since then from nuclear tests and refugees to climate justice – and future Pacific refugees.

The environmental campaign flagship was bombed on 10 July 1985 just weeks after it had been in the Marshall Islands carrying out four humanitarian voyages to rescue more than 320 Rongelap atoll villagers from the ravages of US nuclear tests and take them to a new home, Mejato island on Kwajalein atoll.

They were nuclear refugees seeking justice, relief and a healthy life far from the dangerous legacy left from 105 tests on Bikini and nearby atolls.

Ironically, the bombing in Auckland and mounting Pacific opposition led to a massive wave of New Zealand and Pacific anti-nuclear solidarity and ultimately to the halt of French nuclear testing at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls in 1996 after 193 blasts.

The bombed ship’s pioneering environmental work has since been carried on by Rainbow Warrior II and the state-of-the-art eco campaign ship Rainbow Warrior III.

Today the focus is on climate refugees, the lack of adequate health compensation for the Polynesians who suffered radiation and failure to provide proper clean-up of the French nuclear testing zones that are still off-limits after almost a quarter century. Tests were carried out by balloon, derrick, in the lagoon and in a series of underground shafts which have threatened the stability of the 60 km long atoll, leaving it fractured “like Swiss cheese”.

Rongelap islanders with their belongings approach the Rainbow Warrior in May 1985. Image: (C) David Robie

Landmark ruling
In January this year, in a landmark United Nations ruling, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, governments have been told not to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by climate change.

Climate action activists have greeted this ruling as a potential game changer for both climate refugees, or migrants, and for advocates for global climate action.

The UN Human Rights Committee ruled in the covenant that “without robust national and international efforts, the effects of climate change in receiving states may expose individuals to violations of their rights”.

The ruling applied to a humble New Zealand vegetable farm foreman, Ioane Teitiota, from the island nation of Kiribati, who had become a poster boy for climate refugee legal advocates even though he had little understanding of this concept.

Five years earlier, his lawyers had applied for protection for him in New Zealand after presenting a legal argument that he and his family’s lives were at risk from the impact of climate change and rising Pacific Ocean level in Kiribati as one of the “frontline states” facing global warming.

Although Teitiota and his lawyers lost the case because the threat to Kiribati was not deemed to be an imminent risk, the ruling opened the door to recognition of the existence of climate refugees and the possibility of legal refugee protection.

Climate change will force tens of millions of people to leave their homes in the next decade, according to a report by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF). And this would include many on low-lying atolls in the South Pacific.

‘Humanitarian visa’
In October 2017, New Zealand’s Climate Minister James Shaw announced that the incoming government was planning an “experimental humanitarian visa” category for Pacific Islanders forced to leave their homes. Partially inspired by the Teitiota case, it was envisaged that up to 100 people a year might settle in New Zealand under this scheme.

However, this humanitarian plan was quietly shelved because Pacific Islanders generally do not want to leave their homes. They prefer support for adaptation and mitigation for their continuing lives on ancestral land with refugee status as merely a last resort.

The Rainbow Warrior had visited Kiribati and Vanuatu on the voyage to New Zealand after the Marshall Islands mission. Crew members saw at first hand some of the climate pressures already apparent back then.

Moruroa Atoll — A panoramic view of Moruroa atoll, French Polynesia. Image: GW

Cancer sufferers seeking nuclear compensation from the French government under the controversial Morin law received a boost last month when a man who had developed bladder cancer as a result of the nuclear tests was awarded almost US$180,000 by the administrative court.

This news was welcomed by both health advocates and activists.

According to the local news service Tahiti-Infos, an earlier application for compensation had been turned down by the authority dealing with the case.

The compensation law has been tightened up again after being earlier relaxed with most claims being rejected between 2010 and 2017.

Moruroa nuclear balloon — A French nuclear test balloon at Moruroa atoll. Image: Gerard Will

Uproar in Tahiti
In May, there was an uproar in Tahiti when the French National Assembly attempted to include a clause about compensation over nuclear weapons testing into generic covid-19 legislation while the French Polynesian representatives were absent from the chamber because of the pandemic travel bans.

Tahiti’s Moetai Brotherson, one of the two French Polynesian representatives, described this move as a “scandal” and two nuclear test veteran advocacy groups, Moruroa e Tatou and Association 193, were also angry, reports RNZ Pacific.

During the three decades of French tests, the early atmospheric explosions had dusted atolls and islets with radioactive fallout.

Brotherson expressed disappointment that the French state had demonstrated yet again that it “detested” the Tahitian people. Moruroa e Tatou’s Hiro Tefaarere said he was “outraged” but not surprised because all French presidents from de Gaulle to Macron “couldn’t care less” about Polynesians.

During 2019, the French Polynesian social security agency CPS reported that it had spent US$770 million on health care costs for radiation-induced illnesses. The CPS, responsible for medical expenses and pension payments, has struggled with its budgets and wants France to take responsibility for compensation.

However, French authorities do not accept liability for test-related illnesses, claiming the nuclear blasts were “clean” unlike the earlier US and British tests in the Pacific.

Moruroa military waste — The dumping of military waste at sea off Moruroa during the nuclear testing period. Image: GW

The nuclear tests have rarely been an issue outside French Polynesia and independent Pacific nations. But some consciences are occasionally pricked.

A French Watergate?
Five years ago, the unmasked French bomber who sank the Rainbow Warrior in 1985 made some revealing comments during his interviews with the investigative website Mediapart and TVNZ’s Sunday programme, none more telling than that “the first bomb was too powerful, it should have ended as a Watergate” for French President François Mitterrand.

The last secret of the “Greenpeace affair”. Image: Mediapart

Mitterrand stayed in office for 14 years – a decade after the bombing and before he finally stepped down when his second presidential term ended in May 1995, the year before nuclear tests ended.

The bomber, retired colonel Jean-Luc Kister, added that had Operation Satanique – the sabotage plot – involved the United States, “more heads would have rolled”.

However, while the “innocent death” of Portuguese-born Dutch photographer Fernando Pereira has clearly played on his conscience for all these years, Kister’s sincere apology wasn’t without a hint of trying to rewrite history.

The claim that the secret sabotage operation never meant to kill anybody is unconvincing for anybody on board the Rainbow Warrior on that tragic night when New Zealand lost its political innocence and the crew lost a dear friend.

In 2005, two decades after the bombing and nine years after Mitterrand’s death, Le Monde published a leaked document revealing that the late president had personally approved the sinking of the ship.

The newspaper obtained a handwritten account of the operation, written in 1986 by Pierre Lacoste, who was sacked as head of the secret services.

The Democracy Now! report – Rainbow Warrior and President François Mitterrand. Video: Democracy Now!

‘Neutralise’ the Warrior
He had testified that he had asked President Mitterrand for permission to “neutralise” the Rainbow Warrior at a meeting two months before the attack and would never have gone ahead without the president’s authorisation.

The so-called nuclear “war” in the Pacific dates back to the US bombing of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki in 1945. The bombing was followed by atmospheric nuclear testing by the United States in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, arguably the “dirtiest” nuclear testing.

The first so-called nuclear refugees in the Pacific were the Bikini atoll islanders who were relocated into “exile” for the first US weapons tests in 1946.

Then came the British tests at Christmas Island (now Kiribati) and in the Australian outback; the start of the French testing at Moruroa in 1966; more US tests at Johnston Atoll in the early 1960s; flight testing of ICBMs, anti-satellite weapons; and more recently “Star Wars” technology at the Kwajalein Missile Range in the Marshall Islands.

As the late Steve Sawyer, Greenpeace campaign coordinator on board the Rainbow Warrior and whose birthday was being celebrated on board the night of the bombing, noted, “the displacement of local populations and adverse health effects as a result of these programmes has not been without opposition.

“But that opposition has been so scattered and unorganised until recently that it has been little felt in Washington and Paris.”

And the Rainbow Warrior Pacific voyage was planned to make a global difference. It did, but one that shook the world and ended in tragedy.

Terraine Militaire Moruroa — Moruroa – “Military Grounds – Do Not Enter!” Image: GW

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Grattan on Friday: Does Victoria’s second wave suggest we should debate an elimination strategy?

By The Conversation -

July 10, 2020

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

Scott Morrison summoned his self-restraint and resisted temptation. Invited on Thursday to attack the Victorian government over its disastrous decision to use private security guards to monitor people in hotel quarantine, the prime minister was careful.

He hadn’t seen himself as a “commentator” on state governments, he said. “I’ve seen myself simply seeking to help them deal with the problems that they’ve had.”

He added just a little dig, saying he understood many Victorians would be frustrated and angry and “I’m aware of where they’re directing that frustration and anger.”

“But it won’t help the situation if I were to engage in any of that. I have a good working relationship with the Victorian government.”

Morrison needs to keep his national cabinet as united as possible, and turning on Victoria would be counterproductive.

The cynics might also note there’s no imminent election in Victoria. Contrast the federal criticism of the Palaszczuk government, which goes to the polls in October, over its refusal to open its border (which it is finally doing this Friday, except to Victorians).

Federal Liberals from Victoria are sending mixed messages. Tim Wilson told Sky the Andrews government had put the interests of companies “that hired their union mates” above the public health of citizens.

But Russell Broadbent said now was the time to be “backing the premier, not attacking the premier. This is not a time for politics and divisions. We all make mistakes.”

This second wave of the coronavirus that’s hit Victoria will test whether the strong public support we’ve seen for Australian leaders during COVID will hold.

Morrison is being diplomatic but Daniel Andrews this week has come under intense criticism, especially from sections of the media, with calls for ministerial heads and greater accountability. Andrews’ decision to appoint a judicial inquiry into the quarantine disaster has been condemned as a way of avoiding having to answer immediate questions.

The premier was particularly exposed because early on, he had been so insistant there should be tough restrictions.

The reporting has also, naturally enough, focussed on the hardships stories. But it is yet to become clear what the majority of the community thinks, or how much more difficult the drastic new lockdown will be to run than the last one.

On treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s figures the lockdown will cost the Victorian economy $1 billion a week – and it goes for six weeks.

The rest of the country will pay for the mistakes and lapses in Victoria, even if it will be some time before we know how high the price will be.

The new situation will reset the parameters for the federal government’s July 23 economic statement, with even more spending needed after September than was anticipated.

The government is now framing that statement against a background of greater uncertainty than expected only weeks ago.

The Victorian outbreak has meant the state has not been able to accept flights of Australians returning from overseas. Other states want inflows of returnees restricted and national cabinet is set to cap numbers generally, adding to the hurdles faced by those who have delayed coming home. Federal and state governments are showing little sympathy for these laggards, believing they should have returned earlier.

On another front, the new outbreak means the hoped-for Tasman bubble – opening of travel between Australia and New Zealand – now seems a distant prospect, certainly at a national level. The Australian National University and the University of Canberra have delayed plans to bring back some overseas students.

If the second wave moves interstate, the consequences could be dire. No wonder premiers are erecting walls against Victorians. ACT chief minister Andrew Barr has even suggested some Victorian federal parliamentary backbenchers might be encouraged to stay at home.

A broader second wave would make the October budget much more difficult. Potentially it could become near impossible to pursue the substantial reform agenda which Morrison has flagged he wants. The government is talking about bringing forward the legislated tax cuts but that is not new reform.

The Victorian situation has reignited the issue of whether Australia should pursue an elimination strategy, rather than a suppression one.

Morrison, with an eye to the economy, early on embraced suppression.

He and the federal health authorities warned, as the economy’s reopening began, that there would be spikes – localised outbreaks that would have to be dealt with.

What was perhaps not adequately appreciated was the fine line between spikes and a new “wave”.

Admittedly an elimination strategy would not have prevented an outbreak caused by a lapse in quarantine arrangements for overseas returnees, although it might have been easier to control.

Morrison always preferred the suppression strategy because he thought the economic costs of pitching for “elimination” would be too high. But the cost-benefit weighting did depend on the “suppression” model working.

The benefits of elimination, despite the greater short-term pain of tougher lockdowns, are to be seen in New Zealand. As of Thursday there were 24 cases there, all overseas returnees and all in hotel quarantine. There is currently no community transmission. The NZ health ministry said it had been 69 days since the last case was acquired locally from an unknown source. The economy has been able to reopen.

The question is whether elimination would be practical for a bigger country like Australia. Some experts believe so.

Former secretary of the federal health department Stephen Duckett is arguing for an elimination approach to be adopted even now.

Duckett, with the Grattan Institute, and Will Mackey this week wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that the Melbourne situation “lays bare the uncertainty that comes with the nation’s suppression strategy”.

“Australia’s national cabinet should explicitly pursue an elimination strategy similar to that of New Zealand. The current suppression strategy carries the certainty of repeated outbreaks and lockdowns, shattering business confidence, confusing the public, and prolonging the COVID-19 ordeal,” they wrote.

“It will cost the economy more than an elimination strategy. If we reassess and refocus, the benefits of elimination are within our reach. If not, we must all prepare to live with uncertainty.”

Health minister Greg Hunt dismissed of Duckett’s call, telling the ABC “to pretend we can wish the disease away is not … a realistic or responsible statement”.

In fact a number of states have in effect been pursuing elimination, through their border policies, and this has been largely successful.

But nationally, the suppression versus elimination debate is one that we’ve never properly had. Maybe it’s time we did.

– ref. Grattan on Friday: Does Victoria’s second wave suggest we should debate an elimination strategy? – https://theconversation.com/grattan-on-friday-does-victorias-second-wave-suggest-we-should-debate-an-elimination-strategy-142374

UPDATED: Leadership, Vision, and Combating a Machiavellian Culture – Is Todd Muller National’s Solution?

By Selwyn Manning -

July 9, 2020

Todd Muller - via Twitter — Former National Party leader, Todd Muller, has resigned from Parliament, to take effect at the next election.

Editorial by Selwyn Manning.

Selwyn Manning, editor of EveningReport.nz.

New National Party leader Todd Muller has presented his party’s vision for New Zealand as it grapples with the economic cost of the Covid-19 pandemic. But Muller’s vision was unsurprisingly National while surprisingly short on economic detail. And, after a week where sordid privacy breaches plagued the party – leaving Muller exposed and scrambling to convince voters that National is credible, stable, honourable and ready to govern – Muller’s campaign vision was supposed to be a circuit-breaker. Instead, it left more questions than answers.

Last week private details of recently returned New Zealanders were leaked to a select grouping of media. The privacy breach was seen as the latest bungle by those charged with protecting New Zealanders against the Covid-19 virus.

National’s leader Muller was quick to apply election year politics to the breach and claim it as another example why voters should oust the Labour-led Government and vote for his National Party at the September elections.

But by Tuesday we learnt things were not as they seemed. After the Government had ordered a judicial inquiry into the matter, stating that the breach could potentially be deemed a criminal issue, a lone National MP put his hand up and admitted to have been the person who sent the private information to the media.

But how did the information come to be in MP Hamish Walker’s possession – information that named Kiwis who were in quarantine, detailed their health status, and indicated the location of their place of isolation?

At that point, National’s Machiavellian politics turned a shade dirty.

It was revealed, Walker was sent the private information from former National Party president Michelle Boag (who was also heading the deputy leader’s re-election campaign team). Boag had apparently received the information as acting manager of a prominent rescue helicopter entity, but, according to Boag, it was received via her personal email account.

By Wednesday, Boag had resigned her acting manager’s role and stood down from the deputy leader’s election campaign team.

Muller insists he knew nothing of Walker and Boag’s tactics and moved to stand his MP down stripping him of his portfolios and hinting that he should be jettisoned from the party referring the matter to the National Party’s board (the board however decided only to remove Walker as a candidate at the next election).

UPDATE: By Friday (July 10, 2020), It was revealed Boag had also provided National MP and health spokesperson, Michael Woodhouse, with private health details of patients. Woodhouse insists that ‘he deleted the information and did not pass any information on to others. He confirmed the information given to him by Boag was not the source of allegations regarding [what was reported as] lax security measures at the New Zealand border‘. (Stuff.co.nz, July 10, 2020)

Stuff reported: ‘Boag said she had sent “several” emails to Woodhouse in June. She described the emails as “comprising notification of a small number of then new Covid19 cases”‘.

Michelle Boag has now resigned her National Party membership.

Woodhouse said Friday he would cooperate fully with the judicial inquiry into the privacy breaches, led by Michael Heron QC.

But Woodhouse is not without blemish either. Earlier this week he told media the leak of patients’ health details was “another serious failing” of the Labour-led Government.

Woodhouse said: “Reports coming in this morning of personal details being leaked which reveals the identity of New Zealand’s current active cases, is yet another serious failing from this incompetent Government.“

“This is unconscionable and unacceptable that those suffering from the incredibly dangerous virus now have to suffer further with their private details being leaked.“

Woodhouse went on to say: “… it’s unfathomable that it couldn’t handle a simple task like this.“

It is ‘unfathomable’ why Woodhouse did not come clean with the knowledge that he himself had received private information of patients’ health details from Michelle Boag.

Woodhouse’s reputation now risks being in tatters. He needs to explain himself further.

What is potentially more damaging are New Zealand Herald revelations that leader Todd Muller knew Woodhouse had received patients’ private health information from Michaelle Boag. This, the Herald reported, Muller knew on Tuesday evening (July 7, 2020).

NZ Herald: A party spokeswoman said today Woodhouse told Muller this on Tuesday night.

‘Muller was specifically asked by reporters “have you checked with Woodhouse, specifically, whether he received that same information from Boag”. “No,” replied Muller and a reporter asked “why not?”

“It’s very clear from our perspective there’s a conversation that’s occurred between Michelle Boag and Hamish Walker. We are confident from what we can see that the issue here relates to Michelle Boag and Hamish Walker.”‘

‘Asked again if he had spoken to Woodhouse and if Boag was a Woodhouse source, Muller said: “No, I don’t really understand where you’re going with this.‘

‘The spokeswoman said Muller didn’t say something yesterday because “we had to look at what that information was and the nature”.

“We needed to assess the information.”‘

The whole deceitful saga leaves one with a sense that National remains bereft of a moral compass, indifferent to legal rights to privacy, manipulative of the public discourse, and prepared to manufacture scandal so as to advance its ambition to retake the Treasury Benches in 2020.

This week’s revelations expose National to a reality that Machiavellianism remains, that factions within National are prepared to operate from the shadows, that the end game justifies the means – to win at all costs.

It is reasonable to realise that Todd Muller was, at best, not respected, at worst, considered irrelevant.

But if Only It Was An Isolated Incident

With Todd Muller becoming leader, standing alongside his Deputy Nikki Kaye, many political observers considered National was sincere in removing dirty politics tactics from its 2020 election toolkit.

But since Todd Muller became leader of the National Party we have seen:

National’s new leadership team signal its MPs to go for it… that National has a moral obligation to win.
a culture of ‘politics placed before the public’s interest’ … gotcha politics designed to erode a public’s confidence in National’s opponents, placed ahead of serving the public interest.

Let’s look at a brief recap of previous happenings:

Around July 17, For at least 20 hours, National held on to information that two women who were Covid positive had travelled from Auckland to Wellington
National chose to wait so they could use that knowledge in Parliament and deliver a political hit rather than alert health officials, the Government, and the media
The public’s right to know that information was denied them, for a time.

Clearly, the public deserved to know immediately so those who may have been in contact with the contagious women could self isolate and await to be tested.

But there’s more.

Also we have seen leaks from inside the National Party revealing how its private polling found it had been sinking in popularity after experiencing a short rise since Muller took the leadership. Its leader Todd Muller was disappointed in the leak having occurred. The leak indicates a lack of discipline inside National.

Is this an indisciplined party that is lacking in leadership, out of step with the New Zealand public’s expectations and interests? This whole saga raises the question: Is National fit to govern in 2020?

A Circuit-Breaker – A Vision – But Where’s The Plan?

After the revelations, and after National’s board failed to remove Hamish Walker from the party, Todd Muller needed a circuit-breaker to restore an impression of leadership. National’s Plan to get New Zealand working ought to have provided Muller with exactly that.

At the Christchurch Chamber of Commerce, on Thursday, Todd Muller indicated his Plan had five key pillars:

Responsible Economic Management
Delivering Infrastructure
Reskilling and Retraining our Workforce
A Greener, Smarter Future
Building Stronger Communities.

But beyond that, Muller gave little else away. He promised that “over the coming months, and into August, I will be releasing the lion’s share of our Plan in a series of major speeches and engagements.”

He added: “Our vision, our Plan and our direction for New Zealand will place jobs at the centre and deliver the results Kiwis need. We have a track-record that shows we do as we say and get the job done.”

He continued: “Over the next 72 days my team and I will be working hard to share our Plan with you.”

He said: “National believes in: An open and competitive economy;
A broad-based, low-rate tax system; An independent central bank with the primary goal of price stability; The Fiscal Responsibility Act, now part of the Public Finance Act; and A flexible labour market, underpinned since 2000 by good faith.”

Then came a glimpse of the real plan. Muller said: “Under Helen Clark, John Key, Bill English and Jacinda Ardern, New Zealand has spent, in 2020 dollars, $505 billion on social welfare, $302 billion on health, $260 billion on education, and $27 billion on corrections. That is well over a trillion dollars on those four areas alone just since the year 2000, or well over $200,000 for every single person living in New Zealand today.

“When we see more than one in eight New Zealand children still living in material hardship; more than 310,000 Kiwis on a benefit even before Covid-19 (and now up to more than 350,000); more than a million food grants needed last year; and the state house waiting list having more than tripled since Labour was elected, then I don’t think anyone can believe we have achieved the best possible return on that trillion-dollar-plus investment.”

So what is Todd Muller suggesting here? Are we to believe that under his leadership National would embark on an austerity plan that would abandon community-led social investment, education, tertiary and trades-training investment (a raw point of failed social investment of former prime minister John Key’s so called ‘rock star economy’ that was publicly criticised by the OECD)?

Is Todd Muller suggesting a return to small government ideology akin to last century? If so, is that out of step with globalised and developed western economies that have embarked on fiscal stimulus plans more aligned with Keynesian economics than that of Milton Friedman and George Stigler’s Chicago school of economics theories that New Zealand zealously embraced from 1987 through to 2017?

Surely in the post-Covid recovery period economies will require governments to intervene, to commit to broad-based and bold fiscal stimulus, plans that lead toward a rebalancing between export-led recovery and domestic self sufficiency and societal progress?

Is there a role for business to work with government? Yes, certainly, it is a necessity. But in the immediate post-Covid recovery period the business sector will not be ready to pick up the shovel and rebuild to scale on behalf of a government that does not have the willpower to lead the effort.

Muller said on Thursday: “Let me tell you what that means in practice. In 2020/21 and 2021/22, my Government will not be scared of investing more in retraining, if we are confident it will genuinely improve productivity, lower unemployment, increase the tax take, reduce the cost of welfare and improve wellbeing over the following decade.”

Does this mean we would see an overhaul within a period of crisis where Government would constrain stimulus through targeted ‘investment’ to the private sector, relying on the latter to deliver once-government services and social programmes?

Will Todd Muller’s National Party outsource to the private sector its responsibility to deliver social welfare, health, education, corrections services?

Is this what Todd Muller’s key appointment, Matthew Hooton, has been working on since his appointment last month? Hooton’s political commentary is known to many and has contributed greatly to political discourse in New Zealand. Matthew Hooton is known as a proponent of small government, an advocate for the ideologies of right neo-liberal economics who earned his National Party stripes when the ideas of former minister of finance Ruth Richardson was all the rage. Hooton often criticised John Key and former finance minister Bill English for being too moderate and failing to deliver, while popular, reform that would further liberalise New Zealand economic environment.

If Todd Muller is to be regarded as a prime minister in waiting, then eliminating dirty politics from his party is only part of a necessary plan. Convincing a voting public that user-pays and the privatisation of essential social services – welfare, health, education, and corrections – may be truly testing.

But then, a real leader would demonstrate courage alongside convictions. And time, as they say, is not on his side.

Politics with Michelle Grattan: Christopher Pyne on being ‘the ultimate insider’

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

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

Former Liberal Minister Christopher Pyne attracted critics for his political front. But he always had plenty of friends and networks, enabling him often to be a player, if not always a “fixer”.

