You’ve got a friend

friends-friendship
Friends photo by Annie Spratt, www.pixabay.com.au

While resting and recovering from Covid (honestly, the virus I had at Christmas seemed worse), I started reflecting on friends and friendship. At this moment in time, my definition of friends are the ones who bring you groceries, chocolate and Panadol, walk your dog and check on your well-being every day (thanks, Sandra, Kaz and Dee).

The deal with friendship is the unspoken agreement that one will reciprocate as and when appropriate. Research on this topic tells us that, unsurprisingly, the main reason friendships end is that one friend feels that the other is being selfish; it is a one-way relationship. Other reasons friendships fail come under the heading ‘loyalty/betrayal’. Or it could simply be that your friend moved to another town or city, took up with a new partner after a divorce or bereavement, or has developed opinions and beliefs that conflict with yours.

The latter clearly was the case when people who believed Covid was a real and present danger and lined up for vaccinations, came into conflict with those who denied it existed.

The advent of social media around 2004 has turned the traditional concept of a ‘friend’ on its head. In short, they hijacked the word.

A former colleague/friend whom I had not heard from in a while posted a message on Facebook on Sunday warning friends he had been hacked.

“Ignore any friend requests from me – I’ve got too many friends already LOL.”

Like all of us, I have far more email addresses and mobile numbers stored away than any one person could categorise as ‘friends’. Many of them date from my journalism career, where ‘contacts’ are the key to everything. Over time I reduced my phone contact list from 1100 to around 300.

Despite having a recent clean-out, I still have 400 Facebook friends.

I deleted anyone I had never actually met, suspect accounts (where there appeared to be more than one) and people I’d had no contact with in the past 12 months.

Many of those ‘friended’ me because they read my weekly blogs or because they follow our music. One also tends to accumulate friends who use Facebook and Messenger to find people. The one-off reason for doing so comes and goes but the ‘friend’ remains on the list.

The irony is not lost on me that at least five of my oldest friends do not have a Facebook account and have no intention of starting one. Even when I share cat jokes. Prompted by the topic and these memories, I rang my old Kiwi school friend, who now lives in Sydney. He was his usual cheery self and I pictured his smile and that of his Dad, who he so resembles. This friend was best man at both my weddings, which is not something many people can say.

I told him we both had Covid and after commiserating he said he and his partner are still Covid-free. He attributes this to living something of a monastic life and wearing a mask when he does go places where people mingle.

We exchanged old war stories from school days. We were probably what people call ‘nerds’ now, before the term was invented. We were bookish and, even at a young age, interested in philosophy, psychology and comparative religions. We once got detention for riding a library trolley up and down the corridors (before school started), but that’s another story.

There’s been a lot of research done into the topic of friendship and how it is essential to our health and happiness. As we age, the number of friends in our physical address book dwindles. We lose people to cancer, heart disease and other illnesses. Others develop dementia and forget who we are.

Friends made when our children were growing up tend to fade away as the kids mature and move away to live their own lives. The vast size of the continent we live in contributes to the dissolution of friendships, as people move interstate for work or family reasons. I am probably fortunate to have kept in touch with a small group of men from school days. We are geographically scattered and to be honest do not have much in common these days.

Yet when we spend time together we are transported back to carefree teen years at the beach, drinking from tall necked beer bottles and daring each other to test the treacherous surf.

Clinical psychologist Anastasia Hronis writes that it is hard making new friends at any age, which is one of the reasons for our epidemic of loneliness. Writing in The Conversation, Dr Hronis, of Sydney’s University of Technology, says that for most adults, making new friends is hard work.

“In school, making friends can be as simple as going on the monkey bars together. But as adults, making, developing and maintaining friendships can be much more difficult.

This matters, because we need friends. And while old friends are golden, nothing stays the same forever. Old friends move away, or have their time taken up by child-rearing or their careers. Without action, loneliness can quietly grow around you.

The onset of the Covid pandemic produced the perfect storm of conditions for making friendships difficult to maintain.

Dr Hronis cites research that shows 54% of Australians reported a keen sense of loneliness. Before COVID, around a third of Australians reported feeling at least one episode of loneliness.

When researchers in a recent study interviewed adults about making friends,,the most important challenge cited was a lack of trust. People found it harder to put their trust in someone new compared to when they were younger.

If you are an older person starting out in a new town or city, you may find this research dispiriting. US researchers estimated it takes roughly 50 hours of shared contact to move from acquaintances to casual friends. Progressing the contact to close friends can take more than 200 hours.

Dr Hronis says there are many other barriers stopping us from having friendships, including an introverted personality, health barriers and personal insecurities.

“It’s entirely possible to overcome these barriers as adults and build meaningful, long-lasting friendships. We don’t have to accept loneliness as inevitable,” Dr Hronis said.

“If you put in ten minutes a day, you can maintain existing friendships and build new ones. Send a text, forward a meme, add to the group chat or give someone a quick call. Don’t get caught up on how much effort, energy and time goes into building friendships. Ten minutes a day may be all you need.

Now you know why I got in touch this week! It wasn’t exactly intimations of mortality that brought me to it; the trouble with technology is, it is too easy to dash off a text or an email (that may or may not be read).

Sometimes what we all need most is to hear a familiar and friendly voice at the other end of the phone – with no risk of catching anything.

I’ll leave you with this performance of the best-known song about friendship. We were fortunate indeed to hear Carole King and James Taylor duet her song in 2010, when they performed in Brisbane. The 2010 world tour band included bass player Leland Sklar and drummer Russ Kunkel, both playing in this 1971 video.

Now there’s friendship for you.

 

Celebrating Multicultural Australia

Australian Bureau of Statistics chart shows growth in population of people born elsewhere since the mid-1940s

Australia is more culturally diverse than ever, according to the first results from the 2021 Census. Almost half our population of 25.76 million people have at least one parent born overseas. Almost a quarter of Australians (24.8%) speak a language other than English at home. Just over a quarter (27.6%) report being born overseas (Ed: and that includes him and me – Scotland and Canada’s loss is our gain, we modestly reckon).

In the five years since the last Census, India has become the second-most common overseas country of birth, shifting New Zealand and China down the list. The above chart from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows the shifting demographic.

Dr Sukhmani Khorana, Senior Research Fellow, Western Sydney University, says the growing number of first-generation migrants means Australians’ ancestry will change significantly over the next decade.

“Australia will continue to change and look different, and we must ensure our institutions and policies reflect this,” Dr Khorana wrote in The Conversation.

“That work, by governments and policy makers, should begin now so they can gain trust and maximise the belonging of these communities. Research shows feelings of belonging lead to better socio-economic outcomes”.

Dr Khorana believes there would have been substantially more immigration were it not for the COVID pandemic with its restrictions and lock-downs.

Dr Khorana highlights an important item from the Census data:

  • the number of people who are either born overseas or have a parent born overseas is greater than half (13.26 million people or 51.5%).

The data shows Australia is as multicultural or even more so than countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States. Canada’s latest Census (2016) showed that 21.9% of people were immigrants, led by people from South Asia. Similarly, data from the UK’s 2018 Census showed that 14% of the UK population was from a minority ethnic background. In the city of London, this figure was 40%.

Dr Khorana, who conducts research for migrant and refugee-focused organisations in Western Sydney, says Australia would have received more migrants had it not been for the COVID pandemic, which shut borders from early 2020.

Census data shows the pandemic led to an 80% decrease in the number of overseas visitors, which affected the tourism, hospitality and higher education sectors of the economy.

We also received fewer relatives of overseas-born Australians, for example on family-sponsored visas.

Our local refugee and migrant network organised an event in Warwick last Sunday. Visiting chefs prepared samples of ethnic food from five different countries. There was also music and dancing. About 60 adults and children showed up at St Mark’s Hall including two Hazara Afghan families wearing traditional dress.

Southern Downs Regional Council Mayor Vic Pennisi attended the event and made a short speech. Italian-born Cr Pennisi related his arrival in Australia as a child “with not one word of English. He grew up in Stanthorpe in a time he acknowledged was not as friendly towards ethnic minorities as Australia is now.

“I left school after Grade 10 and now I’m Mayor of the Southern Downs Regional Council and only in a country like Australia could you do that.”

The event, ‘A Taste of the Southern Downs’, was open to the public, with cooking demonstrations and a chance to sample dishes from South Korea, China, The Philippines, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Southern Downs Refugee and Migrant Network organized the event with the support of a grant from the Queensland Government and sponsorship from Acciona’s McIntyre Wind Farm Project.

Our contribution to the event was to set up our PA, make a multi-cultural music play list and present a short set of Australian folk songs. Our theme was the Anglo-Saxon immigrant experience. She Who Still Has a Canadian Accent sung ‘Un Canadien Errant’, a traditional French language song about a young Canadian exile forced to leave Quebec.

We learned two new songs, Farewell to old England and The Shores of Botany Bay, and performed my immigration story, Rangitiki.

Earlier, we listened to guest speakers who impressed me with their command of English language. Even though most grew up in Australia, if you are from Asia, knowing what ‘cooking from scratch’ means is quite impressive stuff. Few of us could translate this to any of the many Asian dialects!

Likewise, a Hazara Afghan and friend of our group, related his story coming from Afghanistan as an unaccompanied minor in 2012. Now a confident young man with a good command of English, he gave some insights into the sacrifices refugees make when forced to flee their home countries. After a decade in Australia, he has only recently been re-united with his family.

Donations were raised for a Melbourne group, Hazara Women for Change. This group aims to support the ongoing education of Afghan women. Afghanistan’s rulers, the Taliban, have shut down schools and forbid women from receiving an education. That’s the least of the worries for persecuted minorities like the Hazara trying to survive within Afghanistan.

The United Nations recently released a report voicing concern over the Taliban authorities’ carrying out human rights violations with impunity. This included extra-judicial killings of individuals accused of affiliation with armed groups, but also cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishments, and excessive use of force by Taliban officials.

The report documented a total of 237 extra-judicial killings. Most of them (160), targeted former members of the Afghan military and government.

No matter how uncertain their future may be as refugees in Australia, Afghan citizens who were evacuated last August will be grateful to be here, although lamenting those family members left behind.

I had to do some digging to establish the 2021 population of people born in Afghanistan. As you might expect, given the upheaval in that country since the last Census, the Afghan population here has grown from 46,800 in 2016 to 67,030 in mid-2021. And that was before the Taliban came back and some 4,100 people with Australian visas were evacuated to this country, many of them Afghans. For perspective, there are about eight million Hazaras living in Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan.

While Australia is a multi-cultural country, the population is still dominated by English-speaking people who were either born here or came from countries where English is the first language.

The top five most common places of birth (outside Australia) are led by England (468,465), India (362,187), New Zealand (267,327), China (239,951) and the Philippines (113,035), followed by Vietnam, South Africa, Italy and Malaysia. People who ticked the ‘born elsewhere’ box numbered 364,949 (includes countries not identified individually by the respondent and people born at sea).

People from the UK still rank among the top five sources of ancestry including English (33%), Irish (9.5%) and Scottish (8.6%).

In his election campaign in May, then Opposition leader Anthony Albanese said becoming prime minister with his Italian surname would proves “you can do anything in this country”.

“We’re a diverse country, and the fact that I have a non-Anglo-Celtic name … I think it sends a message out there hopefully to multi-cultural Australia that you can achieve anything in this country,” he said after being elected in May.

Indeed. We also have a Senate leader named Wong.

It wasn’t always like that.

FOMM back pages (2018)

Multiculturalism under siege

 

After the floods, the clean-up

floods-clean-up
O.O Madsen Bridge, image by Sandra Wilson, May 13, 2022

I had no sooner finished writing about floods in Warwick when it started raining again. I’d written the lead article for our local U3A newsletter last week, recounting the times since 2000 the Condamine River had closed the main bridge into town.

The answer (so far) is four – October 2010, January 2011, January 2013 and May 2022, when the river rose above 6.5m. Closing the bridge effectively cleaves the town in two,as alternative routes will also be under water if this happens. This time, the closure was for only 24 hours; but in 2013, the highway was cut for days, as the river peaked at 7.21m.

The O(tto) O(ttosen) Madsen Bridge is not just the link across the Condamine River, it is a national monument. The 58-year-old bridge is a vital link between Brisbane and Sydney, carrying traffic across the bridge from the Cunningham to New England highways.

Spanning 100m across the Condamine River, the O.O. Madsen Bridge was opened in 1964. It is dedicated to Otto Madsen, who was State MLA for Warwick from 1947–1963 and served as a Minister in the Nicklin Government between 1957 and 1963. If you have ever taken the inland highway to or from New South Wales, you’ll have driven across it.

On May 13 this year, after an early call from a friend, we did a dash to the supermarket and got safely home again before the bridge closed. Twenty-four hours later (the rain having stopped) the river level dropped and the bridge re-opened.

It might seem churlish to complain about the minor inconvenience, given that so many parts of urban and rural Australia have been smashed multiple times by floods. The damage bill this year for South East Queensland and NSW alone is $4.38 billion.

In February this year, floods visited the Sunshine Coast, Lockyer Valley, Toowoomba, Gympie and Maryborough, to name a few regions. In late February, the northern NSW town of Lismore was badly flooded. Lismore copped it again a few weeks later. In some parts of town, the flood levels were so high houses and shops vanished beneath the waters.

This week, a major rain event revisited Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Hawkesbury and Hunter regions of New South Wales. This is only three months after unprecedented rains inundated many NSW cities and towns. Apart from the drama, the danger, and loss of property, those affected by floods are almost always traumatised. Being forced to live through flood events twice within six months is more than anyone should have to bear.

Those of us who live on high and dry properties might blithely say “Oh well, you did have insurance, didn’t you?”

That’s a thorny question and one worth trying to shed some light on.

The latest data from the Insurance Council of Australia on the 2022 South East Queensland and Northern NSW floods tells a story.

Data from June shows that of the 225,000 claims made, 68,000 have been settled, leaving 157,000 claims still outstanding,

Three to six months after flood events in SEQ and NSW, 70% of those who made claims are still waiting. To be fair to insurers, a claims assessor must physically visit the property to which the claim applies. The assessor then makes a recommendation and the claims department makes a decision. It all takes time.

Typically, those badly affected by natural disasters like bush fires and floods turn to State and Federal government for help.

New South Wales Premier Dominic Perrottet said in March this year the floods then affecting NSW were a “one-in-one-thousand-year event. But that’s not what science, or the insurance industry, suggests, according to University of Melbourne academic Antonia Settle. The Conversation says that Australian home owners and businesses are facing escalating insurance costs in areas prone to fires, cyclones and floods.

The trend is being driven by the frequency and severity of extreme weather events as the global climate continues to change.

Premiums have risen sharply over a decade, as insurers count the cost of insurance claims and factor in future risks. Rising insurance premiums are creating a crisis of under-insurance in Australia, Settle says.
Under-insurance has been a problem for untold thousands whose houses were wrecked by floods. In some cases, insurers have no option but to offer a cash payment rather than re-instate what has been damaged or destroyed. (The level of insurance the policyholder has chosen will not cover the cost of a repair or rebuild).