After his election to the South Australian seat of Sturt at age 25, he went on to hold senior portfolios, notably education and defence, and to stride the parliamentary stage as Leader of the House of Representatives.

In his memoir, The Insider, the former politician provides his take, humorous and candid, on a tumultuous 26 parliamentary years.

In this podcast, Pyne talks about life after politics, and stories from the ‘Canberra bubble’.

“I don’t miss politics at all – because I left happy, and I wanted to go.

“So I’m not one of these politicians that was dragged kicking and screaming. I left when people wanted me to stay, which is a great rarity.”

Pyne is ultra candid about his ambition to be prime minister:

“I think when you’re 15, and you decided you want to be a member of the House of Representatives, you kind of think ‘I’m going to dream big.’ So of course I dreamt to be prime minister”.

Reality, it appears, didn’t hit for quite a while.

“I think that week when Malcolm [Turnbull] was deposed and nobody was suggesting that I should be running for leader, it dawned on me that the generation that was being elected, which was Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg, were a generation different to me.”

– ref. Politics with Michelle Grattan: Christopher Pyne on being ‘the ultimate insider’ – https://theconversation.com/politics-with-michelle-grattan-christopher-pyne-on-being-the-ultimate-insider-142399

Asylum or economic opportunity? The mixed messages in Australia’s new Hong Kong visa options

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alex Reilly, Professor, University of Adelaide

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has announced new visa arrangements to help Hong Kong passport holders stay in Australia.

This has the potential to impact thousands of Hong Kong visa holders, either already in Australia or overseas.

The new visa conditions come in response to China’s recent crackdown on protests and freedom of speech in Hong Kong. On Thursday, the Australian government also announced it will suspend its extradition treaty with Hong Kong.

However, while Australia’s changes in visa arrangements are humanitarian in motivation, what is really being offered is a range of temporary economic opportunities.

What did the Australian government announce?

The new measures involve Hong Kong passport holders on student, recent graduate and skilled worker visas.

Those who are here now can stay for another five years, on top of the time they’ve already been in the country. At the end of that five years, the government has announced there will be “pathways to permanent residency”.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison and acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge announced new provisions for Hong Kong passport holders on Thursday. Mick Tsikas/AAP

Hong Kong passport holders overseas will need to meet existing visa criteria, including any skilled work or study requirements, but there is no doubt these new provisions will prioritise Hong Kong applicants.

For example, those with temporary graduate visas in the “post-study work stream,” typically stay two to four years.

Similarly, applicants for temporary skilled visa usually stay two to four years.

At the same time, the government will “enhance efforts” to attract about 1,000 businesses based in Hong Kong, by offering incentives to relocate to Australia to companies with “a strong potential for future growth and employment of Australians”.

How many people will this involve?

The government says there are almost 10,000 Hong Kong visa holders in Australia who will be eligible for these special arrangements. There are a further 2,500 outside Australia and 1,250 who have applied. The government has stressed it is not expecting “large numbers” to make use of the new scheme.

As Morrison told reporters

This will all be accommodated very comfortably within the existing caps that we have on the overall level of visas for permanent residency into Australia.

Mixing up economic opportunities and humanitarian needs

There is no doubt the driver for the change in visa arrangements is China’s crackdown in Hong Kong.

For some Hong Kong passport holders, the crackdown might mean they meet the definition of a refugee under the Refugee Convention. This could see them fearing persecution “for reasons of political opinion” and open up eligibility for a protection visa under Australia’s Migration Act.

Morrison said this pathway remained open to people, but at the same time, no specific, extra provisions have been created for Hong Kong residents. As the Prime Minister said

I should also stress that the refugee and humanitarian stream remains available for those who are seeking to apply through that channel and that is available to people all around the world.

China’s warning

Before Morrison’s announcement, China warned against offering special visa arrangements for Hong Kong passport holders, telling Australia to “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs with Hong Kong as a pretext”.

China’s new security laws have sparked repeated protests in Hong Kong. SOPA Images/AAP

So, it is possible the Australian government decided to take a conservative approach to protecting Hong Kong passport holders, so as not to further antagonise the relationship with China.

The announcements are certainly a long way short of the United Kingdom’s plans to offer citizenship to almost three million Hong Kong passport holders.

They are also not as generous as the Hawke government’s permanent protection to 42,000 Chinese students in Australia following the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

Pragmatic but confusing

The prime minister’s press release emphasised the economic benefit to Australia of the new visa arrangements, bringing in talented Hong Kong passport holders and successful businesses, and providing visa extensions to students, graduates and workers who can contribute to the Australian economy.

But the principle of humanitarian protection is not based on the potential contribution of those seeking protection. Indeed, humanitarian visas are offered with an expectation that refugees will require considerable assistance to overcome the trauma they have fled and to adjust to a new life in Australia.

While it may be politically pragmatic, the focus on economics rather than humanitarian need confuses the policy objectives.

Ambiguous ‘pathways to permanency’

At the conclusion of the visa extensions, the government has stated there will be “pathways to permanent residence”. The criteria to meet this pathway will be crucial for visa applicants.

If it is equivalent to existing criteria – satisfying the points test of independent skilled migration, or meeting the requirements for sponsorship by an existing employer – Hong Kong passport holders could be forgiven for feeling anxious about their future.

China passed its controversial nationals security law in June. SOPA Images/AAP

What if, at the conclusion of their five year visa, they happen to be out of work, or have not yet attained the points required for independent skilled migration?

There is a large body of research indicating the uncertainty associated with temporary protection is responsible for poor mental health outcomes for visa holders. This is for a range of reasons, including the prospect of return to a place they fear persecution, and the inability to commit to a new life in Australia.

It is also important to note that Australia may find that its limited visa offering is not particularly attractive to Hong Kong’s educated and skilled migrants, who will be concerned to find a country offering them genuine asylum.

– ref. Asylum or economic opportunity? The mixed messages in Australia’s new Hong Kong visa options – https://theconversation.com/asylum-or-economic-opportunity-the-mixed-messages-in-australias-new-hong-kong-visa-options-142380

During COVID-19, women are opting for ‘freebirthing’ if homebirths aren’t available. And that’s a worry

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Hannah Dahlen, Professor of Midwifery, Associate Dean Research and HDR, Midwifery Discipline Leader, Western Sydney University

The pandemic is prompting some Australian pregnant women to give birth at home without a midwife or registered health provider, according to a survey out this week. Another new survey helps explain why.

The number of women who say they have either had or were thinking about “freebirthing” is concerning, due to the increased risk to mothers and babies when unrecognised complications arise or emergencies occur.

So we need to support women to choose where they give birth, or they may be forced to choose this riskier option.

How many women are changing their birth plans?

The evidence to date indicates the risk of COVID-19 for pregnant women and babies is not as high as other groups. But women have understandably been concerned.

This has led to a spike in inquiries from women wanting to change where they give birth. We see this trend, from hospital to home, in Australia and overseas.

For instance, in Victoria a publicly funded homebirth program tripled the number of homebirths provided from March to May compared to the previous year.

Now, a national survey the Australian College of Midwives conducted during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic provides further evidence.

Out of 2,750 responses from women about their experience of maternity care, 26% reconsidered where they wanted to give birth and who provided their care.

Reasons ranged from fear of contracting COVID-19 in hospital to restrictions on support people allowed in hospital for pregnancy, birth and postnatal care.

Most of those who reconsidered their maternity care looked for a homebirth option. But of those who wanted a home birth, 60% couldn’t find a private midwife, and 39% found they were fully booked. Around 3% chose to freebirth.

Why do women choose to homebirth or freebirth?

We have just published the results of the largest survey in Australia examining why women choose to give birth at home. We conducted this survey before the COVID-19 pandemic, with 1,681 women responding.

Most women said they wanted to give birth at home with a midwife. But nearly half said they would consider a freebirth or finding an unregulated birth worker if they could not have a midwife. One in ten women had a freebirth.

Reasons for wanting to give birth at home included wanting to avoid medical interventions, such as induction of labour or episiotomy, or to avoid feeling pressured to have them, rather than being supported to have the birth they wanted.

Many of the women who responded to the survey described their previous hospital experience as traumatic (32%) or were diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (6%).

Are homebirths safe?

In Australia only 0.3% of women are able to access a homebirth attended by a midwife.

This contrasts with other countries such as the Netherlands (12.7%) UK (2.1%), Canada (2%) and New Zealand (3.4%) where this birth option is funded and supported for low risk women by government and key obstetric colleges, such as those in the UK and Canada.

In Australia the obstetric college RANZCOG advises against homebirth.

Yet reviews published in 2018, 2019 and 2020 find strong evidence for the safety of a homebirth for low risk women with a midwife attending.

Having a homebirth with a midwife is more common overseas. So why not in Australia? from www.shutterstock.com

Why aren’t there more homebirths in Australia?

There are many reasons for the lack of support for homebirths in Australia. These include medical opposition, lack of insurance for private midwives to attend a homebirth and lack of Medicare funding.

Women who live within 20-30 minutes of one of the 17 publicly funded homebirth programs (run out of public hospitals) and remain low risk, can birth at home. But these programs are oversubscribed and inaccessible to many women, especially in non metropolitan areas.

Others will try to find one of around 200 private midwives nationwide, who are not already fully booked, to care for them. They will pay up to A$6,000 for a private midwife to attend a homebirth, getting no Medicare rebate for the birth at home and little chance of private insurance rebates.

COVID-19 has escalated this demand for homebirth even further.

Here’s what we can do

We have written extensively about the reasons why women choose freebirth, and engage non regulated providers such as birth workers.

So we need to support women to choose where they give birth and not to be forced into less-safe options. Here’s what would make a difference:

make respectful care a reality for all women, to reduce birth trauma in the first place
support women’s access to their chosen place of birth and model of care
support midwifery care at home through funding and insuring midwifery care
offer more flexible, acceptable options for women experiencing risk factors during pregnancy and/or birth
get the policy, regulatory and educational framework right to enable safe and sustainable homebirth services.

Heather Sassine was the lead author of the study and undertook the survey as an honours student in the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University.

– ref. During COVID-19, women are opting for ‘freebirthing’ if homebirths aren’t available. And that’s a worry – https://theconversation.com/during-covid-19-women-are-opting-for-freebirthing-if-homebirths-arent-available-and-thats-a-worry-142261

Melbourne’s second lockdown will take a toll on mental health. We need to look out for the vulnerable

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

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

Metropolitan Melbourne and Mitchell Shire are beginning another six weeks of lockdown due to a spike in COVID-19 cases.

While this second round of lockdown may bring the case numbers under control, its effects on Victorians’ mental health could be significant.

Australians are already experiencing mental health fallout from COVID-19. A prolonged pandemic, and a second lockdown, might only make things worse.

COVID-19 and our mental health

Our mental health is affected by changes in our social circumstances, and no event in recent history has wrought havoc with our daily lives quite like COVID-19.

Parents of newborns have had reduced access to social support.

Many people have had to grieve alone after the death of a loved one.

People experiencing homelessness have received temporary housing, but may have difficulty readjusting to life without support again.

Nursing home residents have endured months of isolation.

Job losses and the economic consequences will mean the emergence of mental health problems in people who had previously enjoyed a life of privilege.

While we don’t yet know the full extent of the mental health fallout from COVID-19, we are seeing an increase in mental disorders like depression and anxiety.

As Melbournians return to lockdown, the impact of loneliness, fear, anxiety and hopelessness is likely to increase further.

It could be harder the second time

A review of the literature around quarantine shows the mental health effects worsen with longer quarantine duration, infection fears, frustration, boredom, inadequate supplies, inadequate information, financial loss, and stigma.

The reality is we don’t know what the mental health effects of a second lockdown will be. But this second lockdown in Melbourne has all the features of a difficult quarantine situation, including enforced isolation from friends and relatives.

Another six weeks will likely bring frustration, anger and a sense of hopelessness, compounding the mental health effects we’ve felt up to this point.

Plus, any “novelty” we might have felt the first time has likely worn off.

This second lockdown also shows us COVID-19 is likely to be with us for a long time. Our hope for a quick resolution and return to normal is fading.

Not everyone across Melbourne will fare equally when it comes to the mental health effects of a second lockdown. James Ross/AAP

It won’t be the same for everyone

The effects of hardship, trauma and loss associated with lockdown and the pandemic more broadly are unlikely to be spread evenly across the population.

People who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, people who are unemployed, Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people and those from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds already have poorer mental health and poorer access to services.

This week’s “hard lockdown” in the North Melbourne tower blocks is a stark reminder of the disproportionate effect this pandemic is having on vulnerable groups.

And unlike natural disasters that bring communities together, epidemics often foster suspicion and division. Sadly, scapegoating is emerging and we’re seeing multicultural groups targeted.

The longer the pandemic endures, the greater the division between those who have resources to access care and those who don’t is likely to become.

For young people, the sense of hopelessness and worry about the future is escalating.

Professor Susan Rossell from Swinburne University has been tracking the mental health of 18-25-year-olds over the past three months, and has noted a serious spike in mental illness. The mental health impacts of COVID-19 also seem to be more severe for women, and those with existing mental illness.

In the past month, this spike was particularly noticeable in Victoria, presumably due to increasing numbers of new cases.

Young people seem to be struggling during the pandemic. Shutterstock

Mental health will change over time

In many ways, the trajectory of emotional responses to COVID-19 echoes the trajectory of chronic illness.

As a GP, I see people transition from their first episode of illness, where they hope everything will return to normal, to a more chronic course, where they gradually realise they need to adapt to a new and changing idea of what normal will become.

This second wave in Victoria shows us we can’t just wait for things to return to normal. The implications COVID-19 has on our lives — and the associated mental health effects — will be ongoing.

Somewhat like a patient with chronic illness, we need to adapt to the idea that change is the “new normal”. This uncertainty makes life profoundly difficult for people beginning to plan for their future, like young people, and people who have few resources to weather change.

More than ever, we need to offer medical and psychosocial care to the vulnerable people in our community if we’re to prevent mental illness becoming more damaging than the virus itself.

On the other hand, there’s always hope the new normal will become more equal, more sustainable and more humane.

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

– ref. Melbourne’s second lockdown will take a toll on mental health. We need to look out for the vulnerable – https://theconversation.com/melbournes-second-lockdown-will-take-a-toll-on-mental-health-we-need-to-look-out-for-the-vulnerable-142172

‘Tokenised, silenced’: new research reveals Indigenous public servants’ experiences of racism

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Debbie Bargallie, Postdoctoral Senior Research Fellow, Griffith University

The Morrison government has just announced a plan to boost the number of Indigenous Australians in the top ranks of the Australian Public Service.

The plan may be well-intentioned, but it is also one in a long line of attempts to boost Indigenous employment in the public service.

My new research shows how racism pervades the public service – one of the most important and powerful structures in the country.

The public service can develop all the strategies it likes. But these will mean nothing unless the public service invests in robust, anti-racist and Indigenous-led strategies.

Racism: every day in every way

In recent weeks, we have seen unprecedented conversations about racism, sparked by the brutal murder of George Floyd. In Australia, this focussed attention on the 430-plus Indigenous deaths in custody since the 1991 royal commission.

Australians have taken to the streets to protest against Indigenous deaths in custody. Richard Wainwright/ AAP

As these episodes show, we tend to only observe racism in its most overt and violent forms. But to understand how race works, we need to look at how it pervades all aspects of life.

If Australians really want to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism in this country, it is time to listen to the voices of Indigenous Australians and learn.

Australians also need to understand that racism is not a single event – it is embedded in all Australian systems, institutions and workplaces. Indigenous Australians experience racism every day in every way.

Racism in the public service

My book, Unmasking the racial contract, draws on the experiences of 21 Indigenous public servants, obtained through yarning sessions, or conversations.

I was an Indigenous employee of the public service for 14 years. The ongoing failure of the public service to accurately understand and acknowledge the experiences of its Indigenous employees led me to conduct my research.

I started by asking Indigenous employees to speak about their experiences with recruitment, career progression and everyday work. This revealed the ways that individual and systemic racism operate in the public service.

The importance of the public service

The Australian Public Service – which provides advice to the federal government of the day and implements its policies – is a microcosm of Australia.

In June 2019, there were 147,237 Australian Public Service employees, with 3.5% identifying as Indigenous (compared to approx 3.3% of the Australian population).

Indeed, it is one of the largest employers of Indigenous peoples in the country, and holds itself up as a bastion of support for equality and career progression through various Indigenous employment strategies, Reconciliation “action plans” and Indigenous cultural awareness initiatives.

The 2019 APS State of the Service Report indicated many Indigenous employees had positive attitudes about inclusion in the public service (for example, more than 80% agreed with the statement “my supervisor actively supports people from diverse backgrounds”). But this does not capture the actual experiences of Indigenous employees.

The myth of meritocracy

The public service is officially a meritocracy. It says it operates on the “merit principle,” underpinned by legislation.

But the idea that all employment, promotion and commendation decisions are made on an entirely neutral basis is a myth. A disproportionately high number of Indigenous employees languish on the lower rungs of the employment ladder.

Indigenous Australians make up a tiny fraction of senior public servants. Mick Tsikas/ AAP

According to 2019 data, Indigenous employment is concentrated at the lower APS 3 and 4 levels, while with non-Indigenous is concentrated at the higher, APS 5 and 6 levels.

Tellingly, Indigenous employees make up 1.2% of the public service’s Senior Executive Service (SES) workforce. This is just 32 Indigenous SES members out of a total of 2,780. As one interviewee observed

If you were to look at all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander SES [staff] in Australia, you could probably name them … the percentage is so small. It’s certainly not that we’re not bright or capable or efficient or any of those things. So, what is the reason?

Meanwhile, they are leaving the public service at a faster rate than non-Indigenous employees. In 2018, 8.4% of Indigenous employees left the public service, compared to 6.5% of non-Indigenous employees.

‘Just here for the stats’

During my research, Indigenous employees reported that they felt tokenised and not seen as professionals with genuine skills or expertise to offer. They said they were valued only for their cultural knowledge: “It feels like I am just here for the stats”.

They also reported they were pigeonholed into Indigenous policy jobs and denied the chance to work in mainstream portfolios.

There was a little bit of that ‘black face’ — we better put you in a black program as opposed to thinking maybe mainstream might be a good opportunity to contribute.

Indigenous interviewees also raised concerns about the use of “identified positions” for Indigenous employees at all levels. Contrary to what might be expected, these were not restricted to Indigenous people

You’ll find most people who win those positions have been white people. A lot of the people that sit on these interview panels are white people.

Marginalised, ignored

Indigenous employees said they were were marginalised and silenced. If they spoke up, raising concerns about recruitment decisions or practices, they were ignored

A few of us senior people went to visit one of the deputy secretaries [senior leaders] who was responsible for HR management to talk about our concerns… we literally had the ‘face in the hand’ to stop talking because she didn’t wanna hear it.

Employees said there was an expectation that they leave their Indigeneity at the door when they came to work

You know I been asked to go to meetings with supervisors and warned before we get there that I’m only there as onlooker and told — just sit there — don’t say a thing.

They also reported being labelled as a “problem” employee if they raised issues about how they were treated

It’s almost like you have to make a choice whether you speak up about racism and get the finger pointed at you, like, ‘Oh. Don’t be so sensitive’.

The public service needs to listen more and learn

Indigenous employees have paid, and continue to pay, a high price for racism. One interviewee described how it ended their career in the public service

I had several acting branch manager stints, which was great. But in the end, I left for a job that paid less because I just didn’t feel I could influence or support any changes.

Shiny new plans and strategies are all well and good. But a more fundamental shift is needed: Indigenous employees must become a genuine and valued part of the public service.

Minister for Indigenous Australians Ken Wyatt has recently announced a new plan to boost the numbers of senior public servants. Mick Tsikas/AAP

A deeper understanding about what racism is and how race works is a good place to start. Non-Indigenous colleagues and managers must commit to anti-racist workplaces. This requires managers to act on reports of racism – the continued failure to do so makes them complicit in perpetuating white supremacy.

Structural change is also necessary. This requires non-Indigenous leaders relinquishing their automatic right to power and control – adopting principles of solidarity to work with us, not against us. Crucially, it means Indigenous employees must have a seat at the table and must be heard.

Indigenous resistance has been a 230-year journey of solidarity and survival. Indigenous Australian leadership has mobilised numerous protests and campaigns against systemic racism in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, in a call to action for all Australians.

But the fight against racism must also extend to one of our our most important institutions – the public service – that shapes how government decisions are made and then carried out.

– ref. ‘Tokenised, silenced’: new research reveals Indigenous public servants’ experiences of racism – https://theconversation.com/tokenised-silenced-new-research-reveals-indigenous-public-servants-experiences-of-racism-141372

‘Living fossils’: we mapped half a billion years of horseshoe crabs to save them from blood harvests

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Russell Dean Christopher Bicknell, Post-doctoral researcher in Palaeobiology , University of New England

If you ventured to the New York seaside in summer, you might see a large dome-shaped animal with a spiky tail, slowly moving towards the water. These are horseshoe crabs – the animals time forgot.

Fossil records for horeseshoe crabs extend back about 480 million years. This is well over 200 million years before the dinosaurs.

More recently, horseshoe crabs have greatly helped advance modern medicine. Their blood is used to identify endotoxins in solutions. These are toxins found in bacteria, so anyone who has had an injection or surgery has been kept safe from dangerous toxins thanks to these creatures.

Unfortunately, the harvesting of their blood for this purpose is one reason horseshoe crabs are becoming an endangered group. Our research published today in Frontiers in Earth Science will hopefully aid conservation efforts to protect these enigmatic creatures.

The American horseshoe crab *Limulus polyphemus*. WikiCommons.

A modern medical marvel

Completely harmless, but spiky like a cactus, horseshoe crabs are not actually crabs. They don’t have the antennae or jaws their crustacean cousins do, and have additional pairs of legs (13 in total). In fact, they’re more closely related to spiders and scorpions than crabs.

Defined within their own order, Xiphosura, these animals are characterised by a horseshoe-shaped head section, a roundish hexagonal backside and a long tail. They are, in essence, a spider in a suit of armour that can swim upside down.

Horseshoe crabs have been used in medicine for at least the past 40 years. Their endotoxin-revealing blood is blue and copper-based (unlike our red, iron-based blood).

A chemical refined from their blood can be used to identify contaminants in medical equipment that is inserted into humans.

Blue blood is used to make sure injections, IV drips, and any implanted medical devices are safe for human use.

Blue bloodletting

However, to access this natural medicinal miracle, humans must collect horseshoe crabs and harvest their blood. While blood loss itself may not be the main cause of death, other factors such as capture and transport can impact group survival.

At present, with improved practices, between 6-15.4% of horseshoe crabs die from harvesting.

This process represents one of the main threats to them today, even though a synthetic substitute for blue blood has been available for nearly two decades. However, there is uncertainty around the efficacy of this alternative, so horseshoe crabs are still harvested.

As a result, two of the four living species – the Chinese horseshoe crab and American horseshoe crab (also called the Atlantic horseshoe crab) – have been placed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s vulnerable and endangered species list.

Apart from bloodletting for biomedical use, other threats facing horseshoe crabs include overharvesting, human interaction and serious habitat modification.

Fantastic beasts, and where to find them (online)

To help raise awareness about the challenges horseshoe crabs face, we created an atlas of all fossil and living Xiphosura. This free, open access collection contains photos of every horseshoe crab species ever described in the group’s 480-million-year history.

Alongside the photos, we provide outlines of how the four living species survived until now.

Building this atlas took three years. It involved emailing more than 100 researchers and museum managers, and even travelling from Australia to England, Germany, Russia, Slovenia and the United States to collect photographs.

Examples of fossil horseshoe crabs. Left to right: *Pickettia carteri*, *Albalimulus bottoni*, *Sloveniolimulus rudkini*, and *Tasmaniolimulus patersoni*. Reconstructions by Elissa Johnson and Katrina Kenny, Author provided

The result is an example of every single horseshoe crab species ever documented, living or extinct – more than 110 in total.

The ‘living fossil’ that roamed with dinosaurs

Our atlas can help highlight the unique and complex evolutionary history of horseshoe crabs.