Settle writes that the two main ways to reduce insurance premiums are to limit global warming (not something Australia can achieve on its own) or reduce the damage caused by extreme events.

This means constructing more disaster-resistant buildings, or not rebuilding in high-risk areas (Ed: obviously, do not build houses (or railways) on flood plains).

The (Morrison) Federal government put most of its eggs in a different basket. Its plan was to subsidise insurance premiums in northern Australia, in response to an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission investigation in 2020.

The ACCC’s final report into insurance affordability found the average cost of home and contents insurance in cyclone-prone northern Australia was almost double the rest of Australia. The rate of non-insurance was almost double – 20% compared with 11%.

Former PM Scott Morrison copped harsh criticism for this policy, as he did for his tardy response to the Lismore floods and before that, not funding urgent requests for more fire-fighting aircraft during the Black Summer bush fires.

Our globe-trotting Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, keen to mend fences, confirmed he would visit flood-affected towns along the Hawkesbury River when he touched down yesterday from a hectic schedule of visits to Europe. This is such a contrast to his predecessor’s weak and belated responses to bush fires and floods.

Meanwhile on the Southern Downs, more rare winter rain is causing the saturated ground to send run-off into the catchment. Relatively few properties in Warwick are prone to flooding, but the damage in low-lying areas is clearly evident. As a farmer who lives on the banks of the Condamine explained, he has seen six floods in the past 18 months, although only one forced the closure of the O. O. Madsen Bridge.

If you walk along the riverbank today, you will see visible signs of flood damage to fences, posts, park benches, trees, light poles and any infrastructure that happened to be in the way of rushing flood waters (the dog park, which has now been completely dismantled, as an acknowledgement of defeat after being knocked over four times).  Most damage has been caused to fences, which simply collapse under the weight of water and debris.

BlazeAid, a volunteer organisation initially set up as a response to the aftermath of bush fires, has set up a base camp at Warwick Showgrounds. The base camp in Warwick was established last month to carry out the organisation’s most valued work – rebuilding fences destroyed by fires or floods.

Warwick coordinator Brad Young is very pleased with the response to the camp.“BlazeAid volunteers have come from all over, including WA, Vic, NSW, ACT and QLD,” he said, adding, “We have currently 38 properties on the books, with an estimated 100 kilometres of fencing to repair, rebuild and clean.

BlazeAid was formed in 2009 after the Black Saturday bush fires in Victoria. Founders Kevin and Rhonda Butler created the charity as a way for retired farmers, tradespeople and others to volunteer on properties affected by natural disaster. BlazeAid has to date completed more than 15,000 kilometres of fencing around Australia, all built by volunteers and funded by donations.

It’s never too late to volunteer.

FOMM Back Pages

 

 

Purple haze – the jacaranda story

On Remembrance Day (November 11), we met a Year 12 student who had been singing in our community choir but had taken time out to concentrate on her studies. She told us (with some excitement), that school was set to finish the following week. That reminded me of the old Queensland maxim about flowering jacarandas and exam times. The story goes that if the jacarandas are flowering and you are behind on your studies, it is too late!

That may have changed over the decades as climate change has led to earlier flowering, not only of jacarandas, but cherry blossoms (and pohutakawas). More on that later.

When I visited Brisbane in late September, the jacarandas were already starting to bloom. They flower later across the Southern Downs, as we know, but even so, this old jacaranda in the grounds of St Mark’s Anglican Church (above) was starting to lose its blooms as I took this photo on November 9.

Warwick has some lovely mature examples of this tree, many of them in the front or back yards of private homes. In some towns and cities (Grafton, Toowoomba, Brisbane, Sydney’s north shore), jacarandas were planted on either side of city streets, to create a stunning, if ephemeral display from mid-October to mid-November.

Jacaranda is the name for a genus of 49 species of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. Wikipedia describes it as a ‘cosmopolitan’ plant.

It is common across many continents and countries including Argentina, Botswana, Brazil, Florida, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Paraguay, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Southern California, Spain, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The jacaranda is also found in New Zealand. It has been introduced to most tropical and subtropical regions and is widely planted in Asia, with trees visible in Nepal, Pakistan and India.

These days, the tree is seen as an invasive foreigner although with a loftier status than the camphor laurel, deemed to be an invasive weed. Regardless, Australian towns and cities compete for status of champion jacaranda; examples including Grafton, Brisbane, Toowoomba, Sydney, Melbourne and Perth (although not until December in WA).

Apart from the obvious connection with school and university exam times, the jacaranda’s purple haze is the first real sign of Spring. Many romances have hatched under their sheltering boughs. Songwriters have mentioned the jacaranda in songs, even!

When at their peak, the showy trees are hard to beat for a visual spectacle. Unfortunately, the triumph is short-lived, with storms, rain and wind soon littering the ground with purple flowers. As staff in hospital emergency rooms would attest, ‘slipped on wet jacaranda flowers’ is a common refrain when patients present at the fracture clinic.

When visiting Brisbane on September 27, I was surprised to see this jacaranda on Coronation Drive. Although I set out to write a ‘light and fluffy’ piece, it did not take much to uncover the climate science take on this. An article in The Conversation and republished in other journals similarly observed the early flowering of jacarandas in South Africa.

Jennifer Fitchett, Associate Professor of Physical Geography, University of the Witwatersrand, explained why early flowering of Jacaranda mimosifolia is a ‘warning sign’. Gauteng Province’s proliferating jacarandas have in recent years started flowering in early September. Octogenarian residents interviewed by researchers recalled the trees flowering in mid-November in the 1920s and 30s. The trees, native to Brazil, were introduced to Pretoria and Johannesburg in the late 1800s. Civic leaders of the time deemed them an ornamental worthy of lining streets in the suburbs and CBD. You could write a thesis about how the seeds ended up germinating in foreign soil.

Professor Fitchett wrote that jacaranda flowering had gradually advanced over the decades to mid-October and now to September. She described this process as ‘phenological shift’, which has been observed in multiple flowering tree species around the world. The earlier flowering is a key indicator that the planet is warming.

Prof Fitchett initiated the first known phenological shift study done in South Africa, singling out the jacaranda. Phenological research is rare in South Africa, compared to the work done across Europe, Asia and North America.

“Because jacaranda blossoms result in such a dramatic change in the urban landscape each year, they are often reported on in the news and, more recently, in social media posts,” she said.

“We mined these sources to compile a list of flowering dates of jacaranda trees spanning 1927-2019.”

These records allowed researchers to confirm the advance in flowering dates, quantifying a mean rate of advance of 2.1 days per decade.

The flowering took place against a backdrop of warming temperatures, ranging from 0.1-0.2°C per decade (daily maximums) and a more rapid 0.2-0.4°C per decade for daily minimums.

Japan’s world-famous tourist attraction, cherry blossom season, has been under threat in 2020 and 2021. Covid restrictions meant that international tourists keen to witness the ‘sakura’ were unable to travel. Those who managed to sneak in a tour in early 2020 may have found their timing was off. The data suggests the peak blooming date in Kyoto has been gradually moving from mid-April to the beginning of the month.

She Who Itches to Travel had a Japan trip lined up for 2020 to see the cherry blossoms, ride the bullet trains and, if not actually climb Mt Fuji, take photos from miles away and say we did. That this never happened was more about my tendency to procrastinate and worry about becoming destitute.

In January SWITT decided we’d left our run too late and postponed the 2020 trip to Japan’s autumn. I agreed, imagining parks blazing with autumn colours, all the while converting yen to dollars. Then Covid appeared and everything changed.

The Japanese have been studying phenological change for centuries, so they have a better handle on it than most. Cherry blossom flowerings last only a few weeks. They have been occurring earlier and earlier in recent decades.

The ABC reported in April this year that the famous cherry blossoms in Kyoto, Japan, peaked on March 26, the earliest date in 1,200 years, according to data compiled by Osaka University. Records that date back to 812 AD in imperial court documents and diaries show that the previous record was set in 1409, when the cherry blossom season reached its peak on March 27.

Kyoto experienced an unusually warm spring this season. The average temperature for March in Kyoto has climbed from 47.5 degrees Fahrenheit in 1953 to 51.1 degrees Fahrenheit in 2020. Japan’s national newspaper Mainichi reported that despite diminished human activity stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic, carbon dioxide levels in surrounding areas did not decrease.

The ABC’s report also mentioned that Washington DC’s famous cherry trees bloomed early this year.

Similarly, New Zealand botanists have observed the early blooming of the pohutakawa, often known as the country’s Christmas Tree. The pohutakawa, with its distinctive red flowers, usually blooms in mid-November through to early January. Early flowering north of Auckland was noted in October. News portal Stuff says the early flowering is due to a relatively dry and warm winter. This might thwart the gathering of kina (sea egg), with local Maori tradition of taking the flowering as a sign that the shellfish is ready to harvest.

As I said, I didn’t set out to do yet another climate change story, but it’s a bit ubiquitous. In the spirit of ‘do your own research’ I have provided more links which confirm what you have just read. As Greta Thunberg would say  “Wake up! Your house is on fire.”

Go out into the suburbs with your camera or phone and capture those luscious jacaranda blooms while they last.

https://www.brisbanekids.com.au/jacarandas-brisbane-find-year/

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2021/4/1/japan-sees-earliest-cherry-blossoms-on-record-as-climate-warms

https://www.sciencealert.com/japan-s-cherry-blossoms-burst-into-color-sooner-than-they-have-in-1-200-years

Alternative media (and a plea for alms)

alternative-media-alms
Image by John Inglar, pixabay.com Suspicious of the status quo media? There are alternatives to fake news, beat-ups and media bias.

Over the years I have found that readers value my occasional reviews of alternative media, as opposed to fake news or the mainstream media. Since the latter started finding it hard to make money (circa 2010), there have been many start-up newsletters and blogs that seek to go counter to the mainstream media. Some survive (and grow), others fade from view. It is a constant chore to keep up with who’s who in the alt-media zoo.

Alan Austin, writing for Michael West Media, said the alternative media attrition rate is high. West’s website (launched in 2016) had been the only new entrant since the Saturday Paper in 2014, Austin noted. Michael West is an investigative financial journalist who previously worked for the Australian Financial Review. On his ‘about’ page, West states: We are non-partisan, do not take advertising and are funded by readers. Our investigations focus on big business, particularly multinational tax-avoiders, financial markets and the banking and energy sectors.  In a plea for monthly contributions to keep the machine rolling, West’s slogan is – Don’t pay so you can read it. Pay so everyone can.

That’s a mantra to keep in mind when perusing daily news online. Austin names four mainstream journalism outlets which are always ranked highly among the Top 50 Australian websites: news.com.au; abc.net.au; theguardian.com and smh.com.au. Of the four, only News Corp has a strict paywall. The ABC is and always has been ‘free’. The SMH and The Guardian prefer you to sign up for a daily email which contains a lot of news. The SMH asks readers to pay but provides a lot of free content on its website, as does The Guardian, which relies on contributions.

As time goes by, it becomes obvious that ‘free’ doesn’t really mean free. It means that if you value what you are reading, you are expected to chip in. When I first started this blog, it was relatively easy to source research material from a bewildering array of choices both local, state, national and international. More frequently I am coming up against messages like ‘you have read two free articles – why not subscribe?’

Today I’d like to point you to five alternative media outlets, chosen from readers’ recommendations and my own research. The list does not favour one publication over the other. The question to ask yourself before subscribing to a free daily email is, can you keep up?

The New Daily

I have in the past read occasional articles but am now trialling a (free) subscription. One of my regular readers recommended TND with the tongue-in-cheek caveat, ‘it might be too left wing for you’. I went browsing and found an article by Michael Pascoe which warned of forces marshalling in the US for the return of Donald Trump in 2024. If not Trump (T1), then a younger, more vigorous version (T2). As Pascoe says, it is a far scarier scenario than anything Covid can throw at us.

TND, a free online news publication, started in 2013 and now has 1.7 million subscribers. TND is backed by Industry Super Holdings, with senior executives including the former editor of The Age, Bruce Guthrie, and digital publishing pioneer Eric Beecher. Unlike some of its peers, it carries ads and tends to delve into celebrity news.

Pearls & Irritations

This weekly collection of essays focuses on Australian public policy and attracts contributions from well-credentialed writers. Formed by retired public service mandarin John Menadue, P&I has no sponsors, no ads and subscriptions are ‘free’ although there is a mechanism to attract sponsors with a structured schedule of monthly donations ($10 to $100) or one-off contributions. P&I recently went on a fund-raising quest to cover expenses including ‘legal challenges’.

Last week’s edition included an article by former diplomat Bruce Haigh, who took aim at former PM Tony Abbott’s “ham-fisted intervention” in Taiwan. In a widely reported speech, Abbott listed all of China’s “sins”, from Hong Kong, Uighurs and trade sanctions against Australia, as reasons to support Taiwan politically and militarily.

“This intervention by Abbott has about it the inept diplomacy which has seen relations with China, France and the EU collapse,” Haigh wrote.

In noting that the speech had not been coordinated with regional countries and major players like the US, France or Japan, Hague asked the question ‘who put Abbott up to this?’.

“Abbott’s speech contained a strong message and a line that has been pushed by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

“The tone, intended or not, reflected the language we have become used to from ASPI.”

The Australian was less critical of Mr Abbott’s pro-Taiwan speech, mentioning that it followed a similar message last year from another former Australian PM, Malcolm Turnbull.

When asked by reporters if he was representing the Morrison government, Abbott replied: “I am here as citizen. But, one thing about being a former Prime Minister is you do have a bit of a megaphone.

“I want the people of Taiwan to know that they are not nearly as isolated as Beijing would like them to feel,” he added.

I should note that this article is one of the few the conservative broadsheet makes available free of charge. You are more likely to be met with a paywall.

The Conversation

I have often referred readers to The Conversation, a digital platform where journalists present articles written by one or more academics. Not only is The Conversation ‘free’, it allows others to freely quote from and even reprint articles under a creative commons license. The project derives its content from a large, international network of academics and researchers. I make a monthly donation to The Conversation as it is often my go-to source for research and fact-checking. One interesting offering this week is a topic that has been turned over by others, including TND.

Crikey

This long-running alternative media publication has broadened its focus since the early days of focusing on media machinations. Crikey now has an investigative unit funded by former newspaper baron John B Fairfax. Crikey’s subscription model appears to be working – its mere existence says so. A visit to Crikey’s website allows the casual reader the chance to read two or three articles which are ‘unlocked’. An ad urges you to “Guard against stupid” and subscribe  “from $1 a week” (the current annual subscription is a discounted $99).

Since I mentioned the investigative unit, this week David Hardaker concluded his four-part series, ‘God in the Lodge’. Hardaker’s quest was to examine Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s public position that his religious beliefs do not influence his policies.

Crikey has been generous with Hardaker’s series, unlocking all four episodes for casual readers. It also published daily commentary on the topic by key thinkers in religion and politics.

The Saturday Paper

This publication belongs to the same stable that publishes The Monthly and the Quarterly Essay (Schwartz Media). The Saturday Paper employs some of the country’s best writers and analysts.  It is one of the few alternative media publications which has a print edition. The on-line edition provides quite a lot of ‘free’ content. But if you prefer a newspaper you can read in bed or at the dining room table, The Saturday’s long-form articles will keep you going all weekend.