These arthropods (invertebrates with an exoskeleton and jointed legs) survived all mass extinctions. Some have changed in appearance through time. For example, we have completely bizarre fossil forms, such as Austrolimulus – essentially a pick-axe in horseshoe crab form.

*Austrolimulus fletcheri* lived in the New South Wales area during the Triassic. They’re a truly unique species. Patrick Smith.

However, some fossil species look very similar to modern ones.

*Mesolimulus walchi*, from the Solnhofen Limestone in Germany. Russell Bicknell/Paläontologisches Museum, München specimen.

Compare the Jurassic-aged fossil Mesolimulus, found in Solnhofen Limestone in Germany, to American horseshoe crabs walking along the North American coast today. They are practically the same.

Apart from size differences, horseshoes crabs have changed very little over the past 150 million years or so, earning them the moniker “living fossils”. But while specimens in the fossil record are between 3-30cm long, horseshoe crabs today can grow to more than 80cm.

Unfortunately, horseshoe crab populations, especially the American horseshoe crab, have been decreasing significantly due to blood harvesting. There’s now genuine concern humans will drive these organisms to extinction.

Expanding our collective knowledge could help fuel future conservation efforts. Let’s prevent these unique icons of a bygone era from passing into the annals of history.

– ref. ‘Living fossils’: we mapped half a billion years of horseshoe crabs to save them from blood harvests – https://theconversation.com/living-fossils-we-mapped-half-a-billion-years-of-horseshoe-crabs-to-save-them-from-blood-harvests-141042

Lives at ‘grave risk’: Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO is a hit to global health

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Adam Kamradt-Scott, Associate professor, University of Sydney

This week US President Donald Trump made good on his threat to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organisation (WHO) by sending a formal letter of withdrawal to the UN Secretary-General.

In so doing, the president has initiated the Congressionally-mandated 12-month countdown to withdrawal that will take effect in July 2021. That is, unless it is over-turned, as presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has immediately pledged to do if elected.

But if the United States’ exit goes ahead, it will be a hit to global health cooperation and place lives at risk in the US and beyond.

Questions persist about the president’s legal authority to unilaterally withdraw the United States from the WHO. But under the conditions imposed by the US Congress in 1948, the president must first ensure payment of any outstanding dues before the withdrawal can take effect.

According to some estimates, the US government currently owes US$58 million to the WHO in unpaid dues, as well as a further $110 million to the Pan-American Health Organisation, the branch of the WHO covering North and South America.

The withdrawal threatens US lives

According to the American Medical Association, American lives will be placed at “grave risk” if Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO is not reversed. Digging a little deeper, it’s not hard to see why.

Twice a year, for example, the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System (GISRS) provides WHO member states with vital information on the dominant influenza strains circulating around the world. This data is then used to develop life-saving influenza vaccines. If enacted, the United States’ withdrawal will mean it’s officially excluded from this global network, placing the country at a distinct disadvantage ahead of every flu season.

The implications could be profound, given that in 2018-2019, 34,200 Americans died of seasonal influenza-related illness despite having access to vaccines developed using GISRS data.

The United States played a pivotal role in helping to create the WHO in 1948. Just over 70 years later, President Trump is withdrawing the country from the agency amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Martial Trezzini/EPA

Likewise, important international discussions about vaccine research and development on diseases that threaten American lives will likely now occur without US scientists being involved. International guidelines on best medical practice will continue to be produced by the WHO but without US input.

The US has benefited for decades from obtaining advance warning about disease outbreaks in other parts of the world through the WHO’s Event Information System, but this will no longer be possible. The US would be effectively cut off from such alerts, forced to rely on foreign media or public WHO announcements.

Aside from the notable health consequences, withdrawing from the WHO will mean the country no longer has a seat at the negotiating table on what future reforms are needed to make the WHO a more effective global health agency. This is something many of Trump’s advisers and supporters had wanted to see happen, but the president’s actions will relegate the United States to the sidelines.

The future of global public health is at stake

The United States has traditionally remained one of the most generous contributors to WHO-led global health initiatives, providing almost twice as much as most other donors. Because of US withdrawal, the future viability of polio eradication, tuberculosis control, and access to HIV/AIDS treatment initiatives, just to name a few, are now all at risk.

US withdrawal is likely to have a significant impact on public health in the region. The Pan-American Health Organisation (PAHO) is on the verge of insolvency as a result of unpaid dues. The US is currently the primary debtor, owing 67% of the unpaid fees.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, PAHO provided vital technical assistance and expertise unavailable throughout many Latin American countries. In the event PAHO is allowed to go bankrupt, the impact on regional health programs such as maternal and child health, not to mention the pandemic response, will likely contribute to considerable loss of life.

For the World Health Organisation, the departure of the United States will be a significant blow. For many years the level and extent of technical cooperation between the global health agency and the US Government has contributed to making the world safer and healthier. Such collaboration is now under threat.

As with the EU’s approach to negotiations on the United Kingdom’s “Brexit”, the WHO’s remaining member states now have to make an example of the United States, ensuring that it is excluded from multiple WHO initiatives. If they do not, it risks more countries threatening to withdraw. The future of global public health is at stake, and the actions of one country cannot be allowed to undermine decades of multilateral efforts to improve the health and well-being of all peoples of the world.

In the event the United States does withdraw from the WHO it will sit in a unique category: that of a global health pariah.

America First is increasingly looking like the new reality will be America Alone.

This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

– ref. Lives at ‘grave risk’: Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO is a hit to global health – https://theconversation.com/lives-at-grave-risk-trumps-withdrawal-from-the-who-is-a-hit-to-global-health-142266

Benny Wenda: A referendum, not ‘autonomy’, only West Papua solution

By Asia Pacific Report -

July 9, 2020

COMMENT: By Benny Wenda, chair of the United Liberation Movement of West Papua

For over 50 years, Indonesia has been promising West Papua “autonomy”. Each time, underneath autonomy lies only bullets and killings.

As the 2001 Special Autonomy law expires this year, the United Liberation Movement (ULMWP) and all the people of West Papua are united in rejecting Indonesian-controlled “autonomy”. There is only one solution to our problem: an independence referendum.

In 1969, after the fake “vote” to legitimate Indonesia’s colonisation of West Papua, Indonesia promised we would be an autonomous region within Indonesia.

As an “autonomous” region for the next 30 years, hundreds of thousands of West Papuans, including most of my family, were killed by the Indonesian military and police. From the brutal military operations in the Papuan highlands of 1977-81 (“Operation Koteka” and “Operation Clean Sweep”) to the mass killing, rape and torture of hundreds on Biak Island in 1998, this fake “autonomy” for us meant one thing – genocide.

At the turn of the millennium, the West Papuan people came out peacefully and demanded their right to self-determination after 30 years of bloodshed. In response, the Indonesian State developed the 2001 “Special Autonomy” law (“Otsus”). Indonesia promised to West Papuans and the international community that they would facilitate development and democracy in West Papua, and reassess the outcome in 20 years.

We now know the outcome. Under this so-called Special Autonomy, we have only been further killed, marginalised and ethnically cleansed. Our environment and way of life has been destroyed in an unrelenting ecocide – our mountains have been mined, our rivers polluted, our forests torn down.

We completely reject the “autonomy” and “development” carried out by an illegal colonial occupation.

Under Special Autonomy, we witnessed the 2014 Paniai Massacre of four Papuan schoolboys. We suffered the invasion of Nduga and the murder of over 200 West Papuans in 2019-2020.

We have felt the crushing of the 2019 West Papua Uprising, with six unarmed demonstrators shot dead as they hid in public buildings in Deiyai, 16,000 additional Indonesian troops deployed and our internet cut off. Even Indonesia’s own Special Autonomy institutions like the MRP have rejected Special Autonomy.

The position of the United Liberation Movement is clear. Indonesia cannot build development on top of mass killings. The only autonomy that exists is the autonomy of Indonesian military and police to kill.

There is only one just, democratic and feasible solution for West Papua: our right to self-determination, exercised through a referendum on independence.

In New Caledonia, South Sudan and Bougainville, the French, Sudanese and PNG governments made a timeline with the liberation groups to implement a referendum. Indonesia has never reached any understanding with the representatives of the people of West Papua.

We issued six demands for the Indonesian government in October last year. We have never received a response. Now, Indonesia must immediately arrange a referendum, mediated by third party international states and institutions, on independence for West Papua.

This call is governed by the sovereign democratic will of the people of West Papua, expressed in the 2017 petition signed by 1.8 million of us.

A referendum is a just solution for the people of West Papua, for Indonesian migrants in West Papua, for our regional neighbours in the Pacific, and for the international community. International states and institutions, particularly the European Union, World Bank, United States, Britain, New Zealand and Australia, must stop funding Indonesian occupation forces and “development” projects and help address the root causes of the conflict in accordance with the call of 79 countries in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States.

To my people: your destiny is in your hands. Your decisions today will set West Papua on its path for generations to come. Whether you are Indigenous West Papuan or an Indonesian migrant, it is time for us to come together to reject Jakarta’s lies and stand united for the only solution- a REFERENDUM and INDEPENDENCE.

Benny Wenda
Chairman
ULMWP

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Newsletter: New Zealand Politics Daily – July 09 2020

By Bryce Edwards -

July 9, 2020

New-Zealand-Parliament — New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.

Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.

Today’s content

National Party Covid-19 patient privacy leak
Claire Trevett (Herald): The harm for Todd Muller in Hamish Walker’s Icarus moment (paywalled)
Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): A swift end for Walker, prolonged pain for National
Cat MacLennan (RNZ): National’s attacks not what we need right now
Richard Harman (Politik): How Walker was persuaded to resign
Pattrick Smellie (BusinessDesk): Does Hamish Walker understand what’s happening here? (paywalled)
Chris Trotter (Daily Blog): Are Walker and Boag National’s (and the Media’s) Designated Villains?
Mark Quinlivan (Newshub): Todd Muller couldn’t challenge Government on isolation escapee because of National MP’s privacy breach – political scientist
Stuff Editorial: The Covid-19 leak exposes National’s lack of discipline
Herald Editorial: National MP Hamish Walker’s resignation symptomatic of a party on the run (paywalled)
Southland Times Editorial: Hamish Walker a mover-and-shaker who proved unsteady
ODT Editorial: Unconscionable and from within
1News: Law broken when private Covid-19 patient information was leaked, says legal expert
Alexander Gillespie (The Conversation): The National Party COVID-19 leak shows why the law must change to protect New Zealand citizens
Mike Houlahan (ODT): So much promise from a passionate southern MP
Ian Powell: Sinister Health Politics drop National in the Bo[a]g
—————
Amelia Wade (Herald): Leaker Hamish Walker attempted to prevent National leader Todd Muller from outing him citing privacy
Amelia Wade (Herald): Behind the Covid leak: How the downfall of Hamish Walker unfolded
Henry Cooke (Stuff): How the Hamish Walker Covid-19 leak saga played out
Mark Quinlivan (Newshub): A timeline of the saga, according to National leader Todd Muller
Mei Heron (1News): Privacy boss says it’s ‘unforgiveable’ National MP and ex-party president leaked details of Covid-19 patients
1News: Leaking Covid-19 patient details ‘backfired terribly’ for National MP Hamish Walker – commentator
Duncan Garner (Newshub): National MP Hamish Walker leaking COVID-19 patient details ‘indefensible’
Mark Quinlivan (Newshub): Sir Bob Harvey says Hamish Walker’s actions have ‘guaranteed a Labour victory’
Zane Small (Newshub): Todd Muller rejects National Party dirty politics claims after MP Hamish Walker steps down over privacy breach
1News: Using private details for political gain ‘never acceptable’ – PM on Covid-19 patient info leak
Newstalk ZB: ‘Others’ fingerprints all over this’: Police Minister on Nats’ Covid privacy breach
David Farrar: Walker resigns candidacy
—————
Michael Fallow (Stuff): Another MP flames out. What gives with National’s famed Clutha-Southland stronghold?
1News: National face scramble to find candidate for ‘poisoned chalice’ seat: 1 NEWS political reporter
Evan Harding and Damian Rowe (Stuff): Hamish Walker makes right decision to leave politics: Southland leaders
Charlotte Graham -McLay (Guardian): New Zealand opposition MP who leaked details of Covid-19 patients steps down
1News: National MP Hamish Walker says he won’t run again following leaked Covid-19 patient info controversy
Henry Cooke (Stuff): National MP Hamish Walker to step down at election over leak saga
Mike Houlahan (ODT: Walker quits before pushed
RNZ: MP Hamish Walker announces he won’t stand for re-election
Zane Small (Newshub): MP Hamish Walker steps down as National Party’s Southland candidate over COVID-19 patient data breach
Pattrick Smellie (BusinessDesk): Gone at lunchtime: disgraced National MP Hamish Walker resigns from politics (paywalled)
RNZ: Hamish Walker’s exit from politics ‘was the only option’ – Todd Muller
Amelia Wade (Herald): Todd Muller: ‘Hamish Walker went behind my back’ and his only option was to resign
—————
Katie Scotcher (RNZ): MOH won’t say if Michelle Boag’s Covid-19 patient detail source claims true
Thomas Manch (Stuff): Michelle Boag: The Ministry of Health sent me the Covid-19 patient details
Chelsea Boyle (Herald): Michelle Boag says Ministry of Health sent her patient details
Katie Scotcher (RNZ): Covid-19 privacy breach info came from Health Ministry, Michelle Boag says
Vita Molyneux (Newshub): Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust says Michelle Boag ‘never’ had access to COVID-19 data
Maiki Sherman (1News):Leak fallout puts pressure on National as Michelle Boag says Ministry of Health sent her patient details
Thomas Coughlan and George Block (Stuff): Michelle Boag resigns from roles with Nikki Kaye, refuses to comment on leak
Jo Moir and Charlie Dreaver (RNZ): Michelle Boag stands down from roles with National deputy leader Nikki Kaye
Jessica Roden (1News): Michelle Boag stands down from National Party roles following Covid-19 patient info leak
Jenna Lynch and Zane Small (Newshub): Michelle Boag stands down from Auckland Central MP Nikki Kaye’s campaign committee
Herald: Michelle Boag: Yes, that really happened
Madison Reidy (Newshub): Former National president Michelle Boag’s history with privacy scandals
Sam Brookes (Spinoff): The insider: Three decades of amazing Michelle Boag headlines

National Party
Toby Manhire (Spinoff): The two-step plan to becoming as happy as Simon Bridges
Newshub: Where is Simon Bridges?
Anna Leask (Herald): National Party donations: MP Jami-Lee Ross back in High Court on SFO charges
Emma Cropper and Ireland Hendry-Tennent (Newshub): Jami-Lee Ross’ trial date set over National Party donations
Catrin Owen (Stuff): Former National MP Jami-Lee Ross’ fraud charges move to High Court
Anneke Smith (RNZ): Jami-Lee Ross appears in court ahead of electoral fraud trial

Border quarantine facilities
Jordan Bond (RNZ): Man who witnessed Covid-19 escapee leaving: ‘We just saw this guy walk out’
Newstalk ZB: Expert says more security needed at isolation facilities
Luke Malpass (Stuff): How isolation breach trumps National’s privacy botchup
Derek Cheng (Herald): Another breach; a blot on the Govt’s record and a reprieve for National (paywalled)
Heather du Plessis-Allan (Newstalk ZB): How do we still have mistakes at isolation facilities?
Barry Soper (Newstalk ZB): Latest hotel escaper case rings alarm bells over quarantine system
1News: Todd Muller says Government’s ‘everyday glitches’ putting recovery back after Auckland isolation breaches
1News: Livid Health Minister lambasts ‘acts of selfishness’ as man with Covid-19 escapes isolation in Auckland
Zane Small (Newshub): Health Minister Chris Hipkins blasts ‘acts of selfishness’ of two quarantine rule-breakers who ‘let everybody else down’
RNZ: Megan Woods on Covid-19 escape: ‘Things have changed in terms of non-compliance’
Collette Devlin (Stuff): Government considers asking police to guard quarantine facilities to prevent people escaping
Lincoln Tan (Herald): Quarantine security to be reviewed after man with virus escaped and visited supermarket
Justin Giovannetti (Spinoff): Selfies, razors, and a missing 40 minutes: What did the Covid-positive absconder get up to?
Matt Burrows (Newshub): Mystery surrounds hour New Zealand COVID-19 escapee spent on the loose in Auckland CBD
Newstalk ZB: Officials trying to work out movements of man who escaped isolation
1News: Man with Covid-19 facing criminal charges after escaping isolation, visiting central Auckland supermarket
Matt Burrows (Newshub): One new case of COVID-19 at managed isolation facility visited supermarket
Katarina Williams (Stuff): Why Wellington hotels aren’t hosting more Kiwi returnees
RNZ: Returning Kiwis in managed isolation: ‘There is going to be a limit’
1News: Other airlines to restrict flight capacities as quarantine facilities get ‘tight’ – Megan Woods
Herald: Emirates freezes flight bookings to NZ for next three weeks

Border, travel bubbles
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Stuff): Fact check: could a trans-Tasman bubble really raise NZ’s GDP by $8.8b by Christmas?
Kate MacNamara (Stuff): The uncounted cost of New Zealand’s border trade-off

NZ’s coronavirus response
Hannah Kronast (Newshub): World Health Organization singles out New Zealand, praising COVID-19 response
Stuff: World Health Organisation praises NZ’s Covid-19 response
1News: WHO posts video praising New Zealand’s success tackling Covid-19 pandemic
Collette Devlin (Stuff): Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern urges Kiwis to use contact tracing app but her ministers silent
Harry Lock (RNZ): How Covid-19 changed travel home – and abroad – for Kiwis

Election
Zane Small (Newshub): Is this legal? Northland candidates Shane Jones, Matt King scrap over ‘Jones for Jobs’ billboards
Jason Walls (Herald): Green Ministers Julie Anne Genter and Eugenie Sage both donated $30,000 to the Green Party
Oliver Hartwich (Newsroom): A Green path to the fringe
Deena Coster (Stuff): Climate change activist breaks away from Green Party
Daisy Hudson (ODT): Politicians trade perspectives at Covid-19 response debate
Leighton Keith (Taranaki Daily News): New Plymouth councillor Chong joins New Conservative for election

Cannabis referendum
Matt Burrows (Newshub): Cannabis referendum: What is it, when is it, where each party and the public stands
Lana Andelane (Newshub): Cannabis referendum: How legal regulation of cannabis can benefit New Zealand
1News: Support for cannabis referendum up but majority still narrow – new poll
Joel MacManus (Stuff): Cannabis referendum: Poll shows yes vote leading by 5 points
Joel MacManus (Stuff): Cannabis policing ‘worst waste of taxpayer money’, former PM Helen Clark says
Vita Molyneux (Newshub): Police ‘hunting down’ casual cannabis users is ‘worst waste of taxpayer money’, says former Prime Minister Helen Clark
Derek Cheng (Herald): Marijuana not so bad for you, won’t turn your hair green
Mike Yardley (Newstalk ZB): Cannabis uncertainty is a cop-out

Water reforms
Dileepa Fonseka (Newsroom): Cash splashed for water reforms
Dominic Harris, Laura Wiltshire and Georgia-May Gilbertson (Stuff): New fund will pave way for multi-billion dollar overhaul of water sector
1News: Government offers $761m to councils to fix water issues – if they opt in to water reform
Jenée Tibshraeny (Interest): Govt dangles $761m before local authorities to get them to centralise water management
RNZ: Government announces $761 million water package upgrade
Paul McBeth (BusinessDesk): Govt offers $761m to help fund 3-waters – with strings attached (paywalled)
Christian Fuller (Hawkes Bay Today): Councils bailed out as Government gives Hawke’s Bay water hope (paywalled)
Georgia-May Gilbertson (Stuff): Casualty of Havelock North gastro crisis pleased with water funding

Environment
Jono Galuszka (Manawatū Standard): Lake Horowhenua may be exempt from new freshwater standards – David Parker says no feasible fix
Sam Kelway (1News): Mount Maunganui marae considering blocking port unless they get Government response over pollution
Leah Tebbutt (Herald): Whareroa Marae sets Govt 10-year deadline for Mount Maunganui heavy industry retreat
Andrea Vance (Stuff): For sale: one endangered kea, but beyond the border it’s completely legal
Skara Bohy (Stuff): Maitai funding of $1.7m to connect ‘mosaic’ of riparian plantings

Housing
Laura Wiltshire (Stuff): Wellington City councillor ‘disappointed’ in MP’s comments on housing proposal
Fiona Connor (Newshub): Mother of sick baby ‘scared’ for future after Kāinga Ora allocates family uninsulated house with fire hazard
Georgina Campbell (Herald): Why are quake prone buildings any different to leaky homes?
Rob Stock (Stuff): Reserve Bank considers extending home loan holiday lifeline
Rob Stock (Stuff): House prices dip across country in June, with Queenstown leading falls

Local government
Hamish McNeilly (Stuff): Marian Hobbs slams dementia rumour as Otago Regional Council drops her as chair
Newstalk ZB: Former Labour MP voted out of Otago Regional Council
Grant Miller (ODT): New chairman Noone says council must unite
Todd Niall (Stuff): Auckland Budget: Rates rise feedback leaves councillors with big call to make
Todd Niall (Stuff): Auckland Council budget: 500 more jobs could be axed in $525 million squeeze
Bernard Orsman (Herald): Auckland Council set to cut 500 more jobs
Damian George (Stuff): Shelly Bay redevelopment put forward as Government shovel-ready project
Chloe Ranford (Stuff): First pay rise in a decade ‘reflects the skills’ of council representatives

Justice
Martin van Beynen (Stuff): The Peter Ellis case and Māori customary law
Newstalk ZB: Justice system report shows very different views from minority groups
Denise Piper (Stuff): New sexual violence laws will help more victims come forward, Rape Crisis says
Catrin Owen (Stuff): Grace Millane: Family calls on New Zealand to ban ‘rough sex’ defence
Ireland Hendry-Tennent (Newshub): Grace Millane’s family call for NZ Government to follow UK’s lead and ban ‘rough sex defence’

Transport and roading
Thomas Coughlan (Stuff): NZ First blocks last part of electric cars policy as Greens fume
Olivia Wannan (Stuff): Kiwis back electric vehicle subsidies – but the devil’s in the detail
Rachel Sadler (Newshub): Todd Muller pleads for questions on $1.5b highway after interrogation over National MP Hamish Walker
1News: National says it will build Christchurch to Ashburton expressway if elected

Employment
Halaena Mckeague (Stuff): Five days sick leave? New Zealanders deserve more
Jody O’Callaghan (Stuff): Covid-19 could spell another economic downturn for Māori without action, report says

Statues
1News: Majority of Māori want statues honouring colonists to be removed – survey
Leonie Hayden (Spinoff): Idea: Put up more statues – of New Zealanders who deserve them

Media
Colin Peacock (RNZ): Mediawatch: MediaWorks boss stepping down
Tom Pullar-Strecker (Stuff): TV3 sale down to ‘one party’ says departing MediaWorks CEO
Damien Venuto (Herald): Why MediaWorks boss Michael Anderson resigned (paywalled)
Newshub: MediaWorks CEO to step down

Ports of Auckland move
Michael Neilson (Herald): Manukau Harbour proposal for Auckland port slammed over major environmental, iwi concerns
Dileepa Fonseka (Newsroom): Just another port study

Primary industries
Tim Murphy (Newsroom): A shake-up for the land and her export billions
Guy Trafford (Interest):Latest MPI aspirational document highlights yet more confusing signals for the rural sector, devoid of detail of what will be supported
Conan Young (RNZ): Govt support for fishers changing methods not enough, some say

Health
Sahiban Hyde (Hawkes Bay Today): Ashley Bloomfield pays tribute to trusted deputy Keriana Brooking as she leaves for Hawke’s Bay DHB role (paywalled)
RNZ: Government gives $14.2m for Hastings hospital redevelopment

Defence
Maxine Jacobs (Stuff): New armoured vehicle purchase replaces ageing fleet
Caley Callahan (Newshub): Government forking out over $100m for armoured vehicles

Other
Jamie Morton (Herald): 600,000 animals used for NZ science in two years
Dana Johannsen (Stuff): America’s Cup organisers need to win back the public’s trust by making changes at the top
1News: Islamic Women’s Council accuses police of ‘othering’, not taking threats against Muslims seriously before Christchurch attack
Ireland Hendry-Tennent (Newshub): American interest in moving to New Zealand jumps amid COVID-19 pandemic
Rob Stock (Stuff): Westpac Life gives unlimited premium holiday to struggling pensioner
Debrin Foxcroft (Stuff): Pretty Penny quits NZ, writes off loans in Commerce Commission settlement
1News: Australian high-cost lender quits NZ, writes off loans following Commerce Commission settlement
Tamsyn Parker (Herald): Business failures: Worst yet to come, insolvency expert predicts bleak 2021
VUW Tutors Collective (Spinoff): A plea to Victoria University from its tutors: don’t answer Covid with austerity
No Right Turn: Why are MP’s exempt from the Privacy Act?
No Right Turn: Rewriting the OIA: A transparency agenda

PNG covid response controller warns public against fake news

By Asia Pacific Report -

July 9, 2020

Pacific Media Centre Newsdesk

Papua New Guinea’s Controller of the National Pandemic Response and Police Commissioner, David Manning, has told the public that a rumour circulating on social media about new cases of covid-19 in Port Moresby is false, the PNG Post-Courier reports.