Happy browsing, people. Do let me know if you uncover an independent media outlet with quality news and analysis I have not mentioned here.

Help keep FOMM going

This is also a good time to remind you of my annual plea for alms and many thanks to those who responded so promptly. It keeps me insured, maintains the website and covers other incidentals (coffee, dark chocolate, a nice lunch out for the Ed?SWPG (She who proofreads gratis.).

 

 

Going bananas over budgets

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North Queensland banana plantation. Photo Bob Wilson

After seeing a photo on a tourism brochure of a fruit cocktail with a banana posed like a dolphin with its mouth open, eating one will never be the same. I decided to write about bananas after spending two weeks in north Queensland, where 94% of the fruit is grown. I had also recently learned of the re-emergence of Panama disease, coined ‘Bananageddon’ by some droll headline writer.

The threat of disease not withstanding, Australian banana growers have to live through the annual cyclone season and its potential for destruction. In March, the north’s most visible politician, Bob Katter, was clamouring for Federal intervention to help bale out growers devastated by Cyclone Niran.

While North Queensland provided the best growing conditions for bananas, the tropical fruit is always under threat when cyclonic winds blow. The North Queensland Register’s Ben Harden  reported up to 100% losses in the Boogan and Wangan districts near Innisfail. There were 20% to 100% losses along the Cassowary Coast, where most of Australia’s bananas are grown. Katter, the member for Kennedy, as usual got himself front and centre in a press photo taken on a farm wiped out by Niran’s wind gusts (between 205kmh and 265kmh).

Katter has pledged his support behind North Queensland farmers with crops worth $200m knocked out by Cyclone Niran. He said the government should look at crop and livestock insurance funded by a 1% levy on farmers.

“It would make the recovery from these events a lot easier, and we could rebound quicker.

Some banana-growing areas were left untouched, as we discovered when visiting Lakeland south-west of Cooktown.

Lakeland’s rich volcanic soil and mild climate is ideal for growing bananas, plantations of which can be seen along both sides of the Kennedy Development Road between Lakeland and Laura.

We picked up a bird-watching map from Cooktown which identified Lakeland Honey Dam as a location to see water birds. We set off at sunset, only to find a gate with a banana farm sign forbidding entry due to biological risks. So we did not venture further; but if we had, we might have spotted corellas, egrets, herons, brolgas, sarus cranes, square-tailed kites and more.

Turns out the dam is on private property and banana farmers tend to be risk-averse about biological diseases and for good reason. Growers are twitchy about people bringing in banana plants or suckers from New South Wales in particular. In short, they do not want to add bunchy top to the list of issues that face banana growers. Trumping bunchy top though, is the re-emergence of Panama disease, which all but rendered the global banana industry extinct in the 1950s.

Stuart Thompson, Senior Lecturer in Plant Biochemistry, University of Westminster, wrote a lengthy article for The Conversation on this topic.He described the attempts to save the banana and the industry that produces the fruit. Scientists are now in a race to create a new plant resistant to Panama disease.

In the 1950s, a condition known as Fusarium wilt or Panama disease was wiping out whole plantations in the world’s major banana-producing countries of Latin America.

It threatened an industry so important to this part of the world that some States had became known as Banana Republics because they were virtually governed by the corporations that produced the crop.”

Luckily, banana companies realised that another variety of banana, the Cavendish, was almost completely resistant to Panama disease. It rapidly replaced the Gros Michel (Big Mike) type which had prevailed until that time. The Cavendish rescued the industry and by the 21st century, 99% of exported bananas and almost half of world production is of the Cavendish variety.

But this strength has now become the banana industry’s greatest vulnerability. Panama disease has returned, and this time the Cavendish is not resistant,” Thompson wrote.

While the Federal Budget managed to find $371 million for ‘biosecurity measures’, they were more focused on prevention of African swine fever and foot and mouth disease. So it falls to State governments to address their own biosecurity challenges. The Queensland Government stumped up $10 million in 2015-2016 to investigate the re-emerging Panama disease tropical race 4 (TR4). Biosecurity Queensland launched a surveillance programme to detect the presence of the soil-borne fungal disease after it was detected at north Queensland farms.

While that battle is being fought (and once again raising questions about the risks of monoculture), just how important is the banana to Australian consumers and the economy?

The Australian Banana Growers Council (ABGC) is a font of knowledge about all things banana, including the incredible statistic that we consume 16 kg per head per year.

I extrapolated that figure, assuming that the average (four person) household consumes over 1kg (seven bananas) per week.

If you prefer Lady Fingers, you are in a minority, as 97% of bananas grown in Australia are off the Cavendish variety. Growers sold 388,000 tonnes of bananas in 2017-2018 (valued at $587m). The ABGC estimates the industry contributes $1.3 billion to the economy.

For all that, there’s not much protection for growers whose crops are wiped out by cyclones or other weather events, not to mention the incursion of a disease like TR4, which cannot be eradicated.

Nonetheless, banana growers keep up the supply of this popular fruit, with harvesting activity occurring as we drove by. Despite Queensland’s dominant market position, the ABGC’s statistics note a growing contribution to the annual banana production from Western Australia (6,800 tonnes), most of the crops grown around Carnarvon and in the irrigated fields around Kununurra.

Some 15,000 tonnes were grown in New South Wales, around Coffs Harbour and northern NSW where rainfall is plentiful.

We used to grow bananas on our half acre at Maleny. They were tall trees which were quite often raided by Brush Turkeys. They’d clumsily fly to the tops of the trees and partially eat out the green bunches. Our yield was better once we planted dwarf bananas closer to the house. They key is to bag the bunches before they ripen. One you cut a bunch, hang it from a rafter with a bag around it to keep vermin out. Growing bananas in much of Queensland is not hard. There’s a bit of work involved, chipping weeds and thinning out the plantation until you have the desired groups of three at various stages of growth.

We travel a bit and unfortunately, bananas are not good travellers. We bought a half-green bunch on Monday and by Tuesday they were ripe enough to eat.

She Who Makes Banana Cake is in charge of Plan B!

A New Twist On The Term Dog Act

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Well-socialised Staffie out for his daily walk. Photo BW

“Starting on Monday,” our Staffie said, “you need to take me for a 30-minute walk, twice a day.” He confessed to sneaking a peek at an article in The Guardian about a new law in Germany, known for our purposes, as the Dog Act.

The Guardian reported that Germany’s agriculture minister, Julia Klöckner, is introducing the new law, based on evidence that many of the nation’s 9.4 million dogs are not getting the exercise or stimuli they need. Under the new regulations in the Hundeverordnung, or Dogs Act, owners will be required to take their dogs out twice a day (one hour in total), seven days a week.

Klöckner said scientific findings showed that dogs need a “sufficient measure of activity and contact with environmental stimuli”, including other animals, nature and people.

The new rules, starting in 2021, will complicate the lives of German dog owners who go out to work. The tethering of dogs for long periods will be banned, as will leaving your dogs alone at home all day.

When I read this report out loud, She Who Edits promptly got the giggles (probably because of my faux German accent). I was more amused by the association with the Australian term, ‘dog act’. For the benefit of our international readers, if two blokes are fighting and one puts in the boot while his opponent is on the ground, that’s a ‘dog act’. Same goes for pushing an old lady over and stealing her purse – ‘dog act’, or throwing the footie at an opponent’s head.

But this new German law is no laughing matter; it will put working dog owners in a bind. I foresee a steep increase in employment for dog-walkers and a variety of household objects chewed to shreds in the owners’ absence.

In Australia, regulations concerning companion pets are left up to individual States and Territories. The RSPCA has a very clear code of conduct and anyone transgressing runs the risk of being investigated, and in dire cases, prosecuted.

There are signs that governments are aware of a worrying statistic that 41% of people don’t regularly walk their dogs. I’ll go into the origins of that number later. Meanwhile, the Australian Capital Territory has passed a new law in which dog owners could be fined $4,000 if their dog has been cooped up all day without exercise.

In a first for this country, the new Bill recognises dogs as:

sentient beings who have the ability to feel their environment and experience sensations such as pain, suffering or pleasure.

That’s a new twist on the Federal Government’s definition of an animal as an ‘object’.

The Pet Industry Association says that 38% of Australians own one or more of the 4.8 million dogs in Australia – that’s 1.9 each, so there are a lot of two-dog households. The RSPCA also estimates that the average dog costs roughly $13,000 over the course of its lifetime. The annual bill (about $1,400) explains in part why so many dogs are abandoned or given to refuges. Which is as good a place as any to let you reflect on the fact that 200,000 dogs and cats are euthanased in pounds and shelters each year for lack of a good home (www.peta.org).

 The COVID-19 pet fad

There was a nation-wide increase in animal adoption from shelters and refuges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Canadian academic L.F (Lisa) Carver, writing in The Conversation, said the worldwide upsurge in adoptions and fostering would at best lead to better physical and mental health among new owners.

Although many people did this for the animals, they, perhaps unwittingly, set themselves up for better mental health during the pandemic.”

Dr Carver says having a pet may help their owners maintain health-protective behaviour including bending, reaching and using both arms to provide food, water, and grooming.

These basic activities involved in animal care actually provide exercise, which is very important for people who spend the day in a stationary position.” 

There are tough laws governing cruelty and neglect and a cornucopia of bureaucratic hurdles to navigate (registration, tagging, vaccinations), before your new pooch can be taken home.

Australian authorities are fairly relaxed about dog owners, although you risk a fine if a dog is (a) off lead in a public place (b) wandering unaccompanied (c) not wearing a (current) registration tag or (d) barking incessantly while the owner is away from the house.

An entertaining blog produced by Scratch, a major pet food company, published the results of Australia’s biggest survey of dog owners. Scratch surveyed more than 20,000 owners to come up with novel findings about dog/owner behaviour including:

  • 74% of participants allow their dog on the bed; (additional research by FOMM suggests that some allow the dog in the bed);
  • 64% would use leaves or straw to remove a dog poo (if they forgot to take a plastic bag while out walking). The others (about 9,200 owners) would just skulk off;
  • 66% of participants said they spend six or more hours a day with their dog;
  • 28% said 3 to 6 hours, which is not so good;
  • 91% support mandatory education for first-time dog owners;
  • 65% of owners had just one dog – 28% had 2 with 7% three or more.

A third of dog owners are just plain slack

I was a bit disappointed this survey did not try to establish how often dog owners take their pets for a walk.

For that reason, I refer to this US study in Psychology Today that (drawing a longish bow), worked out that 41% of dog owners do not regularly walk their dogs.

Author Dr Stanley Coren’s study of surveys on this subject found that 57% of dog-walking owners admit to skipping walks each week. Reasons included unsatisfactory weather (56%), work pressures (32%) difficulties dealing with the dog (31%), or family responsibilities (24%). A worrying 32% admitted to cancelling a walk on a given day out of laziness or fatigue.

On the plus side, Dr Coren concluded that owners who did walk their dogs always went the extra mile.

One of the larger studies found that the average pet dog is taken on a walk around nine times a week, with the walk lasting around 34 minutes on each occasion and covering almost two miles.” 

So, as Germany prepares to usher in its tough new law, do Australians need someone to force them to walk their dogs?

If and when we return to some form of normalcy and people return to the ritual of commuting to work in an office, those pampered pets who cannot distinguish lockdown from normalcy may well fret.

Whatever the post-covid world looks like, try to maintain your dog-walking regime; the dog and your blood pressure will benefit.

Or, if you want to help stimulate the economy, there are always people offering to walk dogs for, on average, about $21 an hour.

As for the Staffie (who misrepresented me, as he does get a walk every day), I say this:

“Noch ist keine Zeit für einen Spaziergang

Loosely translated this means: “We will decide who goes for a walk (and when), and the circumstances in which we walk. ”

 FOMM Back Pages

It’s a Nation, Not Just an Economy

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Recession? What recession? Image by www.pixabay.com

It’s traditional to write about economics and economists at this time of year, the end of the financial year in most jurisdictions. Publishers like to ask economists to offer their predictions for the year. The cruel editors then go back a year later and mark their score cards.

Forecasts are all very well in ‘normal’ times, but few had forecast a deadly global pandemic that (so far) would infect 10.5 million people and kill 511,000. Even in Australia, where the progress of the virus has been carefully monitored, we have had 7,832 infections and 104 deaths. The long-term effect on economies – ours and every other country’s – is yet to be seen.

Trying to forecast economic trends for the next year or two has  been rendered difficult by the ongoing effects of COVID-19. Nevertheless, economists will try, because they are (in my experience) optimistic people. Before we go to our panel of experts (he said, sounding like David Speers on Sunday morning), let’s recap what the politicians are saying.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison recently promised to lift economic growth by “more than one percentage point above trend” (an average 4% per year), to 2025.

Economists from 16 universities in seven states came to a less ebullient conclusion, forecasting annual GDP growth averaging 2.4% over the next four years, “tailing off over time”.

22 economists were polled by The Conversation, an independent alliance of journalist and academics, and delivered their forecasts for the next four years.

The headline view is a weak recovery, getting weaker as time goes by, amid declining living standards. The panel expects weak economic growth in all but one of the next five years. The panel comprises macro-economists, economic modellers, former Treasury, IMF, OECD, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA),. financial market economists and a former member of the RBA board.

The panel included well-known doomsayer Steve Keen, who writes for Crikey and other publications. Keen was the economist who in January forecast a 75% probability of a recession.

The ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy Visiting fellow Peter Martin wrote an 18-page report on the survey, warning that the results imply living standards 5% lower than what the PM expects. Moreover, the panel expects unemployment to peak at 10% and to be still above 7% by the end of 2021. Wages are unlikely to grow beyond 0.9% in 2020, lower than the rate of inflation (expected to be 1.2%).

I’m frankly surprised The Conversation found 22 economists prepared to forecast the future, particularly as it seems a second wave of COVID-19 is upon us. One economist withdrew from the panel before the poll saying, “It’s a mug’s game now”. Another who did participate said forecasting had been reduced to “guessing”, in the context of an unprecedented event.

The panel more or less agreed on expectations for incomes and production. They expect those figures to shrink when the June quarter figures are released, confirming that Australia is in a recession. The panel forecast an average 4.5% decline in GDP for 2020.

So what’s the good news?

The Government’s budget deficit will be easily financed, with the 10-year borrowing cost at 0.9% and the panel forecasting 1.4% per year thereafter and not expected to rise until late 2021.

The RBA has made a commitment to buy as many bonds as needed to keep the figure low. For this reason alone, Australia has maintained its AAA credit rating.

Mining investment is expected to continue its recovery in 2020 into 2021, after huge falls between 2014 and 2019, the latter attributed to the collapse in infrastructure projects and large LNG plants being completed.

It might be bread and circuses, but don’t forget the Federal Government is unleashing a second round of stimulus payments on July 10. Those eligible received the first payment between March and April. Stimulus payments include $750 for eligible pensioners, seniors, carers, student payment recipients and concession card holders.