He also cautioned the public from spreading misinformation and fake news which was detrimental to public safety.

It was also a criminal offence under the country’s cyber crime laws, he said.

To date, Papua New Guinea has 11 confirmed cases of covid-19, with the last case confirmed on June 15.

The ninth case has been repatriated to his home country, Australia, while the other two last cases, which are still active, are being monitored.

The rapid response team of the National Capital District continued to conduct case investigation and contact tracing, in collaboration with the teams from the Department of Health, the PNG Defence Force, the Australian Defence Force, St John Ambulance and the World Health Organisation.

Manning said that any new cases would be confirmed and announced to the public through the National Control Centre.

Call to be vigilant
“I urge people to get your information from reliable sources and not share anything from unverified platforms. As we continue to be vigilant against covid-19, I urge you to also be mindful of the information you share,” Manning said.

He said the threat of covid-19 remained. He urged everyone to continue the “new normal” public health measures, which included:

Anyone who is sick must stay at home and must stay away from others. Limit social gatherings and time spent in crowded places;
Physical distancing of at least 1.5 metres must be adhered to in all public places. If physical distancing is not possible, wear a mask;
Wash your hands often. All business establishments and offices must have hand washing facilities and make available hand sanitizers for visitors;
Temperature checks must be consistently imposed and deny entry to those with symptoms; and
Practice respiratory etiquette – cover your coughs and sneezes with flexed elbow or tissue.

“I emphasise once again, anyone who is experiencing flu-like symptoms, fevers, coughs, sore throats, body aches or difficulty breathing must stay at home and immediately call our toll free line 1800 200,” Manning said.

Andriana Sutandy + Westly Nukundj — Indonesian Ambassador Andriana Sutandy and PNG Border Security Minister Westly Nukundj … covid-19 discussions. Image: PNG Post-Courier/PNG Govt

Border covid security talks
Meanwhile, the Minister for Immigration and Border Security, Westly Nukundj, has held discussions with the Indonesian Ambassador about the threat of covid-19 spreading into Papua New Guinea through the land border.

The Indonesians assured Nujukunj that the second batch of 100 PNG citizens will be repatriated to PNG later this month.

Nukundj on Wednesday accepted an invitation from the Indonesian Embassy in Port Moresby to meet with Ambassador Andriana Sutandy.

Discussions surrounded the areas of strengthening bilateral cooperation between the two nations in the areas of visas and border protection along the PNG-Indonesian borders, border infrastructure development within the covid-19 period and cooperation between the two nations after covid-19.

The meeting was a followup to earlier discussions between Prime Minister James Marape and Indonesian President Joko Widodo.

Indonesia has more than 66,000 cases of covid-19, including more than 2000 in West Papua.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Join us for #BlackLivesMatter in the Asia Pacific – a free, live-streamed event

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Molly Glassey, Digital Editor, The Conversation

Live on YouTube from 3pm WIB, 5 pm WIT, 6pm AEST today (Thursday, July 9). Use this link to watch.

For West Papuans in Indonesia and Indigenous Australians who live within systemic racism and oppression, #BlackLivesMatter resonated deeply.

Join Elvira Rumkabu, lecturer of international relations at Cenderawasih University, and Eddie Synot, a Wamba Wamba First Nations person and the Centre Manager of the Indigenous Law Centre at UNSW, to learn how racism and discrimination continues in Indonesia and Australia and how this global movement should force us all to confront past and current injustices.

Chaired by Prodita Sabarini, Editor at The Conversation Indonesia.

Elvira Rumkabu is a lecturer of international relations at Cenderawasih University based in Jayapura, Papua. She completed her Master’s Degree at the Australian National University. Her areas of expertise are conflict resolution, peace studies, and Papuan politics.

Elvira is a member of the Academics Forum for Papua Peace (FAPD), a forum established by Indonesian lecturers to initiate conflict resolution and peacebuilding in Papua.

She is actively involved in the Peaceful Papua Lobbying Team, initiated by the Democratic Alliance for Papua (ALDP).

Elvira has written about issues relating to the conflict in Papua in a number of publications. She has also spoken about conflict resolution in Papua, racism and marginalisation, and women, peace and security in national and international forums.

Eddie Synot is a Wamba Wamba First Nations person who writes about Indigenous experience at the intersections of law, culture and society, exploring how these different fields impact upon and affect different representations of Indigenous peoples. He is an Indigenous academic lawyer and researcher and the Centre Manager of the Indigenous Law Centre at UNSW.

Eddie has worked in Indigenous higher education providing support to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students studying at Griffith University through the GUMURRII Student Support Unit. Eddie is also currently completing his PhD with the Griffith Law School focusing on a critique of Indigenous recognition and the liberal rights discourse of Indigenous recognition.

Eddie has also taught Indigenous Studies and Law at Griffith University, teaching Reconstructing the Aboriginal Australian, Aboriginal Political Histories, Contemporary Aboriginal Issues and Property Law 1. Join us tonight for #BlackLivesMatters in the Asia Pacific – a free, live-streamed event from The Conversation

– ref. Join us for #BlackLivesMatter in the Asia Pacific – a free, live-streamed event – https://theconversation.com/join-us-for-blacklivesmatter-in-the-asia-pacific-a-free-live-streamed-event-142292

Why children and teens with symptoms should get a COVID-19 test, even if you think it’s ‘just a cough’

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Christopher Blyth, Paediatrician, Infectious Diseases Physician and Clinical Microbiologist, University of Western Australia

A Victorian teenager holidaying on the NSW South Coast has been diagnosed with COVID-19, NSW chief health officer Kerry Chant said on Wednesday.

The revelation follows reports senior students at Al-Taqwa College in Melbourne are now considered the main source of Victoria’s second-biggest COVID-19 cluster.

These cases serve as a reminder that although children and teens are considered less likely than adults to catch and spread COVID-19, everyone with symptoms should get a test — including children and teens.

Children, teens and COVID-19 risk: what we know so far

In my field, paediatric infectious disease, new research is emerging all the time about how SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) affects children and teens. In short, the evidence so far says:

children and teens can contract and spread the disease — but compared to adults, several studies suggest that they are less likely to.
children and teens are much less likely to get severely unwell, be hospitalised or die compared to adults and older people.
tragically, children and babies overseas have died of COVID-19, but compared with adults, this is much less common. Thankfully, it has not yet occurred in Australia.

The current thinking is that for most of Australia, the benefit of keeping schools open outweighs the risk. (In metropolitan Melbourne and Mitchell Shire, however, school holidays have been extended for all students except for those in year 11 and 12 or specialist schools.)

In Australia, the youngest COVID-19 death has been a person in their 40s. Less than 7% of all cases in Australia have so far have been recorded in children and teenagers. This proportion may rise, depending on the demographics in areas where community transmission is occurring.

What about older teens?

The risk of becoming unwell with COVID-19 increases with age. We know older teens are very different to young teens, both in growth and development but also in their activities – many of these activities put older teens at greater risk.

As Victoria’s Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton has said

They are older kids, they tend to have more transmission that is akin to adults if they’re not doing the physical distancing appropriately.

And if teens do develop COVID-19, the disease can move incredibly quickly from person to person and may soon reach populations with much greater risk, such as older people.

That’s why the very best strategy we have is to get tested.

Most children or teens with COVID-19, and indeed most people, will experience a mild illness that improves by itself. However, a small proportion of the community will become severely unwell. I’d be encouraging parents to remember that having a test is not just about the child; it’s about the community, children, parents and grandparents.

Most children or teens, and indeed most people, who get COVID-19 will experience a mild illness that improves by itself. Shutterstock

Younger kids and the constant runny nose or cough

As we head into winter time, we’re starting see more children and adults with common cough and cold viruses. For many parents of younger children, runny noses and coughs are a constant part of life during this time.

To these parents I would say: if it is a new cough, a new fever or sore throat, consider getting the child tested. This is particularly important for those living in places where community transmission is occurring, such as Victoria.

Some children, particularly through winter, will have an ongoing sniffle or cough and one infection will roll into the next. In this situation, the thing to watch for is a worsening of a fever or cough. If this happens, do not hesitate to get tested.

Testing is a key strategy

To sum it up, testing is one of the key strategies to contain the spread of COVID-19 in Australia. One needs only look to Victoria to see what can happen when flare-ups occur. Although some of the public health interventions may appear draconian, we have to make sure people who are infectious are separated from those who are susceptible.

If your child is showing symptoms, you might be tempted to think “it’s just a cough” — and most of the time it will be just a cough. It’s not that we think every child with a cough has got coronavirus, but early detection — along with other measures such as physical distancing, staying home if unwell and hand hygiene — is absolutely crucial in our response.

– ref. Why children and teens with symptoms should get a COVID-19 test, even if you think it’s ‘just a cough’ – https://theconversation.com/why-children-and-teens-with-symptoms-should-get-a-covid-19-test-even-if-you-think-its-just-a-cough-142276

Our field cameras melted in the bushfires. When we opened them, the results were startling

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Benjamin Scheele, Research Fellow in Ecology, Australian National University

This article is a preview of Flora, Fauna, Fire, a multimedia project launching on Monday July 13. The project tracks the recovery of Australia’s native plants and animals after last summer’s bushfire tragedy. Sign up to The Conversation’s newsletter for updates.

In late summer, male northern corroboree frogs call for a female mate. It’s a good time to survey their numbers: simply call out “Hey, frog!” in a low, deep voice and the males call back.

This year, the survey was vital. Bushfires had torn through the habitat of the critically endangered species. We urgently needed to know how many survived.

In late February we trekked into Kosciuszko National Park, through a landscape left charred by the ferocious Dunns Road fire.

We surveyed the scene, calling out: “Hey, frog!”. At ponds not severely burnt, reasonable numbers of northern corroboree frogs responded. At badly burnt sites where frogs had been found for 20 years, we were met with silence. The adults there had likely died.

After completing our surveys we collected melted cameras we’d deployed eight months earlier to monitor water levels in the ponds. Some weeks later, these would reveal just what the frogs had endured.

Northern corroboree frog on burnt moss after the fires. Ben Scheele

A tiny frog with a big problem

Northern corroboree frogs are tiny – no longer than three centimetres long – and feature distinctive yellow and black stripes. They are listed as critically endangered, but are more abundant than their close relative, the southern corroboree frog.

They’re found only in the high country of southern New South Wales and the ACT. Before last summer’s bushfires, just a few thousand northern corroboree frogs were thought to remain in the wild. Our preliminary post-fire assessment indicates a substantial number might have died where fires were severe.

Caught on camera

Of the frogs’ two key habitat areas in NSW, one was burnt by the fires and one was left untouched. Over the border in the ACT, the fire damage was relatively slight, but the worst came later.

Heavy rain after the fires filled ponds with ash and sediment. Ben Scheele

After the fires, heavy rain in denuded burnt catchments produced water runoff laden with sediment. Some frog breeding habitat was eroded and filled with silt and ash. Once-mossy ponds were now gravel and ash.

In March 2019, we’d set up cameras to take one photograph a day, to monitor water levels in ponds. The fires melted the cameras, and some were also waterlogged. One of the authors, Ben Scheele, took them home and left them in his garage, assuming the footage was lost.

But several weeks later, bored during the COVID-19 lockdowns, he chiselled open the warped casing and removed the memory cards. Amazingly, most still worked.

They contained a fascinating series of photos. Some revealed how some ponds largely escaped the fires, only to be destroyed afterwards by flooding.

The series below shows a pond in Kosciuszko National Park. Watch the transition from autumn to deep winter snow, then to dry earth before the fire and its smoky aftermath (when the camera had fallen to the ground):

A frog emergency

Australia is home to around 240 frog species, most found nowhere else in the world.

The expert panel advising the federal government on bushfire recovery has identified 16 frog species likely to be severely affected by last summer’s fires.

All but one was listed as threatened by the IUCN prior to the fires. Importantly, the panel noted not much is known about how Australian frogs respond to fire.

Many Australian frog species have adapted to survive fire. But last summer, fires tore through areas where such events are extremely rare.

This includes World Heritage rainforests in northern NSW, home to the mountain frog, found nowhere else on Earth. How these frogs will respond to the fires remains to be seen.

For species associated with streams, such as the Barred River frogs, the impacts of fire may not be immediately apparent. Males typically stay near streams and may have escaped the flames, but females spend much time away from streams and may have died. These frogs are long-lived, so it may be many years before population declines are detected.

A stuttering frog after a fire in Gibraltar Range National Park last summer. Jodi Rowley

A shared fate

The effects of last summer’s fires on frogs are likely to be felt for years to come. For example, regrowing forests use lots of water, which will affect species in forested areas such as the northern corroboree frogs. This compounds a trend towards less rainfall under climate change, which is already driving their decline.

Annual northern corroboree frog monitoring conducted under the NSW government’s Saving Our Species program has been in place since 1998. This, coupled with the fact about half the known sites were fire-affected, puts us in a good position to better understand the species’ responses to fire by comparing burnt and unburnt sites in coming years.

The NSW government’s Saving Our Species program, and Taronga Conservation Society Australia, have started work on a captive “assurance” population for the species. The project, supported by Commonwealth funding, involves collecting eggs from the wild to safeguard the species’ unique genetic diversity.

Ongoing monitoring of other frog species is also critical. Importantly, anyone can get involved in helping understand frog responses to fire through the FrogID app.

Habitat degradation, climate change and disease threaten frogs globally. In this, they have much in common with humans. Last summer’s severe fires were a direct result of climate change. And of course, COVID-19 has killed more than 500,000 people in recent months.

Perhaps humanity should reflect on the fate we share with wildlife, and act. Perhaps humanity should reflect on the fate we share with wildlife, and act.

David Hunter of the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment contributed to this article.

– ref. Our field cameras melted in the bushfires. When we opened them, the results were startling – https://theconversation.com/our-field-cameras-melted-in-the-bushfires-when-we-opened-them-the-results-were-startling-139922

Children’s books must be diverse, or kids will grow up believing white is superior

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Helen Joanne Adam, Senior Lecturer in Literacy Education and Children’s Literature: Course Coordinator Master of Teaching (Primary), Edith Cowan University

Global support for the Black Lives Matter movement isn’t only about standing up against the injustice done to George Floyd, or Indigenous Australians in custody. People are also standing up against the entrenched racism that leads to a careless approach towards the lives of people who aren’t white.

Research shows 75% of Australians hold an implicit bias against Indigenous Australians, seeing them negatively, even if this is unconscious. Children absorb this bias, which becomes entrenched due to messages in the media and in books, and continues to play out at school and the broader community.

Making sure children have access to books showing diversity is one step in breaking the cycle that leads to entrenched racism.

Children develop bias from an early age

Children develop their sense of identity and perceptions of others from a very early age – as early as three months old. Because of this, young children are particularly vulnerable to the messages they see and hear in the media and in books.

Research over many years has shown books can empower, include and validate the way children see themselves. But books can also exclude, stereotype and oppress children’s identities. Minority groups are particularly at risk of misrepresentation and stereotyping in books.

First Nations groups are commonly absent from children’s books. Excluding the viewpoints, histories and suffering of First Nations Peoples can misrepresent history, and teach kids a white-washed version of the past.

A world of children’s books dominated by white authors, white images and white male heroes, creates a sense of white superiority. This is harmful to the worldviews and identities of all children.

Sharing stories through books

Evidence shows sharing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander stories helps break down stereotypes and prejudice. And this, importantly, helps empower Aboriginal children and improve their educational engagement and outcomes.

But research suggests many classrooms have books that are monocultural literature, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander books are notably absent.

There are some encouraging signs, with an increase in the publication of books by and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We are also seeing bookshops and publishers reporting a rise in demand for books on race and racism.

Books can empower and validate children’s identities. But they can also make them feel inferior. Shutterstock

This can also help adults become informed about Australia’s colonial history. Reading these books can help challenge their own unconscious biases and misunderstandings.

The challenge for teachers and parents is to access suitable children’s books and share them with the children in their care. We can use these stories as a foundation for conversations about culture and community.

This can help to drive change and support reconciliation.

Don’t panic (again): here’s why Melbourne’s supermarket shortages will quickly pass

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Flavio Romero Macau, Senior Lecturer in Supply Chain Management and Global Logistics, Edith Cowan University

You’re nervous, I get it.

Panic buying is back, not as strong as in March and more localised in Melbourne. Once again shop shelves have been emptied of pasta, toilet paper and other household items.

When will things get back to normal? Soon, more than likely in a matter of days, rather than weeks.

What is different now

Last time most of Australia was involved. Taken by surprise, supermarkets struggled with shoppers across the nation going into “hoard mode” simultaneously.

Normally supermarket supply chains run like well-oiled machines with highly predictable demand. Products move slowly and continuously from factories to distribution centres to stores. Supply chains are “skinny”, with stores ensuring they have just enough stock to meet that demand, particularly for low-margin products like toilet paper that take up a lot of shelf space.

A spike in demand can thus quickly empty shelves. It can prompt other shoppers to also start stockpiling, due to fear of missing out, making the problem worse.

Responding to this situation in March took weeks, as supermarkets adjusted their orders and manufacturers ramped up production to supply more products. The supermarket chains used every trick in the book to balance supply and demand – including imposing limits on the quantity of products shoppers could buy at any one time.

What is happening

This time suppliers are more prepared. Their lean supply chains have built some fat. Inventory has not been at a minimum. Limits on the amount customers can buy have been quickly reintroduced.

So why are shelves empty at all if this time businesses are more responsive?

Signage for product limits in a Woolworths supermarket in Melbourne. James Ross/AAP

Well, one thing has not changed: there’s still a lag in supply chains responding to any sudden change in demand.

With toilet paper, for example, orders are generally fulfilled in about ten days. Last time it took about three weeks for more paper to make to it shops.

But, given the information of a spike in demand in Victoria made its way from shops and distributors to manufacturers almost instantly, things should happen faster this time.

Retailers have already moved to answer the call by rerouting deliveries to increase supply where it is needed the most. The only thing stopping supply returning to normal is the speed of transportation and restocking.

Also, the spike in demand is heavily localised in Melbourne. While there have been reports of panic buying and stockpiling in other states, it’s nowhere near the level of a few months ago.

So shortages in Victoria will not be as prolonged as last time. Redirecting inventories will be a lot simpler.

Think of it this way. Panic buying during March was like a big detour in the supply-chain highway given the whole country was involved. Now it is more like a car with a flat tyre reducing traffic speed locally. It’s not less dramatic for the people affected, but much simpler from a supply-chain perspective.

The new normal

So don’t panic. There’s less reason to join in the panic buying (or stockpiling, if you think of it as a rational response to lockdown) this time. We’re likely to experience these disruptions so long as COVID-19 outbreaks continue. The “new normal” is like a faulty switch. Regions will be on and off the spot until the pandemic is over.

But as long as the entire nation does not move backwards all at the same time, supply chains from one state will quickly support the one experiencing difficulties.

There’s really no reason for you to add to the problem.

– ref. Don’t panic (again): here’s why Melbourne’s supermarket shortages will quickly pass – https://theconversation.com/dont-panic-again-heres-why-melbournes-supermarket-shortages-will-quickly-pass-142288

Trauma, resilience, sex and art: your guide to the 2020 Miles Franklin shortlist

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jen Webb, Dean, Graduate Research, University of Canberra

It seems sometimes literary fiction performs a bellwether function: signalling changes; alerting us to the directions in which a society is headed.

The 2020 Miles Franklin shortlist seems to bear this out in six novels whose topics shimmer with relevance: the continuing wounds of colonisation (for people and the environment); language and all its possibilities and failures; ditto families; and the issues that are intrinsic to fiction, like conflict and character, trauma and resilience, sex and art. And, in the case of these six novels, lost or vanished family members and the uncertain status of the dead.

Islands

Peggy Frew’s Islands reads like a sequence of vignettes, focused through members of the Worth family and other, more tangential, characters. Frew demands and rewards a reader’s attention, because the impact of her structure is a lapidary arrangement of different voices, times, geographies.

The overall effect is of fragments of impressions, a prism that reflects and deflects the light cast by childhood: the presence and absence of the younger sister Anna, and then of the rejected mother and the incompetent father, until the remaining sister, Junie, is left almost alone, with every breath freighted by the disappearance of her sister:

Junie can look back on the past, when Anna was there. She can see, behind her, that world, where things were aligned. And then there is a signpost, a marker, which is Anna being gone. And after that the void opens …

The Yield

Tara June Winch’s The Yield is another story of family crisis, of a daughter gone missing, a family stranded in the midst of the enduring trauma of invasion and the newer catastrophe of environmental mismanagement. All that, and then the death of grandfather Albert Gondiwindi and the impending loss of their family home.

This sounds like an unrelieved tragedy but the novel is full of light, not least because of the writing: practically every sentence is a marvel, language that does not merely describe but perfectly fits the world of things. The characters, too, are beautifully rendered, with Albert and his widow Elsie demonstrating how one can live fully and hold close all that seems lost.

As his legacy, Albert has left a dictionary full of words from his apparently lost language, which come with advice and responsibilities:

The spirit woman was empty-handed and showed me her hands … and she said, ‘Wanga-dyung.’ ‘What’s that mean?’ She said, ‘It means lost, but not lost always.’ I said okay, and she told me to practise it.

The “not lost always” is bequeathed to his sad granddaughter August, who starts learning, as grandmother Elsie insists, “We aren’t victims in this story anymore”.

The White Girl

Another lost daughter, another unresolved mourning is at the heart of Tony Birch’s The White Girl, set during the period of the Aborigines Protection Act, which permitted white people to insult, assault, and confine Indigenous people without legal consequences.

Odette, grandmother of the eponymous “white girl”, has struggled to preserve her right to raise the baby, Sissy, left behind when her daughter disappeared. She struggles to maintain dignity in the face of unremitting abuse. When a local thug says to her, “I thought there was none of your lot left around here”, she replies, “Oh, my people are still here, son … We’ve always been here and we’re going no place”.

The name Odette recalls the swan: always just out of reach, always poised, always gracious. But she is also tough and decisive. When it’s time to leave town, illegally, to protect her granddaughter, and Sissy says, “We’re in trouble, aren’t we, Nan?”, Odette merely laughs:

Trouble? Our people have been in one sort of trouble or another from the first day we set eyes on a white person.

Exploded View

It wasn’t a good year for daughters.

Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View works like a negative Bildungsroman, focusing on a girl who practices elective mutism because “You have to stop listening to yourself to be able to speak”.

She avoids human contact, creeping into neighbours’ homes when they are out, creeping out of her own home at night, entirely dissociated and alone. This is not surprising given her backyard mechanic and abuser “Father Man”; her Mother who escapes into fantasies; her isolation from friends and protectors. She identifies with car bodies and engines but also assaults them — dropping sewing needles into their delicate moving parts, hacking holes into pipes. She insists, “There are many happy times in my family”, but her example of a happy time is only the hunt for Mother’s lost contact lens.

There seems little hope in the exploded view this novel offers of abused adolescents, but it is leavened by her determination not to cave in: “You are only lost to others”, the unnamed girl? observes, “not inside yourself”.

The Returns

In The Returns, Philip Salom produces what in some lights reads like a metafiction.

It is the story of Trevor, an artist turned bookseller turned bookseller-artist whose dead father returns, inconveniently, to trouble him. It is the story of Elizabeth, daughter of an ex-cultist, a book editor who suffers from face blindness and recognises people by their shape and smell. It is the story of the art sector where only artists with a track record can expect to be exhibited, where “the book publishing scene looks like property management sometimes. Safe books in safe suburbs”.

Salom is a poet, and great swathes of this novel show this lineage:

[S]o many people want art to be romantic gestures and a clutch of the bowels, a dazzle born of insanity (first), suffering (second) or heroin, or beautiful lovers or genius from the fucking stars. Oh, art! Our body is made of stardust! No, it’s not.

Set in a slice of Melbourne struggling for recognition, between the dog shit and motor accidents and incompetent criminals, the cool eye of the painter and the cool voice of the editor deliver a cocktail of tenderness, irreverence and sometimes laugh-out-loud humour in the face of what feels a little like disaster.

No One

John Hughes’ No One follows the lonely narrator through his attempts to determine who or what he hit while driving past Redfern station one night. He can’t resolve the problem: there is no data to work with, and the absence in this accident operates as a sort of allegory for his life. He cannot, after all, resolve his own history – his lost homeland and parents, his invisibility.

“It’s like we walk on water”, he says, “so little trace do we leave of ourselves.” Even the strange relationship he develops with a young woman he calls the Poetess – one who carries the scars of her own abusive past – is built on water.

The narrative also seems an allegory of Australian history. Speaking of his history lecturer, he recalls:

You can’t alter historical injustice in the present, he said. Two hundred years after the fact – he was talking about colonisation – the crime continues, only it’s a criminal-less crime now, which means it can never be solved.

While this novel is desperately sad, the writing is exquisite, and the narrative offers the promise one can adapt; it is possible to achieve at least small moments of resolution.

The winner of the Miles Franklin will be announced on Thursday July 16.

– ref. Trauma, resilience, sex and art: your guide to the 2020 Miles Franklin shortlist – https://theconversation.com/trauma-resilience-sex-and-art-your-guide-to-the-2020-miles-franklin-shortlist-140937

Is watching adult content bad for your health? We asked 5 experts

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Liam Petterson, Assistant Editor, Health + Medicine, The Conversation Australia

Let’s be honest: during coronavirus lockdown it was hard to resist the allure of internet intimacy. Rates of watching porn skyrocketed in Australia during isolation.

But have you ever wondered what effects consuming adult content can have on your health?

We asked five experts whether watching porn is bad for our health.

Three out of five experts said yes

Their main concerns were about the creation of unrealistic expectations, links with gender-based violence, and the potential for addiction.

But some suggested education can help offset some of these possible harms, and porn can play a positive role for LGBTIQ+ young people.

Here are the experts’ detailed responses:

If you have a “yes or no” health question you’d like posed to Five Experts, email your suggestion to: liam.petterson@theconversation.edu.au

This article is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

– ref. Is watching adult content bad for your health? We asked 5 experts – https://theconversation.com/is-watching-adult-content-bad-for-your-health-we-asked-5-experts-140550

Birdwatching increased tenfold last lockdown. Don’t stop, it’s a huge help for bushfire recovery

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ayesha Tulloch, DECRA Research Fellow, University of Sydney

Many Victorians returning to stage three lockdown will be looking for ways to pass the hours at home. And some will be turning to birdwatching.

When Australians first went into lockdown in March, the combination of border closures, lockdowns and the closure of burnt areas from last summer’s bushfires meant those who would have travelled far and wide to watch their favourite birds, instead stayed home.

Yet, Australians are reporting bird sightings at record rates – they’ve just changed where and how they do it.

In fact, Australian citizen scientists submitted ten times the number of backyard bird surveys to BirdLife Australia’s Birdata app in April compared with the same time last year, according to BirdLife Australia’s Dr Holly Parsons.

But it’s not just a joyful hobby. Australia’s growing fascination with birds is vital for conservation after last summer’s devastating bushfires reduced many habitats to ash.

Birds threatened with extinction

Australia’s native plants and animals are on the slow path to recovery after the devastating fires last summer. In our research that’s soon to be published, we found the fires razed forests, grasslands and woodlands considered habitat for 832 species of native vertebrate fauna. Of these, 45% are birds.

Some birds with the largest areas of burnt habitat are threatened with extinction, such as the southern rufous scrub-bird and the Kangaroo Island glossy black-cockatoo.

Government agencies and conservation NGOs are rolling out critical recovery actions.

But citizen scientists play an important role in recovery too, in the form of monitoring. This provides important data to inform biodiversity disaster research and management.

Record rates of birdwatching

Birdwatchers have recorded numerous iconic birds affected by the fires while observing COVID-19 restrictions. They’ve been recorded in urban parks and city edges, as well as in gardens and on farms.

In April 2020, survey numbers in BirdLife Australia’s Birds in Backyards program jumped to 2,242 – a tenfold increase from 241 in April 2019.

Change in the number of area-based surveys by Australian citizen scientists over the first six months of 2019 compared with 2020. Data sourced from BirdLife Australia’s Birdata database.

Similarly, reporting of iconic birds impacted by the recent bushfires has increased.

Between January and June, photos and records of gang-gang cockatoos in the global amateur citizen science app iNaturalist increased by 60% from 2019 to 2020. And the number of different people submitting these records doubled from 26 in 2019 to 53 in 2020.

What’s more, reporting of gang-gangs almost doubled in birding-focused apps, such as Birdlife Australia’s Birdata, which recently added a bushfire assessment tool .

The huge rise in birdwatching at home has even given rise to new hashtags you can follow, such as #BirdingatHome on Twitter, and #CuppaWithTheBirds on Instagram.

A gang-gang effort: why we’re desperate for citizen scientists

The increased reporting rates of fire-affected birds is good news, as it means many birds are surviving despite losing their home. But they’re not out of the woods yet.

Their presence in marginal habitats within and at the edge of urban and severely burnt areas puts them more at risk. This includes threats from domestic cat and dog predation, starvation due to inadequate food supply, and stress-induced nest failure.

That’s why consolidating positive behaviour change, such as the rise in public engagement with birdwatching and reporting, is so important.

A female superb lyrebird calling to her reflection in a parked car in suburbia. Her nest was later discovered 100 meters from the carpark.

Citizen science programs help increase environmental awareness and concern. They also improve the data used to inform conservation management decisions, and inform biodiversity disaster management.

For example, improved knowledge about where birds go after fire destroys their preferred habitat will help conservation groups and state governments prioritise locations for recovery efforts. Such efforts include control of invasive predators, supplementary feeding and installation of nest boxes.

Gang gang Cockatoo hanging out on a street sign in Canberra. Athena Georgiou/Birdlife Photography

Better understanding of how bushfire-affected birds use urban and peri-urban habitats will help governments with long-term planning that identifies and protects critical refuges from being cleared or degraded.

And new data on where birds retreat to after fires is invaluable for helping us understand and plan for future bushfire emergencies.

So what can you do to help?

If you have submitted a bird sighting or survey during lockdown, keep at it! If you have never done a bird survey before, but you see one of the priority birds earmarked for special recovery efforts, please report them.

There are several tools available to the public for reporting and learning about birds.

iNaturalist asks you to share a photo or video or sound recording, and a community of experts identifies it for you.

BirdLife’s Birds in Backyards program includes a “Bird Finder” tool to help novice birders identify that bird sitting on the back verandah. Once you’ve figured out what you’re seeing, you can log your bird sightings to help out research and management.

The majority of habitat for Kangaroo Island glossy black cockatoos burnt last summer. Bowerbirdaus/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

For more advanced birders who can identify birds without guidance, options include eBird and BirdLife’s Birdata app. This will help direct conservation groups to places where help is most needed.

Finally, if there are fire-affected birds, such as lyrebirds and gang-gang cockatoos, in your area, it’s especially important to keep domestic dogs and cats indoors, and encourage neighbours to do the same. Report fox sightings to your local council.

If you come across a bird that’s injured or in distress, it’s best to contact a wildlife rescue organisation, such as Wildcare Australia (south-east Queensland), WIRES (NSW) or Wildlife Victoria.

By ensuring their homes are safe and by building a better bank of knowledge about where they seek refuge in times of need, we can all help Australia’s unique wildlife.

– ref. Birdwatching increased tenfold last lockdown. Don’t stop, it’s a huge help for bushfire recovery – https://theconversation.com/birdwatching-increased-tenfold-last-lockdown-dont-stop-its-a-huge-help-for-bushfire-recovery-141970

Why heritage protection is about how people use places, not just their architecture and history

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Lesh, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Australian Centre for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage, University of Melbourne

The roar of the crowd at the stadium. Jostling to see the New Year fireworks in the public square. Captivated by the band at the pub. Meeting mates outside the train station. These experiences conjure sites of importance for each of us.

As a Melburnian, places that come to mind for me are the MCG, Federation Square, Flinders Street Station and Festival Hall. Sydneysiders could be thinking about the Opera House, Central Station, the Enmore Theatre and Homebush Stadium.

It’s people that make these places important. Without crowds, an idling Gabba in Brisbane or an empty Cottesloe Beach in Perth is a less exciting place.

Each of the above places possesses outstanding social value. It’s why state heritage laws and local planning schemes can protect places of community importance.

However, this does not happen enough. Of more than 2,300 items on the Victorian Heritage Register, for instance, about 10% are listed for their social value.

Although data are scarce, the numbers are likely similar for heritage lists across Australia. This leaves treasured meeting places – neighbourhood pubs are a prime example – at risk.

Interactions between people and places over time give places their cultural heritage significance. Joel Carrett/AAP

With restrictions on public gatherings, urban heritage places of social significance have more allure than ever. Just as we are distanced from each other, we are separated from these places. Their temporary absence in our lives, and the sense of community and comforting memories we associate with them, only add to their cultural significance.

However, heritage typically gives more priority to the historic and aesthetic integrity of older fabric, buildings and structures than to ongoing social and cultural relationships between people and built places.

A lack of participatory methods to involve the public in heritage decisions is another problem with how authorities and the private sector manage the cultural values of historic places.

Two landmark cases

For more than a century, authorities typically safeguarded monumental architecture and places embodying the apparent progress of the Australian nation, such as public buildings and memorials.

Since the 1970s, additional cultural values – social, scientific and spiritual – have been inscribed in heritage practice. Yet, as I explore in my research, traditional ideas of aesthetic and historic value have been privileged in conservation. Other significant cultural values have not been treated as equally important.

Heritage systems have traditionally performed well when managing grand 19th century public buildings. Luis Enrique Ascui/AAP

The introduction of social value saved Flinders Street Station when it was threatened with demolition in 1972 for high-rise development.

Model of Flinders Gate Project, 1974. Wolfgang Sievers/State Library of Victoria (reproduced with SLV permission)

The National Trust wanted to preserve the train station. But its committee of architects perceived it as an “architectural monstrosity” because its Edwardian Baroque style was out of favour.

After long deliberations, the National Trust deemed the station a

landmark […] a major focal point of Melbourne’s city life [with] the Clocks! section [sic] inextricably bound to the social fabric of Melbourne and Victoria.

The famous clocks overlook the intersection of Flinders and Swanston streets, pictured here in the early 1970s. Rennie Ellis/State Library of Victoria (reproduced with SLV permission)

So Flinders Street Station was protected for its lasting importance to Melburnians. Only later would it be recognised for its architecture.

Despite its social value, when the station was repainted in original colours in 2017, there was little public engagement in this decision. Research on people’s perceptions of historic places has shown they often prefer agedness and wornness over traditional conservation works that make places look new again: the patina of age has value. Public participation could have resulted in a different conservation decision based on Melburnians’ preferred colours and textures.

Flinders Street Station was preserved because of its social value for Melburnians, but they weren’t consulted about restoring the original colour scheme. AAP/Victorian government

Another landmark case involves the MCG. Authorities rejected a comprehensive heritage listing for the stadium in the 1980s, when the Great Southern Stand was developed, because a listing might have prevented redevelopment.

The MCG designation was reconsidered, however, in the lead-up to the 2006 Commonwealth Games. It then met revised thresholds to be fully state-listed. It was “the matches and public not the buildings” that created the heritage importance.

And to retain the cultural importance of the MCG in the future lives of Melburnians, flexibility on the stands was required. With the support of club members and heritage authorities, the 1928 Members’ Pavilion made way for the new Northern Stand.

Ian Harrison Hill, ‘Demolition of Members’ Stand [Melbourne Cricket Ground]’, photograph, 2004. State Library of Victoria, Pictures Collection, H2004.24/4 (reproduced with the permission of the State Library of Victoria and Ian Harrison Hill)

Social value in the past, present and future

At the MCG, social value was projected into the future, allowing for flexibility during redevelopment.

At Flinders Street Station, social value was perceived as developing in the past. The recent station works demonstrated that, even when public places are heritage-listed, their management often does not include participatory methods.

Neighbourhood pubs, which are being rapidly redeveloped, are another form of at-risk public place with great social value. Pubs become important to people for their longevity as gathering places, often more so than for their architecture, facades and interiors.

The now-demolished historic Greyhound Hotel in St Kilda had potential to inspire the public realm in future development works. National Trust of Australia (Victoria)

The National Trust is seeking to conserve some pubs. However, authorities have far more power to mandate the continuity of historic places’ built fabric rather than ensuring redevelopments retain community spaces.

Even when this does happen, opportunities can be missed to use historic elements of the demolished buildings. Participatory and social approaches to heritage have unrealised potential to guide the design and use of the future public realm.

A major step towards placing people at the heart of heritage would be to mandate and fund a diversity of participatory methods in state and local heritage governance. It’s important, too, to embed community participation across private sector heritage practice. Only by working towards more holistically conserving the broader cultural values of historic places can heritage achieve cultural stewardship for people.

– ref. Why heritage protection is about how people use places, not just their architecture and history – https://theconversation.com/why-heritage-protection-is-about-how-people-use-places-not-just-their-architecture-and-history-138128

If architecture is the canary in the coalmine, the outlook for construction is appalling

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Professor of Architecture, University of Adelaide

Architecture suffers before building does.

A survey of more than 450 architecture practices conducted by the Association of Consulting Architects finds that two thirds have lost more than 30% of their revenue, and eight in ten have had projects cancelled or put on hold.

Six in ten are relying on JobKeeper. Half have cut pay or working hours. Three in ten have stood down or sacked staff. Only 15% believe they have enough work to see out the year.

In total, the survey finds more than A$10 billion of projects have either been cancelled or put on hold, just among those responding to the survey.

John Held, the National President of the Association of Consulting Architects says

unless there is a more effective stimulus package for construction, the government will need to consider extending JobKeeper beyond its expiry in September to prevent the loss of many normally-viable architectural practices. Without a pipeline of projects, a substantial rise in unemployment across the whole construction sector will result

Dr Peter Raisbeck, an expert in the building and construction industry at the University of Melbourne, says

two thirds of architects in Australia are small businesses employing less than five people, operating on small profit margins. Widespread insolvencies amongst these vulnerable firms would be catastrophic

The design professions – architecture and engineering – are the canary in the coalmine for the wider construction industry. If those professions are in a slump now, construction itself will most probably be in big trouble in three to six months.

A window on the future

Surveys point to fewer cranes on the horizon. JULIAN SMITH/AAP

The findings are reinforced by forecasts prepared by the Australian Construction Industry Forum.

They show that while engineering construction on projects such as motorways and public transport is likely to hold up reasonably well, residential and non residential construction, already weak prior to COVID-19, is set to slump over this year and the next, with the brunt of the impact being felt in NSW and Victoria.

It will be very bad for employment.

The building and construction industry consists of nearly 400,000 businesses that directly employ more than 1.2 million Australians. Most of the supply chain for building materials is in Australia, particularly for low-rise residential buildings.

The immediate priority should be to ensure that projects continue to be designed and documented to avoid the “valley of death” caused by the need for drawings to be completed before construction can start.

We’ve had warning

If eight out of ten architectural practices have projects that have been cancelled or put on hold now, there will be a significant shortage of projects going to tender later in 2020 and in 2021.

Based on the numbers in the surveys, the loss of jobs in construction could add two percentage points to unemployment during 2021.

To overcome the valley of death, something needs to be done to restart projects that have been deferred or cancelled.

To their credit, state and territory governments have brought forward varying amounts of public works projects, including schools, hospitals and a small amount of social housing. In Victoria, the acceleration of the government’s combustible cladding replacement program is also helping to prop up demand.

Unfortunately, the evidence from the Association of Consulting Architects survey suggests this won’t be enough.

HomeBuilder, the federal government’s $680 million program intended to “save the tradies”, appears to have stalled.

So far, none of the states has finalised an implementation plan for the scheme, perhaps because it was so poorly designed.

In Sydney, where a lot of houses may exceed the $1.5 million value cap, some builders are complaining that the scheme is actually delaying decisions while homeowners wait to see if it will apply to them.

And we know what to do

We can learn from history. The Rudd government’s $3 billion (in today’s money) Building the Education Revolution scheme was successful in stimulating construction and delivering jobs during the global financial crisis.

The $3 billion Home Insulation Program (later known as the “pink batts” program) also created jobs.

Although there was widespread and justified criticism of how both programs were implemented, they were big enough and quick enough to make a difference to employment. And they delivered general benefits.

We should be able to learn from these ideas and the mistakes that were made in their implementation.

The Morrison government’s efforts to support the construction industry to date have been too small and too slow. The architects survey suggests the design professions will go over a cliff in September. The construction forecast suggests that the construction industry will follow them over in 2021.

State and local governments have a long list of useful school, health and community projects that could go ahead now if the federal government made the money available.

Many shovel-ready projects that have been cancelled are in the higher education sector, many of them meant to deliver the STEM graduates or STEM research that the government says it is keen on.

There is also a crying need for good social housing, made more apparent by developments in Melbourne.

If we learned anything from the global financial crisis, it was that going hard and early worked. It is not too late to do it now, but it will be soon.

– ref. If architecture is the canary in the coalmine, the outlook for construction is appalling – https://theconversation.com/if-architecture-is-the-canary-in-the-coalmine-the-outlook-for-construction-is-appalling-141367

Yes, street art is on public display — but that doesn’t mean we should share it without credit

By The Conversation -

July 9, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mike Dickison, Research Information Advisor, Massey University

When Wellington mural artist Xoë Hall discovered her work on a calendar, she hadn’t been contacted by anybody, let alone credited or paid for it.

This wasn’t the first time. Her art often appears on T-shirts and postcards without permission. This is because Hall is a street artist — and most people think street art is in the public domain, to be freely photographed, shared and republished. They’re wrong.

Street artists make a difference to the character of our cities and often use their art to raise social issues. But with a few high-profile exceptions, most don’t make much money.

Seeing street artists’ work ripped off, particularly by agencies with big photography budgets, is common. But there are things artists can do to protect their work from unauthorised use.

Street art and copyright

Under New Zealand law, all original artworks are copyrighted automatically from the moment they’re created. Artists don’t need to register them or put a copyright symbol on them.

This gives two sorts of legal protection: legal rights and moral rights.

Moral rights mean the artist is identified as the author, and the work cannot be used in a derogatory way which could harm their reputation. Legal rights describe the exclusive right to make a copy of, communicate, or adapt the artwork.

To photograph and share an original artwork legally, you need to get the permission of the copyright owner and credit the artist. A common misconception is that copyright law only kicks in if you’re making money from using an artwork – but copying is copying.

Another misconception is that work in a public space isn’t copyrighted. New Zealand’s Copyright Act (1994) exempts some works like sculptures permanently installed in a public space, but protects “graphic works”, which include murals and other street art. Copies (photos) of those works need the permission of the copyright owner.

But many people aren’t aware of this. This includes tourists sharing holiday snaps on social media; marketing firms using street murals as a backdrop to advertising campaigns; building owners letting artists use their walls; city councils commissioning the art; and often even the artists themselves.

A test: would you carry a camera and tripod into an art gallery and photograph paintings to make a set of postcards? If this scenario gives you an ethical twinge, you should feel the same when photographing street art.

In most cases, casual photography is not a problem. Street artists usually don’t mind people celebrating their work by sharing photographs of it, especially if they’re credited. But when street art is used to sell a product or push a message, that’s a different story.

Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra’s mural in a Chicago park features the late photographer Vivian Maier. But since Kobra probably owns the copyright, the photo was almost certainly taken and shared without permission. Matthew T Rader/Unsplash

How artists can protect themselves

One complication is figuring out who owns the copyright in an artwork, even one that has been signed. A lot of street art is commissioned, and under New Zealand law, copyright rests in the person who commissioned the work. Either party can put a clause in the contract assigning copyright back to the artist. The only problem: most street art is arranged with a handshake, not a contract.

And what exactly “commissioning” means can be murky. If the artist was paid, it’s obviously a commission, but what if they were paid in materials, or had their airfare or accommodation reimbursed, or were shouted a meal or beers?

Some street art festivals don’t pay the artists but cover their expenses. Do the artist know that by accepting they may be handing over their copyright to the organisers?

For their own protection, we think street artists shouldn’t do any work, paid or unpaid, without a contract. Ideally they should retain both their legal and moral rights to the work and get it in writing.

We also strongly recommend artists paint a copyright symbol and a date on the artwork along with their name. This makes it clear to photographers whom they need to credit and ask permission to reuse. If there’s a copyright owner who’s not the artist, add their name too.

The copyright owner might want to specify that taking photos for noncommercial use is permitted. The easiest way to do this is with a Creative Commons licence. The appropriate licence is Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial, which just involves painting “CC BY-NC” somewhere on the work, near the copyright symbol. This is an extra reminder to advertisers and marketers that they need to ask permission, and gives the copyright owner some comeback in cases of a flagrant breach.

We hope artists will feel motivated to organise and demand legal protection in their contracts, stop companies from selling unauthorised copies of their work, and even send an invoice to the worst offenders. And we should all credit them for what they do and respect their copyrights.

Many thanks to Tom Huthwaite for legal advice, which this article is not. Xoë and Tom have set up a website, Bad Exposure, to educate street artists about copyright.

– ref. Yes, street art is on public display — but that doesn’t mean we should share it without credit – https://theconversation.com/yes-street-art-is-on-public-display-but-that-doesnt-mean-we-should-share-it-without-credit-132000

Scott Morrison set to slow the arrival home of Australians amid coronavirus fears

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

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

Scott Morrison will take a proposal to Friday’s national cabinet to slow the influx of Australians returning from overseas.

Morrison’s proposal followed this week’s request from Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan that international flights be diverted from landing in Perth to relieve pressure on resources, and the earlier diversion of flights from landing in Melbourne because of the new outbreak.

The prime minister told a news conference his proposal would be to contain the inflow rather than pause it. He said the numbers coming in were very low “but at this time, we don’t want to put any more pressure on the system than is absolutely necessary”.

New Zealand has moved to slow the flow of returnees.

Morrison also said the federal government would support state governments charging travellers returning from abroad for their quarantine.

It was up to the states but “if they wish to do that, then the Commonwealth would have no objection to that”.

“I think that would be a completely understandable proposition for people who have been away for some time.”

There had been “many opportunities for people to return. If they’re choosing to do so now, they have obviously delayed that decision for a period,” he told a news conference.

Queensland is already charging – $2,800 for one adult, $3,710 for two adults, and $4,620 for two adults and two children, with some provision for waivers. The Northern Territory also charges.

As Victoria announced 134 new cases, Morrison’s message to Melburnians facing the six-week lockdown was: “It’s tough. And it will test you and it will strain, but you have done it once before and you will be able to do it again because you have proven that”.

“We’re all Melburnians now when it comes to the challenges we face. We’re all Victorians now because we’re all Australians.”

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg said the cost to the economy of the Victorian re-imposed lockdown would now be factored into the government’s July 23 economic statement. It would affect forecasts for growth and unemployment. “Victoria is a big part of the national economy” and “the cost to Victoria is up to a billion dollars a week and that will fall heavily on businesses”.

“This is a major challenge to the economic recovery. This is going to have an impact well beyond the Victorian border. It’s already starting to play out in consumer confidence numbers that have been down in the last two weeks, ” Frydenberg said.