Two stimulus payments totalling $1,500 might not seem like much but in terms of people with no disposable income, it is an absolute windfall.

A homeless person could spend his or her $750 on a swag or a Himalayan standard sleeping bag, fleecy pants and jacket, thick socks, underwear and a cheap pre-paid phone. They might even have money left over for smokes. If you are employed but have no disposable income, you might be tempted to yield to those ‘sale ends tomorrow’ exhortations to buy a smart TV, laptop, tablet or mobile phone.

Whether you are unemployed and poor or the working poor, the main problem is a lack of disposable income. The Conversation’s panel expects disposable income to fall on average 4.5% for the year to December 2020. Most also expect household spending to decline in calendar 2020 (by 4.3% on average).

Gloomy as this picture may be, it redresses the balance between reality and the daily ‘spin’ from State and Federal governments.

In his 1964 book, A Lucky Country, Donald Horne said Australia was “a lucky country run by second-rate people”. By that he meant that Australia was lucky to be blessed with natural resources and agricultural wealth, despite its second-rate political and economic system. Decades later, it seems, more Australians agree with Horne’s harsh assessment, which has been a set text in universities since it was published.

A 2018 survey showed that 40.56% of Australians have lost faith in the notion of democracy since 2007.  Successions of administrations – Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Gillard, Turnbull and Morrison – have evidently lost a lot of the people somewhere along the line. The Guardian mentioned this survey in a story about politicians billing taxpayers for doubtful travel expenses.

Trust and Democracy in Australia shows a majority of Australians have lost faith in democracy, from a high of 86.5% trusting in 2007 to 40.56% in 2018. As The Guardian’s Christopher Knaus and William Summers comment in their article on travel rorts, “On current trends, that would leave fewer than 10% of Australians trusting politicians and political institutions by 2025”.

We who live in this vast, under-populated democracy should be grateful for what we have. The sun is still shining, the water is potable, it’s a mild winter thus far; the supermarkets have replenished their shelves; the footy is back and life continues relatively untrammelled. (Ed: Broncos fans may not agree).

All up, Australia is a considerably better place to be than the favelas of Rio De Janeiro, the slums of Kolkata or Mexico City or even one of Donald Trump’s Republican States that thought the coronavirus was ‘fake nooz’.

Even in the UK, our far away traditional Motherland, last month’s relaxing of the COVID19 lockdown appears to have led to the emergence of 10 new hotspots across England. This unhappily coincides with news that the level of public debt has surpassed the UK economy for the first time since the 1960s.

If you are still feeling besieged, spare a thought for migrants forced out of Yemen at gunpoint by the Iran-backed Houthi militia that controls most of northern Yemen. The militia has expelled thousands of migrants since March, blaming them for spreading the coronavirus. According to a report in the New York Times this week, they were dumped in the desert without food or water.

Compare that to young Queenslanders complaining about not being allowed to dance at their local nightclub.

It’s all about perspective

(The Democracy 2025 report is available for download here):

FOMM back pages (despite the headline, this is about economics)

Cyber attacks and the Faraday cage

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Image: Antoine Tevaneaux, Wikipedia CC: these women are protected from the electric arc by the Faraday Cage. (Palais de la Découverte in Paris.)

Just as I was thinking about the unexpected email from the Australian Taxation Office, She Who Mocks ScoMo called me in to watch a live press conference about cyber attacks.

Beware of State-based actors with sophisticated means to hack Australian infrastructure, began the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison (ScoMo).

“He’s dog-whistling,” interjected SWMS. This of course sent me off to google what ‘dog-whistling’ meant. After discounting a video of a wizened old Kiwi farmer in gumboots and a Swanndri using two-fingered whistling to direct his sheep dogs, I alighted upon this:

dogwhistle:  a type of doublespeak used in political messaging. Dog whistles work by employing language that has normal meanings to the majority, but can be implied or loaded to mean very specific things to intended recipients.

In this context, there were several observations to be made – what was the government seeking to do by causing fear and trembling in a community already alarmed about the coronavirus? What news did the government not want to get out, hiding behind the ‘cyber-attack’ smokescreen?

I asked a couple of IT gurus I know what they made of it all.

“Whatever it is, just sandbox it,” said one (which means isolating the malicious email/code and testing it in a non-network environment).

“Well if Scotty from marketing says there are more state actors right now. you gotta believe him,” said our resident geek boy.

“I might even quit my day job and go after my real dream as a state actor. Hopefully they do the Scottish play. .. I know that one well.”

Chin up Scotty, they’re not taking you seriously – should they?

After analysing the press conference on Friday morning, I tend to agree with ScoMo’s “it hasn’t just started” caveat. The controversy over Russia’s involvement in social media manipulation of the 2016 US election is one example alone. CSO Australia recently listed the top 15 cyber security breaches of the last 20 years, ranked by the number of people whose personal data was stolen. Data belonging to 3.5 billion people was compromised in the top two alone (Adobe and Adult Friend Finder). Well-known names on the list include LinkedIn, Yahoo, eBay and Marriott International.

The PM refused to be drawn on which ‘State-based actor’ was the villain of the piece but journalists have, of course, made much of the role of China as the state power with the ability and the motive.

If there is anything useful to be drawn from ScoMo’s cyber attacks warning, it is perhaps to remind computer and smart phone users to do a regular Wi-Fi security audit.

The growing popularity of smart devices (Wi-Fi speakers, smart TVs, household appliances that take verbal orders and Bluetooth-enabled devices has just added new vulnerabilities to the wired household.

I use Bluetooth to hook up my phone in the car but I also to stream music to wireless speakers. No problem, you’d think.

Technology writer Dave Johnson says, rather colourfully in this article for howtogeek.com, that “Bluetooth is about as secure as a padlock sculpted from fusilli pasta.”

Johnson recently attended the Def Con 27 security conference where the first order of business was to ask delegates to disable Bluetooth while attending the conference.

Tyler Moffitt, a senior threat research analyst at Webroot, says there are “zero regulations or guidelines” as to how Bluetooth vendors should implement security. He also warned that smart phone users might not know that using Bluetooth with earbuds disables the smart lock, leaving the phone open to abuse.

Moving right along, the other security threat which bothers experts is the proportion of social media users who do not use or understand privacy settings. Password manager LastPass revealed in a recent blog how careless people are with their private information. A survey showed that 52% of respondents set their social media profiles to ‘public’ (open to FB’s 1.7 billion account holders!) The survey showed that 51% of social media users had shared vacation photos, an open invitation to burglars who troll social media. About 20% shared pictures of their house or neighbourhood and 25% shared pictures of their pets or kids).

The government’s over-kill way of bringing cyber security to ‘front of mind’ was timely, in that June and July are the peak scam months.

Our end of financial year reminder from the ATO did seem genuine, given it was addressed to the recipient by name. We became suspicious in that the email encouraged clicking on links to ‘learn more’ – something the ATO says it never does.

That is an example of the common email scam known as ‘phishing’, an attempt by someone posing as a legitimate institution to trick individuals into providing sensitive data. An article from The Conversation, titled “Don’t be phish food!” cited below, summarises why you should be suspicious of bogus emails. Phishing scammers are not afraid to impersonate government agencies, banks or large institutions – even your own ISP!

If it looks real but you were not expecting it – be wary.

The very least you can do to avoid cyber attacks is change your computer logon passwords. This was one of the key messages from The Australian Cyber Security Centre. ACSC’s website advisory says the attackers are primarily using “remote code execution vulnerability” to target Australian networks and systems. That is, the attacker attempts to insert their own software codes into a vulnerable system such as a server or database, thus taking control. That, folks, is why Windows 10 keeps updating your operating system.