“We have been there with JobKeeper and the cash flow boost, which together have provided more than $10 billion into the Victorian economy,” he said.

“We’re ready to do what is required to support Victoria, and Daniel Andrews himself has said whenever he’s asked the Prime Minister for support the answer has been an unequivocal yes.”

Frydenberg confirmed there will be another phase of income support for the period beyond September when JobKeeper is due to finish. The future support would be temporary and targeted, he said. The higher JobSeeker payment is also scheduled to snap back at the end of September, although it is not expected to return to the old rate.

Frydenberg also indicated the government was considering bringing forward the next round of the legislated tax cuts. “We are looking at that issue, and the timing of those tax cuts, because we do want to boost aggregate demand, boost consumption, put more money in people’s pockets, and that is one way to do it”.

NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian told people in communities along the NSW-Victorian border not to move outside their “bubble”; nor should people go into these areas. She warned “the probability of contagion in NSW given what’s happening in Victoria is extremely high”.

The ACT has three new cases, the first in more than a month. Two arrived from a Melbourne hot spot and the third is a household contact.

– ref. Scott Morrison set to slow the arrival home of Australians amid coronavirus fears – https://theconversation.com/scott-morrison-set-to-slow-the-arrival-home-of-australians-amid-coronavirus-fears-142290

Melbourne’s hotel quarantine bungle is disappointing but not surprising. It was overseen by a flawed security industry

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Sarah Kaine, Associate Professor UTS Centre for Business and Social Innovation, University of Technology Sydney

In late March, the Victorian government put private security firms in charge of hotel quarantine in Melbourne. This happened without a formal tender process.

It was a decision made at the height of concern about the spread of COVID-19 in Australia. But it is one that has come back to bite Victoria as it stares down a second wave, amid reports of serious infection control breaches in the hotel quarantine system.

The Andrews government has since announced a judicial inquiry into management of the program.

This situation is both distressing and disappointing. But it should come as no surprise to anyone with a passing interest in labour standards in the private security industry or an understanding of governance issues in supply chains.

To put it plainly, the Victorian government used an industry with a long history of non-compliance with minimum standards for a critical public safety job.

An industry where labour issues are rife

According to the Australian Security Industry Association, in March 2020, there were more than 11,000 security businesses in Australia with more than 147,000 individual security licence holders.

It is not difficult to enter the industry. It does not take much capital to start a business and the workforce is relatively low-skilled. As a result, a large number of security businesses compete for security contracts and there is strong competition on labour costs.

The Fair Work Ombudsman has also identified

a lack of awareness and education regarding employer obligations and employee entitlements.

This creates an industry where labour issues are rife. The Ombudsman and media regularly highlight issues in the sector, including underpayment of wages, health and safety problems and sub-contracting.

The problem with sub-contracting

Sub-contracting is a problem on two levels. Firstly, it often appears in the form known as “sham contracting”. This sees an employer try to hide an employment relationship as an independent contract, to avoid liability for employee entitlements.

Secondly, subcontracting by larger companies to smaller companies dilutes control and responsibility and increases the pressure on costs, especially wages.

There are about 150,000 individual security licence holders in Australia. James Ross/ AAP

It has been reported that at least one of the security companies involved in Victoria’s hotel quarantine system subcontracted work to a smaller security company.

There are also concerns the industry makes extensive use of “zombie” agreements, which are agreements made under WorkChoices-era regulations that were not subject to the “better off overall test”. This means workers potentially receive lower wages and less generous conditions than they would under the current industry award.

Pay disputes and ACCC investigations

The three firms contracted by the Victorian government were MSS Security, Wilson Security and Unified Security.

MSS, one of the largest security providers in Australia, has recently made headlines over a pay dispute with security guards in Bendigo. Five guards were back-paid $52,000 after a years-long dispute.

Wilson, another large security firm, was the subject of a 2018 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission investigation. This saw them pay back more than $700,000 to clients after charging for security patrols it did not carry out.

The Victorian government is also in the middle of a review into the state’s private security industry, with the specific aims of raising industry standards, improving safety of employees and the community, and ensuring workers are paid properly and fairly. It is due to report by December 2020.

The aims are admirable, but the disconnect between the review and the government’s reliance on security contractors for hotel quarantine raises questions about due diligence within government procurement processes.

According to media reports, the companies were engaged without a formal tender process and selected with just 24 hours notice.

The third company used for the hotel program – Unified – was not even part of a pre-approved panel of service providers that allowed certain firms to be contracted at short notice.

Returning overseas travellers have been quarantined in hotels to try and stop the spread of COVID-19. James Ross/AAP

This was a decision made in context of fast-moving pandemic. But it was not the only option.

For its hotel quarantine system, NSW has used police and Australian Defence Force personnel as well as security contractors. Victoria is also now seeking parole and prison officers to help with its hotel quarantine.

The real issue here is procurement

The Victorian government is taking the blame at the moment, but the problem here is much broader and touches all Australian jurisdictions.

The fact that Victoria has relied on private security firms for a hyper-sensitive public health job is testament to an entrenched culture of outsourcing government services all around Australia. In the federal sphere alone, in 2018-19, there were 78,150 contracts published on AusTender with a combined value of $64.5 billion.

There can be serious consequences if outsourced security goes wrong. Scott Barbour/ AAP

But as governments are among the biggest procurers of goods and services in Australia, they also have a ready-made lever to influence the behaviour of contracted companies.

All levels of government need to monitor the companies who work for them and use their influence to ensure subcontractors adopt best practices in terms of workforce management and labour standards.

Policy is only as good as its implementation. And it doesn’t help that those in charge of procurement within government are not necessarily on the same page as those in charge of industrial relations or industry policy.

Many non-government organisations have similar issues, where corporate social responsibility is at odds with procurement needs.

While the issue seems tricky in highly competitive industries, it can be solved.

A good example here is the Cleaning Accountability Framework set up in 2014. This is an independent, industry-led body that brings together property owners, companies and employee groups to solve labour issues in the cleaning sector.

The hotel quarantine program bungle is the wake-up call we need for a similar body for the security industry.

– ref. Melbourne’s hotel quarantine bungle is disappointing but not surprising. It was overseen by a flawed security industry – https://theconversation.com/melbournes-hotel-quarantine-bungle-is-disappointing-but-not-surprising-it-was-overseen-by-a-flawed-security-industry-142044

New NZ case of ‘isolated’ covid patient visiting supermarket to be charged

By Asia Pacific Report -

July 8, 2020

By RNZ News

Health Minister Chris Hipkins says New Zealand’s latest case of covid-19 will be charged for breaching isolation and visiting a central Auckland supermarket last night.

Hipkins said the 32-year-old man, who arrived from India on July 3, left his managed isolation last night to go to the Countdown supermarket on Victoria Street in Auckland city.

The man was outside the facility for 70 minutes.

Hipkins said after CCTV footage was viewed and the man was interviewed, the current assessment of the risk to the public was low.

“The person wore a mask although indicated that was removed for short periods of time,” he said.

In a statement, Countdown said the supermarket closed for cleaning at 8.15 this morning and will reopen tomorrow.

The company said it was “incredibly disappointed that this has happened given the potential for an incident like this to put our team and customers at risk”.

‘Self isolating as precaution’
“We have asked all of our team that were working last night, including the nightfill team, to self isolate as a precautionary measure. They will get tested over the next few days and we are offering them any and all support they need.”

[embedded content]
Today’s covid-19 media briefing. Video: RNZ News

Officials do not know what the man purchased from the supermarket.

Hipkins said all covid-19 facilities were on standby and people needing a test would have no problems getting one.

Individuals within these facilities need to “play by the rules”, he said.

“These are acts of selfishness and we intend to use the full weight of the law.

“My understanding is he left through a smoking area where the fences were being replaced,” Hipkins said.

Air Commodore Darryn Webb, head of Managed Isolation and Quarantine, said the smoking policy – as well as the security policy – will be looked at.

Robust system in place
He said there was a robust system in place “however, as we’ve seen, we can always do better”.

Webb said there was a guard outside Stamford Plaza when the man left.

The security guard watched the man leave but wasn’t sure if the man leaving was a contractor, Webb said.

“They don’t have the powers of police to apprehend…clearly it’s about communicating…if it’s logical that they take chase then that’s what they do.

“It certainly looks like it was a spur of the moment idea,” Webb said.

CCTV footage showed that no one else had left Stamford Plaza, Webb said.

Hipkins said the hotel was a managed isolation facility, not a “maximum security prison”.

Police called immediately
In a full statement, Webb confirmed that the man will be charged.

“Around 6.50pm the man escaped through a fenced area at the Stamford Plaza when he was out smoking, as a section of external fencing was being replaced. Security attempted to follow the man but were unsuccessful in locating him.

“Police were called immediately, and enquiries were underway to locate the man including reviewing CCTV footage and undertaking substantial area searches, before he returned to the facility where he was then interviewed by police.”

The man walked to the supermarket on foot and purchased items at a self-service checkout, before returning to the hotel about 8pm.

“Once the man’s movements were established, police visited the supermarket and ensured the self-service checkout and the areas entered by the man were cleaned.

“CCTV footage from within the supermarket has confirmed there was no close contact between the man and any staff or customers during his time there.”

‘Actions completely unacceptable’
Police are looking at other CCTV footage to figure out the man’s movements in the Auckland CBD.

“The actions of this man are completely unacceptable. Returnees are given clear instructions and information about what their responsibilities are. Managed isolation is a critical part in our defence against covid-19, and it is up to each and every person entering this country to play their part.

“We take any breach of the covid-19 rules very seriously. Wilfully leaving our facilities will not be tolerated, and the appropriate action will be taken.”

The fencing in place at all managed isolation facilities is being replaced with 6 feet-high fences.

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The National Party COVID-19 leak shows why the law must change to protect New Zealand citizens

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Alexander Gillespie, Professor of Law, University of Waikato

The leak of the confidential personal information of COVID-19 patients by Clutha-Southland MP Hamish Walker and influential party figure Michelle Boag has been highly embarrassing for the National Party.

In less than 24 hours their attack strategy has detonated in their own trenches and newly elected party leader Todd Muller has been scrambling to explain why.

New Zealand was only saved from an even more outrageous privacy breach because various media acted with proper restraint.

But while the political fates of Walker and Boag appear to be sealed, their legal exposure needs closer examination.

National Party leader Todd Muller: scrambling to explain.

They are both guilty by their own admission of a serious breach of privacy – but are they guilty of a breach of the law? Given the official inquiry being undertaken by Mike Heron QC, the legal implications of what has happened will undoubtedly come into sharper focus.

Privacy is about trust

The principles of personal privacy are very important. They allow citizens to control their own lives and they control the power others have over citizens.

A respect for privacy allows a system of trust to develop between citizens and governing authorities.

That trust is especially important when it comes to the confidentiality of medical records. While there is no shame in any illness, at a time of paranoia, abuse and intolerance, discretion and security are paramount.

This extends to public health management. People being tested for COVID-19 and receiving medical assistance must be assured it is private – even more so at a time when the power to gather and collect information is so strong.

The law is vague

Unfortunately, it’s not as clear in practice as it is in theory.

While privacy is important, it is not an unambiguous right of the type found in the New Zealand Bill of Rights. Rather, it sits between criminal law, civil law and other statutes such as the Privacy Act (currently being updated).

To help govern this area of information privacy there are generic rules and specific codes. The Health Information Privacy Code sets rules about the ways health information is collected, used, held and disclosed by health agencies.

These include ensuring information is not improperly disclosed. While there are some exceptions to the rule, the importance of information being used only for the purposes it was obtained, and not identifying individuals without their consent, is critical.

In theory, this all sounds good and should be sufficient for the Human Rights Tribunal to investigate a possible breach. The problem is that the Privacy Act – explicitly – does not apply to members of parliament in their official capacity.

What about whistle blowers?

One possible defence might be that an MP or other party was blowing the whistle on government incompetence.

The law in this area is designed to facilitate the investigation of serious wrongdoing. This covers alleged conduct by public officials that is grossly negligent or constitutes gross mismanagement.

Whether the Walker-Boag leak reaches such a standard is debatable. What is not debatable is the process set down in law for whistle blowers to follow. This includes first exhausting internal processes to resolve the problem. That would not appear to have happened in this case.

It’s also highly questionable whether it would have been necessary to reveal the private health information of citizens to prove the point.

However, MPs don’t require whistle-blowing protection when they are speaking in the House of Representatives as they have parliamentary privilege. Generally this means they can’t be brought before the courts for what they say, and the privacy of individual citizens can be pushed to one side.

In any event, Walker did not use parliament to release the information, so the point is moot.

The Privacy Commissioner needs more power

Where to from here? At the political level it will be for voters to use the ballot to express their opinion of what has just occurred.

But in terms of the law there are gaping holes that need to be fixed.

First, the right to privacy should be adopted unequivocally in law.

Second, greater powers should be given to the Privacy Commissioner to protect this right. When it is in the public interest, the commissioner should be able to instigate civil law actions for attempted or actual breaches of privacy.

Finally, members of parliament should only be allowed to override the privacy of fellow citizens when they are using parliamentary privilege.

At all other times they should be held accountable.

– ref. The National Party COVID-19 leak shows why the law must change to protect New Zealand citizens – https://theconversation.com/the-national-party-covid-19-leak-shows-why-the-law-must-change-to-protect-new-zealand-citizens-142250

Lidia Thorpe wants to shift course on Indigenous recognition. Here’s why we must respect the Uluru Statement

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dani Larkin, Associate Lecturer in Law, University of Newcastle

Gunnai-Kurnai and Gunditjmara woman Lidia Thorpe was recently elected by Greens party members to replace the former party leader, Richard Di Natale, as senator for Victoria.

Thorpe is the first Indigenous woman to represent the Greens in federal parliament. She brings a welcome diversity of experiences and perspectives. There is understandable interest in her views on Indigenous issues.

Since entering the Senate, Thorpe has renewed her public engagement with the reform proposals of the Uluru Statement from the Heart. The statement calls for the constitutional entrenchment and protection of

a First Nations Voice to Parliament to advise government on laws and policies that impact on Indigenous affairs
a Makarrata Commission to supervise processes of treaty-making and truth-telling.

Most First Nations representatives championing the Uluru Statement are focusing first on the co-design of the Voice to Parliament proposal with government. They see the Makarrata Commission and its goals as the next step in the sequence.

The Greens have endorsed the Uluru Statement, but Thorpe has a different take on what she believes should be priorities for Indigenous leaders. She argues a treaty should come first – not the Voice to Parliament.

However, a Voice to Parliament as a first step is a practical way forward, enabling First Nations to guide treaty-making processes. A change like this would be significant.

The path to Uluru

The Uluru Statement was the outcome of an extensive consultation process. It emerged from 13 regional dialogues and the subsequent First Nations National Constitutional Convention of 2017. This process was key to reaching a First Nations consensus embedded with elder and community authority.

Throughout that process, First Nations people affirmed the immediate need for practical and meaningful changes to Australia’s governance structure. The most immediate proposed change was for a representative First Nations political voice.

The Voice to Parliament would give First Nations people a say on the laws and policies that affect their affairs. This is essential given the history in Australia of forgetting, marginalising or silencing First Nations perspectives, which continues today.

The Uluru proposal would also entrench the Voice in the constitution to protect against the possibility of being extinguished. This was the fate of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) – the only previous Indigenous representative agency with substantial program and policy responsibilities.

A majority of the 250 First Nations leaders at the convention agreed to the Uluru Statement. But that does not mean all Indigenous people agree with its proposals.

Thorpe was among a small group of delegates who walked out of the convention in protest. Other Indigenous people have also challenged the Voice proposal, preferring a treaty process.

Why follow the Uluru sequence of reform?

Yet, preserving the sequence proposed in the Uluru Statement respects the cultural authority of the reform process.

And diverging from a consensus outcome undermines the integrity of the consultative process that led to it. It can also devalue the standing of those elders who together designed the proposed reforms.

Following the Uluru sequence ensures the word “self” remains key to the concept of self-determination for Indigenous peoples.

To put this in global perspective, all people around the world are recognised by the UN as having the right to self-determination:

By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

Since 2009, Australia has affirmed its support for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This declaration does not create new human rights, but puts universal rights in the context of Indigenous peoples’ lives and aspirations.

Article 4, for instance, states

Indigenous peoples, in exercising their right to self-determination, have the right to autonomy or self-government in matters relating to their internal and local affairs, as well as ways and means for financing their autonomous functions.

And Article 5 says

Indigenous peoples have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinct political, legal, economic, social and cultural institutions, while retaining their right to participate fully, if they so choose, in the political, economic, social and cultural life of the State.

In the Australian context, First Nations people are not seeking to exercise self-determination by forming an independent nation state. They are, however, calling for respect for their never-ceded sovereignty.

This is a challenge for the Australian legal and political system, and for Australian society. It does not square neatly with the idea of a single political unit. It unsettles the assumption that a majoritarian democracy (in which a majority of voters decide the outcome of elections) can ensure equitable representation of citizens.

This takes us back to the idea of a Voice. The Voice to Parliament provides a platform for First Nations people to work in partnership with parliament. The Voice will challenge parliament to confront the hurdles preventing Indigenous people from exercising self-determination and other human rights.

One such hurdle – the over-policing and disproportionate incarceration of Indigenous people – is at the centre of the current protest movement.

Does the Voice limit further reform potential?

We acknowledge Thorpe’s position that constitutional reform is a distraction from the main aim of achieving a reckoning through treaty.

We agree, as lawyers, that only treaty-making can fundamentally shift the foundations of a legal system built on dispossession and denial of First Nations sovereignty.

Where we diverge from Thorpe is in our view that the Voice to Parliament can be a pragmatic first step in the deeper reform process Australia needs.

A political voice and standing – if constitutionally entrenched – can bring many more First Nations voices into the political arena and progress the unsettling of the Australian legal system.

– ref. Lidia Thorpe wants to shift course on Indigenous recognition. Here’s why we must respect the Uluru Statement – https://theconversation.com/lidia-thorpe-wants-to-shift-course-on-indigenous-recognition-heres-why-we-must-respect-the-uluru-statement-141609

COVID-19 forced us to move a conference from a Greek island to the web — and quickly. Here’s what we learnt

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Charlene Zietsma, Associate professor, Pennsylvania State University

In May this year, we were convening a dream conference: 140 like-minded academics on a Greek island for three-and-a-half days to work on a topic we cared about – organising sustainably.

We recognised the contradiction of travelling to Crete to discuss sustainable organising. But it was a long tradition of the Organization Studies Summer Workshop — an annual workshop of organisation scholars — to be there. This year’s workshop focused on how businesses and other organisations could be reconfigured to operate in more ecologically-friendly and socially just ways.

So, we tried instead to make the conference itself sustainable by using a sustainable venue, serving only vegetarian meals, avoiding plastics and air conditioning, and encouraging carbon offsetting.

Mykonos, Greece, where the 14th Organization Studies Workshop was held. Facebook

Then the universe threw us a curveball in the form of COVID-19, which made us rethink sustainable organising. Despite a complete lack of experience, and no funding, we decided to move online. More than 100 participants, across 14 time zones, decided to experiment with us.

We grappled with a few decisions. How to deal with time zones? How to deal with tech issues? How to ensure the conference was not only intellectually fulfilling, but also contributed to the social interactions that deepened discussions, fostered collaborations, and that had always made the summer workshop so special?

And how to organise this in only a few weeks?

So here’s what we did.

Group discussions and Zoom rooms

We decided to shrink the conference into two-and-a-half days, spreading most sessions across the hours that worked for most participants’ time zones. But we also ensured there were at least some sessions for those outside the main time corridor.

We asked authors to post a 10-15 minute video of their presentation on YouTube a week before the conference, which people could watch in their own time.

Then we hosted 50-minute Zoom sessions of around 18-25 participants. Each presented comments on three papers (four to five minutes per paper, without using slides to avoid tech issues). The papers’ authors briefly responded, which led to an open discussion in the group.

In the first few sessions, session chairs often had to prompt discussions. But the interactions became quite lively.

It’s not a Greek island, but there are many benefits to virtual conferencing. Shutterstock

We left the rooms open after the 50 minutes and the informal conversations that make workshops so rich often continued.

We also included two keynote sessions. One was a plenary session for all (100+) conference participants, which included breakout discussions. And there were three social sessions, in which participants were randomly assigned to breakout rooms so they could enjoy conversations in small groups (two to five people), or join larger group conversations.

Digital benefits

While we missed the post-work drinks by the pool in Greece, we were pleasantly surprised to find the virtual conference had a number of benefits.

No travel not only reduced environmental impacts, but also the work-life impact, enabling some people to participate who otherwise may not have been able to, because of the time required.

Some participants told us that, for budgetary or family reasons, they were only able to attend the conference because it was virtual.

While conference fees will be needed in the future to offset organisational costs, virtual conferences will still be far less expensive than face-to-face, enabling broader participation.

The random assignment of people to breakout rooms for social hours ensured conversations among people who may not otherwise have interacted. It increased camaraderie during the virtual conference, leading to stimulating discussions.

The chat function during talks allowed participants to share resources and insights sparked by the talks immediately, which then could trigger additional insights among others. For example, the idea to start a Utopia Platform to share blogs, teaching and research resources was hatched on the chat during a keynote. We have since launched this platform.

The feedback from participants was extremely positive, though expectations were probably low.

We imagine a greater variety of conferencing formats going forward, including more regular but shorter virtual meetings, alternate years of physical meetings and mixed models with some virtual sessions and some remote participants.

Our COVID-19 induced experience showed us virtual conferencing is both practical and desirable as a means of organising sustainably and ensuring more democratic participation.

– ref. COVID-19 forced us to move a conference from a Greek island to the web — and quickly. Here’s what we learnt – https://theconversation.com/covid-19-forced-us-to-move-a-conference-from-a-greek-island-to-the-web-and-quickly-heres-what-we-learnt-140634

Students in China heed their government’s warnings against studying in Australia

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Marina Yue Zhang, Associate Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Swinburne University of Technology

Only 40% of students in China who previously intended to study overseas still plan to, while just under 50% of those who had studied overseas plan to return to their study after the borders reopen.

These are results from our unpublished survey of 1,012 students we conducted in China between June 5 and 15. We asked them whether they would continue with their plan to study abroad post COVID-19.

These findings are not surprising. Due to growing tensions between China and the West – even before COVID-19 – middle-class parents in China had become increasingly concerned about the safety of, and possible discrimination against, their children abroad, including in the US and Australia.

The pandemic seems to have accelerated this trend.

What students say about studying in Australia

Of the 1,012 students we surveyed, 404 had registered to study abroad in the next three years (in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Singapore) and 608 had been studying overseas (including in Australia, US, UK, Canada, New Zealand and Japan) before COVID-19 .

In the questionnaire, we presented interviewees with considerations and asked them to nominate which ones would influence their decision about whether to study in Australia after COVID-19, as well as in other countries.

The first group (group A) includes 304 students who had studied in Australia but who were not able to return due to travel restrictions.

Of these, 50% were undergraduates, 42% graduates, 5% doctoral students, and 3% vocational education or high school students.

The second group (group B) includes students who had never studied abroad before but had registered their intention to in the next three years, including in Australia, before COVID-19.

The second group also answered Australia-specific questions.

Not many students in either group considered issues such as more expensive air travel, less freedom in China and online lectures as critical factors influencing their decision to study in Australia.

But the two groups reacted to some factors quite differently. The students who had studied in Australia before considered the following factors as more critical to their decision:

returnees with Australian degrees are not more competitive in China’s job market compared to graduates from top-tier universities in China
life is more convenient, safe and easier at home and I don’t want to go abroad to endure the hardship as a foreign student
improved political stability and economic prospects in China
less of a chance of landing a good job with an Australian degree in China
no need to go abroad if lectures are delivered online.

The group of students who hadn’t yet studied in Australia but planned to, considered the following factors as critical:

media reported cases of Chinese being “discriminated against” or “abused” in Australia
deterioration in Sino-Australia relations
not many outstanding returnees from Australia are visible in the media to represent the success of Australian education
Australian universities lowered the entry standard for foreign students due to COVID-19
Australian degrees are perceived to be less valuable compared to degrees from other English-speaking countries, especially the US and the UK, by HR personnel in China.

What the students said

Not surprisingly, both groups considered the Chinese government’s warnings against visiting, or studying in, Australia important. A decision to study and live abroad is often made by the whole family in China. Official voices weigh significantly in such decisions.

A student who had done some of her master degree in a Melbourne university said:

After the Chinese New Year, Australian borders were closed to Chinese students due to COVID-19. Direct travel was not allowed. So I travelled to Thailand and spent 14 days in a small hotel in Bangkok before I landed in Melbourne. I had to be self-quarantined for 14 days in my rented room.

Then I found all lectures were moved online and the situation of COVID-19 became serious in Melbourne. The PM urged international students to go home. My parents were so worried. They paid for an over-priced air ticket and a quarantine-hotel in Shanghai for me for 14 days before I could go back to my hometown.

When the [Chinese] government announced the travel and study warnings, I couldn’t convince my parents that things aren’t that bad in Australia. They listened to the government and believed the ‘official voices’ rather than their own daughter.

There have been cases (though isolated ones) of Asians or Chinese people being bullied in Australia due to COVID-19. Unfortunately, social media in China often distorts such cases and amplifies the (mis)perceptions. And the tensions between China and Australia have enhanced these negative perceptions.

Sending their children abroad was once a privilege for elites with intellectual, economic or political power in China. But this is now quite common among middle-class Chinese families.

Chinese families spend a large amount of money on their children’s education. Better opportunities (either in the host country or on returning home) after study abroad is an underlining reason Chinese families invest in their children.

Australia has attracted many Chinese students in recent decades. But if Chinese students with Australian degrees are less appreciated or less competitive compared to those who study in other countries or in local universities, families will look for other options.

A Chinese student who had been studying at a Sydney university told us:

We are the clients and the degrees are a commodity; we pay for our degrees. What if the commodity loses its value? The clients will surely walk away.

COVID-19 has had a negative impact on the number of Chinese students likely to study in Australia. But the downward trend started way before the pandemic.

Australian universities need to adjust their strategies for a future that will not only deliver value for Chinese students, but also strengthen a positive perception about this value.

– ref. Students in China heed their government’s warnings against studying in Australia – https://theconversation.com/students-in-china-heed-their-governments-warnings-against-studying-in-australia-141871

‘There needs to be consequences’, says Muller over NZ MP’s covid leak

By Asia Pacific Report -

July 8, 2020

Evening Report

‘There needs to be consequences’, says Muller over NZ MP’s covid leak

00:00 /

By RNZ News

The opposition National Party leader says he has written to the party’s board asking them to remove MP Hamish Walker from the party after it was revealed he leaked private health information to New Zealand media.

It was revealed yesterday that former National Party president Michelle Boag was responsible for leaking confidential covid-19 patients details to Hamish Walker, who then passed that information on to media.

Prior to that revelation, National Party leader Todd Muller described the leak as “loose, shabby and a reminder these guys can’t manage important things well”.

“The problem is when you’ve allowed a culture of sloppiness and clumsiness to take over and become pervasive, you know, really history suggests you need a new broom to be able to sort and set the tone from the top,” he said just a few days ago.

Minister of Health and State Services Chris Hipkins said he was disappointed about the leak and said it had “a ring of dirty politics about it”, but he did not want to prejudice the investigation.

Walker, who admitted the leak late yesterday afternoon, has already been stripped of his portfolios.

Muller told RNZ Morning Report there needed to be consequences and he has written to the party’s board asking it to remove Walker from the party.

“This behaviour is completely unacceptable,” Muller said.

Awaiting legal advice
“Muller said he became aware that Walker was responsible for the leak on Monday and was awaiting legal advice before passing that information on.

He said he had not spoken to Boag about the issue and he was not sure what the arrangement between her and Walker was.

“It doesn’t support the values I bring to the role, and it doesn’t support the values of the National Party I know.”

NZ Herald front page — Today’s New Zealand Herald … opposition National Party leader Todd Muller “hugely angry” with own party’s involvement in the covid privacy breach. Image: PMC screenshot

“I am personally, hugely angry. This is not the politics who reflects who I am as a person. It does not reflect the National Party.

The board will meet to discuss the matter today.

“Ultimately it’s a board decision, but he’s shown some serious lapses of judgement. It’s totally inappropriate.”

Privacy Commissioner John Edwards agreed it was an appalling lack of judgement.

‘Using unwell individuals as pawns’
“It’s really difficult to justify using unwell individuals as pawns in that kind of game.”

Edwards said MPs were exempt from privacy legislation so it falls to the National Party leader and board to administer discipline.

Boag, however, may have breached the Privacy Act, he said.

“I will be thinking about what, if any, response we make to that… those decisions are yet to be made.”

Edwards said he was a little surprised the Auckland Helicopter Trust had access to the details.

“It’s not immediately obvious to me as to why they would need information about people under quarantine.

“I’m very interested in understanding the breadth of that distribution of the information.”

Up to National to deal with
Quarantine Minister Megan Woods told Morning Report the matter was one for the National Party to deal with.

“We’ve been really clear, leaking of that information is really disappointing, these are New Zealanders who had returned home to be safe, they have a right to assume their data won’t be leaked to the media.”

Emergency services across the board are supplied the names of people who have covid-19, she said.

“That is because if emergency services need to come into contact with someone who has tested covid positive for whatever reason, be that an airlift or whatever, that they have that information and make sure their staff is protected.”

This article is republished by the Pacific Media Centre under a partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Nasya Bahfen: Some broke the rules and the covid enemy is taking over

By Asia Pacific Report -

July 8, 2020

COMMENT: By Nasya Bahfen in Melbourne

Australia’s Victorian state government told returned travellers to quarantine for two weeks. Some broke the rules.

It then paid for them to stay in hotels with security guards. Some of the guards couldn’t keep their dicks in their pants. Some of the returned travellers broke the rules.

It then eased some restrictions, and asked people to maintain social distancing and not hold large gatherings. Some broke the rules.

While these rules were being broken a competent, terrifying enemy we thought we’d held back re-emerged.

Energised, it started to spread through a city whose people vastly underestimated its power.

The state government then gave suburbs slated for lockdowns a day’s notice.

Of course, some broke the rules. Residents moved to friends’ or relatives’ homes or used their loved ones’ homes to change their addresses on the Vicroads website.

The enemy snaked its way into inner suburbs
The enemy was reinforced – it snaked its way to Ascot Vale, Maribyrnong, Travancore … it encroached onto the inner city suburbs of North Melbourne and Flemington where 3000 underprivileged people live in high rise towers in close quarters, many with underlying health conditions.

(The inadequacy of some of the public housing in Australia is an issue which, to our shame, should have been dealt with before the powder keg of covid-19 blew up our lives.)

These tower blocks are vertical “cruise ships” – their inhabitants are sitting ducks. Some of the towers are designated for elderly residents. If not stopped, the enemy will soon discover that this is like shooting fish in a barrel – easy, easy kills.

Premier Daniel Andrews can’t afford to take any more chances. If a day, or eight hours, or five hours, or one hour is given, some will break the rules.

Rush to the shops while unknowingly helping the enemy spread. Rush to change their address online. Rush to move elsewhere, helping the enemy spread its vicious wings.

During a pandemic, the rights of the individual take a back seat for the greater good. If they don’t, you get situations where the enemy rages uncontrolled, infecting at will, and handing out painful deaths, and leaving survivors with after effects whose extent we still don’t fully know about.

During a pandemic, the rights of the individual take a back seat for the greater good. Image: Al Jazeera screenshot/PMC

High density public housing
In New York city, high density public housing bore the brunt of the enemy’s attacks.

In Singapore the second wave started in the packed homes of migrant workers, which also had to be locked down. Returned travellers are video-called more than once a day and visited more than once a day by immigration cops; step outside the apartment and it’s a prison sentence. (This is why Singapore can have nice things.)

When I look at this tower filled with elderly people metres from where I live, I think “there, but for the grace of Allah, go I” and I feel utter terror for them.

If the enemy is not contained, they’ll be pulling bodies out of here.

And across the state people will be baying for blood, asking why the government didn’t do something.

Dr Nasya Bahfen is a journalist and media academic living in Melbourne, Victoria. This is her personal view expressed on social media. The commentary has been republished by the Pacific Media Centre with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Owners of electric vehicles to be paid to plug into the grid to help avoid blackouts

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Bjorn Sturmberg, Research Leader, Battery Storage & Grid Integration Program, Australian National University

Electric vehicles can help keep the air clean in our cities – as we’ve seen recently with the reduction of traffic through COVID-19 lockdowns – but they face two obstacles.

In the short term they’re still expensive. In the long term charging millions of vehicles from the electricity grid presents challenges.

I’m part of a new project, launched today, that tackles both of these obstacles head-on, and it could mean owners earn more money than they’re likely to pay for charging their electric vehicles.

Paid for battery power

The Realising Electric Vehicle-to-grid Services project (REVS) will see owners paid to plug their electric vehicles into the national electricity grid.

In exchange, the vehicles will allow the national grid operator to draw upon their batteries in the rare moments that the grid is on the brink of a blackout.

The REVS trial project uses vehicles from the ACT government fleet. This is a big step towards making these services available to all Australians because fleets make up more than half of all new car sales in Australia.

To understand the importance of this work we need to imagine electrifying all of Australia’s 19 million vehicles.

Every electric car has the potential to be a power source for the national grid. Shutterstock/mastersky

The need for charge

If all Australia’s vehicles were electric they would use more than 60 terrawatt hours of electricity a year. That’s around 35% of Australia’s annual electricity consumption.

Still more imposing is the amount of power these vehicles could draw if they all charged at once.

Let’s say, for argument’s sake, there were 1 million, 7.7 kilowatt home chargers in Australia. That’s roughly one in ten properties. If all these cars charged at once, they would add 25% to the national load.

Adding public “fast chargers” and “ultra fast chargers”, say along highways and in car parks, would increase this further.

Flexibility is key

The first step in meeting these challenges is to utilise the flexibility of electric vehicle charging.

In reality, we won’t all charge our electric vehicles at the same time, just like we don’t all go to fill up at the petrol station at the same time. Even if we all plug in our electric vehicles overnight, our charging stations will manage their charging schedules for us.

And electricity is widely available, unlike petrol. This means electric vehicles can be topped up frequently instead of requiring a big charge from empty to full.

These smart charging strategies have been very effective in supporting electric vehicle power demand on the grid.

Power to the grid

While smart charging aims to reduce the stress on the grid, we can go further and use electric vehicles to support the grid in times of need.

The opportunities for this are tremendous. The battery capacity of 19 million vehicles would likely exceed 1,800 gigawatt hours. That’s equivalent to more than 10,000 “Tesla big batteries”, such as those used to help power South Australia, or five of the new Snowy 2.0 hydro-electric projects.

South Australia’s Hornsdale Power Reserve uses Tesla’s big batteries. AAP/Hornsdale Power Reserve

The key to unlocking this opportunity is “vehicle-to-grid” technology, which enables electric vehicles not only to charge but also to discharge power back into the grid.

The importance of these control options were demonstrated by Australia’s big batteries that help stabilise the grid when storms and fossil fuel generator outages create large mismatches in power supply and demand.

Vehicle-to-grid in Australia

Vehicle-to-grid technology has been in development for decades. It’s now available commercially in the Nissan LEAF vehicle and Wallbox Quasar chargers.

The Nissan LEAF can plug in to power the grid.

The technology was demonstrated in overseas trials but questions remain about customer uptake.

How attractive will vehicle-to-grid services be for customers? What business models will be viable for manufacturers and service providers? Our REVS project is addressing these questions.

We’re deploying 50 vehicle-to-grid-enabled electric vehicles into the ACT government fleet, and one into the fleet of electricity retailer ActewAGL.

The national electricity market will pay these vehicle owners whenever the vehicles are plugged in.

In exchange, the vehicles will automatically inject power into the grid (or absorb it) when unexpected events push the grid towards a blackout.

REVS working to rebalance the grid after a generator trips. Bjorn Sturmberg, Author provided

We expect each vehicle to earn more than A$1,000 a year. That’s almost three times what it costs in electricity to drive a Nissan LEAF 12,607km (the average annual distance driven by a passenger vehicle in Australia).

This should be attractive to owners because the vehicles will only be called upon to provide power during contingencies that occur a few dozen times a year.

These contingencies are typically corrected within 15 minutes, so the effect on an electric vehicle’s battery capacity will be less than 5%. That means a vehicle won’t be left drained, without any power.

REVS is putting this scenario to the test, tracking the costs and benefits for every customer and service provider.

The REVS journey is just beginning but its destination is clear: unleashing vehicle-to-grid to drive accelerated electric vehicle uptake across Australia.

– ref. Owners of electric vehicles to be paid to plug into the grid to help avoid blackouts – https://theconversation.com/owners-of-electric-vehicles-to-be-paid-to-plug-into-the-grid-to-help-avoid-blackouts-132519

Newsletter: New Zealand Politics Daily – July 08 2020

By Bryce Edwards -

July 8, 2020

Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.

Today’s content

National Party revealed as source of Covid-19 privacy leak
Audrey Young (Herald): National’s failures on patient leak from top to bottom (paywalled)
Luke Malpass (Stuff): National leader Todd Muller found wanting in first real test of moral leadership
Jo Moir (RNZ): How the Hamish Walker Covid-19 patient detail leak played out
Mark Quinlivan (Newshub): Muller says he’s lost confidence in Walker, found out National MP was involved in leak on Monday
RNZ: Todd Muller on Hamish Walker – ‘There needs to be consequences‘
Amelia Wade (Herald): ‘Hugely disappointed’ – Muller wants leaking MP out of National
1News: Todd Muller says he doesn’t want MP Hamish Walker to run again after Covid-19 patient details leak
Collette Devlin (Stuff): National leader Todd Muller wants party board to axe Hamish Walker as Clutha-Southland MP
Richard Harman (Politik): Muller faces his first big test
Pattrick Smellie (BusinessDesk): National MP under pressure to resign after ‘dirty politics’ disclosures
1News: Covid-19 privacy leak admission ‘hugely damaging’ for National party, says 1 NEWS political reporter
Ben Thomas (Spinoff): Boag and Walker have admitted a terrible privacy breach. And it won’t end there
Laura Walters (Newsroom): The curse of Clutha-Southland or dirty politics?
Mike Houlahan (ODT): Walker’s future in doubt
Stuff Editorial: The last thing Todd Muller needed
David Farrar: Staggeringly bad judgment
David Farrar: Covid-19 leak inquiry
—————
1News: National MP’s leak of Covid-19 patients’ details has ‘a ring of dirty politics to it’ – Health Minister
Thomas Manch (Stuff): National MP Hamish Walker and former party president Michelle Boag unlikely to face criminal charges, privacy lawyer say
Rachel Sadler (Newshub): Chris Hipkins says COVID-19 patient data leak has ‘ring of dirty politics’
RNZ: Privacy breach disappointing and has ‘ring of dirty politics’ – Hipkins
Jason Walls (Herald): Hamish Walker outed himself as a leaker of Covid-19 patient information – but who is he?
Amelia Wade (Herald): National MP Hamish Walker, ex president Michelle Boag leaked patients’ details
Henry Cooke and Thomas Manch (Stuff): National MP Hamish Walker admits passing on leaked Covid-19 patient info from former party president Michelle Boag
Zane Small and Jenna Lynch (Newshub): Former National Party president Michelle Boag admits passing COVID-19 patient details to MP Hamish Walker
1News: National MP and ex-National president admit leaking Covid-19 patient details
Mike Houlahan (ODT): Walker apology after revealing Covid patients’ details
Rachel Sadler (Newshub): National MP Hamish Walker admits leaking details of active patients to media
RNZ: National MP Hamish Walker admits leaking Covid-19 patient details
Jenée Tibshraeny (Interest): National MP & former National Party president admit to involvement in leak of Covid-19 patients’ details
Eleanor Ainge Roy (Guardian): New Zealand politician admits leaking Covid-19 private details to media

Election
Justin Giovannetti (Spinoff): Winston Peters takes exception to UK media report by issuing an angry diatribe – against The Spinoff
1News: Winston Peters denies NZ First has hired UK political operatives as he decries ‘clickbait journos’
Zane Small (Newshub): Winston Peters denies New Zealand First hired pro-Brexit campaigners Arron Banks and Andy Wigmore
Christopher Hope (Telegraph): What Arron Banks and ‘the Bad Boys of Brexit’ did next: joining up for election fight in New Zealand (paywalled)
Jason Walls (Herald): Winston Peters hires political operatives, dubbed the bad boys of Brexit, to help run NZ First campaign
Justin Giovannetti (Spinoff): Brexit campaigners pledge to bring ‘mischief, mayhem and guerrilla warfare’ to NZ election
Martyn Bradbury (Daily Blog): Can Brexit Dirty Politics win NZ First 13%? Really?
David Farrar: Winston’s foreign helpers
Michael Daly (Stuff): Weston Frizzell’s ‘Aroha’ posters ruled to be adverts for Labour Party
Mark Quinlivan (Newshub): Election 2020: Electoral Commission finds Jacinda Ardern ‘Aroha’ posters are political ads, not art
Emily van Velthooven (1News): Posters of Jacinda Ardern created by artists ruled a party advertisement
Luke Appleby (1News): How much for that doggy? Electoral Commission reveals the price of Pup and their 2020 brand makeover
Hamish MacLean (ODT): Muller picks win in new Taieri seat
Hamish MacLean (ODT): Muller mum on toilet seat photo
Jo Waitoa (Spinoff): Voting isn’t everything: On Māori politics and the meaning of participation
Steven Cowan: Cancelling Kurt Taogaga
Nathan Morton (Herald): Local Focus: Waiariki electorate explained

Cannabis referendum
Derek Cheng (Herald): Legal cannabis has potential to reduce harm, but many unknowns: PM’s chief science adviser
Derek Cheng (Herald): Reducing harm, ‘systemic racism’ and overseas comparisons: The experts on legalising cannabis
1News: ‘A level look at all the evidence’ – Government launches cannabis info website to help voters
RNZ: Legalising cannabis may reduce ‘biased enforcement’ of Māori – chief science advisor
Russell Brown: The cannabis referendum: the evidence

Justice and corrections
Collette Devlin (Stuff): Reports find public support for police and victims but not other areas of criminal justice system
Derek Cheng (Herald): Systemic bias? Justice system report shows very different views from minority groups
Jonathan Mitchell (RNZ): Māori, Pacific and Chinese NZers less comfortable with criminal justice system – survey
1News: Non-white Kiwis continue to have trust issues with courts and corrections – report
Matt Burrows (Newsroom): Dramatic report shows the major changes New Zealanders want made to our criminal justice system
Laura Walters (Newsroom): New Zealand backs justice system transformation
RNZ: Phillip John Smith takes Corrections to court over visitation
Stuff: Convicted killer Phillip Smith wants visits from his family while in prison

Official Information Act
Nikki Macdonald (Stuff): Government to rewrite Official Information Act
No Right Turn: Rewriting the OIA

Chris Hipkins, testing
Luke Malpass (Stuff): Chris Hipkins stamps his newfound authority on health
Sam Sachdeva (Newsroom): Hipkins starts to make his mark
Derek Cheng (Herald): New Health Minister Chris Hipkins sweeps in to clear up the mess (paywalled)
RNZ: Covid-19 testing rates drop: ‘People can fall into a bit of complacency’
Katarina Williams (Stuff): New health minister condemns lack of Covid-19 testing
1News: NZ needs to be doing more Covid-19 testing, Health Minister says
Rachel Sadler (Newshub): Testing rate ‘isn’t meeting the Government’s expectations’ – Chris Hipkins
Brittney Deguara (Stuff): What we know about Covid-19 transmission, testing, vaccines six months on
Amelia Wade (Herald): When did you last use the contact tracing app? Usage falls off a cliff as experts warn the system isn’t working

Call for border re-opening
Gordon Campbell: On why we shouldn’t be pushed into re-opening our borders
Melanie Carroll (Stuff): Call for quick New Zealand border opening “irresponsible”, says THL chairman

Border quarantine facilities
Georgia Forrester (Stuff): A look at NZ’s Covid-19 quarantine facilities, their space and next steps
Newstalk ZB: Air NZ boss suggests passenger number restrictions won’t be for long
RNZ: Checkpoint: Air NZ won’t rule out extending three-week booking freeze
Newstalk ZB: Air NZ boss says blocking bookings ‘exactly the right thing to do’
Dan Lake (Newshub): New Zealand Government not ruling out using cruise ships to quarantine arriving passengers
Zane Small (Newshub): Air New Zealand’s three-week ticket freeze: Megan Woods insists ‘space isn’t going to run out’ in quarantine facilities
Zane Small (Newshub): Air New Zealand ticket freeze: Jacinda Ardern hopes to avoid ‘arbitrary’ flight capacity caps adopted in New South Wales
Bernard Hickey (Newsroom): ‘Sorry, but New Zealand is all full up’
John Anthony and Melanie Earley (Stuff): Air NZ, Singapore Airlines restrict passenger numbers to NZ as more Kiwis fly home to escape Covid
RNZ: Air NZ putting a temporary hold on new international bookings to NZ
1News: Seats on Air NZ flights coming into NZ to be ‘managed’ to ease pressure on quarantine facilities
AAP: New Zealand rations places for citizens returning home during Covid-19
Rebecca Howard (BusinessDesk): Stranded Kiwis to face up to three-week wait to get home
1News: Todd Muller slams Government’s ‘failing border management’ as numbers of returning Kiwis is capped
1News: Isolation hotel turnover remains NZ’s greatest Covid-19 vulnerability, expert warns
Mike Houlahan, Grant Miller and Guy Williams (ODT): Dunedin named as first choice for managed isolation facilities in South
Tess Brunton (RNZ): DHB urges government to avoid Queenstown for isolation due to healthcare
Jackson Thomas (Stuff): What’s on the menu in NZ’s isolation hotels?
1News: Ardern picks up sweet treat made popular by Kiwi who blogged about quarantine gratitude

Christchurch mosque shootings, later mosque threat
Kurt Bayer (Herald): Islamic Women’s Council claims police failed to take March 15, 2019 threat seriously
RNZ: Islamic Women’s Council: ‘The government had failed the Muslim community’
1News: Islamic Women’s Council says police failed to take March 15 threat against Hamilton mosque from person in Christchurch ‘seriously’
Anneke Smith (RNZ): Renewed call for Key to apologise over ‘jihadi brides’ claim
Jody O’Callaghan (Stuff): Calls for reparation for mosque shooting victims due to systemic ‘failures’
Josie Adams (Spinoff): ‘Everything was in place to ignore us’: Officials ‘uninterested’ in Muslim community’s pre-March 15 warnings
—————
Sam Sherwood (Stuff): White nationalist group member pleads guilty to failing to assist with search warrant
Kurt Bayer (Herald): Christchurch mosque threat: Action Zealandia member Sam Brittenden refused to hand over phone code
Joy Reid (1News): Far right teen pleads guilty, fined for failing to assist police investigating Christchurch mosque threat

Housing
Thomas Coughlan (Stuff): National Party admits it sold too many state houses
John Minto (Daily Blog): Megan Woods should take a leaf out of Nicola Willis’ book
Newstalk ZB: Waitlist for public housing at crisis point
RNZ: Returning New Zealanders may hold key to house prices – QV
Greg Ninness (Interest): Property values have flattened out but it’s too early to say if they are at the edge of a cliff or will start to rise again, Quotable Value says
Ireland Hendry-Tennent (Newshub): Property prices: Lockdown sees growth rate decline in 13 New Zealand cities

Environment
Rachel Thomas (RNZ): Critic says govt’s freshwater package doesn’t address the problem – pollution
Michael Neilson (Herald): Climate change: New Zealand seafood sector set for major disruptions – report
Conan Young (RNZ): Climate change effects on NZ fishers ‘dire’ under 4% warming – report
Whanganui Chronicle: Rangitīkei District Council fined over waterway pollution
RNZ: Funding provided to fix hazardous landfill
Sean Hogan (1News): ‘Heartbreaking’ – Heavy rain causes sealed Te Araroa tip to start leaking into the sea
RNZ: Awatere River strewn with rubbish after flooding into old landfill
Richard Davison (ODT): Petition seeks to ban vehicles on key Catlins beaches