While you are at it, change all of the passwords you use for social media, web-based email and any website which holds your financial information. Make them complex passwords of at least 8 and preferably 10 characters. Check your social media settings and ensure that you are set to private and friends only (or at worst, friends of friends).  If you are on the Facebook app Messenger, don’t open videos, even if they are sent by your lover or maiden aunt. Much-circulated ‘joke’ videos containing malicious code are often used to hack someone’s Facebook account. (What – you didn’t know that?)

If all else fails, you could purchase a Faraday Cage, invented in the late 1800s by an English scientist (Faraday). The cage is an enclosed space made of conductive material that blocks electromagnetic signals. Wi-Fi and cellular signals are rendered useless inside the cage.Any spy worth his 2020 clearances would have mini-Faraday cages at home and work in which to keep smart phones and other hackable devices safe from cyber attacks.

Coincidentally, this week we just started watching season five of the quality French spy thriller, The Bureau*, where the Faraday Cage got a mention in episode one or two. This up to the minute drama, while fictional, nonetheless references present day political pariahs including Trump, Putin and Assad.

In the early episodes we see one of the protagonists in a Russian troll factory – a vast air conditioned room where drones fly a circuit to make sure the worker bees are not eating baklava at their keyboards.

If you are really concerned about cyber attacks, you could get an engineer, an architect and a builder to collaborate on the hacker-proof house, modelled on the Faraday Cage.

Shouldn’t cost that much.

(By all means, watch ‘The Bureau’, but only if you don’t mind numerous gratuitous sex scenes. It is French, after all. And you can improve your French language skills too, if you don’t look at the sub-titles. Ed.)

 

 

Climate debate burning fiercely

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Peregian bushfire image by Rob Maccoll

As we prepared to move from the Sunshine Coast hinterland after 17 years, the air was full of bushfire smoke, dust and haze from an early, hot start to spring. It blew a gale up there for the best part of a week; strong south-westerlies, the last thing you need in an early bushfire season.

Multiple properties were lost around Stanthorpe and in the Gold Coast hinterland between Sarabah and Canungra as hot gusty winds sent bushfires out of control.

We all know how dry it has been around the Southern Downs and across the border in towns like Tenterfield and Armidale. The aforementioned towns join Stanthorpe and Warwick and at least six other regional New South Wales towns at risk of running out of water.

I recall being sent on assignment to Warwick in 1992 with a Courier-Mail photographer. We walked along the dry bed of the Condamine River with then mayor Bruce Green, commenting on the sparse pools of water here and there. The town’s main water supply, Leslie Dam, was at 3% capacity at the time.

In January 2011, I was marooned in Warwick. So much rain fell authorities had no choice but to open all seven floodgates on the Leslie Dam. Creeks rose and the main roads to Brisbane and Toowoomba were closed.

People who have at least one foot in the climate change denial camp will tell you it was always thus in Australia: floods, droughts, bushfires, insect swarms, dust storms and sometimes all five inside a few months.

The key differences between the long-lasting droughts of the late 1800s and what is happening now is a notable rise in average temperatures.

The CSIRO, the nation’s pre-eminent science organisation, states that Australia’s climate has warmed by just over 1C since 1910. Eight of Australia’s top ten warmest years on record have occurred since 2005.

University of Melbourne PhD researcher Mandy Freund and colleague Benjamin Henley studied climatic changes in Australia by studying seasonal rainfall patterns over an 800-year period.

“Our new records show that parts of Northern Australia are wetter than ever before, and that major droughts of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in southern Australia are likely without precedent over the past 400 years.

“This new knowledge gives us a clearer understanding of how droughts and flooding rains may be changing in the context of a rapidly warming world”.

The debate between those who accept what 97% of the world’s scientists are telling us and the contrarians who think it is a left wing plot is increasingly polarising people.

The Australian, our only national newspaper, has kept up a steady flow of news stories and opinion articles which by and large support the views of those in denial about climate change.  Similar views are consistently espoused by Sky News and populist radio shock jocks. Some would say that it is a good thing someone is putting the other side of the story.

What the Guardian Weekly now terms the “climate crisis” is well and truly on the agenda today with Strike4Climate, a globally coordinated series of rallies to emphasise the gravity of the situation.

The main idea is to support teenagers who have taken the day off school to protest. They, after all, will be the generation left to clean up problems left by their parents’ and grand-parents’ generations. The international protest movement was started by Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg. She called on school students who have concerns about inaction over climate change to go on strike and support climate rallies.

Given the increasingly strident coverage of climate change news and opinion from the both sides, it isn’t hard to mount an argument for having both points of view up for public debate, although you need a subscription to The Australian to read its coverage.

So let me summarise an opinion piece, forwarded to me by a reader.

On July 8, New Zealand geologist David Shelley refuted climate activist assertions that temperatures are at record highs, glaciers and sea ice are melting at unprecedented rates, and sea levels rising dangerously.

“A cursory examination of the geological literature shows that the first two assertions are simply not true, and that rising sea levels are par for the course.

“To assert that today’s temperatures are record highs is mischief-making of the highest order. Earth has been much hotter (up to 10C hotter) for the vast majority of geological time”.

Shelley goes on to say that sea levels were also significantly higher in the last interglacial 125,000 years ago.

“Florida Keys, for example, is the remains of a coral reef that grew then”.

David Shelley’s views are moderate compared to those of the Top 10 climate deniers.

Brendan Demelle, executive director of DeSmog, lists names including Fred Singer, Christopher Monkton and Bjorn Lomborg. Demelle says many climate change deniers start their pronouncements with: “I’m not a scientist, but…”

(Lord) Monkton, a former UK politician with a degree in the classics once said: “global warming will not affect us for the next 2,000 years, and if it does, it won’t have been caused by us.” 

Did I suggest the debate between believe and don’t believe is getting more strident? Environmentalist Tim Flannery went so far this week as to suggest that ‘predatory’ climate change deniers are “a threat to our children”.

A despairing Flannery now admits that his 20 years of climate activism has been ‘a colossal failure’.

Each year the situation becomes more critical. In 2018, global emissions of greenhouse gases rose by 1.7% while the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere jumped by 3.5 parts per million – the largest ever observed increase.

“No climate report or warning, no political agreement nor technological innovation has altered the ever-upward trajectory of the pollution”.

On Tuesday, The Conversation’s Misha Ketchell announced a surprise ban on those promoting climate denial views through the portal.

“The editorial team in Australia is implementing a zero-tolerance approach to moderating climate change deniers, and sceptics,” he wrote. “Not only will we be removing their comments, we’ll be locking their accounts”.

We believe conversations are integral to sharing knowledge, but those who are fixated on dodgy ideas in the face of decades of peer-reviewed science are nothing but dangerous”.

The Australian’s Chris Kenny said The Conversation’s decision was a fundamental assault on freedom of speech and intellectual integrity.

“This action flies in the face of scientific endeavour, where the scientific method is founded on the presumption of rigorous scepticism”, he wrote.

Kenny added: “The Conversation was founded with taxpayers’ support and still relies heavily on the involvement of publicly-funded universities. This is taxpayers’ money used for the silencing of dissent and the deliberate shrinking and censoring of scientific, academic, environmental, economic and political debate”.

“Who will decide what level of scepticism is acceptable?

The user-friendly website Skeptical Science (getting skeptical about global warming skepticism) should help clarify that question. The website lists 100+ common climate change myths, matching each one with the scientific facts.

I encourage you all to do your own research into this most urgent of issues. As the Joan of Arc of climate change Greta Thunberg said last year: “I want you to act as if our house is on fire, Because it is’.

Due to unforeseen circumstance I am unable to attend the Brisbane rally. I guess they’ll start without me!