Relocating the Ports of Auckland
RNZ: Labour and NZ First at loggerheads over Auckland port move
1News: Shane Jones says Manukau Harbour is ‘worst harbour in NZ’ to be chosen as country’s next super port
Wilhelmina Shrimpton (Newshub):Why the Government’s $1.8 million report into Auckland port move has been labelled a waste of money
Heather du Plessis-Allan (Newstalk ZB): Govt has wasted $2 million on another port report
Denise Piper (Stuff): Report backing new Auckland port over Northport ‘a disgrace’, Northlanders say
Belinda Feek and Michael Neilson (Herald): Auckland ports report: ‘Give the $2m back’ expert says after Manukau harbour preferred over Northland
Thomas Coughlan and Todd Niall (Stuff): Auckland Port should move to Manukau report says, but Government defers decision
Jo Moir (RNZ): Manukau Harbour preferred location for port – new report
1News: Decision on whether to move Auckland’s port won’t be made before election
Jenée Tibshraeny (Interest): Ports of Auckland relocation a problem for the next govt; New study suggests a move to Manukau
Brent Melville (BusinessDesk): Govt sidesteps decision on Ports of Auckland relocation (paywalled)

Primary industries
John Anthony (Stuff): Prime minister Jacinda Ardern reveals 10-year plan to boost primary sector by $44b
Maja Burry (RNZ): Government plan aims to boost primary sector export earnings by $44bn
Jamie Gray (Herald): Jacinda Ardern looks to the primary sector to help fill the void left by Covid-19 (paywalled)
Herald: Jacinda Ardern outlines plan to lift NZ primary export earnings
Brent Melville (BusinessDesk): Ardern rolls out $44b primary sector export plan (paywalled)
Esther Taunton (Stuff): Old foes united over farmer’s ‘shocking’ sentence

America’s Cup, sport
Todd Niall (Stuff): America’s Cup allegations: A second ‘whistleblower’ in Team New Zealand?
1News: Govt announces $80 million investment into sport recovery ‘at all levels’ in NZ

Wage subsidy, employment breaches
1News: ‘It’s awesome’ – Shipping company boss hands back Government’s Covid-19 wage subsidy
Ireland Hendry-Tennent (Newshub): Wage subsidy scheme ending will make or break many small businesses – economist
Jacob McSweeny (ODT): More redundancies expected when wage subsidy ends
Ripu Bhatia (Stuff): Wage subsidy loss ‘major blow’ to Auckland, business leader calls for extension
John Anthony (Stuff): Aviation catering company Gate Gourmet used lockdown to try dodge minimum wage hike
RNZ: Hospice ordered to pay redundant workers outstanding wages

Economy, business
Newshub: New Zealand economy ‘not out of the woods yet’ – economist Brad Olsen
David Hargreaves (Interest): NZIER says 28% of businesses plan to cut staff in the next quarter
RNZ: Gloom in construction sector as business confidence slide
BusinessDesk: NZ firms expect weak activity, more job cuts
Debrin Foxcroft (Stuff): Noel Leeming under investigation for selling stock it didn’t have
Debrin Foxcroft (Stuff): Empty shelves as retailers struggle to get the stock
Damian George (Stuff): Wellington business owners worried Golden Mile plans will be ‘disastrous’ for retailers

Immigration
Collette Devlin (Stuff): Government extends migrant work visas for six months but cuts timeframe for new essential skills visas
Jason Walls (Herald): Government gives migrant visa holders six-month extension, benefiting 16,500 workers
RNZ: Government extends temporary work visas by six months
1News: Relief for migrant workers in NZ as Government extends temporary visas
David Hargreaves (Interest): Govt makes changes to help temporary migrants
Brent Melville (BusinessDesk):Govt grants 6-month reprieve to work visa holders
—————
Greg Ninness (Interest): Since March the number of people leaving this country has exceeded those arriving by a substantial margin

Local government
Bernard Orsman (Herald): Auckland Council’s budget hole blows out to $750 million
RNZ: Auckland rates rise options more popular than freeze – council survey
Grant Miller (ODT): Noone probable successor if Hobbs goes

SkyCity
Damien Venuto (Herald): SkyCity warned by Department of Internal Affairs for online gambling advert (paywalled)
RNZ: SkyCity warned about online casino breaching Gambling Act
Anuja Nadkarni (Stuff): SkyCity warned by Internal Affairs for promoting Malta casino

Health
Ian Powell: Beware Babylon tale
Mike Houlahan (ODT): Widow calls for improved cancer service

Education
Simon Collins (Herald): ‘Ethnic prejudice’ alleged in smacking complaint against Korean daycare teacher
Martyn Bradbury (Daily Blog): Why NZ Students should fight for Universal Union Membership

Methamphetamine
Patrick Gower (Newshub): We must not give up fighting meth
RNZ: The Detail: Re-thinking society’s attitude towards methamphetamine

Media, Facebook
Jehan Casinader (BusinessDesk): Will businesses keep boycotting Facebook? (paywalled)
Newstalk Zb: Facebook boycott movement reaches New Zealand
Sam Hurley (Herald): NZME v Nine judgment over potential sale of Stuff to remain redacted for 6 months, High Court rules
Victoria Young (BusinessDesk): Judge keeps Stuff info secret – and her reasons why

Transport
Lorna Thornber (Stuff): ‘Holding our money hostage’: Air New Zealand customer denied refund on $12k worth of flights calls for law change
1News: Hastings mayor calls for NZTA to step up and fix State Highway 5 as fatal crashes climb
RNZ: Hastings Mayor says not enough done to fix risks on State Highway 5

Other
ODT Editorial: Snapshot shows WorkSafe’s shortcomings
Freeman Apou (Stuff):‘Doing well for a Māori’: My experience of racism in New Zealand
Susan Hornsby-Geluk (Stuff): New privacy laws must cope with rapid technological change
Thomas Coughlan (Stuff): Politicians should put scientists in their place
Ian Hyslop (Newsroom): When you’re in a hole, stop digging
Julia de Bres (Manawatū Standard): Gender-diverse language something to celebrate
Jean Bell (RNZ): Watercare restrictions push water blasting businesses to the brink
RNZ: First Up: AT threatens to rip up planted berm which stops flooding

China could be using TikTok to spy on Australians, but banning it isn’t a simple fix

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Paul Haskell-Dowland, Associate Dean (Computing and Security), Edith Cowan University

In an age of isolation, video sharing platform TikTok has emerged as a bonding force for many. But recent headlines allege the service, owned by Beijing-based company ByteDance, is feeding users’ data to the Chinese Communist Party.

Earlier this week, the Herald Sun reported that an unnamed federal MP was pushing for the app to be banned.

Following suit, Liberal senator Jim Molan said TikTok was being “used and abused” by the Chinese government, while Labor senator Jenny McAllister called on TikTok’s representatives to face the Select Committee on Foreign Interference Through Social Media.

TikTok has denied the accusations and rebuffed suggestions it should be banned in Australia.

But why is the federal government examining this app so closely? And could it really be a tool used by the Chinese government to spy on us?

A growing following

With a reported two billion downloads worldwide, TikTok’s Australian market is also significant. It has an estimated 1.6 million Aussie users, mostly aged 16-24 but with a growing number of older users too.

Simply, users generate short videos that are shared in the app, with many celebrities also signing up. But although TikTok seems to offer carefree entertainment, is there a darker side?

Australian television presenter Andrew Probyn had an unexpected TikTok moment.

What information is collected?

When installed, TikTok asks users to grant several permissions, including the use of the camera, microphone and contact list. However, it may also collect location data, along with information from other apps on the device.

Last year, a proposed class action lawsuit filed against TikTok in California claimed the company gathered users’ data, including phone numbers, emails, location, IP addresses, and social network contacts.

The lawsuit also stated TikTok concealed the transfer of data (including biometric data), and continued to harvest it even after the app was closed. This would mean when a user shoots a video and clicks the “next” button, the video could be automatically transferred to servers – without the user’s knowledge.

Where is the data stored?

While TikTok’s headquarters are in Beijing, Australian general manager Lee Hunter recently claimed Australian users’ data was stored in Singapore.

A major challenge in sorting the truth from fiction lies in how we define “data”. While TikTok users’ details and videos may be stored in Singapore, there’s still potential for data to be extracted from this video content and the device and sent to China’s servers (although this hasn’t been proven to have happened).

Hypothetically, it would then be possible for Chinese authorities to use biometric data to identify people using facial recognition. It would also be possible to map rooms and locations by using “feature extraction” (a machine learning method) on videos.

This could then aid the creation of new, advanced deepfake videos potentially targeting specific people.

While this may seem far-fetched, there have already been preemptive TikTok bans within major organisations to ensure sensitive information isn’t leaked.

For instance, the app has been banned from devices used by the Australian Defence Department, the US Department of Defence, and even entire countries – with the Indian government announcing a nationwide ban last month.

Privacy issues

ByteDance claims its data is stored in servers in the US and Singapore:

Our data centers are located entirely outside of China, and none of our data is subject to Chinese law.

TikTok’s privacy policy is ambiguous. As of January, it states:

You should understand that no data storage system or transmission of data over the Internet or any other public network can be guaranteed to be 100% secure.

From a user privacy perspective, TikTok has access to a device’s location and a user’s personal information. Although TikTok’s servers may be located outside China, it’s very difficult (if not impossible) to confirm where this data could end up, or what it could be used for.

While the location of servers can be important, possession of data is more relevant. Once data is obtained, it can be used. If data is stored on a server in Australia, for instance, Australian jurisdiction applies. But once it is sent to another country, that country’s laws take precedent.

And if a TikTok user decides to delete their content from their device, or if there is a government-imposed ban, data can’t be retrospectively erased. Once information is transferred, it’s impossible to retract without the cooperation of the organisation or agency concerned (in this case, TikTok).

Can the government actually ban TikTok?

The fact is, enforcing an Australia-wide ban on TikTok isn’t a simple prospect. While the federal government could request the app’s removal from the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, it could only do this for Australian regions and marketplaces.

Users in Australia would still be able to download TikTok from another region’s store, or via a third-party source. Also, banning the app won’t automatically remove it from devices on which it is already installed.

Blocking access to TikTok’s servers would be done in conjunction with internet service providers (such as Telstra and Optus), as they can block access to apps and websites. But users could still use proxies or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to circumvent these controls.

And even if TikTok was banned, citizen data already handed over would remain stored, and could be accessed for the foreseeable future.

– ref. China could be using TikTok to spy on Australians, but banning it isn’t a simple fix – https://theconversation.com/china-could-be-using-tiktok-to-spy-on-australians-but-banning-it-isnt-a-simple-fix-142157

After last summer’s fires, the bell tolls for Australia’s endangered mountain bells

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Kingsley Dixon, John Curtin Distinguished Professor, Curtin University

This article is a preview from Flora, Fauna, Fire, a multimedia project launching on Monday July 13. The project tracks the recovery of Australia’s native plants and animals after last summer’s bushfire tragedy. Sign up to The Conversation’s newsletter for updates.

Hidden in the Stirling Range national park in Western Australia – an area so diverse, so ecologically important, I’ve described it as a “coral reef out of water” – are Australia’s spectacular mountain bells.

When Western botanists encountered these predominantly bird-pollinated plants, they found them so intriguing and so unlike anything they knew (Britain has no bird pollination), they named them Darwinia after Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin.

These breathtaking native Australian flowers are now at grave risk from recent fires, with many species listed on the government’s provisional list of plants requiring urgent management intervention. The Stirling Ranges were ravaged by this summer’s fires, and three-quarters of this WA national park now experience fire cycles twice as frequent as species recovery rates.

If it sounds grim, that’s because it is. There’s hope yet for the mountain bell, though, thanks largely to the efforts of concerned community members.

*Darwinia collina*, the yellow mountain bell, is listed as endangered. A. T. Morphet, Author provided

Why are mountain bells so special?

With an astonishing range of colours, the Stirling Range mountain bells are the glamour plants in WA’s floral bouquet.

Standing up to 60cm tall, these glorious shrubs are a gardener’s dream. They have neat foliage and pendulous, bell-like flowers in colours ranging from yellow, to greens, to striking reds and multicoloured variegated blooms.

Darwinia has just 70 species – a modest number compared with some plant genera in Australia.

They occur in southeastern and southwestern Australia. Darwinia split from their ancestral lineage 16 million years ago with the southwest, including the Stirling Ranges – a cradle of the genus. The chance dispersal of seed to southeastern Australia meant the two nodes of diversity were separated by the Nullarbor and central desert, and evolved in splendid isolation. How these heavy-seeded plants managed such an epic journey across the Australian deserts remains a mystery.

Nectar-hungry Australian birds found the rewards in the rain-protected, bell-like flowers irresistible.

In what was a blink of evolutionary time, mountain bells capitalised on birds as a better system for pollination than offered by insects, and new species appeared across the peaks of the Stirlings.

Today, there are ten species of mountain bells. All but one are only found in the Stirling Ranges, often on single peaks or in highly restricted locations. And many feature on the provisional list of plants requiring urgent management.

Virtually each peak could have its very own mountain bell. I recall my first encounter with the mountain bells years ago. I’d spotted the delicate cherry-coloured blooms of Wittwer’s bell nestled in a small wooded hollow, midway along the main drive through the Stirlings. I eagerly sought out other mountain bell species and, soon enough, realised I had an untreatable case of “bell fever”.

A _Darwinia macrostegia or Mondurup Bell on Mondurup Peak. A.T Morphet, Author provided

A biodiversity hotspot at a crossroads

Traditional owners revered the Stirling Ranges as sacred land that had endured countless ice ages and climate ravages. But today, the Stirling Ranges are at a crossroads.

The discovery of dieback disease (Phytophthora cinnamomi) in 1974, as well as fires both prescribed and natural, have taken a heavy toll on the plants and animals in the park.

Last summer’s cataclysmic fires scorched half of the Stirling Ranges national park, and the danger the mountain bells now face is emblematic of the broader problem of biodiversity loss.

Many plants and animal species here may never recover. Yes, many Australian plants evolved to cope with bushfire – but not with how frequently these fires are reoccurring.

The Stirling Ranges national park is like no other, with an astonishing 1,500 plant species, eclipsing the flora of the British Isles.

Threats abound

Contemporary fire is now one of the single greatest threats to what remains of this extraordinary ecosystem.

The mountain bells need more than 15 years or more to rebuild their soil seed bank, as these plants are killed by even the mildest of fire.

We knew this was coming. Dire predictions by conservation scientists as early as 2015 warned the Stirling Ranges faced a biodiversity meltdown, and that mountain bells were particularly at risk of extinction.

Though the fires have retreated, the once thriving populations of mountain bells are reduced to blackened stems. It is indescribably sad to see.

For some species, the 2020 bushfires came hot on the heels of an out-of-control prescribed burn in 2018, and few species can survive such short interval fire. Scientists are surveying the damage, to see if parts of the soil seed bank survived to grow the next generation of mountain bells. But it may be too late for some species. Time will tell.

The endemic grass tree *Kingia australis* absorbs ethylene gas from bushfire to initiate flowering within months. Keith Bradbury, Author provided

Community action

Is there a future for mountain bells? I like to think so. I have grown them in wildflower gardens from cuttings handed down from wildflower gardeners over decades. Through temperamental and often unpredictable to grow, mountain bells are remarkably easy to propagate.

A key part of saving our mountain bells is, I believe, intimately linked to the community of wildflower enthusiasts. These passionate, committed community members stand ready to help save the last bells.

The Stirling Ranges national park in Western Australia. Trevor Dobson, CC BY-NC-ND

The way we’ve done conservation in the past needs a reboot. For the mountain bells and many other threatened species to have a future, we need to embrace a new way of engaging with community volunteers and particularly our traditional owners.

Everyone I have spoken to is ready to roll up their sleeves and help our plants, and animals struggling to come out of the fires. Such an approach will need trust, training and support – but it may be our only hope.

– ref. After last summer’s fires, the bell tolls for Australia’s endangered mountain bells – https://theconversation.com/after-last-summers-fires-the-bell-tolls-for-australias-endangered-mountain-bells-139665

Climate explained: what the world was like the last time carbon dioxide levels were at 400ppm

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By James Shulmeister, Professor, University of Canterbury

Climate Explained is a collaboration between The Conversation, Stuff and the New Zealand Science Media Centre to answer your questions about climate change.

If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, please send it to climate.change@stuff.co.nz

What was the climate and sea level like at times in Earth’s history when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at 400ppm?

The last time global carbon dioxide levels were consistently at or above 400 parts per million (ppm) was around four million years ago during a geological period known as the Pliocene Era (between 5.3 million and 2.6 million years ago). The world was about 3℃ warmer and sea levels were higher than today.

We know how much carbon dioxide the atmosphere contained in the past by studying ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. As compacted snow gradually changes to ice, it traps air in bubbles that contain samples of the atmosphere at the time. We can sample ice cores to reconstruct past concentrations of carbon dioxide, but this record only takes us back about a million years.

Beyond a million years, we don’t have any direct measurements of the composition of ancient atmospheres, but we can use several methods to estimate past levels of carbon dioxide. One method uses the relationship between plant pores, known as stomata, that regulate gas exchange in and out of the plant. The density of these stomata is related to atmospheric carbon dioxide, and fossil plants are a good indicator of concentrations in the past.

Another technique is to examine sediment cores from the ocean floor. The sediments build up year after year as the bodies and shells of dead plankton and other organisms rain down on the seafloor. We can use isotopes (chemically identical atoms that differ only in atomic weight) of boron taken from the shells of the dead plankton to reconstruct changes in the acidity of seawater. From this we can work out the level of carbon dioxide in the ocean.

The data from four-million-year-old sediments suggest that carbon dioxide was at 400ppm back then.

Sea levels and changes in Antarctica

During colder periods in Earth’s history, ice caps and glaciers grow and sea levels drop. In the recent geological past, during the most recent ice age about 20,000 years ago, sea levels were at least 120 metres lower than they are today.

Recent research shows that west Antarctica is now melting. Elaine Hood/NSF

Sea-level changes are calculated from changes in isotopes of oxygen in the shells of marine organisms. For the Pliocene Era, research shows the sea-level change between cooler and warmer periods was around 30-40 metres and sea level was higher than today. Also during the Pliocene, we know the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was significantly smaller and global average temperatures were about 3℃ warmer than today. Summer temperatures in high northern latitudes were up to 14℃ warmer.

This may seem like a lot but modern observations show strong polar amplification of warming: a 1℃ increase at the equator may raise temperatures at the poles by 6-7℃. It is one of the reasons why Arctic sea ice is disappearing.

Impacts in New Zealand and Australasia

In the Australasian region, there was no Great Barrier Reef, but there may have been smaller reefs along the northeast coast of Australia. For New Zealand, the partial melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is probably the most critical point.

One of the key features of New Zealand’s current climate is that Antarctica is cut off from global circulation during the winter because of the big temperature contrast between Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. When it comes back into circulation in springtime, New Zealand gets strong storms. Stormier winters and significantly warmer summers were likely in the mid-Pliocene because of a weaker polar vortex and a warmer Antarctica.

It will take more than a few years or decades of carbon dioxide concentrations at 400ppm to trigger a significant shrinking of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. But recent studies show that West Antarctica is already melting.

Sea-level rise from a partial melting of West Antarctica could easily exceed a metre or more by 2100. In fact, if the whole of the West Antarctic melted it could raise sea levels by about 3.5 metres. Even smaller increases raise the risk of flooding in low-lying cities including Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington.

– ref. Climate explained: what the world was like the last time carbon dioxide levels were at 400ppm – https://theconversation.com/climate-explained-what-the-world-was-like-the-last-time-carbon-dioxide-levels-were-at-400ppm-141784

Public housing ‘renewal’ likely to drive shift to private renters, not owners, in Sydney

By The Conversation -

July 8, 2020

Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dallas Rogers, Associate Dean, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney

A target of 70% private and 30% public dwellings is an accepted standard for public housing renewal projects in several Australian states. This level of private ownership is said to be necessary to counter stigma and the supposed demotivating impacts of concentrated disadvantage. When we looked at the impact of applying this model to the planned Waterloo redevelopment in inner Sydney, the demographic projections were revealing.

Our analysis shows the project would reduce the suburb’s proportion of social housing dwellings from 30% to about 17%. About 30% of households in the suburb would be owner-occupiers. Private renters might rise to more than 50% of households.

Why set social mix targets?

Social mix is often proposed as an antidote to a range of presumed problems associated with public housing estates. With the need for a social housing stimulus package receiving attention, and the Victorian government announcing a A$500 million program, it’s timely to revisit the mix of tenancies in estate redevelopments.

State housing authorities favour a mix of public and private residential tenures when they redevelop large public housing estates. Authorities can then sell the majority of new dwellings to private owners and investors.

As Kate Shaw, Janet McCalman and Deborah Warr have explained in The Conversation, the strategy doesn’t always work as promised. Drawing on extensive empirical research into mixed-tenure renewal neighbourhoods, the evidence shows simple mathematical “one size fits all” targets do not work. Decisions on the residential mix need to be sensitive to local settings and needs.

Nonetheless, an orthodoxy has emerged among some housing authorities that social housing tenants should make up 30% of households while 70% should be sold to owner-occupiers and investors.

The case of Waterloo

In Waterloo, limitations of the fixed-ratio approach relate to the likely composition of the post-renewal resident population.

The Waterloo estate site now contains about 1,900 public housing units. The renewal plan proposes retaining this number in the context of a three-fold increase in dwellings with a 70:30 private-public tenure mix. This will result in a total of about 6,500 dwellings.

At the suburb or neighbourhood level, Waterloo had 6,151 dwellings in 2016. As the table below shows, almost exactly 30% of these were let to social housing tenants.

The table also shows the large variation in tenure mix across five Sydney suburbs and the Greater Sydney area. Some 44% of all dwelling stock in Waterloo was already rented privately. That’s almost 50% more than the Sydney-wide average of just under 30%.

Importantly, 63% of private dwellings in Waterloo are privately rented – double the Greater Sydney proportion.

Located close to three universities and the CBD, Waterloo is dominated by investor-owned rental housing. Future occupation is likely to follow this pattern.

More like 17% social housing

State housing authorities measure tenure mix within public housing estates. But the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute recommends measuring tenure mix at the neighbourhood scale.

Adding 4,500 new private households, while maintaining current social housing numbers, will reduce the proportion of social housing in the suburb of Waterloo to about 17%.

Projecting the current rate of renters in private dwellings onto the proposed 70:30 renewal mix might be expected to result in 63% of new private dwellings being privately rented.

The suburb would then comprise 52% private renters. Less than one-third of residents would be owner-occupiers.

The chart below shows how applying the 70:30 target to redeveloping the public housing estate could actually reduce tenure diversity for Waterloo.

Many private renters struggle too

The need for more social and affordable housing in well-serviced, inner-urban areas is well recognised. Getting the residential tenure mix right through renewal is key.

In the only full-length book on social mix in Australia, Kathy Arthurson notes social disadvantage occurs in both public and private rental housing. She writes:

The omission of private rental from the social mix literature is problematic, as in Australia and elsewhere most poor renters are in private rental and not in public housing.

A key element of the case for limiting social housing to 30% in redevelopment projects is the belief that any more would scare off potential private buyers and reduce developer returns.

However, an RMIT evaluation of the Victorian Public Housing Renewal Program showed the presence of social housing had little effect on sales of private apartments in renewed inner-city public housing estates.

Another evaluation of the Kensington renewal project in Carlton, Victoria, found strong investor sales but fewer owner-occupiers than anticipated.

Key takeaways

Recent research in Melbourne and Sydney suggests the supposed benefits of social mix are based on owner-occupiers, not more transient private renters.

It also shows social mix renewals that apply a simplistic 70:30 target within a narrowly defined boundary around an “estate” risk seriously undervaluing large public housing assets.

– ref. Public housing ‘renewal’ likely to drive shift to private renters, not owners, in Sydney – https://theconversation.com/public-housing-renewal-likely-to-drive-shift-to-private-renters-not-owners-in-sydney-133352

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